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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As expected, the electoral results from Belarus were a load of cobblers. Now the unexpected protests have started, with an estimated 5,000 brave protestors supporting the opposition candidate, Milinkevich, and declaring the elction null and void.
Thousands of protesters thronged the main square of the Belarusian capital on Sunday in defiance of a government ban, refusing to recognize a presidential vote that appeared all but certain to give the iron-fisted incumbent a third term.
The crowd hooted when a large video screen broadcast a live statement from the Central Election Commission chief, who announced results that showed President Alexander Lukashenko headed toward overwhelming victory in Sunday’s vote.
The protesters chanted “Long Live Belarus!” and the name of the main opposition candidate, Alexander Milinkevich. Some waved a national flag that Lukashenko banned in favor of a Soviet-style replacement, while others waved European Union flags. Milinkevich arrived at Oktyabrskaya square later.
These are the results from the election thief:
The elections chief, Lidia Yermoshina, said Lukashenko had won 89 percent of the vote, according to returns from nearly one-fifth of polling districts. The results virtually guaranteed a third term for the authoritarian leader who has ruled the republic since 1994.
“Lukashenko cannot have won 80 percent!” he said, referring to exit polls conducted by two groups the opposition says are loyal to the government and released just hours after voting began that projected he would win more than 80 percent of the vote.
“Cannot! Cannot! Cannot!” the crowd chanted.
Let us remember that Lukashenko has no qualms about viewing all of these protestors as terrorists. Russia will stand idly by, with the satisfied smile of Reynaud, and the EU will wring its hands, a pity it isn’t its own bloody neck!
However, I am quite pessimistic about the outcome. Lukashenko has the support of stagnation amongst the majority of the population. Only those whose future hopes have vanished under this regime will be in the square tonight.
Now we wait for Lukashenko’s move…frostbite or tanks?
There is a rally going to be held in Trafalgar Square between 2:00pm and 4:00pm on Saturday March 25th 2006, in support of freedom of expression. Be there and show your support! There is also going to be a similar rally in Berlin on the same day and hopefully others organised in various cities if a critical mass of interest can be attracted.
… but the Dissident Frogman is still waiting for someone to give him the suitable translations for his banners in Arabic. Any takers?
If you are in Oxford on Saturday and want to join a protest against animal rights extremists, check this out. The Research Defence Society blog has more, as does the Social Affairs Unit and Laurie‘s own blog.
Those who have felt left out by the various cartoon demonstrations recently, and fancy getting out on the streets in support of something they care about have a chance on Monday lunchtime. In my capacity as General Secretary of NO2ID, may I extend an open invitation:
NO2ID and Liberty will be holding an emergency lobby of Parliament on 13th February 2006, when the Identity Cards Bill returns to the Commons for consideration of Lords’ amendments. Mr Blair will be wielding the whip for MPs to assent to the nationalisation of the people with as little fuss as possible.
The lobby will take place from 12 noon until 1:00pm on the sundial in Old Palace Yard. This is opposite the St Stephen’s Gate entrance to the Houses of Parliament. [Location marked ‘H’ on this map (pdf)]
This will be your last chance to make a visible protest against the Bill before it goes into the final stages of negotiation between the two houses. And for Samizdata people, it is a rare chance to make common cause with a true rainbow coalition – the fabulous collective of security professionals and technologists, business-people and anti-capitalists, spooks and mooks, great and good, lefties, ultra-lefties, Greens, red-greens, nationalists, internationalists, peaceniks, Old Labourites, New Tories, LibDems, Europhiles, Euroskeptics, Muslims, evangelical Christians, not-so-evangelical Christians, outright pagans, constitutional wonks, geeks, babes, and Trots that are backing the NO2ID campaign.
As always, we shall be laying on some props, but please do bring your own (death-threat-free) banners and placards – the bigger and clearer the better.
To get an idea of numbers, for our own comfort and the helpeful people from Charing Cross police station. we’d appreciate a note to events@no2id.net to let us know if you’re intending to come, though it is not obligatory.
End of commercial. Here’s the musical version.
This call [original link removed] for a rally in Trafalgar Square next Saturday is interesting. Does anyone know any more details of who is behind it? I would like to know more before leaping to any conclusions.
update: question answered – not worth supporting one group of (white) fascists protesting against another group of (Islamic) fascists
Recently, a Greenpeace boat was rammed by a Japanese whaling ship. Or vice versa, depending on which side of the fence you sit on. Somewhere in my blogospheric wanderings, I stumbled over a Greenpeace blog purportedly authored by the crew on that particular mission. Since sparring with members of the crew and those peopling their fawning commentariat, I am reminded yet again how soft-headed, shallow and emotionally driven the anti-whaling argument is.
It continues to amaze me how, over the years, Greenpeace has pulled off such a remarkable public relations campaign in regards to whaling. They have successfully ensured the utter ignorance of many hundreds of millions of otherwise intelligent individuals on the matter of whaling. For most opposed to whaling, there is one species, “the whale”, and it is being fished into extinction by those nasty Japanese. Forget the fact that some species of whale are not even close to endangered. The minke, for example, has an international population ranging somewhere between 500 000 – 1.1 million individuals. The minke is the most commonly harvested whale. Icelandic and Norwegian whalers only hunt minkes and the vast majority of the Japanese catch consists of minkes. Forget the fact that, when the Japanese hunt other species, each year they have never taken more than 51 Bryde’s whales, 10 sperm whales or 100 sei whales. If you want to check the population levels on each of those whale species, please take a look at the earlier IWC chart I linked to. To suggest this tiny rate of harvesting will have a negative impact on whale populations is preposterous. Even if the Japanese follow through on their threat to double their cull of minkes to about 1000, and – let’s be generous – add another 1000 taken by the Icelandic, the Norwegians and indigenous groups, this cumulative figure of 2000 is clearly sustainable given a conservative population growth rate of 1% and a highly conservative total population of 500 000.
Another point that the anti-whaling wailers do not like to concede and invert in their rhetoric; whaling in international waters is not illegal. Membership of the International Whaling Commission is entirely voluntary, and no member is bound to accept its rulings. For example, IWC member Norway has been catching minke whales under an objection to the moratorium on whaling since it was put in place in 1986. Japan, whilst almost certainly running a misleading campaign that asserts its catch is predominantly for scientific purposes, could withdraw from the moratorium on commercial whaling and start openly whaling commercially any time it wanted to.
A further blow to the relevance of the anti-whalers’ cause can be seen in the dwindling market for whale meat. Even arch enviro-moonbat David Suzuki concedes that the market for whale meat is falling in Japan. The same thing is happening in Norway, according to other environmental hysterics. Simply, the young don’t much care for the stuff in Japan or Norway. The market for whale meat is literally dying. As for any potential non-culinary demand in the West, we no longer need whale oil, and there are far cheaper sources of pet food. When viewed rationally, whaling is a non-event, and its importance is further deflating.
Considering the above, the anti-whaling campaign seems like a ridiculous waste of energy if “saving the environment” is key. One of the eco-pirates on the Greenpeace boat claimed, in a response to my initial post on their blog, that “Greenpeace’s position is based purely on the need to leave healthy intact ocean ecosystems for future generations.” If they were truly a group concerned with preserving ocean ecosystems, they would be concentrating their efforts in South East Asia, where numerous fisheries are in various stages of collapse due to rampant overfishing. The whaling debate shows Greenpeace for what they are – a bunch of filthy hypocrites who ignore true environmental catastrophes to chase after high profile red herrings. Please pardon the pelagic pun.
Incoming email:
Greeting!
Keith Burgess Jackson, a tenured philosophy professor, has just started a new blog designed to deflate thuggish far-Leftist blogger, Brian Leiter. Leiter has a lot of influence and uses it to harm people who dare to challenge him. So Keith wants to try to civilize him a bit. Apparently Leiter is obsessed with his reputation. Keith says that Leiter scours the Internet for references to himself and then writes to people to get bad references removed. He has also apparently hired a lawyer to get the University of Pennsylvania law students to take down their rankings blog. Keith wants to put him down, but only by saying true things about him. Truth is an absolute defense to defamation. If you would like to help, at least please blogroll the new blog so that it rises in Google’s rankings, so that when people type “Brian Leiter” into Google, the new blog comes up. I myself have no connection with the new blog – just a wish to see it thrive. The blog is here: http://brianleiter.blogspot.com
Thanks
John Ray
Sounds like a laugh. Presumably this posting will help.
I have no idea just how much of a shit this Brian Leiter is, and how much he contributes to the “Brians are bad” syndrome, but I expect that he is indeed a shit to some degree. I will visit this blog a few times, and then decide if I want to keep reading it. If I do, I will then blogroll it, here.
Nearly forgot. Happy New Year everybody.
From David Tebbutt:
This is the promise: “The Habitat JAM will gather your input and add it to thousands of others to identify actionable ideas for the Vancouver World Urban Forum agenda and influence the Forum’s content. It will start conversations and build new networks that bring enormous potential to global problem solving.”
It sounds more like a threat to me. At best, manipulated bullshit. Problem solving is a fine thing, but the fewer conversations and networks devoted to “global” problem solving, the better, I would say. This is, I think, because “global” bundles together lots of difficulties into one huge impossibility, which you then blame on global capitalism. But the way to actually solve problems is to do what actual capitalists actually do, which is break the problems up into solluble particles.
Still, “actionable” means that someone will at least be able to sue these people, yes? No. Non-responsibility for resulting chaos is of the essence of gatherings like this.
In response to overwhelming popular demand (Julian Taylor can be a bit overwhelming sometimes) here is the text of the Marie Antoinette International Dead Liberty Award for the year 2005, which has been awarded by the Libertarian Alliance to Robert Gabriel Mugabe, and which I featured yesterday in one of these photographs.
Click on this:
I hope you (Julian Taylor) can read that okay, and that it need not be typed in, again.
So, since we are on the subject of Mugabe, how are things in Zimbabwe these days? Well, this story says quite a lot:
Harare, Zimbabwe, 11/17 – A magistrates court in Zimbabwe Thursday dropped corruption charges against President Robert Mugabe`s nephew, two weeks after his high profile arrest on suspicion of graft involving billions of dollars.
Leo Mugabe and his wife Veronica were arrested on charges of illegally selling flour on the local market and exporting it to Mozambique.
Trade in wheat and flour, both of which are in short supply here, is controlled and exports are banned to preserve stocks for the local market.
No evidence, according to the magistrate. I do not suppose that lack of evidence is usually much of a problem, in Zimbabwe nowadays. But this case must have been rather different.
I wonder how Robert Mugabe himself feels about this. I do not assume that he will automatically side with his nephew. As I wrote here, a while ago, I was briefly acquainted with another relative of his, and I can report that the Mugabe family is not the proverbial big happy one. They do not all stick together. They quarrel. And Robert Mugabe is easily stubborn enough and self-righteously cruel enough to throw a relative to the wolves, if he decided that this was the right thing for him to do, just as he has decided that wrecking Zimbabwe is the right thing for him to do and will stubbornly continue with that, until death or ruin stops him.
In other words, this Libertarian Alliance prize will change nothing in Zimbabwe, nothing at all. But, future recipients of the award may perhaps be influenced by it.
The whole issue of Walter Duranty’s Pulitzer Prize in 1932 has always pissed me off. It just rankles that he got away with it, so the least we can do is blacken the bastard’s name posthumously for the sake of the millions of dead Ukrainians he lied about.
Now that Harold Pinter has won a Nobel Prize for literature, I guess the tradition of lionising men of letters who are apologists for mass murdering leftists is still alive and well.
Want to make your voice heard on the issue of Walter Duranty’s Pulitzer Prize? Take a look at Cyber Cossack (and check out their great site banner) and if you are in the NY area, consider lending your hand to a bit of activism.
Better late than never.
Tomorrow (Wednesday) the issue of trade justice will be topical. Free-market NGO Global Growth is looking for volunteers in London who would be willing to help with a stunt outside the French Embassy. If you are free in the middle of the day tomorrow, e-mail your details to info at global-growth.org. Please include your mobile number.
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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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