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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He [Michael Moore] travels to London to show off the beauty and brilliance of the British National Health Service. He talks to an unstressed doctor who has a four bedroom house in Greenwich and a £100,000 salary from the NHS. He films empty waiting rooms and happy, care-free health workers. He even talks to Tony Benn about how this wonderful marvel came into existence in 1948.
What he hasn’t done is lie in a corridor all night at the Royal Free watching his severed toe disintegrate in a plastic cup of melted ice. I have.
– James Christopher, reviewing Michael Moore’s film Sicko in the Times.
Nikki Giovanni found one of her Creative Writing students a trial.
“And every class I’m saying, ‘Mr. Cho, take off your (sun)-glasses please, take your hat off please. Mr. Cho, that’s not a poem. Can you work on it please,'” Giovanni recalled. “And then I finally realized that something is not wrong with me, something is wrong with him, and I said to him, ‘I’m not a good teacher for you.'”
One day, she arrived and found her class of about 70 students had dwindled to fewer than 10. When she asked a student after class about it, he confessed that “everybody’s scared of (Cho).” Giovanni later had him removed from her class after she threatened to resign.
Why did it have to come to that? Imagine if every class Cho Seung-hui had attended had taken place at the invitation of the teacher- an invitation that could be rescinded at any time.
In reality his memories of school were of humiliation, but imagine if, from the age of twelve onwards, or from even earlier if your imagination can stretch that far, school had been an option he could choose if he wanted it.
What if Cho’s concepts of “school” and “college” had been formed by classes like the Karate class described by Brian Micklethwait?
What struck me, so to speak, about these “martial arts” classes was that although the children present may have supposed that all there were learning was how to be more violent, what they were really learning was no less than civilisation itself.
The children were all told to get changed into their Karate kit in an orderly fashion, and to put their regular clothes in sensible little heaps. They all lined up the way he said. They all turned up on time. They left the place impeccably clean when they’d finished, all helping to make sure that all was ship-shape and properly closed-up when they left.
Were these children being “coerced”? Certainly not. They didn’t have to be there, any more than The Man had to teach them Karate if he didn’t want to. If they wanted out, then out they could go, with no blots on their copybooks or markings-down on their CVs.
Having reached the age of twenty-three, Cho was no longer forced to be taught – but his teachers were still forced to teach him and his fellow students to associate with him. True, there were a few last ways out from his menacing presence; the students could jeopardise their education by skipping class and the teacher could jeopardise her career by threatening to resign. Unfortunately by the time these sanctions were employed Cho had already got away with too much.
I sometimes think that practically every problem, inefficiency and cruelty of our education system has at its root compulsion. People who are forced into each other’s society tend not to behave well to each other. Wherever the doors are locked, be the locks visible or invisible, those inside seem to revert to the hierarchy of the baboon troop. There is still room for free will: most do no worse than learn a few habits of obsequiousness or sullenness that can be shaken off. Cho was not forced to become a mass-murderer. (In fact I see his own claim to the contrary in his video as a sort of twisted acknowledgement of this fact; the thought that “I don’t have to do this” had to be actively denied.) No, he was not forced to pull the trigger – but force did play too large a part in his life. Imagine if the doors had been open for the bullied Cho Seung-hui to walk away, or if the adult Cho Seung-hui had been shown the door at the first sign of discourtesy. Imagine this was the case not just for Cho Seung-hui on certain pivotal occasions but for everyone on all occasions. Then, I think, he would have learned differently.
If you’re unhappy and you know it, ring the cops.
If you’re unhappy and you know it, ring the cops.
If you’re unhappy and you know it, and you really want to show it…
If you’re unhappy and you know it, ring the cops.
If you’re unhappy and you know it, shout out loud.
If you’re unhappy and you know it, shout out loud.
If you’re unhappy and you know it, and you really want to show it…
If you’re unhappy and you know it, shout out loud.
If you’re unhappy and you know it, blow your horn.
If you’re unhappy and you know it, blow your horn.
If you’re unhappy and you know it, and you really want to show it…
If you’re unhappy and you know it, blow your horn.
If you’re unhappy and you know it, ring up again.
If you’re unhappy and you know it, ring up again.
If you’re unhappy and you know it, and you really want to show it…
If you’re unhappy and you know it, ring up again.
If you’re unhappy and you know it, jump up and down.
If you’re unhappy and you know it, jump up and down.
If you’re unhappy and you know it, and you really want to show it…
If you’re unhappy and you know it, jump up and down.
(The original version of this post was rather obscure, so I have expanded it. I also felt that a musical setting would render the advice of the Minister on how to assist an old woman being beaten up more memorable to citizens anxious to do the right thing in these difficult times.)
The Times reports that Rickshaw pullers reach end of ‘inhuman’ road
Rickshaw pullers … could soon be out of work after the Indian city of Calcutta banned the trade as inhuman.
The vote was boycotted by the Opposition, but Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, the West Bengal Chief Minister, told the state legislature: “In the 21st century it is not right for a human being to pull another human being.
I shall try not to be diverted into asking what the date has to do with it and go straight to the main issue. Why, out of all the millions of possible services that one human can perform for another is pulling a cart someone else rides on deemed “inhuman”?
It certainly would be inhuman if the rickshaw pullers were forced to this labour – but they are not. The only force involved is that Mr Bhattacharjee is forcing the rickshaw pullers to give up their livelihood. Compensation is promised but the plan for that seems haphazard and uncertain. In any case compensation diminishes but does not annul the wrong done to people who were making an honest living.
What is so bad about human muscle rather than batteries or internal combustion engines being used to power a conveyance? There are plenty of dirtier jobs, plenty more dangerous, plenty (if it were any business of Mr Bhattacharjee’s, which it is not) in which the generally perceived difference of class between the person paying for a service and the person providing it is greater than it is between a rickshaw puller and the person riding on the rickshaw. (Though if the class aspect is what bothers you, bear in mind that according to the leader of the Opposition in the state Assembly, quoted in Kolkata Newsline, many of the users of rickshaws are “school goers and senior citizens”. Not that it matters. If every rickshaw user were a sneering rich businessman with a villain’s moustache, it would still be a private matter between the sneering rich businessmen and the rickshaw pullers whether and at what price the latter sold transportation to the former.)
Such has been the strength of the idea of socialism for a century or more that even those who explicitly reject it often adopt its assumptions.
Socialists have always claimed to defend the dignity of labour, and have always been lying. If they really believed that the man who labours with his body was fully equal to the man who labours with his brain they would not have presumed to deny him the right to direct his own life and sell his own labour in the way he thought best. Rickshaw pullers are only one example of people whose dignity has been violated in this way, and India is far from being the only place where it happens. Readers will be able to think of many other examples closer to home.
Incidentally, pound to a rupee the twenty first century will not have run its course by the time the city of Calcutta bans everything but human-powered rickshaws on evironmental grounds.
“The only way that has ever been discovered to have a lot of people cooperate together voluntarily is through the free market. And that’s why it’s so essential to preserving individual freedom.”
He forced back force by the power of argument. His epitaph might be: the pen is mightier than the sword.
Our next Prime Minister speaks.
In the wake of the BNP pair’s acquittals, Chancellor Mr Brown said: “Any preaching of religious or racial hatred will offend mainstream opinion in this country.
“We have got to do whatever we can to root it out from whatever quarter it comes.
“And if that means we have got to look at the laws again, we will have to do so.”
I wrote two posts for Biased BBC about the BBC’s reporting of President Bush’s “admission” that there were parallels between the present situation and Iraq and the Tet Offensive. The BBC, of course, is neither the only nor by any means the worst offender among the media organisations that have seized on this.
Those who think that a clueless idiot can get and keep the office of President of the United States may well be good children or pleasant neighbours but there is no need to take anything they say about politics seriously. Whatever criticisms one might justly make of Bush, one thing he cannot be is a simpleton. For all that there is a kind of truth behind it: Bush is a simple man. As I wrote here, precisely because he is a child of privilege “in important respects his values are more normal than is normal in his milieu.” Poor guy. Of course he had thought about the similarities to the Tet Offensive. Like some prince letting slip that there might be something to this Copernican system in front of his less enlightened bishops, he just forgot for a moment to keep one of the taboos that it is safer to observe when so many of the intermediaries between him and the populace are either ignoramuses or hostile.
He forgot that so many of them rejoice that the American media managed to turn that offensive, which General Giap viewed as a failure, into “proof” that the war could not be won. He forgot that so many of them view the conquest of Vietnam by a regime so detested by its own people that thousands of Boat People preferred the mercies of the open sea to enduring it any longer, and the deliverance of Cambodia into the hands of the democidal Khmer Rouge, to be their finest hour.
You know, thinking about it, his moment of forgetfulness might make a few people remember these things. It may not do him such harm after all.
“Teach you I cannot, my young Padawan.” As a science fiction reader I am used to meeting strange words and either guessing their meaning through context or not guessing and enjoying the story anyway. So I was only slightly hampered when reading a story in yesterday’s Times headlined “New York Mayor fights drain of IPOs to London” by my complete ignorance of what an “IPO” is and the complete failure of the story to enlighten me. You can tell me all about it in the comments if you must, but as far as I am concerned “eye-pee-oh” could be replaced by any other sequence of sounds, such as snurg-ah-poog or plibble. Plibble it is. Plibbles must be pretty nice things, because the mayor of New York is so concerned that all the plibbles New York used to win (apparently plibbles are things you win) now being won by London that he has appointed management consultants to investigate causes and possible remedies for the Great Plibble Crisis. Concern has focused on the fact that since the passing of the Somebody-Whatsit Act, London has gained a 26.4 per cent share of the global plibbles. Hurrah for London, I think. New York’s problem is that doing whatever you have to do to comply with the Somebody-Whatsit act before you can get your plibbles is one big hassle. So the plibbles go somewhere else.
Blimey, I could have saved Mayor Bloomberg a packet on consultancy fees and I still have no idea what a plibble is.
Come to think of it, anyone could work out that if plibble-getting is made tedious and expensive in your country then plibbleseekers will get their fun somewhere else.
Even if you do not know your plibbles from your twogbots.
The German magazine ZAPP has a video of Green Helmet, whose name has been revealed as Salam Daher, taken in Qana when it was bombed ten years ago. He oversees a dead boy being put into an ambulance. The sequence is not good enough. He gives stage directions. The boy is taken out again, transferred pointlessly to another stretcher, put back in the ambulance. Daher makes sure there is a clear field of view for the camera and the blanket over the boy is pulled back so that his face can be seen.
The video is on You Tube.
EU Referendum promises to provide an analysis soon. This should be worth reading, as it was EU Referendum’s Richard North who first noted Daher’s surprising prominence If you care to you can also read a translation of an article from Stern magazine saying that the whole thing is just a bizarre conspiracy theory.
The picture from 1996 briefly shown on the left of the Zapp footage shows Daher holding up a dead baby dressed in blue. The baby’s head is blurred, and that is not surprising. Zapp’s picture was taken within minutes of this one showing that the baby’s head had been blown up. (Needless to say, this is a disturbing image.) That picture is fairly famous – for instance it appears as the fourth picture down in this series of pictures from the “Main Gallery Of Zionist Massacres” of a website called “Resistance.” It was also, I seem to recall, at one time the cover picture for Warblogger Watch (http://warbloggerwatch.blogspot.com, although if you try the link it is immediately covered up by sex adverts.) Daher has had a successful career.
The dead children from both 1996 and 2006 were really dead. Almost certainly they were really killed by Israeli munitions – although I have no doubt Hizb’Allah reassigns casualties from “friendly fire” whenever it gets the chance, let us not pretend that in what I take to be a worldwide war our side will not also kill innocents. The much mocked defence that an image is “fake but accurate” does have some validity.
However from now on it will be impossible to forget that these famous images tell not one but at least three stories. The dead child. The man holding him. The man behind the camera.
“One of the perverse effects of the Endangered Species Act,” writes Jonathan Adler at the Volokh Conspiracy, “is that it encourages private landowners to make their land inhospitable to potentially endangered species. ” He then links to a sad but predictable tale of residents of an area hastening to make sure that a particular endangered bird finds no place to nest and rear young – at least no place on their land, since once this bird is found there, environmental regulations make the land unsaleable.
In North Carolina they persecute woodpeckers. They do not hate woodpeckers, they just do not love them enough to lose thousands of dollars for their sake. Here in Britain we persecute bats, and not because we are afraid of vampires.
Drinking from Home posts two Reuters pictures (CORRECTION: one Reuters picture and one AP) of a woman lamenting the destruction of her home by the Israelis. Different dates, different homes, same woman.
The Sun is not happy about the “First National Muslim Fun Day”, to be held at Alton Towers. The Sun says
BRITAIN’S biggest fun park has sparked a race row — with a MUSLIMS-ONLY day.
Up to 28,000 are expected at Alton Towers on September 17 when there will be no music, booze or gambling.
Instead there will be prayer areas, Muslim stalls and all food served will be HALAL.
Organisers Islamic Leisure have billed it the First National Muslim Fun Day and tickets can only be bought through their website.
Non-Muslims phoning the Staffordshire park have been refused tickets.
So far as I can see, Muslims who did not book via Islamic Leisure have also been refused tickets. “Sorry, the park is already booked.” What is so difficult to understand about that?
One, George Hughes, 19, who rang up for 15 tickets for a pal’s birthday, said: “I couldn’t believe it.
“It’s the only day we can go, yet I can’t because I’m not Muslim. Can you imagine all the fuss if there was a Christians-only day?”
I do not know the previous policy of Alton Towers, but a few years back I went with a church playgroup to Thorpe Park for “Prayers in the Park”. The children spent the day on the rides then finished with an open air service. Happy time had by all.
Back to the Sun:
George, of Crayford, Kent, added: “My Muslim friends think it’s outrageous.
“What’s the world coming to when people are being banned from flying the St George’s flag yet this sort of day is allowed? If it must be held, then why not on a weekday rather than a busy weekend?”
Maybe because Islamic Leisure paid the hefty premium that such places charge to book on a busy weekend?
The event is widely promoted on the internet and the Muslim Public Affairs Committee declared it “exclusively for our brothers and sisters”.
The lawyers ought to administer a slap on the wrist for the MPAC for saying that, which probably contravenes discrimination law. The lawyers ought, but libertarians and other people with respect for freedom ought not. Freedom of association necessarily involves freedom to exclude. Sometimes you want the party to be private. How would you feel if you hired a hall for the annual party of your local pro-abortion group and they demanded that the doors be open to anti-abortion activists? Feel free to swap the sides in this example. The point is the same.
(In fact the organisers seem confused as to whether they they actually want non-Muslims along. Some other statements suggest that the organisers feel that if non-Muslims see Muslims enjoying themselves just like everyone else it will would be good P.R. for them.)
The Sun says
Alton Towers said any organisation could hire the park for a day.
A spokeswoman said “We make no distinction regarding sexuality, religious, ethnic or lifestyle choices.”
I doubt either statement is entirely true. We will not be seeing a Nazi Fun Day for the excellent reason that Alton Towers would turn down the booking. That is their right. There are urban myths that theme parks are sometimes hired out for the day to childish but very rich individuals; if that is the booking a park wants to accept then that is their right too. It is tough luck on George from Crayford, but theme parks are not public utilities. Unless you want them to be nationalised (imagine a theme park run by civil servants and tremble) can I suggest that George try Drayton Manor?
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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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