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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Melanie McDonagh, ever the dependable voice of anti-idiotarianism and reason, has pointed out the ludicrous thinking behind the latest changes planned regarding laws on domestic violence. The intention is to remove the defence of provocation, whilst at the same time introducing a plea of self-defence for women who kill after years of being abused… or as Melanie sums it up:
a killing that is premeditated for a long time will be treated more lightly; in another, a killing that was not premeditated at all will be treated with the maximum severity.
As one would expect from a socialist collectivist like Solicitor General Harriet Harman, because men tend to kill out of anger and women out of fear, the law will be skewed to in fact make that a presumption. This is not really English law so much as feminist law, treating men and women according to their category rather than as individuals judged on the basis of facts.
But murder, like romance, is unique to the couple concerned. And it doesn’t take much reflection to see that a blanket extenuation of self-defence is quite as likely to lead to miscarriages of justice as the blanket extenuation of provocation.
Quite so! This is a charter for murdering partners with whom a woman has a volatile (but not necessarily violent) relationship. The statue on top of the Old Bailey is ‘blind justice’, but no longer if you are male, it seems.
If you have played the computer game America’s Army, now you have the opportunity to try a… different… sort of real-life based first-person-shooter game:
Hizbullah has launched a computer game allowing players to simulate its fighters during military operations on Israeli soldiers prior to the liberation of the South. Special Force, which took two long year s of development by the Hizbullah Central Internet Bureau, hit the market on Feb. 16. The game consists of different stages all inspired by actual Hizbullah operations in the South. Players face the same conditions as Hizbullah fighters, including geographic locations, mines, the number of Israeli troops and even the weather conditions. Special Force also offers a training simulation, where players can practice their shooting skills on targets such as Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and other Israeli political and military figures.
The medium of computer games is neutral… what next? A mod for a civilian airliner flight sim that re-creates some rather well known flights on September 11th? I would not be surprised. After that, maybe a ‘role playing computer game’ set in Poland in 1943 called Einzatsgruppen?
Unfortunately the good guys do not have a monopoly on creativity.
As the London based Samizdatistas are meeting for a booze up at the Black Widow Pub on Gloucester Road this evening, there may be a lack of new articles tonight.
It is good to see Mikhail Kalashnikov, the inventor of that fine weapon that was for so many years an icon of violent socialism, finally succumbing to full blown capitalism.
Coming to your neighbourhood soon… Kalashnikov umbrellas, snow boards and cocktails: products for real men!
More seriously, it seems only fair that the man who created what is pretty much the definitive assault rifle finally gets to make a buck or two out of his masterpiece.
(link via Kevin Connors)
Many of the anti-war protesters has been carrying placards with the slogan ‘Not In My Name’. Well if you voted in the UK, regardless of whether it was for Labour or Conservative or LibDem, then you gave your consent to the system which taxes me without my consent, so I suppose I am robbed in ‘your’ name. I was disarmed (by a Tory government) and forbidden to effectively defend myself in ‘your’ name. My rights to own property and control my own labour and capital are abridged into meaninglessness in ‘your’ name.
So when you say say about a war against the Ba’athist socialists of Iraq “Not In My Name”, please forgive me if I really do not give a damn if something gets done by the state that you do not like.
I do not think George Bush and Tony Blair want to topple Saddam Hussain due to an abiding concern for the Iraqi people, but frankly I really do not care why the statists who tax me are going to do it, just that they do it. Provided there is a net gain in liberty in Iraq, and it is hard to see how that could not be the case post-Saddam, then I am in favour of the violent and hopefully fatal removal of the Ba’athist thugs.
Do it for ‘Freedom for Iraq’, do it ‘because Saddam is a threat’, do it ‘because of links to Al-Qaeda’, do it ‘because the voices in my head told me to’… I do not care. Just do it!
You can even do it in my name if you like.
David Goldstone has written in with Why Libertarians should be for the liberation of Iraq but against the war. I have replied to his thoughts afterwards
Dear Perry,
I have every sympathy with those on Samizdata who support the forthcoming war. The thought of Tony Benn telling an Iraqi women why it is wrong for her people to be freed from tyranny is skin-crawlingly repellent. And as for the marchers yesterday, well if they against the war that is almost reason enough for me to be for it.
Almost reason enough, but not quite. In the final analysis, I still believe (and I say this with all respect to those who disagree), that the pro-war libertarians are wrong.
Let me say clearly that this posting is not addressed to those who believe that the war is justified on the grounds of pre-emptive self defence. I disagree with them but the debate between us is not a debate of principle, merely one as to the weight of the evidence. Rather, this posting is directed at those who would justify the war on the grounds that it will bring liberty to millions of Iraqi’s.
Let me also say clearly that I fully endorse the goal of bringing liberty to Iraq and I would willingly contribute some of my own money to pay for a military effort to bring about that end.
But others would not. And therein lies the contradiction for libertarians. How can we justify using force (viz tax revenues) to make others pay for a war that they oppose? If the U.S. or U.K. governments were to conscript people to fight to free Iraq, I am sure we would be loud in our condemnation. Yet taxation is at only one remove from conscription. Whether we like it or not, millions of people in the U.S. and the U.K. disagree with the war. We may disagree with them, but how can we as libertarians justify forcing them to pay for it? The implications are obvious and run counter to everything that libertarians stand for.
I would dearly love to see a compelling answer to this question because I would dearly love to be able to support the war. But so far, I have yet to see any answer to this question on Samizdata, let alone a compelling one.
David Goldstone
Well David, I actually agree with you more than you might suppose! Although I am less convinced than you seem to be that Saddam Hussain poses no actual threat to me, my primary reason for wanting to see the overthrow of Ba’athist socialism in Iraq is that I wish to see an end to tyranny, the death or imprisonment of its perpetrators and an increase in liberty for Iraq’s hapless people.
For me the only argument against this being done by the militaries of the USA and UK is that this requires the theft of tax money from US and UK taxpayers.
However…
What is done is done. I have been robbed by the US and UK states (the two places I have been paying taxes) for a great many year and the lavishly equipped volunteer militaries capable of overthrowing Ba’athism are already in existence.
As selling off the military equipment and returning a huge pot of my stolen tax money to me is going to happen when pigs fly, I am left with either watching the proceeds of my robbery slowly depreciate as they sit in military bases scattered across the world, or instead demanding that I at least get some value for my stolen money!
Just as I would rather have privately own roads, private police forces and private healthcare, in the here-and-now I at least what the state owned roads to have no potholes, the state owned police to prevent me being mugged and the National Health Service to fix me up when I am injured. I am after all being forced to pay for all these things!
And so… please take this volunteer military I was forced to pay for and go and kill Saddam Hussain. The state made me pay for the weapons and salaries, so bloody well give me some value for my money!
It is a strange experience finding myself supporting Tony Blair, the man who presides over my ongoing robbery by the British state, let alone quoting his remarks of yesterday approvingly, but I suppose these are strange times:
There will be no march for the victims of Saddam, no protests about the thousands of children that die needlessly every year under his rule, no righteous anger over the torture chambers which, if he is left in power, will be left in being.
I just wish the people marching yesterday would spare us the nauseating claim to the moral high ground and, if they still oppose the war, just acknowledge that theirs is an emotional rather than a moral argument and that the reality of their position is that if they get their way, Iraqi people will continue to die at the hands of murderous Ba’athist socialism in Iraq whilst they smugly congratulate themselves on their ‘having prevented a war’.
Preventing the overthrow of the people who did…
this…
and…
this… 
… to the people of Halabja with a weapon of mass destruction (poison gas) is the reality what those marchers are trying to achieve.
Regardless of how you feel about George W. Bush or Tony Blair or capitalism or Israel or the Palestinians or globalisation or anything else, that does not change the fact that the continuation in power of the murderous Saddam Hussain and his Ba’athist thugs will be the consequence of appeasement. Is that what you want? Is it?
Bianca Jagger addressed the Anti-War protesters assembled in London this evening thus:
No matter how terrible a nation is, the UN charter forbids just overthrowing the regime. The war against Iraq is unjustified.
In other words, if the National Socialist regime has confined its programme of genocide against the Jews to Germany and had not invaded other countries, war against Nazi Germany would have been unjustified.
And there you have it… THIS is where collectivist thought takes you. To hell with an individual’s right not to be murdered by the state, because the state, the NATION, the collective, is what matters more.
Evil. Truly evil.
Not much commentary is needed really about his protest in London, but judging from the placards, more people seemed interested in Palestine than Iraq.
A rolling river of political incontinence
I guess they want to give Saddam time to develop nuclear weapons, thereby giving themselves someone else to protest against
… but Saddam Hussain not wanted for murder by Socialists Workers apparently
At least this one is amusing
I wonder if they could find Iraq on a map?
Hell, I wonder if they could find Britain on a map
Actress & pro-totalitarian activist Vanessa Redgrave
One protester made the serious tactical blunder of assuming David Carr was in agreement with the marcher’s objectives. He explains the error of her ways.
I have never seen so many Arabs in London
This chap wants the world to look like that paragon of human rights and civic virtues, the Palestinian Authority
Socialist Dictators of the World Unite! And another guy was waving a Soviet flag (the picture of that did not come out unfortunately)
No, war will cease when men no longer stand up to fight against tyranny
Your intrepid blogger can feel his brains being sucked out…
All the usual people really. Yawn.
David Carr and I are off to take pictures of the Pro-Saddam Hussain/Anti-Liberation of the Iraqi People demonstration in London this afternoon… I hope to have a report up this evening.
In response to a contention that I made in the comments section of an earlier Samizdata.net article that ‘wealth redistribution’ was intrinsically immoral, a commenter replied:
Have you considered that many people consider wealth redistribution morally right, and consider it morally right to use violence to achieve it?
Well I happen to believe in objective (albeit conjectural) truth, and hence objective (and yes, conjectural) morality, so the subjective views of other matter little to me when deciding what is and is not a moral use of violence. I understand that statist people think it is ‘moral’ to take my money under threat of violence. I also know that some people think it ‘moral’ to prevent mixed marriages, ‘moral’ to kill Jews, ‘moral’ to treat women as chattels, ‘moral’ to jail people for sodomy. So what?
To say my property is there for others to help themselves to is to negate the very existence of several (i.e. ‘private’) property, which is of course what paleo-socialists are quite up front about wanting to do and modern socialists want to do in the fascist manner (i.e. allow ‘private’ property whilst regulating its use to the point ownership becomes a meaningless notion).
Yet without several property, there is no modern western civilisation, let alone liberty, so taking my money is not just theft, it is an assault on civilisation itself, and I have no objection to using violence to defend it. I am all in favour of shooting burglars that a home owner finds in their house, so my views on tax collectors and the people who sent them (i.e. anyone who legitimises what they do) should not be hard to figure out. The only reason I am not out shooting people and putting bombs in cars is a purely utilitarian cost/benefit analysis that it is not the most effective way to secure my liberty and the liberty of others. Those who love liberty can (mostly) play a waiting whilst economic reality has its way with the nations just as it did with the Soviet Union, but that does not mean fighting figuratively and literally for liberty is not moral. In fact, it is really one of the most moral reason for fighting there is.
Richard Madeley & Judy Finnigan, a well known pair of daytime television presenters on UK Channel 4, are the epitome of Middle England sensibilities, not to mention falling hook line and sinker for whatever PR hype is trawled in front of them. When they saw the music video for All The Things She Said by the teenage Russian lesbian couple called TATU, they were so shocked that they are demanding not just a boycott but that the TATU single be banned.
So yet again we here are told by the self-appointed guardians of ‘morality’ that things which they find distasteful or threatening should be suppressed by force of law. I can almost hear Ivan Shapovalov, TATU’s creator and promoter, chuckling as these idiots take the bait and provide his winsome couple with a whirlwind of free publicity.
Disturbing to some, it seems!
Well given that TATU’s single looks like topping the UK charts, I guess not all that many people agree with these statist prigs.
For those of you who are not upset by lesbian schoolgirls in really short skirts singing infectiously catchy tunes, check out their live gig at the 2002 MTV Europe Music Awards (in English) or their rather splendid little OTT video in Russian (fast connection recommended for both links).
TATU singer Julia signs petition to ban Richard & Judy
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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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