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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This story is already being well bounced around the blogosphere. Let me give it another bounce. Here is what Jacob Sullum of Reason online says:
Although prosecutors admitted Paey was not a drug trafficker, on April 16 he received a mandatory minimum sentence of 25 years for drug trafficking. That jaw-dropping outcome illustrates two sadly familiar side effects of the war on drugs: the injustice caused by mandatory minimum sentences and the suffering caused by the government’s interference with pain treatment.
Paey, a 45-year-old father of three, is disabled as a result of a 1985 car accident, failed back surgery, and multiple sclerosis. Today, as he sits in jail in his wheelchair, a subdermal pump delivers a steady, programmed dose of morphine to his spine. But for years he treated his pain with Percocet, Lortab (a painkiller containing the narcotic hydrocodone), and Valium prescribed by his doctor in New Jersey, Steven Nurkiewicz.
Insane.
I got to this by going to Instapundit and then to National Review.
War on drugs: insane; the blogosphere: sane.
Glenn Reynolds has reported some recent photos purportedly showing flag drapped coffins at Dover Air Force Base are a hoax. According to a NASA headquarters statement, the pictures are actually of the coffins of the Challenger astronauts:
An initial review of the images featured on the Internet site www.thememoryhole.org shows that more than 18 rows of images from Dover Air Force Base in Delaware are actually photographs of honors rendered to Columbia’s seven astronauts.
Apparently a number of news outlets fell for it hook, line and sinker.
I have heard it said that war is politics by other means and, similarly, that politics is war by other means.
However, it appears that some people in the USA are not really much interested in pursuing ‘the other means‘:
It’s hard to imagine a greater clash of cultures within America than that between George Bush’s Republican party and the New York left.
Ever since the announcement, in January last year, that for the first time in convention history the Republicans would be coming to Manhattan, a multi-layered conflict has been looming…..
This example, from the grassroots conservative site FreeRepublic.com, indicates that animosity is flowing freely on both sides.
“Frankly, I wouldn’t be shocked to see real street battles,” the piece says.
“The extreme left is angry. Angrier than I’ve ever seen them. And they will be made angrier still by the harsh security measures which will be required to protect the dignitaries in New York. But the right is angry too, and there will be a lot of conservatives converging in New York City for the event. If the left wants to fight, expect the right to fight back……
Sitting on a sofa, dressed like a Manhattan bike messenger, one student who identified himself simply as William said he was spending the week attending a raft of different group meetings on the protest.
After he was arrested in Miami during the recent Free Trade Area talks while simply walking down the street, he said he was looking for a more meaningful encounter in August with the NYPD:
“If you are going to get arrested, it might as well be for something rather than nothing,” he said, with a disturbing cheeriness.
Yes, well, it all looks very strange from this side of the pond where partisan politics is still a remarkably genteel business. The occasional caustic comment is about as confrontational as it gets over here. The very idea of Tory matrons from the Shires fighting pitched battles with delegates from the Teachers Union on the ‘mean streets’ of Bournemouth is just too hilarious and far-fetched to even contemplate.
Is this a reflection of something very different about the nature of the British polity? Is it because there is much more of a polite consensus over here? Or is simply because there is so much less at stake in the British electoral process?
It was said that El Sado’s (or whatever the man’s name is) newspaper in Iraq was closed down because it was “inciting violence”. I think that is true – I do not have to read the newspaper to guess what sort of things it was printing “mutilate, kill, feed what is left to the dogs” (and so on) or therefore understand why it was closed down. However, hearing of this did make me think of the following.
One does not have to be a libertarian to think the government of the United States has treated the Constitution of the United States as a bit of toilet paper for at least the last 71 years. And, of course, President Bush far from fulfilling his Oath of Office to “Protect and Defend the Constitution of the United States” has added new unconstitutional programs (the ‘no child left behind’ thing, the extension of Medicare, and so) in addition to all the existing unconstitutional programmes.
Whilst I am not drawing a direct analogue to what is going on in Iraq (for obvious reasons), I wonder what the Founding Fathers would be writing if they were around today – I think they might well be inciting violence (although, I accept, they would not be writing about mutilating or feeding to dogs).
Please no comments about how “time changes how a text should be interpreted” or “the Supreme Court says X is O.K., so X must be O.K.”
The Constitution of the United States is not some strange mystical text written in an ancient language – any person of average intelligence (who bothers to read it) would know that most of what the United States government now does is unconstitutional.
A representative of SMCCDI, an Iranian student freedom movement Samizdata has long supported, will be on the drivetime airwaves in southern California today:
Aryo B. Pirouznia will be speaking, on Monday April 12, 2004, on the widely listened Southern Californian 740 AM Talk Radio. The program is hosted by the famous KBRT’s anchor Paul McGuire and will be of half an hour length starting from 05:00 PM PST.
The SMCCDI Coordinator will be explaining the Movement’s reasons for supporting President George W. Bush and why millions of Iranians are concerned by John Kerry’s controversial position and statements in reference to the Tyrannical and Terrorist Islamic Republic regime.
It is hardly surprising Iranians would feel this way. I have heard similar sentiments expressed by some Iraqi bloggers and commenters. The upshot of this is, the American Iranian and Iraqi communities will be solidly in the Bush camp in the upcoming US elections.
One wonders if presidential hopefuls will in the future have to add two I’s to the traditional ‘three I’s’ voting blocks: Ireland, Italy, Israel… Iran and Iraq?
For more information, you can go here for the SMCCDI press release.
How the Soviets would have loved this kind of technological capability:
A US requirement for visitors to be fingerprinted and photographed is being expanded to include citizens from America’s closest allies.
The move will affect visitors from 27 countries – including the UK, Japan and Australia – whose nationals are able to visit the US without a visa.
Though even if the technology had been available to the Soviets they would not have been to afford it. But Western democracies can afford it so these fingerprint-reading machines will be coming soon not just to an airport near you but, in due course, a bank, a supermarket, a sports stadium and just about everywhere else.
I was so impressed with all those books written in the 1990’s that confidently predicted that the new age of digital technology would empower the individual and neuter the state. The implementation is having exactly the reverse affect.
But then I suppose you already knew that. After all, state’s often think it is justified to outlaw consensual sex-for-sale (unless it is part of a package involving marriage, of course). Now however, it seems even what you do with your private bits in a non-sexual way is the business of a bunch of priggish regulators.
You think not? Well that is what Georgia’s political masters reckon (that is Georgia in the USA not the one in the former USSR). It is now illegal for an adult woman to get a genital piercing. Now I realise that the USA already claims de facto ownership of its subjects (a much more realistic term than ‘citizens’) even when they wander off to foreign lands, but I though that these notions of owning folks only applied to the fruits of their labour, not their actual bodies (yes, I realise this may be wandering into a touchy area given the USA’s interesting history of intrapersonal economic relations, particularly in places like Georgia).
Now if some woman is subjected to non-consensual genital mutilations, I have no problem regarding that as criminal, but will someone tell me how a bunch of legislators can think they have the right to tell a woman what she can do to her own labia and clitoris for her own private aesthetic reasons? To me the law itself is an affront, but far more shocking is that every single one of the members of the Georgia legislature feel they have the right to tell a woman what she may do with her own body for her own private ends.
(via Jessica Lyons: Naturalis)
Barbara Amiel is someone I frequently find disagreements with but when she is right, boy, is she right. Whilst I am usually rather prone to point the finger of blame at the state as the font of all evils when things go wrong, Amiel makes the reasonable point that even with the best intelligence in the world, the prevailing zeitgeist in the United State (and elsewhere) on and before September 10th 2001 meant that there was very little support for anything which could really have stopped Al Qaeda’s infamous arrival onto the world’s front pages.
The question is not whether Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush actually knew about the murderous intentions of radical Islam or whether they took what they knew seriously, but what the public mood would have let them do about it before 9/11.
Not much, I wager. What administration could, before 9/11, have sent in American boys to fight a regime in Afghanistan because it was implementing the ideas of an old man with a long white beard, sitting crossed-legged in the mountains talking about Satan America? Had I been in Congress before 9/11, knowing everything that was knowable about the Islamists, I still doubt if I would have voted to send troops to the Hindu Kush to topple the Taliban. Eardrums would have exploded all over Capital Hill from outcries of racism and imperialism if there had been serious efforts, pre-9/11, to round up suspected Muslim militants in the United States and tighten security on Muslims entering the country. As it is, the post-9/11 sensitivity to racial profiling makes travel hazardous for white grannies who dislike body-searches.
All too true. Read the whole article.
For a good look at what pissed-off Middle America is thinking, check out the invaluable James Lilek’s bleat (actually, more of a screed) today.
Immediately below the picture of the protestor with the sign saying “I (heart) New York even more without the World Trade Center,”* Lileks cuts to the heart of the matter:
That, Ladies and Gentlemen, is a traitor. He may be an idiot, a maroon, a 33rd degree moonbat, but he’s still a traitor. That is a man who celebrates the death of Americans (and others) and supports the people who killed them. Oh, sure, he’s nuts. But he fits right in. So what were all these people against, exactly?
A free press in Iraq. Freedom to own a satellite dish. Freedom to vote. A new Constitution that might actually be worth the paper on which it’s printed. Oil revenues going to the people instead of Saddam, or French oligopolies. Freedom to leave the country. Freedom to demonstrate against the people who made it possible for you to demonstrate.
Freedom. More freedom now than before, and yes it comes with peril; it always does, at first. But freedom is either in retreat, or on the advance. These people marched to protest the premature bestowal of freedom by exterior forces. Better the Iraqi people live under the boot for 20 years, and rise up and get slaughtered and rise up again and slaughter those who killed their kin, then have Bush push the FF button and get it over with now. Better they suffer for the right reasons than live better for the wrong ones.
As the man says, read the whole thing.
The major obstacle faced by many opponents of the war in Iraq is that already, a year later, Iraq is demonstrably better off in almost every way than it was under Hussein. Even the worst feature of the current scene, the terror attacks, pose less of a threat to most Iraqis than Saddam’s regime did. It is very difficult to argue against a war that has been so immediately and obviously beneficial; that is why opponents so often have to resort to abstractions and platitudes about the UN and lack of international cooperation. Underneath it all, it is more important to the committed Left and its new Islamist allies that the US lose than that a nation of millions be given a decent shot at freedom and prosperity.
*= I believe this sign to be genuine, and not a photoshop job. If you believe otherwise, well, comments are open.
One of the best summaries of the travesty that lead to Martha Stewart being convicted of, well, lying to avoid self-incrimination, can be found on WorldnetDaily by Samuel Blumenfeld:
Stewart was acting on information given to her. She did not build her wealth on a career of insider trading. It was a one-time fluke which involved a relatively small amount of money. When federal investigators questioned her on this transaction, she said that she had a standing order for her broker to sell the stock if the price went below $60.00. Apparently, that was the alleged lie that the jury convicted her on.
Here was the federal government, which couldn’t protect us from the terrorist attack of 9-11 in which thousands of people were killed, trying to protect us from Martha Stewart. The alleged lies she told were not told under oath. She did not commit perjury. Apparently it is now a crime to tell a falsehood to a government investigator. That’s considered an obstruction of justice.
Whatever you may think of Stewart’s action, she did not kill anyone or rob anyone. Her action did not result in anyone else losing anything. In other words, unless you believe that citizens don’t have a right to tell a falsehood to a government official in defending themselves from self-incrimination, Martha Stewart committed no crime.
Read the whole thing. The sickeningly self-righteous chortling of the predators of the wealth destroying US legal establishment just makes the whole thing worse and make it clear to me what really makes the legal world go around. If some ambitious prosecutor who thinks nothing of destroying lives and livelihoods in order to advance their own careers decides you are going to be their stepping stone, watch out. The state is not your friend.
Tired of the orgy of Kerry worship from the British media, not just the BBC, but also from ITV and C4, I turned to the internet for some other news from the United States.
As expected, propositions 57 and 58 passed in California. Prop 57 being approval to borrow billions of Dollars (sorry ‘issue bonds’) in order to ‘pay for’ already agreed government spending, and Prop 58 being a promise (sort of) not to borrow money in future.
However, I came upon another proposition – Prop 55. This prop was a request to borrow (again sorry ‘issue bonds’) – $12.3 billion for government education spending on top of what had already been agreed. This bond debt to be on top of the $73 billion bond debt that the State already has.
The prop passed – I admit that it passed only narrowly (50.6% to 49.4%), but it passed.
So on the same day that Californians agreed (in Prop 57) to borrow another $15 billion (or so) for existing spending and (in Prop 58) overwhelmingly voted not to pile up more spending… they in fact did just that.
“We will not add deficit spending on to the deficit spending we already have”
…except that more deficit spending is indeed added and on the very same day.
That sums up politics – not just in California, but everywhere.
Nick Forte has some good news in the struggle for ideas in the USA
The advocates for smaller government appear to be winning the war of ideas on this side of the pond if the following Rasmussen poll is accurate. For a long time I believed this to be the case, but I was surprised by the margin shown in the poll.
February 16, 2004–Sixty-four percent (64%) of American voters say that they prefer smaller government with fewer services and lower taxes. A Rasmussen Reports survey finds that just 22% would rather see a more active government with more services and higher taxes.
What is even more amazing is that even a majority of Democrats hold this view. Only the extreme left prefer more government over less government, and even then by not as large of a margin as one might have guessed.
Support for smaller government cuts across just about all demographic lines . It is the preference for 67% of men and 62% of…
[…]
… group, 49% say they want a more active government with more services and higher taxes. Just 40% prefer smaller government
It will be interesting to see how this will affect US politics. So far, President Bush has not been able to capitalize on what should be a Republican issue because he has been seen (accurately) as big spender despite his tax cuts. Somewhat counter-intuitively, an earlier Rasmussen poll shows that more Americans voters view the front running liberal New England Democratic presidential candidate as better able to control spending than the purportedly conservative Texan Republican candidate (42% to 33%).
There is indeed growing discontent among conservatives over Bush’s spending record. Last week, House Republicans held a ‘mandatory’ conference to come up with ideas to curtail runaway government spending. Among the more radical initiatives under discussion are measures to curb the power of House authorizers and appropriators who have routinely ignored budget limits, giving the budget resolution the force of law, and requiring two-thirds supermajorities in both the House and the Senate to pass spending provisions which exceed the budget.
Although some Republican members of Congress are true believers in the need to reduce the size of government, many more are probably reacting to concerns that Americans are turning to the Democrats as the party of fiscal responsibility, undercutting a traditional GOP advantage. Could it be that political pressures for lower spending has finally overtaken the normal election year drive by politicians to buy more votes through higher government spending? Recent actions by Congress suggest not, but I remain cautiously optimistic.
Nick Forte
Falls Church, Virginia
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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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