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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Adriana, who knows a thing or two about the reality of living in a repressive regime, points out that doing business in a place in China is not a morally unambiguous matter and asked
[D]id anyone call for a boycott of Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola companies during the Cold War? I remember the drinks in their distinctive bottles that put some fizz into my rather gloomy childhood under communism.
I guess my answer is that I have no problem with selling Coca Cola to communist states, after all it is communism’s hapless victim for the most part who will be drinking it. Also trade itself can be wonderfully subversive… but what Yahoo is doing is analogous to Coca Cola agreeing to embed a recording device in each bottle so that the state can hear what each person is talking about whilst they sip their drink…ie, not just trading with tyrants but actually collaborating with the repression of their subject peoples. That is what Yahoo (and Cisco, Oracle and their ilk) are indeed doing.
And that I rather do have a problem with.
However please do not think I want just Yahoo singled out. As Adriana said, Cisco thought nothing of installing the telecom architecture to enable the Chinese Panopticon approach to the Internet. Whenever companies do business with those who would abridge our liberties, they rarely do so for reasons of sheer malevolence but rather due to the cost-benefit to shareholders of working in such regions of the world (though Oracle chief Larry Elison does like to hold up pro-fascist Napoleon as a paragon of virtue so in his case who knows).
My view is that not just Yahoo but Cisco, Oracle and anyone else who wants to get rich selling the apparatus of repression should be given to understand when they make their utilitarian business decisions that part of the cost will be people who see the world in more moral terms taking their business elsewhere. Do not underestimate the value to a company of its corporate image:
‘Cisco and Yahoo, Big Satan and Little Satan: international partners in repression’
…is not the sort of meme these guys want in circulation as it is just not good for business, and that is why I support noisy boycotts which involve saying things that people in boardrooms do not want to hear.
Far left statist Christian peace campaigners Pax Christi have issued a declaration on the impending war to depose Iraqi despot Saddam Hussain. It makes for a fascinating insight into the meta-context of the organization’s members, which include former KGB favourite cleric, Bruce Kent:
The so-called ‘war on terrorism’ is an act of political rhetoric that must be distinguished from a military campaign against a sovereign state. It cannot be used to justify an attack on Iraq, and any offensive planned to counteract the perceived threat posed by Iraqi weapons of mass destruction should not be represented as a war against terrorists.
What the hell is morally enabling about a sovereign state as opposed to a bunch of trans-national terrorists? How does an act by a state or against a state somehow take on a different moral quality simply by virtue of the fact it is carried out by or against a collective? Are there no objective moral qualities? Because Saddam Hussain presides over a sovereign nation and Osama bin Laden did not, what is the difference morally how they may be attacked? Surely an attacks is objectively just (or not) regardless of the fact a nation state is (is not) involved.
We are pleased to note that Prime Minister Tony Blair has assured Parliament that Britain will not support any military action against Iraq without the authority of the United Nations.
As I mentioned yesterday when I attacked the next Archbishop of Canterbury, what possible moral authority can spring from a ghastly cabal of benighted states like the UN? To get approval from the UN for something is not a moral matter but rather a political matter… the calculus is ‘We’ll vote to lift restrictions on ivory sales if The Peoples Republic of Kleptostan votes for x in the general assembly’. Why the hell do these people hold up UN authority as having any validating moral quality whatsoever? As our resident Reuters wonk Tom Burroughes said yesterday, people like the excellent Jim Henley have made all manner of rational arguments against going to war with Saddam Hussain, but people like Pax Christi are incoherence incarnate and with a sense of their own moral superiority to boot which is insufferable and laughable equal measure.
Ace blogger John Weidner of Random Jottings has written about a truly shocking decision by Yahoo to help the Chinese government censor the Internet for the 1 billion people living in China (and of course that open air prison camp called Tibet).
There is only one way to deal with a company like Yahoo and that is to made them pay a price in the market for their collaboration with the brutal regime in Peking: Boycott Yahoo!
The next Archbishop of Canterbury tells us that without a new UN resolution authorizing the United States and its allies (meaning Britain) to attack the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussain:
…any US-led invasion of Iraq [would be] “immoral and illegal.” Yesterday he softened his stance to say that he would support only a UN-sanctioned invasion of Iraq.
Firstly, Rowan Williams is not a lawyer and his legal opinions are about as meaningful as those of David Beckham or Mariah Carey or Joe Blogs who works flipping burgers in a fast food joint near you. The Nazi race laws were passed by the duly constituted judiciary and therefore ‘legal’, Pol Pot murdered a third of Cambodia under the duly constituted law of the land, slaves were ‘legally’ owned in the USA and Jesus Christ was not lynched but rather was crucified perfectly ‘legally’ by the Imperial Roman and Jewish authorities. Since when has the utterances of churchmen been relevant to an act’s legality as opposed to its morality? Legality and morality are only passing acquaintances.
Secondly, as for moralitry, the majority of member states of the UN are, by ‘western’ standards, abusers of human rights. A substantial minority of those states are out and out tyrannies, such as Zimbabwe, Cuba, China, Belarus and Burma to name but five. How does this body somehow become a font of moral authority? By what logic does this parliament of thieves and murderers become transformed into a source of moral authority whose imprimatur transforms a act from illegal and immoral to one he can support? Are there no objective moral reasons involved in making a choice here, merely the machinations of a corrupt transnational bureaucracy?
As of yesterday, the Japanese government brought a nightmarish integrated national resident registry network system on-line called Juki Net. Privacy activists in Japan see this as an alarming tool in the hands of a state with a long history of intrusion into civil society and even some municipal authorities are uneasy about the privacy implications.
When I read this first paragraph in a longer piece about Rowan Williams the intrinsically hilarious next Archbishop of Canterbury (he even looks funny), I could not help but marvel over the sheer linguistic and logical absurdity of it
ST DAVID’S (Reuters) – The future Archbishop of Canterbury has been made an honorary druid at a colourful pageant in his native Wales, but he denies that the ceremony makes him some kind of pagan.
Actually it does indeed mean precisely that. The next Archbishop of Canterbury has been made ‘some sort of pagan’, namely an honourary pagan. The Druids are a pre-Christian order whose spirituality is by definition pagan: it pretty much has to be if it is pre-Christian! The Archbishop designate has allowed them to make him an honourary Druid, therefore…
I suppose having some facility with simple logic is not a pre-requisite for a job of such passing consequence to the Church of England.
When a private citizen is robbed, a worthy man is deprived of the fruits of his industry and thrift; when the government is robbed, the worst that happens is that certain rogues and loafers have less money to play with than they had before.
– H.L. Mencken
Now that we have a European ‘single market’, trade is much easier between companies across EU national borders right? Well, not necessarily.
In today’s Sunday Telegraph, the nightmares experienced by a British fireworks company trying to do its lawful business across Europe highlights the reality of Europe’s so-called single market.
What a superb showing by British shooter Mick Gault. He keeps winning at the Commonwealth Games in spite of having to do all his training in Switzerland.
The reason he has to train in another country is that Britain took a giant lurch towards becoming a police state in 1997 by outlawing all handguns (not to mention seeing firearms crimes soar since then).
It has long seemed to me that as interest rates have been forced to a ludicrous 40 year low, there is no real reason to keep money sitting in a bank as once the government appropriates a chunk of the pitiful interest on your cash, you might just as well have it stashed under your bed.
The rational view is that rather that seeing a bank as intermediary to invest your money for you, it is really just a glorified piggy bank… a supposedly safe place to invest your money. But then when you add in the fact retail banks go out of their way to pile on service costs and pull such ‘fast ones’ as taking up to four days to clear cheques (thereby pocketing a few days interest on the uncleared funds), when in reality they are capable of clearing the transaction before you have walked away from the counter, it is hardly surprising that retail banks are hearing the first rumblings of a consumer revolt.
I have always thought consumer boycotts were splendid things but quite why the inane Independent Banking Advisory Service (IBAS), a bank consumer group, is calling for a windfall tax (free registration required for link to ERisk Portal) on banks as a result is not so clear.
[Eddie Wetherill of the IBAS says] Nobody can understand how charges are calculated or precisely when they apply. The banks appear a law unto themselves.The Government has made fancy promises to be the consumer champion, but in reality it appears to have been in the pockets of the banks. We are calling for a windfall tax. They have ripped off the public and ought to be paying back £5-10 billion. We have seen ten years of plundering.
And as a consumer of retail banking services, exactly how do I benefit from having the government help itself to the bank’s funds? Does Wetherill think the state is going to appropriate £5-10 billion from the banks and then dole it out to retail banking customers? How idiotic. The government already takes a great deal more of my money that my bank ever has and any ‘windfall tax’ is just going to make the bank a less solvent less secure piggy bank without helping me one iota. With ‘friends’ like the Independent Banking Advisory Service, who needs enemies?
It is nice to see HM Customs and Excise get one in the eye from a British court. These people would have you believe they are just acting to ‘protect’ Britain from ‘evil drug smugglers’ whilst in reality just engaging in capricious power trips, confiscating property of travellers without any evidence of wrong doing and reversing the burden of proof with a presumption of guilt.
It is particularly bizarre that Customs and Excise claim:
Cigarette, tobacco and alcohol smugglers cost taxpayers £9 million a day
How does depriving the British state of £9 million per day in taxes, and thereby allowing British consumers to purchase cheaper tax free ‘smuggled’ goods, actually cost British taxpayers? Surly it is the British taxes on cigarettes, tobacco and alcohol that is the added cost to British taxpayers, not the avoidance thereof. Since when is not being forced to pay more money a ‘cost’? The ‘smuggler’ makes a profit by purchasing cheaper goods taxed at lower French levels and then importing said goodies to Britain… and the millions of Britons each year who purchase those less costly tax-free goods are thereby able to afford more of what they want… and the state gets less money to spend on surveillance, property redistribution, bureaucracy etc. etc. etc.
Sounds like a win-win-win situation to me.
Canadian Leah McLaren‘s remarks about the sexuality of English males amused Adriana but a gentleman who actually dated the winsome Ms. McLaren has a rather less charitable view on why she wrote the things she did.
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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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