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 has the gall to (metaphorically) dig up J S Mill’s dead body, sit it next to him, do a ventriloquist’s act with the dead skull, and then to say, “look – Mill agrees with me.”
Hattersley claims that Mill would have joined him in wanting schools to be banned from teaching creationism. Here’s the offending article. Yes, I know that Mill sometimes departed from pure classical liberalism, but if there was one thing that he, writing in an age riven by religious controversy and when religious organisations provided the majority of British primary education, would have recognised as a test case for liberty it would be the right of religious people to propagate their beliefs to their children as they see fit. Yet Hattersley writes:
“We need to decide where individual freedom begins and ends. Fortunately, we have John Stuart Mill to guide us. He was a passionate opponent of what vulgarians call “the nanny state”. So he insisted that: “All the errors which [we are] likely to commit against advice and warning are far outweighed by the evil of allowing others to constrain (their neighbours) for their own good.” But, while we must be free to harm ourselves, there can be no freedom to “injure the interests of one another, or rather certain interest which, either by express legal provision or tacit understanding, ought to be considered as rights.” It is surely self-evident that to teach in schools that Eve was created from Adam’s rib injures children’s interests. They either go into the world believing manifest nonsense, or spend their adolescence under the impression that their teachers are cranks.”
I may not have my copy of On Liberty to hand, but thanks to the internet, I can nail that one. Back before I lost the book I put an entry in my blog about Mill’s very explicit view that propagating mistaken beliefs did NOT constitute an injury to another’s rights. A quick Google search called it up. When the secretary of the Alliance, an organization agitating for the prohibition of alcohol, said, “I claim, as a citizen a right to legislate whenever my social rights are invaded by the social act of another,” Mill replied:
“So monstrous a principle is far more dangerous than any single interference with liberty; there is no violation of liberty which it would not justify; it acknowledges no right to any freedom whatsoever, except perhaps to that of holding opinions in secret, without ever disclosing them: for the moment an opinion which I consider noxious passes any one’s lips, it invades all the ‘social rights’ attributed to me by the Alliance.”
From memory that passage comes very soon after the passage Hattersley quotes. How on earth did Hattersley come to miss it? Don’t answer that! And how, too, did he come to claim Mill as an ideological ally given Mill’s view, expressed in the same book, that Hattersley’s beloved state education was a thoroughly bad thing:
“A general State education is a mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mold in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government–whether this be a monarch, a priesthood, an aristocracy, or the majority of the the existing generation–in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by natural tendency to one over the body.”
(Quote found via Improved Clinch)
I haven’t touched here on Hattersley’s remarks on extending anti-discrimination legislation to cover sexuality even for religious schools who hold homosexuality to be a sin, nor on his views about halal slaughter. But I am pretty sure that on those topics, too, Hattersley vilely misrepresents the inferences it is possible to make from J S Mill’s writings when he (Hattersley) concludes his article thus:
No doubt the government will behave in that way as it examines “creationist” teaching, employment discrimination and ritual slaughter. Unfortunately, it will take as its text not On Liberty but the recent report of a focus group.
Blogger David Holford has been threatened with legal action by Tower Hamlets Council unless he removes some comments from his site. He has no plans to comply.
For more from me about why Tower Hamlets Council are not, as they claim, preventing hate speech but rather are attempting to suppress ridicule of Tower Hamlets Council, click here, or here if the Blogspot archives are bust again.
Turn on your TV now. If you are in Britain ITV is the right station to watch – never mind missing Bob The Builder on BBC2 – just do it, OK? You have just missed the sight of a Baghdad citizen in traditional Arab dress hitching up his robe to make a universally comprehensible pelvic gesture towards a picture of Saddam Hussein, said picture held up by another guy who has just finished whacking it with his shoe – oops, no, he hasn’t finished, more whacking left to do. They don’t think he’s coming back.
I gather the minders didn’t turn up at the press hotel today; like the rest of the Iraqi state apparatus they have melted away. Now the whole of Baghdad looks like the world’s worst organised car boot sale. Horns honking, people smiling, waving, jumping, shouting and looting every official building in the city. I just saw a lady carrying off a vase almost bigger than she is. Chairs seem to be popular, as do tyres. One practical-minded lad has gone for a large bottle of olive oil. Heavens, is nothing sacred? One reporter said that the mob had nicked all the UN vehicles and were driving them around.
I tell you, it’s anarchy out there!
Only – ahem- not our sort of anarchy. I am a minarchist most of the time, but on Tuesdays and Thursdays I am an anarchist, and I am a little bit worried about our good name. I can certainly cheer on the guys who have doused a mural of Saddam with petrol and set it alight; deconstructive art, I call it. Nor do I begrudge most of the looters their spontaneous redistribution of the ruling kleptocracy’s wealth back to the people. But it’s not all innocent fun: reports speak of shops being cleaned out as well as palaces, and that will be hard for those whose wealth and lives were tied up in those shops. Expect also to see the pent-up anger of the people bursting out into mob violence which will harm the innocent as well as the guilty.
When a drug addict undergoes the “cold turkey” cure, he will sometimes go into convulsions. This is the anarchy of cold turkey.
This is amazing, considering the source. Arab News war correspondent Essam Al-Ghalib reports that Iraqis who chanted pro-Saddam slogans told him privately that they only did so out of fear of the massacre that would follow if Saddam’s rule were to return to their area. He says he heard the same sentiments many times.
Kudos to Essam Al-Ghalib for reporting things that will make him very unpopular at home. His willingness to do so is a good sign for the future of the Arab press.
I found the link in Joanne Jacobs’ blog. If the permalink is bust, try the general link here.
[Napoleon] had one prodigious advantage – he had no responsibility – he could do whatever he pleased; and no man has ever lost more armies than he did. Now with me the loss of every man told. I could not risk so much; I knew that if I ever lost five hundred men without the clearest necessity, I should be brought upon my knees to the bar of the House of the Commons.
– Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington
Our present day military commanders probably think in private that Old Nosey had it about hundred times easier on the PR front than they do.
You’ve heard of Parkinson’s Law, Sod’s Law and various other codifications of observations about human affairs. How about this one?
One of the comments to an earlier post of mine, made by Mark Griffith, seemed to embody such a fundamental truth of commercial life that it deserves to be a law in its own right.
“Speaking as someone from Manchester, I can tell you the Guardian is not the only Mancunian organisation to get silly after moving to the capital.
“Marks and Spencers’ troubles really date from the shift of its head office from Manchester to London.
“Come to think of it, I believe the headquarters of the hyper-merde bank Credit Lyonnais were relocated to Paris, not Lyon, a couple of decades ago, before the debt disaster really took off.
“Could we have a theme here?”
Can readers think of any other examples?
I urge you to read a post by Stephen Pollard. He links to a Guardian articled headed, breathtakingly, “Welsh pensioner turns freedom fighter”. Why do I say “breathtakingly”? Because the freedom-fighting of the woman profiled by the Guardian, Anne Gwynne, consists of the fact that she went to ‘Occupied Palestine’ the better to be chummy with the families of two suicide bombers who killed twenty-three Israeli civilians. Or who “went on the mission to Tel Aviv” as she winningly puts it, before adding, “They are such lovely families and very proud of their sons.”
The woman herself is of a recurring though despicable type: the White Liberal Murder-Groupie. OK, you’ve seen her like before, swooning over the Khmer Rouge or the Black Panthers. We are up to about Mk VIII by now, with Improved Extra Gush Factor. Let us wash our minds of her and move on.
But the Guardian’s commentary hits a new low, and the Guardian once had some honour to lose. Did you know that it was once the Manchester Guardian, provincial in the best sense, standing for a tradition of Nonconformist self-improvement? Think on that and then re-read that headline describing a woman who pants to to further help the killers in their bloody work: Welsh pensioner turns freedom fighter.
Then look at the first sentence: Anne Gwynne is conducting her own war on terrorism. Mrs Gwynne did not write that, the reporter, Chris McGreal wrote it. Probably didn’t think about it much.
Did I say “the Guardian’s commentary” just then? Silly of me, it isn’t a commentary. The nearest it comes to an effort at any of that “dig deeper, ask the tough questions” stuff reporters and analysts are meant to do is this:
Twenty-three people died in those bombings in Tel Aviv in January, including many poor foreign workers. Was it wrong?
The answer given, pretty quickly, is “Nah, ‘course not.” Note how McGreal had to drag in that fact that many of the victims weren’t Israelis in order to make even a debating-point case for sympathy. Beyond that one limp line there is no justification offered for the term “freedom fighter” or for calling Anne Gwynne’s activities “her own war against terrorism.” In contrast great detail is offered of the sufferings of the Palestinians (which is as it should be) – but not the slightest scepticism as to whether Anne Gwynne is telling the whole truth. Could McGreal not have made some interjection, asked a few challenging supplementary questions, for instance, when confronted with lines like this: “I used to think it was all excuses, but they [Israeli soldiers] actually believe this shit. We have nothing to kill them with, just a few AK-47s.”? Perhaps he was never going to give the answer I would have given, namely, “Your pals with the bomb-belts seem to slaughter well enough, dearie,” but one would think that the traditions of the Guardian would demand some note of distance, of qualification, of un-acceptance?
An apologia, even when desperately, heartbreakingly wrong, is a sort of bridge between evil and good, an acknowledgement that there is something here that needs explaining. But Chris McGreal saw no necessity for any elaboration. Tip-tap-tip went the swiftly typing fingers and out came the words “freedom fighter”, “her own war on terrorism”, praise as easy and insouciant as a local reporter putting in a good word for the latest charitable efforts of the Womens’ Institute or Rotary Club. As Stephen Pollard concludes, “Ms Gwynne’s evil views are not merely presented without criticism or proper questioning; they are endorsed. And that is, in its own way, also evil.”
[This post originally appeared on my own blog. I have also posted it here because of Blogger problems and to make it as widely known as possible what sort of attitudes the Guardian considers acceptable in its reporters.]
Cor, Gnasher, that’s a relief! Alert status down to Bikini Off or whatever they call it. The good guys are so far ahead in the War on Terror that they have time to spare to ban the Dandy.
Samizdata voted No. 1 Group Blog by a fairly large group of the great and the good of the blogosphere (or the mad and the bad, depending on your p.o.v.) Nice. True. Stiff competition, too.
Chris Bertram of Junius has written:
I’ve just blogged about a matter that I think has potentially serious implications for freedom of expression in British universities. See link.
It is, too. Universities are understandably anxious not to have their names dragged in the dust by things like the Mona Baker affair. These proposals, however, would have a chilling effect way beyond that. As Bertram says:
“We could see, for example, a physicist who feels strongly about Tibet and protests against the Chinese government, being held to account for endangering the reputation of a university. Academic freedom would be no defence.”
UPDATE: Apologies for the bad link, and thanks to those who pointed it out. It ought to work now.
I don’t care how hungover you are. Get thee hence to the newsagents and buy, yes buy, a paper copy of the Mail On Sunday today. They have a story about some TV chick the German Chancellor is shagging. You care not about the paramours of foreign potentates? Buy it anyway. The point is that it’s a test case about whether British courts are supreme or whether the EU can over-rule them. Apparently Lover-boy Gerhart has got an injunction to suppress the story in Germany and is claiming that under EU law that means he can suppress it here too.
“You teach people that it’s wrong to care. You tell them that the right course of action is to “not get involved”. When they see a crime being committed, then if they try to stop it they may end up in prison, but there’s no punishment for looking the other direction and not seeing. And thus fewer people will get involved.”
– Steven Den Beste writing on what happens when you punish people for killing robbers. Emphasis added by me.
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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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