We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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It seems to me that the latest suicide bombings in Iraq, targeted at Iraqis nascent army, should be met with a blizzard of public relations aimed not at minimizing the horror of what happen but rather making it clear that the perpetrators are trying to play the Iraqi people for fools.
Certainly seeking to play one section of Iraqi society off against another is potential a highly effective strategy for the bag guys. However by making the revelations such as the one Dale wrote about yesterday as widely known as possible within Iraq, this could be turned around in a most interesting fashion and perhaps used to promote a sense of solidarity within Iraq againt the Al-Qaeda/Ba’athist hardcore.
Perhaps the propaganda war will be the decisive battle in this struggle and paradoxically publicizing the enemy’s views as widely as possible might be the Allies trump card. By their own words they are revealed. Now let them be reviled for them.
An Australian swam 300 yards with a live shark clamped to his leg before driving a mile for assistance to have it removed (the shark, not the leg)!
They make ’em tough down-under!
G’day, Sport!
There is an interesting article by Peaches Geldof about the perils of being a little bit too free and easy with one’s innermost thoughts on-line.
Mandatory reading for all Journal Bloggers!
Now that it seems Saddam Hussain may not in fact have any weapons of mass destruction, Dubya and Blair are being pilloried for having gone to war to oust that particular mass murderous fascist regime.
Sometime in the not too distant future, when it looks like war with North Korea’s mass murderous regime is inevitable, Dubya and Blair (or their successors) will be pilloried for threatening war because the North Koreans have weapons of mass destruction.
And it will be the same people doing the pillorying in both cases.
We are being warned that there is an obesity ‘timebomb’ in Britain (which is to say, as in so many things, we are headed where the USA leads). The great and good of the medical establishment intone in sententious voices that “a far-reaching national strategy is needed” to deal with this.
So we can look forward to the state taking even further control of our very bodily functions, for our own good of course, no doubt starting with the children interned in state’s educational conscription centres. But then why the hell should we care about this whole problem? If obesity causes us to fall ill, we have the state’s National Health Service to look after us and pick up the tab! If being a porker makes us unhappy, we have the state’s social workers to tell us that there is nothing for us to worry about and in any case, how dare anyone utter ‘fatists’ slurs? Do these nasty doctors calling for “a far-reaching national strategy” not realise that by stigmatizing fat people, they are undoing the work of thousands of Guardian reading self-esteem councilors paid for out of tax money?
The solution to this statist regulatory tangle is to set one part of the social-welfare class again the other in a bitter begger-thy-neighbour “our victims have it worse than your victims” battle to the political death.
We could be on to a winner here… Let the welfare state eat itself.
I’m not fat! I’m a
horizontally challenged victim
of the capitalist system!
As the economy of Zimbabwe continues its steady collapse into a Mad Max like wasteland under the thuggish tyranny of Robert Mugabe, perhaps we are seeing the first signs of resistance.
The rebellion by 6,000 black workers is the first in nearly four years of state-sponsored terror on the country’s white-owned farms. Kondozi’s 1,500 profitable acres provide huge quantities of runner beans, mange tout and red peppers for stores including Safeway, Sainsbury’s and Tesco.
But the minister for agriculture, Joseph Made, wants the business for himself. A few weeks ago, he arrived at the farm with colleagues and ordered out the workers and the white owners. A fortnight later, scores of ruling Zanu-PF party loyalists were sent in but around 200 women workers fought back with broken tiles, stones and broken bricks. Shots were fired, apparently by pro-government thugs, but they were forced to flee. Mr Made was not available for comment.
As I have suggested before regarding the Logistics of Tyranny, if the ‘aid lobby’ was actually serious about the welfare of people in the Third World generally, and places like Zimbabwe in particular, they would do better to call for ending 90% of all aid payments to the kleptocratic governments that rule them and in place of the remaining 10%, send an equal value of weapons and ammunition to people who actually oppose the regimes keeping Africa from sharing the vast economic improvements elsewhere in the Third World.
One would think that because the vast majority of Mugabe’s victims are not white land owners but are in fact the common black people of that woeful nation, this might move even the chattering classes in Islington, Berkeley and Grenwich Village to feel a spot of indigestion over their morning bowl of Muesli and hense to demand ‘something be done’, but I guess that only applies when the designated ‘bad guys’ are Jews (or Donald Rumsfeld), not black African socialists.
The only message people like Joseph Made understand weighs 55 grains and moves at about 3,100 feet per second. I do not lightly wish for bloodshed anywhere, but the occasional grimaces of the Guardian reading classes have not stopped the long nightmare of the people of Zimbabwe.
Arm the workers of Kondozi!
A couple truck loads of ammo and one for
these each of the workers of Kondozi and you
will have a real rebellion
Just as the Tory Party (the party that has given us Chris Patten, Edward Heath and Ken Clarke) cannot be counted on to reverse the march into regulatory Euro-statism (they at best slow the rate at which it happens), similarly the Tory reaction to plans by Labour Home Secretary David Blunkett to lower the burden of proof in criminal cases where the state really wants to convict someone is one of essential support.
So… we are left with only one half-way significant party who seems to care even the slightest about civil liberties in the court room: The LibDems. But then again, when it comes to regulatory statism and abridging economic free association in society at large, the LibDems are even more keen than Labour to replace all social interaction with politically derived formulae for just about any kind of behaviour you can think of.
And people wonder why I urge folks not to vote for anyone? So how does one resist the increasingly panoptic regulatory state? Good question.
You would have to be deaf, dumb and blind (or read nothing but the Guardian) to have failed to notice that there is rather a large constituency in Britain whose feelings regarding the European Union lie somewhere between dislike and loathing.
As a consequence this would presumably lead the leader of the opposition Tory Party to firmly align his troops with the Euro-sceptics, correct? I mean, there is no way in hell that he would sign up the Tory Party to be a member of a group within the European ‘parliament’ who had a charter objective that included “the realisation of a United States of Europe”, right?
Anyone who sees the Tory Party the solution to Labour marching Britain into a bureaucratised regulatory pan-European dystopia is deluding themselves. There is opposition to the EU within the Tory Party but they are not the people in charge, and the LibDems are even worse than Labour.
But of course the Tory Party can talk a fine Euro-sceptic game when it suits them, but then they can also talk a fine ‘we are the party of low taxation’ game when it suits them. It is a delight to hear someone making the moral case against high taxation.
Except of course, ‘white man speak with forked tongue’…he does not actually mean it. The Tories talk about the importance of civil society and yet you will look in vain for a list of state functions that the Tory party intends to amputate to actually stop the regulatory gangrene killing off civil society.
Don’t support the Tory Party… you will only be encouraging more of the same. And of course if you like the state of civil liberties under ‘Big Blunkett’, you will just love them under Michael ‘a touch of the night’ Howard.
Until there is a meaningful choice, do not vote for anyone or you will be deluding yourself that you are making any significant difference.
The reason that there has been relatively little output this evening is that many of the Samizdatistas were at Samizdata HQ rather than at their keyboards, celebrating the start of new business ventures by two of our number…
There is an interesting story in the Telegraph about a teenage Afghan arrested as a Taliban supporter and held in Guantanamo Bay. Although he was none too happy about being taken away from his parents, rather surprisingly he claims that he had a good time in the US military prison!
In a first interview with any of the three juveniles held by the US at Guantanamo Bay base, Mohammed said: “They gave me a good time in Cuba. They were very nice to me, giving me English lessons.” Mohammed, an unemployed Afghan farmer, found the surroundings in Cuba at first baffling. After he settled in, however, he was left to enjoy stimulating school work, good food and prayer.
What a funny old world.
There used to be a time when companies has serious names. Standard Oil. East India Company. Marks & Spencer. Ford Motor Company. Western Union. General Electric. Blohm und Voss. Consolidated Engineering.
Now companies have names like Eat My Handbag Bitch.
Perhaps the commentariat knows of some other interesting examples? God bless post-modern capitalism!
Yes, of course you socialists are more concerned about the poor… your policies create so many of them!
– Part of a heated conversation overheard at another table during lunch at The Chelsea Bun restaurant
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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