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I am quite satisfied with the Café Press on-line shop we already have for Samizdata.net (they are currently running a sale in fact!), but does anyone out there know of any other on-line shop providers which offer tee-shirts in colours other than Ash Grey and White? I would love to do black and/or deep blue shirts with our logo in white as well! Please e-mail us (see sidebar) if you know of any. Thanks. August 9th, 2002 | Comments are closed
 Yes, that is right. Regardless of the facts presented about how nationalised industries fail in every other sector, the moral (it is funded by theft) and intellectual (it makes no economic sense) arguments against a socialist health service that is based on force backed appropriation has fallen on deaf ears in Britain. So how about a purely utilitarian analysis based on life and death? The NHS is institutionally incapable of not perpetrating horrors like this. If you pay taxes in the UK, that is what you are paying for. On nothing other than utilitarian grounds based on self-preservation, do you still want the NHS to survive? I occasionally use the NHS myself under the logic as as the state forces me to contribute to it regardless of alternate arrangements I might make, I may as well use it to recoup at least some of my own money. In fact I am going to submit to its ‘tender cares’ tomorrow. Wish me luck! August 8th, 2002 | Comments are closed
Calling all you former anti-Apartheid protesters of years gone by: do you miss the comradery of old days standing in front of the South African embassies in London or Washington DC or Paris in protest at a regime that treated people not as individuals but just as a collective racial category? Have you not been able to bring yourself to throw out the old placards and tee-shirts? Well have I got some great news for you! Britain is introducing overt political Apartheid and so your time has come again! Huh? You’re not interested? Oh, I see… it is only so called right wing collectivist racial discrimination you were against, not collectivist racial discrimination itself. Sorry to have bothered you. August 8th, 2002 | Comments are closed
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
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:
…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. August 7th, 2002 | Comments are closed
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:
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.
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. August 7th, 2002 | Comments are closed
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!  August 7th, 2002 | Comments are closed
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:
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? August 6th, 2002 | Comments are closed
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. August 6th, 2002 | Comments are closed
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
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. August 5th, 2002 | Comments are closed
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. August 4th, 2002 | Comments are closed
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.  August 4th, 2002 | Comments are closed
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). August 2nd, 2002 | Comments are closed
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