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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In this report the New-York based organization Human Rights Watch unequivocally describes suicide bombers, and those who send them, as war criminals.
UPDATE: There are some comments below disagreeing with the term “suicide bomber” and suggesting various alternatives that better get across the idea that these are evil people. While I certainly do think they are evil I prefer to stick with the term “suicide bomber”, as it accurately describes the factor that makes them striking and newsworthy. Any terrorist bombers – the Basque separatists ETA, for instance – can be described as homicide bombers. In our present world, when you say “suicide bombers” everyone knows in a second who’s killing who and where and why. This is an aid to efficient transmission of information, if nothing else. If the trend spreads we may need to particularize further.
However, I quite agree that the suicide angle is irrelevant to their status as terrorists and war criminals. Morally, suicide affects only themselves. I also agree that their suicide is used to glamourize and excuse their evil. This needs to be debunked. However I think the debunking can be done as well or better by argument as by changing a generally accepted and efficient term.
So let me rephrase my original post to bring all this out more clearly: “…Human Rights Watch unequivocally describes those who kill Israeli civilians, and those who send them to kill, as war criminals. It does not go along with the idea that suicide somehow legitimizes this.”
May I add that I think this report is quite big news. HRW’s website gives the impression that they are generally within the same mildly-lefty tradition as Amnesty International, Oxfam and so on. The record of this tradition in speaking out against the recent murders of Israelis by suicide bombers is not that impressive. It is therefore slightly surprising and very welcome to see HRW speaking out so clearly. Hence my title, “Breaking the Silence.”
Iain Murray has scared the **** out of me.
If the Blogger bug strikes, as it might well (some bug has certainly prevented me from posting at all on my own blog today), go to The Edge of England’s Sword and scroll down until you reach the words “The end of Habeus Corpus in Britain.” The thing I’m talking about was posted on Tuesday October 15th at 9.19 am.
Don’t give me any of your excuses, either. Whatever the difficulty, go there.
“I don’t mind keeping the bunny-huggers happy so long as it doesn’t cost me a penny.”
– Brian Aldridge, the Sage of Ambridge. Pity he’s such a John Major.
You remember the DMCA? It’s that Digital Millenium Copyright Act that Americans concerned with freedom are getting so steamed up about. As usual the EU are not far behind in providing an equivalent for us over here to have bad dreams about. Chris Bertram of Junius has linked to an article by Julian Midgely which claims that:
…university lecturers or school teachers will need to appeal to the Secretary of State on each and every occasion that they need to make a copy of part of a copy-protected CD for teaching or research. Librarians, archivists, private individuals, and the disabled can expect to be similarly encumbered.
A ‘Bear Of Very Little Brain’ such as I does not quite follow every twist and turn of the A-Level scandal, but the story goes something like this: the government wants more students in higher education for good reasons and bad. So the government puts direct and indirect pressure on the exam boards to make the exams easier by changing their mark schemes and structures. This manouevre is kept secret; they would like us to think that they have made students cleverer by good magic. The ruse does not work. As grades go up and up people start to talk about “dumbing down.” Finally the jump in the number of A grades is so embarrassing that the exam board start secretly moving the goalposts. This is a betrayal of trust: even if the level of achievement necessary for a good grade is objectively set too low, once the board has publicly stated the criteria it is bound to stick to them as part of its contract. To secretly mark students down is close to libel.
What a mess, hey? What’s a poor Education Minister to do? In an article called Estelle, here is your way out of this mess the Telegraph’s John Clare puts forward his advice to the beleaguered Estelle Morris.
But I’ve got some even better advice. I know a breathtakingly simple way for Estelle to get out of this mess entirely. It’s this: Get out of this mess entirely, Estelle! Yes! It’s that easy! Kick over your ministerial desk, make a barbecue of all your papers, hurl your dispatch box over the balustrade of the magnificent interior balcony of Sanctuary Buildings, and be gone and free within the hour. I don’t just mean resign. I mean make your last act the complete and inalienable renunciation of government interference in A Levels, AS Levels, right through to X, Y and Z Levels, with every record so much as touching upon the subject shredded or electronically wiped to make sure your courageous decision sticks. Because government interference is the only cause of all this mess and government butting out is the only cure.
You lucky kids! Those cool people at the BBC don’t just know what’s good for you, they even know what you want. All of you. Despite anything you might say to the contrary. If you have forgotten what you want and need to be reminded, just check out this website from children’s news programme “Newsround”. See, it’s telling you: “Kids Want Tougher Air Rifle Laws.”
Adult readers seeking a more detailed rundown on this topic, including details of which of the BBC’s own guidelines are being ignored, might like to see my post at Biased BBC.
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a gun”
(With apologies to Arthur C. Clarke. This one came up on a computer newsgroup discussing open-source projects that would let anyone bypass censorship limitations such as Yahoo has imposed in China.)
Remember my July 10 post, “Tell me about special reading”? Well, you can all stop thinking I’m just another middle class mama boasting about my wonderful offspring. I am and I do, but not today. The purpose of this post is to downplay my kid and up-play, if the term is allowable, the system that taught him to read so quickly. Evidence that this might be a group rather than an individual effect was provided by a little sign posted up on his classroom door at the end of term. It said that 95% of the children in his year were ahead of the national average in literacy, and 54% of them were more than a year ahead. In case you are wondering, the school is an ordinary state school in an area that is mostly middle and respectable working class but includes some children from welfare enclaves.
So what’s this post doing on Samizdata? Early Reading Research (ERR) certainly is not a system designed to appeal to libertarians. The teacher is boss. The kids listen and participate as a group, in unison. Scientific it may be, but in spirit it is a throwback to systems the Victorians would have recognized.
But that doesn’t matter. The libertarian morals to be drawn are (a) it’s taken thirty freaking years or more to overthrow the fraudulent orthodoxy that monolithic state education enthroned, and the job ain’t done yet; (b) that when you next hear statists moan on about how horrifically complicated, interconnected and hard to solve social problems are, mentally add the words “so long as you refuse to admit that you were wrong”; (c) watch the buggers in the educational establishment. Watch them with the eyes of a hawk. Sure, they are by now in their heart of hearts convinced that phonics is the system that works. But a little matter like the interests of actual children won’t override the fact that the last thing the Special Needs “community” want is sudden, clear improvement in children’s literacy. It would make them look bad. Worse, it would make them look unecessary. Expect them to obfuscate, distort and delay reform in every way imaginable. They’ll tell themselves that gradual change and a “mixed approach” are the best thing all round, which is true when the best thing is defined as covering their tails.
One final point. I can talk “mixed approach” too. I’m not saying ERR is the best and only system for all time, just that it knocks the National Literacy Strategy into a cocked hat. I’m not saying that there are no children with real special needs, just that there are much fewer of them than will keep all today’s legion of special needs teachers in their jobs. And I have no idea of what Jonathan Solity’s political opinions are. If he ever reads this and finds himself agreeing with me, I suggest that he keep very, very quiet about it.
Basking in the anticipated riches from sales of Samizdata consumer durables, Perry e-mails to suggest, “Natalie should consider a shop for her site… a nifty line in ‘Ninja Librarian’ tee-shirts?” Thank you, Perry, but I have already launched my own mug and T-shirt business, and while doing it had the inspiration that will make me the next Bill Gates. As capitalists you might be interested in my business model. Start up costs are zero. Running costs are zero. Depreciation is zero. Losses from theft, breakage and catastrophes of nature are all zero. Profits, it is true, are also currently running at an integer number between one and minus one, but it’s early days yet. The Great Thought came to me while I was thinking of what to give my 48,888th visitor, a chap called Dave. Suddenly it came to me:
“You win a… um… free endorsement of whatever T shirt, baseball cap or coffee mug you happen to own anyway. It is now an official nataliesolent.blogspot.com shirt, cap, mug or other promotional article. Tell all your friends!”
“Virtual micromanufacturing,” as I like to call it is the true child of the information age, with all its virtues of instantaneousness, flexibility and asypmptotically trivial transaction costs. You don’t like the Ronald MacDonald logo on your nataliesolent.blogspot.com mug? Just look hard at your much more tasteful 1802 Sèvres card dish and reassign that coveted Natalie identity at the speed of thought. Just In Time manufacturing has nothing on this! It remains only for the delighted customer to send me his money.
Antoine Clarke is a ferociously well-informed man, so perhaps he can nail down a quotation from Milton Friedman for me. Somewhere in his discussion of market failure, Friedman points out that when someone says, “but if there were no government intervention, this or that bad thing might happen,” it’s a perfectly valid defence to answer, “And with government intervention this horrendously bad thing definitely is happening.” You compare the real option with the other real option, not the real with the ideal.
In his post “If they must die: then let them do so quickly” Antoine makes the same error. He writes,
“Great. “Algeria” is better off for the next twenty years under Islamic fundamentalist rule … Several thousand individual women have had their throats cut in the past decade for not wearing ‘modest dress’. Several hundred children have been slaughtered by similar means. But that’s OK ‘cos in twenty years someone else’s kids might not be shot for demonstrating against the ban on “The Simpsons” or Pepsi adverts.”
No, it’s not OK. It will never be OK. My point and Brian’s was not that either Algeria or Iran are OK but that Iran is less bad than Algeria, and that the main reason for that is that the Iranian army let their fundamentalists keep their genuine election victory, dreadful though the fundamentalists were. The Iranian corpse-pile is lower by a factor of around ten, I believe. How much clearer can it get that the Iranian path is the better one to follow? Of course it would be a million times better yet if
“…consenting Islamic fundamentalists wished to purchase land and build a shining model of the good society for us all to learn from.”
But this was never on the table. It was on the table for the Iranian army, not known for its fundamentalism, to mount a coup at the time of the first Iranian election. It was on the table for the Algerian army not to. And I bloody well wish they hadn’t.
There’s another libertarian point to be made in this case. Don’t initiate agression. Antoine correctly observes that:
“Unlike Iran, the Algerian Islamists are quite open about scrapping elections.”
Now I am relying on memory here, but I seem to recall that the FIS gave the opposite impression at the time of their original election victory. Having their genuine election victory stolen from them gave them support, put fire in their bellies, made them more savage. War made them worse, so that now, yes, they have to be shot like dogs (and I am willing to defer to Antoine’s superior knowledge about the relative evil of the two sides.) Judging from the Iranian experience, it would have been better not to have had the war.
So would everything have been hunky-dory then? No. Quite possibly the FIS were always lying and always intended to scrap the holding of elections. It still would have been better, militarily, practically better, to have let the guilt fall on them. That was the real alternative.
Here’s an interesting thing. I was surprised to receive an e-mail from John Braue of Rat’s Nest, asking whether I had sent him an e-mail headed “Fw:darling” with no text but two attachments.
I had not.
I tried to post a virus warning on my blog, but Blogger wouldn’t let me. My Blogger troubles aren’t the interesting part though. This is: Dawson kindly posted a warning on my behalf and added that he had had similar fake e-mails purporting to come from other bloggers, including himself. Now, am I wrong, or does that suggest not the random spatter-gun malice of most viruses but a individually-targeted campaign to diminish trust within a community, namely ours?
By the way, it’s an ill wind that blows no one any good: I have now discovered the Rat’s Nest: a splendidly outspoken blog. And, apropos of Brian’s post next but one down, the latest blogger blug that takes you to the wrong link is not unique to UK Transport. It’s hit me, and several others too.
UPDATE: I have been advised that my virus was probably something called “the Klez worm” or simply “Klez.”
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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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