A man, by some miracle of medicine, is cured of bubonic plague. Then does he forget that he came close unto death and sayeth he desireth back his beloved plague because the warmth of fever, yea the very burning of his flesh, stopped him feeling cold at night in the tents of his cyber-camp. Truly, it is hard to discern the meaning of this parable.
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Perry mocks the Black Kittens. David laughs at the soppy little FARC-ers. Can I just remind you boys that, if you must be some sort of revolutionary socialist, it is at least less bad to be a halfway peaceful one. Let’s not make it harder for them to move in the right direction. Along the same lines, may I also offer my heartfelt congratulations to any ex-Taliban among our readers who cried “uncle”, hid, shaved or ran away during the recent readjustment in Afghanistan. Well done. Right decision. You think I’m joking at your expense, but I’m not. Welcome back to the real world. January 19th, 2002 | Comments are closed
 I agree with ‘Johnny Student’ that one reason for the elite to want to present the world as complex is to keep them in jobs as the only people able to understand it. Another reason for wanting the same thing is as an explanation for the failure of their preferred solutions. They look around after decades of welfare/gun control/affirmative action and still see poverty/gun crime/blacks at the bottom of the heap. It is much pleasanter to bemoan the complexity and “stubborness” of poverty/crime/racism than admit that their solutions were just plain wrong. It also gets you a bigger budget. Obviously in many ways the world is complex. But rather as physics can reduce multifarious phenomena to simple equations, I think you can dig down to some fairly simple ethical principles. The complexity comes in seeing what applies where. January 10th, 2002 | Comments are closed
Lots of good but wrong stuff… …In Kevin Holtsberry’s blog. I would like to join battle with the redoubtable Mr Holtsberry on several issues, but can I start with just this one. I am as he is of sick of e-mails headed “heya…” and “hi?” that turn out to be porn. These e-mails disgust me when I see them, waste my time while I delete them, and mean that my children cannot be let out even for a moment from the kiddie-ghetto of Kids’ AOL. I don’t deny there is a problem. His proposed solution is to have a law. I have to point out that there probably are laws already, dozens of them. How long does a new one take to come in? How effective will enforcement be? Is there any special reason to suppose that it will be any more effective than the laws prohibiting drugs? Slowly, imperfectly, but definitely, the market has provided solutions to related problems before. We first hooked up to Compuserve in 1995. At that time you paid for every message you received. We received a lot of junk, got sick of it, and quit. (Our family would be classified in advertiser’s jargon as not so much “early adopters” as “early rejecters”.) When we came back five years later the payment structure problem had been solved, and the quantity of junk mail much decreased. (Yes, really.) It’s an arms race. At the moment the attackers are winning – but who is going to be more motivated to research on means of defence: AOL, who are going to lose my custom one of these fine days if they don’t get a move on, or the government? It’s not the case that I deny any role for law in this issue. Separate contracts, enforceable in law, between ISP and users as to what could and could not be sent by the ISP’s services, would be fine by me. Different ISP’s could compete on their various brand contracts. “We always prosecute pornographers who send unsolicited mail!” some would boast. Others could proudly say, “You choose: this service is completely unrestricted and unsupervised.” Contrast that with the obvious dangers of blanket supervision by not just the present government but all future ones. But the law is always likely to trail behind the power of angry customers (like me) with the right of exit. The lowlife that Mr Holtsberry rightly describes as being “creative and dishonest” in evading the software barriers that Internet Service Providers try to put up against them are scarcely likely to be less creative and more honest in evading legal barriers. January 8th, 2002 | Comments are closed
Libertarians will be deeply concerned to learn that the authorities of the Orwellianly-named “Samizdata” have hidden from their readers that Natalie Solent’s most recent reading matter was not “?” as appeared in the summary of what all the Samizdata posters just read (an obvious ploy; the world public has long known that “?” is a Pokemon, silly). It was actually a whole pile of 1997 copies of House and Garden given to me by my next door neighbour. Clearly the powers-that-be considered this insufficiently intellectual. In a compromise move Ms Solent has offered a real-life clever person’s book she read just too late for the deadline: Getting the Message, a history of communications by Laszlo Solymar. It’s full of interesting nuggets. Here, for example, is an excerpt from a law passed in France in 1837:
And here is the text of a warrant issued by the British Government to the Post Office during the Boer War:
Plus ça change… December 24th, 2001 | Comments are closed
Some people ask:
That is right, we don’t. What we owe to them, and to our own people too, is the ordinary right to buy and sell what they please, along with all the other ordinary rights to life and respect for property. Tariffs against African imports mean that we in Britain pay more than we ought and the people in Africa are arbitrarily forbidden from bringing their wares to our attention – it’s up to British individuals whether they buy or not. So the European Union, having stopped Africans making a respectable living as producers and traders by denying them access to us, then bestows a lesser largesse via ‘Third World Aid’. Adding insult to injury, the EU then expects gratitude from the very people they have discriminated against. Of course what happens is that Africans, now being dependent on largesse rather than their own efforts, take on the character of beggars, whiny when desperate and sullen when temporarily a little better fed. We in our turn take on the character of patronising social workers-cum-lords of the manor. What a pity, when we could be interacting as equals and fellow human beings. December 18th, 2001 | Comments are closed
Lots of high octane posts on Samizdata today, covering many issues of topical importance. That’s why I’d like to talk about a thirty year old TV show. According to Phil Farrand’s Nitpicker’s Guide, these top 10 reasons for violations of the Prime Directive include No. 10 “The Stupid Machine that ran the planet didn’t allow any touching and kissing”, No. 6 “The inhabitants were using a bunch of stupid computers to fight their wars like pantywaists”, culminating in No. 10 – Kirk’s personal No.1 – I noticed my hairline receding that day.” I knew I had become a real hard-core libertarian when I started getting genuinely outraged on behalf of the right of the inhabitants of gangster-obsessed Sigma Iotia II not to pay protection money to the Feds in “A Piece of the Action.” I reckon that episode indicated subliminal acceptance by Rodenberry of the Federation’s real nature, that of a protection racket that breaks its own rules whenever convenient. Farrand also takes Star Trek (both Classic and Next Gen) to task in a way that will find, perhaps, less sympathy with the Samizdata crowd: their attitude towards religion, which is that it will have no place in their nice clean universe (unless it’s PC American Indian religion, that is. There are no Christians, Moslems, or Hindus to be seen – and nearly all the alien religions turn out to be covers for a ruling elite of some sort *. Babylon 5, though written by an agnostic, treats the subject far more plausibly.) * = That’ll get the comments coming about present day religions. December 17th, 2001 | Comments are closed
I couldn’t resist throwing this BBC News 24 historical morsel into the stew of debate about possible cooperation between Jordan and Israel. King Hussein wanted Israel to bomb Syrian forces during the Black September crisis of 1970, according to British Government documents released thirty years later. Notice Mr Heath being as wrong about Hussein’s prospects as about everything else. BTW, my post of earlier this afternoon now appears quite loopy. I often think this about my own past writing but to think it after a delay of hours rather than years is unusual. December 14th, 2001 | Comments are closed
When I first heard – at the school gates where I ought to be now – that some spectacular act of terrorism had taken place in America, some chime of memory struck about the date. I did wonder whether September 11 was the thirtieth anniversary of some event in Hussein’s expulsion of the Popular Front? I never did track it down, though. December 14th, 2001 | Comments are closed
This Teheran Times story says that two of their nuclear scientists have been rearrested on suspicion of something or other to do with Afghanistan. Can the two stories be linked? November 28th, 2001 | Comments are closed
Well, if you’re going to have libertarian Kipling, you’d better get a good strong dose of MacDonough’s Song: Whether the State can loose and bind Whether the People be led by the Lord, Whatsoever, for any cause, Once there was The People–Terror gave it birth; November 19th, 2001 | Comments are closed
…to point out that the 18 US Rangers in Somalia gave a good account of themselves. All honour to them. The fact remains that the point of military action is not to get a favourable kill-ratio but to win. If I wanted to bore you with a list of wars where the losing side killed more than the winners I would start with World War II, go on to World War I, and keep talking for a long, long time. Not that I’m arguing with the main thrust here! Here’s some more forgotten dead people: 5,000 killed by chemical weapons by Saddam Hussein in Halabja. November 17th, 2001 | Comments are closed
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