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]
|
I have come across an allegation I am unable to verify because I am a linguistic curmudgeon, unable to read (or even speak!) Swedish or Danish. Sorry, everyone. A late night trawling through a comments thread over at Tim Blair’s unearthed this very interesting comment from reader “TOGITV” :
I have just read that the Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten is about to republish the Mohammed cartoons!
I can’t find any reference to it in any English language press. But here is the link to the article in the Swedish press
TOGITV later posts :
I just read the Swedish article a bit closer. It isn’t the same newspaper (Jyllands Posten) that will re-publish the cartoons, it will be another Danish newspaper called Politiken.
I can’t read Danish quite as well as Swedish, but I think the article in Politiken says that Harpers Magazine will also publish the cartoons in their June edition also accompanying an article on Art Spiegelman.
Interesting, if true. Perhaps someone versed in Swedish or Danish could enlighten the rest of us as to the articles’ content. If it is true, and the cartoons are published again in another Danish magazine, the seemingly obvious consequence would be another explosion of fundamentalist Islamic vitriol against Denmark, freedom of speech, the West and Western values, you name it. However, the furore over the Jyllands-Posten cartoons occurred several months after publishing, and was certainly incited by a few conspiring Islamic leaders, who provided the nexus between a liberal European paper and the protesting Middle Eastern mobs. On reflection, it is hard to see what good the rabble-rousing has done for the Islamic cause. In response to the disgusting behaviour of the Islamist mob, the silencing veil of political correctness was blown off various issues surrounding Islam in quite remarkable time. I’ve noticed that the educated middle class – possibly the social group most conscious of PC mores – are these days far more likely to openly discuss and criticise the ugly sides of Islam and its (in)compatibility with modern Western society. I’d go so far to say that, post cartoon-rage, even tracts of the left are less willing to defend Islam’s excesses.
I rather think that those who scurrilously incited the cartoon rage did not expect the mob to claw and bay with such intensity. Certainly, the hideous scenes we witnessed on our televisions at the time turned many erstwhile allies in the West away from the Islamic cause. More importantly, an enormous number who had no opinion one way or the other regarding Islam now see it in a negative light. It is most evident that the individuals who all-too-successfully activated the mob dealt themselves an almighty propaganda defeat – possibly one of the more spectacular tactical backfires we’ve seen in recent times. Surely, even the most benighted, zealous Islamic leader has the limited perspicacity required to concede that point. Hence, if the cartoons are soon published in another Danish newspaper, we may hear nothing more of it.
City Journal, the New York-based magazine, is rapidly turning into one of my favourite reads (many of its articles are now on-line). It carries writers of wit and grace on all manner of issues, many on education, urban life and business. It is now, in my view, streets ahead (‘scuse the pun) of the Spectator, which lost the plot under the editorship of Boris Johnson, whom I now regard frankly as a twerp. City Journal ranks alongside the rejuvinated Atlantic Monthly and Prospect magazine as a place to go for having one’s views challenged and stretched.
I strongly recommend the latest issue, which has an appreciation of the late writer, Jane Jacobs, who helped take apart the case for centralised planning of towns, and a review of the life of Robspierre, and a must-read piece on Iran by Mark Steyn, who happily is still churning out great material despite parting ways with the Telegraph Group.
Sorry to keep banging on about J K Galbraith, but I just had to drag a gem of a BBC Radio 4 radio interview out of this comment thread – thanks to commenter John K (not Galbraith, one assumes) for bringing it to light. The Radio 4 producers were no doubt expecting hushed reverence for a crusty Keynesian warrior like Galbraith – much beloved by most BBC types – so I think they received rather a rude shock when the interviewee, Meghnad Desai, got into his free marketeering stride. My favourite part :
“So Galbraith was very much a 1950s man. And he still has fans, because lots of people are still stuck in the 1950s. You know, quite a lot of them in the Labour Party.”
I also particularly enjoyed the shocked pause before the interviewer, Greg Wood, thanked the eminent Professor for his heresy.
Now recent British history is changing.
Last week we heard that the Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, had offered to resign but that the Prime Minister refused to accept his resignation. The PM subsequently told the House that he did not know the details when he rejected that resignation.
Yesterday the PM told the News of the World that he might have to sack Clarke, depending on what happened. This morning it emerges in The Sun, the News of the World’s stable-mate, that, “BUNGLING Home Secretary Charles Clarke did NOT offer to quit last week over the freed foreign convicts scandal. He told the BBC he had offered to go — which infuriated Prime Minister Tony Blair.”
Those of us who have been seized by the strange idea that the reason a PM might reject a resignation without asking for more details could only be in order to be able to deny knowledge later, can take comfort. It never happened.
That the serious press, read by a tiny proportion of the public, may have carried stories in which Blair supported his Home Secretary, and that he told the House of Commons something similar, carries no weight. Many millions of tabloid readers are subvocalising the much simpler truth: that Tony has been badly let down, and investigations are going on to discover how badly.
And as to the Battle of the Cowshed, I believe the time will come when we shall find that Snowball’s part in it was much exaggerated. Discipline, comrades, iron discipline! That is the watchword for today. One false step, and our enemies would be upon us. Surely, comrades, you do not want Jones back?
David Miliband, Minister of Communities and Local Government, is happy for (undisclosed) government employees to post comments full of praise for him on the taxpayer-owned blog he uses to promote himself and his department. When a taxpayer – in this case, journalist David Tebbutt – asks if the fawning comment is indeed from a government employee, Miliband will not even publish the query, let alone answer it.
This, in a blog discussion about how MPs and ministers can prove to us through blogging that they do listen to taxpayers and are not as out of touch as we silly people imagine.
The state is not your friend and politicians certainly do not work for you, no matter whose propaganda (theirs or the taxpayers’ rights’ groups) you have bought into. Taking your money under threat of violence and actually working for you are not the same thing. David Miliband is one of many who take your money and work on their own agendas, on which self-promotion is paramount. This is an obvious fact, and David Miliband’s abuse of his taxpayer-owned blog is just one more piece of evidence which proves it.
I submitted the following comment to the David Miliband promotional blog:
Dennis Howlett – who I know personally and like – misses the point about the difference between other blogs and this one: This blog is not the private property of David Miliband. It is being financed by the taxpayer and is using government (taxpayer-funded) resources.
Which makes it all the more disgraceful that David Miliband refuses to publish comments that might make readers realise his ‘integrity’ is not quite what it seems. (I do not expect this comment to be published, either, but only hope it imbues David Miliband with some degree of shame when he reads it, if he is capable of feeling such a thing.)
Quite apart from this abuse of a taxpayer-funded blog, this is a sterling example of abhorrent customer service. Then again, when the customers don’t actually choose your ’service,’ and are forced under threat of violence to pay for it, you have the freedom to be endlessly selective about which ones you pay any mind. Right, Minister Miliband?
Jeff Jarvis is consulting the BBC, and is excited over the Beeb’s claims that it wants to “reinvent” itself. Here is what I said to Jeff:
Jeff, the point is that the BBC doesn’t want to ‘reinvent’ the very worst element of itself: the funding via shakedown of Joe Public. We’re not talking about a situation where a small percentage of the income tax or sales tax a person pays over a year is diverted to the BBC. One cannot own a radio or television without paying a ‘protection fee’ – Mafia-style – to the BBC. Don’t pay? You get a huge fine, and if you don’t or can’t pay it, you are thrown in prison.
The BBC is not going to ‘reinvent’ the threat of violence under which they operate. It’s not even a remote possibility. Ask some of your contacts there what the odds are, and I assure you they’ll laugh in your face.
The facts are inconvenient and chilling, but they are facts. Isn’t that what journalism is supposed to be about?
I really do not understand how people – not just Jeff, because there are a hell of a lot of them – who would be outraged over being shaken down by corporate interests can be so qualm-free about being shaken down by politicians and bureaucrats. Then again, these are often the same people who fully realise how incompetent and corrupt politicians and bureaucrats are, yet want to give them more and more responsibility for running a big chunk of our lives (healthcare, education, you name it). Cognitive dissonance, anyone?
This morning I was on SkyNews on the Saturday live programme debating blogging. It was one of those discussions the media in the UK has started to have, as in… these bloggers are not going away, so let’s make them sound a bit ridiculous and question whatever it is they do. Yawn.
I was in the studio with Bobbie Johnson, a blogger and technology correspondent of the Guardian, and Iain Dale, a former Conservative party candidate, political commentator and.. wait for it.. a blogger. We had fifteen minutes to argue with the presenter about what is a blog, are they any good, shouldn’t blogs be like journalism, what is the bloggers’ responsibility, is it good or bad that they are undermining and stretching the current rules and frameworks etc. So three years ago, dahling…
The questions were extremely basic and there was no time really to answer anything other than try to get a sound-bite in. Perhaps that is why I could not take the whole thing too seriously. Both Bobbie and Iain were good and made the experience rather enjoyable…
The best thing about this morning was an excellent tip from the studio make-up person – she recommended a smudge-proof eyeliner that will do what I want from it, i.e. stay put and make my eyes look smokey. For those interested it is MAC fluidline eye-liner gel. Perhaps the traditional media has something going for it…
And here is a gratuitous pictures of me, with the make-up on.
And yes, it was rather sunny today.
Cross-posted from Media Influencer
Update: Tim Worstall actually watched it! I wish he had been there too but flying all the way from Portugal for the sake of a few silly questions about blogging just does not seem worth it.
The Economist magazine, about which James Waterton wrote a few days ago (it is getting a new editor), has an interesting cover article ‘Soft Paternalism’, chronicling the growing trend of governments to devise ways to make people behave in certain ways, usually in order to meet some supposedly desirable objective, such as losing weight, saving for a pension and so forth. I do not think the Economist hits the issue nearly hard enough but I absolutely love the picture associated with the article.
I rather like this quotation in the final paragraph:
Private virtues such as these are as likely to wither as to flourish when public bodies take charge of them. And life would be duller if every reckless spirit could outsource self-discipline to the state.
Some people, including libertarians, are a bit hard on the Economist, which often veers away from its historical attachment to free markets, liberty and limited government. I occasionally find its tone condescending but on the whole that magazine is a force for good. Let us hope that under its new editor, the Economist continues to beat the drum for classical liberalism in an era when liberty is all too often on the back foot.
Hopefully the new boss is not the same as the old boss, who, in the last few years, edited a magazine that has increasingly moved away from its liberal tradition, perceptibly found more faith in government action and embraced a whole plethora of questionable agenda – most notably, global warming. I cancelled my subscription some time ago. Here’s hoping the new editor gives cause to take it up again.
This story from the BBC is beyond parody:
Television viewers will have a say in the price of the licence fee, with the government conducting research before it sets the cost for the next decade.
Each licence will go up to £131.50 on Saturday, and the BBC has requested future rises of 2.3% above inflation.
The public’s views would have “a material impact” on the final sums, Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell said.
How jolly nice of our political equivalent of a head girl at school to let us unwashed plebs have some input into how much we get to pay for a service that, er, ahem, we have to pay for regardless of whether we watch it or not.
Seriously, though, this is the sort of thing one might expect of life in the former Soviet Union, where workers at the local tractor plant were urged to suggest ways to make the machines work even better down at the local collective farm.
Well, Ms Jowell might as well know what my preferred size of a licence fee is: zero.
The New Individualist magazine has put one of the Jyllands-Posten ‘Mohammed Cartoons’ on its cover. If any other US publication has published them at all, I am not aware of that (hopefully the commentariat will let me know if I have missed one). In the UK, as far as I know only The Blanket have done the same. As a commenter has pointed out, anyone with an internet connection can see them on a thousand sites, so the point of publishing now in hard copy is to make a statement rather than facilitate people seeing the cartoons themselves.
The media in Britain and America have hardly covered themselves in glory on this issue, leaving European editors to make most of the running in standing up to those who howl for legislated intolerance (and I am not just talking about Islamo-fascists), so credit to Robert Bidinotto for sticking his head over the parapet and pouring some hot oil on the barbarians below.
At a recent speech, Rupert Murdoch noted:
“It is difficult, indeed dangerous, to underestimate the huge changes this revolution will bring or the power of developing technologies to build and destroy — not just companies but whole countries,” said Murdoch, in a speech for the Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers.
He mentioned bloggers as one of those forces so I guess we are doing something right.
|
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.
|
