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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Tony Blair gave his annual Labour Party conference speech to the party faithful (and not-so-faithful) in Brighton this afternoon. He touched on a variety of issues but this series of quotes stands out and reminds us, as if we needed reminding, that this is one of the most illiberal governments since the Second World War:
We are trying to fight 21st century crime – ASB (anti-social behaviour) drug-dealing, binge-drinking, organised crime – with 19th century methods, as if we still lived in the time of Dickens. The whole of our system starts from the proposition that its duty is to protect the innocent from being wrongly convicted. Don’t misunderstand me. That must be the duty of any criminal justice system. But surely our primary duty should be to allow law-abiding people to live in safety.
It means a complete change of thinking. It doesn’t mean abandoning human rights. It means deciding whose come first.
The emphasis is unmistakeable, however much Blair tries to soften the authortarian message with assurances about defending the rights of accused persons. Under this government, the traditional checks and balances of the Common Law, already eroded by the previous Tory government, have decayed at an accelerating pace. The right to trial by jury, habeas corpus, double-jepoardy, admissability of previous conviction details… the list of protections that have been wiped out or been eroded gets longer and longer.
Blair, being the crafty sonafabitch he is, understands how easy it is to portray we defenders of civil liberties as “soft on crime”, and so the point to stress must be to challenge the false choice he offers: be liberal or be safe.
Far from making us safer, playing fast and loose with the Common Law protections of the individual are having the opposite effect in the medium and long run. Weakening the right to self defence emboldens burglars. And dismantling traditional legal safeguards will undermine respect for the rule of law among the otherwise law-abiding, to no good effect. And yet when people are convicted of serious crimes like rape and burglary, the offenders often regain their liberty after a relatively brief period in jail, making no restitution to their victims.
Blair, and for that matter the Tories, have still not grasped the fact that it can and should be possible to crack down hard on crime while protecting our ancient liberties. Or is that too subtle for for our political classes to grasp? Is there some great nugget of wisdom in the Blair speech that I missed?
Those so inclined to read Blair’s speech in full can go here.
I was only a toddler when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin went on that historic walk on the Moon (well, assuming you don’t buy the tedious conspiracy theories that it was all staged in Madison Avenue or whatever), and have been interested in this period of post-war history for a long time. So, for all you space junkies out there, there is a 3-D IMAX documentary on the way, portraying how the whole Moon landings went. Excellent. Book the popcorn and the soda drinks.
The Science Museum in London – one of the greatest – is showing the film.
As I predicted a few weeks ago, SUV-phobes need not get into a hissy fit. The market is changing people’s driving habits:
Toyota Motor Corp. has seen a rise in demand for hybrid vehicles in the United States in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina as consumers seek more mileage out of $3-gallon gasoline, a top official said on Thursday.
“At the end of last month, we had a 20-hour supply of the Prius (hybrid sedan),” Jim Press, head of Toyota’s U.S. operations, said at the Reuters Autos Summit, held in Detroit. “We no longer count in days.”
Price increases change human behaviour. Who would have thought it?
Well, I can not say this bad story came as a total surprise, given the near-total lack of respect for property rights and the rule of law in Africa:
South Africa says it will for the first time force a white farmer to sell his land under a redistribution plan.
The story goes on to say that the seizure is part of a drive to “redistribute” land to people who lost what was rightfully theirs as a result of the 20th Century apartheid regime. Hmmm. It seems to me that on an abstract level relating to rectification of previous injustices, there is some credibility to this idea. However, the big problem is that the people who will get chunks of this land are unlikely to have much to do with the people who were allegedly robbed of said land in the first place, assuming that such a claim can be validated. (Of course if there are people who could claim that they or their ancestors were robbed of what was rightly theirs, then I have no objection in principle to some restitution).
In practice, as we have seen all too clearly in nearby Zimbabwe, the spoils of any assault on white-owned farmland will go to the political hacks and cronies of the governing regime, and likely bring about a serious, possibly catastrophic loss of economic wealth and food in a part of the world, that is not, to put it mildly, greatly endowed with such things.
Perhaps the president of South Africa should put this book on his reading list. Or perhaps he should remember to heed his own words.
More than anything else, Africa needs stable, enforceable property rights, period, if it is clamber out of its current state. Sir Bob Geldolf and friends, please note.
The BBC is reporting that the British film industry – however defined – cut its total payroll by about 20 percent in 2004, caused in part by uncertainties over the future tax treatment of said industry. It is a familiar tale.
British governments, especially the current Labour one, liked to attract the plaudits of the film-buff classes by promising to shower grants and tax breaks on the film business, but the returns on all this activity have been mixed at best. I am not sure whether tax is the prime reason for choosing to avoid Britain or not. Surely the availability of top talent, on both sides of the camera; good locations, ease of access and relatively decent labour market conditions also play a big part in all this. The latter point gets overlooked, particularly given the still-severe armlock on the industry by the acting union Equity, which operates a closed shop system on the industry.
Another thing – far too many British films try to go for the “quirky” or period-piece route and I suspect that the industry is now saddled with a fairly set image. Brits continue to ply their trade around the world – some of the best movie directors, special effects artists and so forth are Brits – so maybe some concerns are misplaced. Film-making is a global industry anyway and I would not be at all surprised if a lot of work is getting outsourced to cheaper locales like India.
I do not believe the government should dangle even bigger tax breaks under the noses of our would-be Spielbergs or Ridley Scotts to get them to make movies here. Cutting taxes overall and keeping labour costs free of regulatory red tape would be a better long-term bet. The film industry is a nice thing to have but it does not deserve and should not get, special treatment from the State.
I fly a lot and have spent more hours in aircraft and the associated departure lounges than I care to think (don’t get me wrong, I am a regular propellerhead). One thing that really cheeses me off is that creature: The Flight Attendant/Pilot Who Thinks He Is The Next Great Wit. On a recent flight our pilot insisted on mixing up his usual spiel (read the safety instructions, we arrive at X GMT, please fasten your seatbelts) with a sort of annoying, endless attempt at making the whole process funny. You could tell that the passengers were getting restless. One chap sitting behind me shouted out “Don’t give up your dayjob” but it was no good. The jerk went on and on for about 10 minutes before, mercifully, takeoff commenced.
A small plea to any wannabee Bob Newharts out there in the airline business: just fly the goddam plane and shut up.
Okay, I feel better now.
Charles Moore on the lamentable Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone:
This man is the Mayor of our greatest city. He condemns the bombing of that city (because it was an attack on “working-class Londoners”, not on “the mighty and the powerful”). But he is friends with our enemies. New York had Mayor Giuliani at its darkest moment. We have Mayor Livingstone. We are in trouble.
We are. The time has long gone when Livingstone and all that he represents could be dismissed as fringe Moonbattery. But he remains in power because he is such a cheeky chappy. Well, I am not laughing.
Thanks to regular commenter Julian Taylor for pointing out the Moore article. Read it all.
For all that I am sometimes bemused about the views of the assorted rock stars, media wannabes and other folk gathered around Sir Bob Geldof’s “Make Poverty History” campaign, I was a bit taken aback at this story. A UK regulatory body has banned the group from making any television or radio advertising on the grounds that it is a political group.
It would surely take the wisdom of Solomon to figure out the fine boundaries defining what is and what is not a “political” organisation. So many charities nowadays seem to stray into territory that one might construe as political. Many think tanks, which describe themselves as education or research institutes for the purpose of getting charitable tax status, are often highly political, if not in the simple party sense.
In my view, if a charity is deemed unfit to broadcast its views on the telly, it should be banned, full stop. For example, a radical Islamist or neo-Nazi group claiming to be a charity which is banned from spreading its message should also be banned as such (although some libertarians might argue that even such groups should be tolerated unless their members advocate violent acts with a reasonable chance of carrying them out).
The state has no business trying to define the boundaries of what is and what is not a charity. Ultimately, of course, the way to cut through the problem might be to end the tax breaks that charitable status brings and cut taxes across the board so that the designation of “charitable status” no longer is something decided by the Great and the Good but left up to we mortals to decide for ourselves.
It is fair to say that I do not always agree with what I read over at the Lew Rockwell blog, considering its position on foreign policy to be sometimes naive to the point of downright obtuse. (That should get the comments fired up nicely, ed). That said, this article drives home very effectively what might be one of the few silver linings of the terrible effects of Hurricane Katrina: it may undermine respect for the wonders of Big Government and underscore the importance of local initiative in times of great danger.
And this article by David Kopel certainly adds to disquiet about what certain state officials are up to.
Surfing the cable television channel briefly on Friday lunchtime, I came across a CNBC programme about oil prices, in which a couple of analysts fielded email questions from the public about why prices are so high. One guy claimed that the price of oil – currently about 70 dollars a barrel – was grossly inflated by those evil speculators and the “real” price of oil was more like 40 dollars.
Okaaay, said one of the analysts. If that is the case, maybe the emailer should quit his or her day job and take up oil speculation if the “real” price of oil was far lower. Armed with this insight, the correspondent would make a killing, said the clearly rather bemused analyst. It is rare on television to see this sort of nonsense smashed out of the park in such a fashion. Certainly not likely on the BBC.
While on the subject of nonsense about the role of speculators and prices, this is worth a read.
I think the field known as nanotechnology just took another pretty major advance, judging by this story:
Scientists have made a breakthrough in nanotechnology which could hasten the development of molecular machines that could act as artificial muscles or drug delivery systems in the body.
Chemists at Edinburgh University said on Wednesday they had built molecules that can move objects larger than the size of an atom in an advance in the technology that deals with manipulating materials on a minuscule scale.
If nanotech can be harnessed to deliver potentially life-saving drugs to parts of the body, to deal with conditions such as cancer, for example, its impact on health care could be enormous. And knowing a few people who suffer from cancer, including a good friend of long standing, this is a very personal issue for me.
A new film is to be made about Che Guevara, the man whose image adorns the T-shirts of many a young student “radical” or someone trying to appear hip (even if they haven’t much clue about his real life). This story, drawn from a report at the Venice Film Festival, suggests that the man will be portrayed warts an’ all, making use of declassified CIA files. Good. It is something of a pet issue here at Samizdata that while the monsters of Fascism are rightly excoriated in film and print and unthinkable of a youngster to wear a picture of Adolf Hitler on his shirt, it is considered okay to do the same with the portrait of a mass murderer like Lenin or Chairman Mao. Of course in some cases the results of this mindset are unintentionally amusing.
Maybe the message is getting through. Totalitarian socialists are not hip, and not clever.
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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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