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]
|
Although it is more or less a policy of mine to not write directly about comments made regarding Samizdata.net articles, it is a policy occasionally worth ignoring.
Many commenters have reacted poorly to David Carr’s article AZNAR KNEW!!!. Whilst it is the readers prerogative to judge articles here as they see fit, I must disagree with some of the views put forward that it was an inappropriate article at a time of such truly hideous moment. I do not say so out of an urge to ‘circle the wagons’ but rather because many of the commenters are fine people whose opinions are of value to me. And because I think they are quite wrong, I feel I must say why, as Chief Editor of Samizdata.net, that I am delighted David wrote such a piece and published it now.
It is a ‘humorous’ article in so far as satire is an appeal to humour, but that does not mean David is laughing at what happened. Just as Jonathan Swift was not laughing at the Irish famine when he penned A modest proposal, so too is David drawing attention to something deadly serious.
It is at times like this when we most need to pour scorn on the people who are, by virtue of their world views, indirectly part of the problem. This hideous and evil act must be met with force and implacable resistance… and it is that sort of response that the people who are the targets of David’s satire will work tirelessly to prevent.
All David is doing is shining a light on them and now, not later, is the time to do that. The fact that what David wrote is close to the bone is what makes it effective. Why? Because it is only a few degrees off the non-satirical screeds we will actually be reading in a few days.
Now of all times, while the stench of death and horror are fresh in Madrid, it is right to point out that some well meaning people’s views, and some not so well meaning, are nothing less than an apologia for mass murderer. Ideas have consequences and that it what David was writing about.
We may be off the air for a short time due to some maintenance issues. Back soon!
Update: Well that was rather painless. Our downtime was hardly a blink
Here, reproduced as it was sent to us, is an open letter to the international mass media by a very worthy website in Spain regarding the horrific and vile attrocity carried out by Marxist terrorists in Madrid yesterday that has resulted in the murder of at least 190 civilian commuters and the injury 1,200 more. The only comment of mine that I will add to what follows is that I share the author’s outrage completely
To the international mass media, ETA is not a Marxist-Leninist terrorist group but a “Basque separatist group”. The magnitude of the 3-11 attack has not changed their narrow sighted style. This is particularly poignant in the case of the US media. After Spain’s support of the American war in Iraq, the coverage by American media is still worthy of a band of ignorants who keep scorning this Spanish bleeding tragedy.
Thus, to try to stop such indecency, I have sent the following brief email to Fox News and CNN. Let’s fill their inboxes with our anti-collaborationist clamour!
I want to express you my most strongest complaint for your horrible coverage of the massacre in Madrid. You name ETA “Basque separatists group”. That’s awfull and infamous. ETA is a terrorist group, as it is recognized as such by all international institutions and developed nations, among them, the USA.
Do you think we should call Al-Qaeda “the resistance”? Has Spain been with the USA and UK in its struggle against international terrorism to deserve that kind of insult?
I am very disappointed by this dishonest style. It is just miserable.
Juan Ramón Rallo
From Spain
Mass media where to send the mail
CNN
Foxnews
BBC
WallStreetJournal
New York Times
Reuters
Associated Press
Washington Post
In what is a splendid testament to the sense and wisdom of Irish youth, when the EU held a conference for young people in Ireland (free registration required)… how many young Irish people turned up?
None.
Clearly they had better things to do. How very, very, very, splendid. 
Some of the Serbian paramilitary ‘heroes’ responsible for the mass murder of 192 Croatians in Vukovar in 1991 have been put on trial in Serbia.
This is a welcome development as not only does it brings bring these people to account, it will require Serbian society and the Serbian state to confront what really happened. In the absence of an externally imposed ‘denazification’ process, this could be exactly what Serbia needs and perhaps the start of a process that will de-legitimise vile creatures like Vojislav Seseji and other nationalists who do not have the widespread opprobrium they deserve within Serbia itself.
War crimes trials far off in the Hague simply cannot have the same effect as trials within Serbia itself. Forcing the painful truth to be brought out for all to see has to be a good thing as far too many people with the blood of the Balkans on their hands are still relaxing in the cafés of Belgrade. Perhaps this is the first sign that their days are numbered, but it would be premature to just assume this will be the case. Nevertheless, these trials are a very good start.
I frikkin’ met an Ayatollah! a real life Ayatollah, I watched him eat a banana and then he put his hands on my shoulder and prayed that I get married soon, my mom was beside herself with joy and I just couldn’t stop laughing.
The heretic fagot getting a blessing from an Ayatollah. that is how great those four days were.
– Salam Pax
One of the best summaries of the travesty that lead to Martha Stewart being convicted of, well, lying to avoid self-incrimination, can be found on WorldnetDaily by Samuel Blumenfeld:
Stewart was acting on information given to her. She did not build her wealth on a career of insider trading. It was a one-time fluke which involved a relatively small amount of money. When federal investigators questioned her on this transaction, she said that she had a standing order for her broker to sell the stock if the price went below $60.00. Apparently, that was the alleged lie that the jury convicted her on.
Here was the federal government, which couldn’t protect us from the terrorist attack of 9-11 in which thousands of people were killed, trying to protect us from Martha Stewart. The alleged lies she told were not told under oath. She did not commit perjury. Apparently it is now a crime to tell a falsehood to a government investigator. That’s considered an obstruction of justice.
Whatever you may think of Stewart’s action, she did not kill anyone or rob anyone. Her action did not result in anyone else losing anything. In other words, unless you believe that citizens don’t have a right to tell a falsehood to a government official in defending themselves from self-incrimination, Martha Stewart committed no crime.
Read the whole thing. The sickeningly self-righteous chortling of the predators of the wealth destroying US legal establishment just makes the whole thing worse and make it clear to me what really makes the legal world go around. If some ambitious prosecutor who thinks nothing of destroying lives and livelihoods in order to advance their own careers decides you are going to be their stepping stone, watch out. The state is not your friend.
Equitable Life is a mess, that is for sure. The responsibility of making sure the people who look after your money can be trusted ultimately lies with the owner of the money… the pensioners, the beneficiaries of what Equitable Life actually does. However if fraud or other gross misrepresentation is involved, and not just incompetence, ineptitude or misfortune, then things do change somewhat as it becomes a criminal matter.
However Equitable Life is massively regulated, so many of its weird business decisions must be seen within the context of the weird distorted environment within which it operates…
So yes, there is an argument that as the state should therefore also be liable for the mess. But then if you accept that, given that the British economy grows more regulated by the day, that would suggest investors should be lining up to claim tax money from the state every time anything goes bust. After all, what makes Equitable Life’s casualties any different from the casualties of any other business cock up?
We were off the air for a short while today because Hosting Matters were moving their servers into a security cage.
Call me cautious if you will, but I will wait a while before jumping for joy over this potentially wonderful news:
U.S. researchers will soon publish strong evidence of a recipe to generate fusion power with tiny bubbles, which does sound like a modern witch’s brew.
The power source is ultrasonic noise aimed at a clear glass canister whose size would qualify as a grande latte in a coffee house. The sound waves rattle through a liquid solvent in the glass and, as they do, create minute (on the order of a thousandth the width of a human hair) bubbles. Further sound causes the bubbles to expand, compress and then collapse. When they do, some of the hydrogen atoms in the liquid seem to fuse and give off light and energy.
Hmmm… What do our resident gearheads make of this?
But parts of it are bloody close.
Laura Bailey described her time in Kenya in a splendid travel article the other day and it damn near had me ordering tickets for the next flight out there myself. I have visited many of the places she mentions, although the most recent time was over twenty years ago. However much of what she describes just goes to remind me how timeless some places like the Masai Mara are.
I recall visiting the Masai Mara for a week, a few days before the great migration (the mass movement of about a zillion Wildebeests, closely followed by sundry hungry lions etc.) arrived at where they have to cross the Mara River. The scenery itself is simply stunning but when the Wildebeests arrive en-mass across the plains which were largely empty the day before, it is a truly amazing sight. Nor have I ever smelled anything so ‘memorable’ in my life.
Thousands upon thousands of Wildebeests drown whilst trying to ford the Mara River, many within sight of a bridge (they are not known for their brains), bringing crocodiles by the hundred to pick off the weak and vultures by the tens of thousands to feast on the ex-Wildebeest as their bodies quite literally clog the river. It is a breathtaking spectacle which has to be seen to be really appreciated.
If you are looking for a holiday with a difference, Kenya is an excellent place to try for all sorts of reasons, but do try to plan your itinerary so that you hit the Masai Mara. It is certainly one of the most fascinating parts of the world I have visited.
Simple really. Give them a vested interest to do so, a financial interest in fact. Create vast numbers of public sector jobs funded from the disloyal private sector and then what do you have? You have 7.4 million people (plus their families) who owe their ‘jobs’ to an expanding state and whilst the Tories are hardly the party of small government, it will hardly have escaped the notice of state employed workers that the number of public sector jobs from Maggie Thatcher onwards had been falling for 15 years… and under Labour they are growing at an astonishing rate.
However the real ‘loyalty lock-in’ comes not from merely giving people a job but rather from providing them with not just a lavish pension but an unfunded one at that! This means that only tax money can redeem these pension plans in the future because, unlike a private sector pension which is backed by investments (investments the state regularly raids for their own uses), there is nothing other than a government promise to pay with other people’s money underpinning what Mr. Buggins from Whitehall intends to retire on. As this is of course economic madness, only someone with a direct vested interest would vote to perpetuate such a giant ponzi scheme.
Alas, people directly effected by something like that are far more likely to be dependable focused voters, whereas a private sector employee may well not see the direct causal link between their declining purchasing power and their public sector neighbour’s pension plan.
Labour’s strategy is multi-election political genius. And of course by the time the economy implodes, people will have either largely forgotten what caused the problem or when faced with cutting pensions in fiat money to telegenic old grannies, will find someone else to blame (Capitalists, Jews, White People, Black People, Arabs, Americans, etc. etc.).
But then as the high priest of amorality once said, in the long run we are all dead anyway.
|
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.
|
