Samizdata

Don’t let’s be beastly to the Germans!
But don’t let’s be beastly to the Hun!
– Noel Coward

Former celebrity brain tumour sufferer and Labour politician Dr Mo Mowlem reportedly believes that we need to “negotiate with Bin Laden”, along the lines of terrorism appeasement in Northern Ireland.

I agree.

In the spirit of reconciliation I propose the following gestures of good faith:

1. Remove all British forces from the Middle East and Afghanistan.
2. Break off diplomatic relations with all non-Islamic countries.
3. Ban women from holding any educational qualifications past primary school.
4. Ban women from holding any jobs other than primary school teacher, nurse or doctor in women only clinics. Especially remove all women from political office.
5. Ban all Jews from holding political office, working in the public sector, the media and the legal profession.
6. Prohibit the sale or consumption of alcohol between 3pm on Fridays and noon on Saturday.
7. Release all Moslem terrorist suspects.
8. Order the Archbishop of Canterbury to publicly abjure Christianity [Editor’s note: is this not already the case?] and exhalt the supremacy of Islam. Convert the established churches of England, Scotland and Ireland to Islam.
9. Prohibit all religious education in schools, except Islam.
10. Order the abdication of Her Majesty the Queen in favour of a male relative (her husband perhaps).

Obviously, we should hold back on some Islamist demands until we have some reciprocal agreements from Mr Bin Laden, for instance:

1. No mass public executions of homosexuals and female adulterers.
2. No public flogging of drug or alcohol addicts.
3. No enforcement of the veil for non-Moslem women.
4. No declaration of war on Israel and the USA.
5. No handing-over of British nuclear, biological and chemical weapons technology to al-Qaeda.

After all, we must have something to bargain with!

Just an after-thought. Am I confused, or did negotiating with the IRA lead to a split with even more violent factions launching even more deadly bomb attacks?

The good Professor Bunyip has a modest proposal for reforming the welfare state:

Fire all the public servants, social workers and ministers of the new and godless Christianity and replace them with the very people to whom they have been sending everyone else’s money.

The newly uplifted wouldn’t actually have anything to do, since there would be no further funds to distribute, but they would have salaries and somewhere to go in the morning. Meanwhile, those laid-off social engineers could sample the poetic justice of penury — the very condition they have encouraged in the underclass whose positions at the bottom of society’s ladder they would assume.

We taxpayers would notice no difference but a positive one: Bureaus of social engineers would cost less to support while achieving just as little. And we could also expect to see crime rates diminish, since the pool of formerly downtrodden malefactors would be otherwise occupied giving each other tattoos with government-issue ballpoints and microwaving infants in their departments’ lunchrooms — a kinder, quicker, cheaper and altogether more efficent way of squandering human potential than the current method. As a final advantage, the newly designated poor, being composed of a better class of person, would be less likely to burn down railway stations.

I say its worth a try.

A few weeks ago, i was looking through old issues of The Spectator and I found a piece by Mark Steyn from a little over a year ago. He was talking mainly about his dislike of the UN, and the silliness of Libya being at the time the newly elected chair of the UN Human Rights Commission and Iraq being about to become president of the UN Conference on Disarmament. (Looking back, I think Iraq and Libya have both learned quite a bit about disarmanent and human rights since then. But I digress).

However, Steyn went on to say that some international organisations were okay.

I’m all in favour of the Universal Postal Union and the Berne Copyright Convention (America was a bit late signing that one), but they work precisely because Sy Kottik and his chums weren’t involved.

I’m not so sure, actually. Certain aspects of the Berne Copyright Convention are somewhat controversial, and I would argue that parts of it are more about certain countries attempting to implement protectionist policies more than anything else. No doubt we could now have one of those long heated arguments in the comments section as we often do when intellectual property issues are brought up. But let’s not. It’s Christmas.

For it was the other one of those international organisations, the Universal Postal Union, that made me think about Steyn’s article when I was posting Christmas presents too my family in Australia a couple of weeks back. You see, there are three postage rates for air mail. The most expensive is the “standard letter rate”, which can be used to send anything, other than items considered actually dangerous to send through the mail. The first of the other rates is “printed matter”, which is defined as

advertisements, books, calendars, catalogues, diaries, directories, greetings cards, illustrations, magazines, maps, musical scores, newspapers, order/subscription forms, leaflets and pamphlets, plans, postcards, price lists, printed drawings and notices, proofs, prospectuses and timetables, but not letters, including personal messages or greetings (other than five words allowed on greetings cards), handwritten receipts, photographic negatives, slides or film, postage stamps or blank stationery

Got that? The other is the “small packet” rate which is defined as

goods, gifts and trade samples, audio/video tapes, magnetic tapes, and photographs. You can include a letter, invoice or other document, if it relates to the contents of the item

These definitions are defined by the treaties that created the Universal Postal Union, and it is impossible for any one country to change them. This is what happens when you put representatives of lots of governments together to negotiate anything. They come up with stupid, overly bureaucratic definitions and rules. But somehow the idea that it is their business what I choose to put in the mail is taken as a given.

They probably had some reason for setting rules like this, at least theoretically. Were books and newspapers considered morally virtuous and letters and photographic negatives not (huh?), or was is considered desirable for people to write their letters on thin paper but it was not considered desirable for people to send light gifts rather than heavy gifts?. In any event, letting people who send things from one almost arbitrary list of things subsidise people who send things from a different list seems somewhat peculiar to me.

But I suppose the international postal system does work on the whole. And even if it does produce silly outcomes like this, multilateralism is generally better than bilateralism

And things are changing. I cannot remember the last time I sent a personal letter to anyone. Business letters occasionally, and occasionally Christmas cards, but otherwise I use the mail service entirely for sending packages. Perhaps the letter rate will fade into non-existence and the costs of sending packages will revert to something resembling the actual costs of sending them because there is no other mail. I suppose we can hope.

But I still have this peculiar vision of somebody working for the post office whose job is to open people’s packages to check that they haven’t written any more than five words on their greeting cards. Clearly this is important. Civilization would obviously collapse if it was not done.

Anyway, Merry Christmas everyone.