Samizdata

It is not just about huge multinational mergers or collapsing energy conglomerates… it is also about small entrepreneurs struggling to make a deal here and develop a property there. Tonight I am delighted to be able to take my good friend Nikki Brandt out to dinner in order to welcome her back to London after an extended stint in Jamaica. She has been trying to breathe some life into a holiday resort development out there in these difficult post-September 11^th times. Londoner Nikki is a partner in a small and rather lovely hotel in Negril, on the western tip of Jamacia.

Clear proof that entrepreneurial activity leads to great legs

Johnny Student’s post has left me stunned. Let me just restate the facts as I understand them.

Johnny was in a college, the place you go to be exposed to different ideas and thereby expand your horizons. Specifically, he was in a philosophy class, the quintessential place to discuss varying points of view. Instead of debating a philosophical issue, the “instructor” sent him to the Dean to explain his actions before calling the police.

Johnny’s supposed crime was not parroting the “all guns are bad” line.

What can you say? That’s not a college. It’s a farce.

Three cheers and hats off to Johnny for sticking to his guns. It’s gonna be a long semester. I’d say invite the professor along on your next range session, but he would doubtless be convinced you were planning his demise. Pathetic scared little man.

As for your classmates; yeah, the second amendment supports terrorism like the first amendment supports hate groups and the fourth amendment supports perversion. (sigh).

As John Stuart Mill, a real philosopher once said:

One person with a belief is equal to a force of ninety-nine who have only interests.

Maybe that’s the trouble. Today’s professors can’t bear the thought of people with belief expressing themselves. It might make other people think, and then where would we be?

Since as long as I can remember, I have had this method of judging people: you are a jock, a “normals”, a freak, a geek, a nerd, or an intellectual. Most of my friends (even the liberal ones) agree with me on this view of the world. However, the older I have gotten, I have started to notice policy trends in all these people, and there is no better place to observe this than in college. I think breaking down the school population like this helps explain why our society is so anti-government and (in the most part) those interested in public policy are so pro-government.

Jocks: Views the world in a very narrow view and is incredibly dense. Typically these people are found in sporting events, but can also be found amongst soldiers. Politics is foreign to the jock; in fact I’ll bet they can’t spell politics, let alone capitalism.

“Normals”: These are people that do not make any statement. They just hope to make it home alive. They raise a family and make some money, but they don’t take risks. They are lousy capitalists and often support government protecting the consumers. They think us free market people are too weird.

Freaks: People who just don’t give a damn about the world anymore. They tend to follow the moral relativists in saying that whatever is right is right and whatever happens will happen. They think capitalists are mean and are attempting to rule the world. They however are individualistic and freedom lovers, so they probably agree with the libertarians, but call themselves socialists.

Nerds: These people can program a coffee pot to run a website, but will get hit by a car because they forget to look before crossing the street. (My best friend in high school was a true geek: he made an alarm clock out of rice and wheat but then he fell in a ditch at a construction site near the playground.) They are oblivious of the world of politics and the world of business….what’s a capitalist? Think pre-CEO Bill Gates.

Geeks: They fit in with the Nerds and the Normals, except that they follow the world very closely, have a good level of practical intelligence (no rice-wheat alarm clocks here), although they do have some level of unimportant intelligence (like the nerds). Unlike the normals, they stick their necks out and don’t mind speaking their mind. Its gets ‘em in trouble (I spent a good many days of school life in lockers, trashcans, and the nurse’s office suffering from bruise attacks.)

Geeky Capitalists: Sub-Group of Geeks. They like what the geeks say and they advocate capitalism. Think CEO Bill Gates. Think Johnny Student. The geeky capitalists are the only people who care enough to defend capitalism out of all the groups identified.

Intellectuals: Can we really know anything? No, so we should sit around the coffee houses and chat all day about Marx, Keynes, Freud, and the complex world. Previously on this blog, I mentioned that the intellectuals are the ones who like to create complex situations – well that is all that these intellectuals do. They are friends of Marx not Smith. By the way, these are mostly the professors and other scholars at the school. They don’t really hold the corner on intelligence, but they like to think that they do.

Although this is a quick overview of the various categories of people on campus, it is clear to see why so few people at a college like libertarians.

To avoid the Ambrose condition, Johnny Student would like to thank Jane Student for her work in co-writing this post

I don’t know how many Americans have been dismayed at the breast-beating of the British elite and much of the British media over the apparent (and in most cases alleged) condition of the Al-Qaeda fighters currently cooped up in Cuba.

Incantations of solicitous concern for their welfare jostle for front page space with dire warnings to the US government about the consequences of ignoring the Geneva Convention. The BBC has just stopped short of launching ‘Taliban-Aid’

It’s all a delicious irony really. Most of these Guardianistas would pay good money to be hooded, handcuffed and pushed around by big, burly men in uniform

Maybe the Americans have been disappointed by all this, maybe not. Maybe they couldn’t care less. But in the event that they have been taken aback then let them take heart from, of all places, the Richard and Judy Show

The ‘Richard and Judy Show’ is a daytime magazine programme aimed strictly at the ‘British Street’, and the female part of that street to boot. It is wall-to-wall gossip, recipes, beauty tips, agony aunts, fashion reviews and is wildly popular. Occasionally, though, the producers like to get serious and hold a phone-in poll on some hot current topic or other. Yesterday that topic was the Al-Qaeda prisoners in Cuba and was their treatment fair or unfair?

Some 5000 viewers phoned in. The result? 8% thought their treatment was unfair and a whopping 92% thought that the US was doing the right thing

Assuming that these kind of polls are an accurate reflection of grassroots opinion then clearly pro-Amercian feelings are far thicker on the ground than they are in the lofty towers of the political/media nomenklatura and yet another indication of the ever-widening gap between the people of Britain and the establishment that rules over them

As has been argued on the Samizdata in previous articles, liberty is not genuinely advanced by legal maneuvers but by cultural shifts. I am all for the overturning of laws that infringe civil liberty on-line and certainly I wish well to groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation which fights the good fight against attempts to censor the Internet and the monstrous Digital Millennium Act in the USA… but this is not an American or a British or an Australian problem. It is a global problem and the solution is a global one.

Encryption cracks, DVD decoders and all that good stuff can be made illegal in the USA but so what? If it can be found on a server in Romania or Taiwan or Indonesia, who cares what the law says in America? You want what the US called non-exportable ‘weapons grade encryption’? No problem, if you know where to look: there are several servers in Eastern Europe that offer you crypto as good as or better than what is commercially available in the USA, plus it is less likely to have a NSA or GCHQ backdoor. Much of the good stuff of that nature is written outside the USA and EU to begin with. If a server gets shut down, there will be another with the same software up and running a day or a hour later somewhere else. Peer-to-peer transfers make this an even more robust process.

Liberty is furthered by simply making unreasonable laws unworkable and this happens when enough people refuse to comply and find viable ways to circumvent them. This can take form from minor disobedience all the way up to Boston Tea Parties. Let the democratically sanctified congresses and parliaments of thieves spew out ever more regulations: if the reality is that continually evolving technical means of distributing the codes of liberty continue, then we win and they lose regardless of who wins in the courts.

Sure, they can find a few people using these unauthorized things and throw them in jail, but if a code crack for a DVD can be downloaded for free in a matter of seconds off some off-shore server and used in the privacy of your own home, the fact is 99.999% of the people who do that will go undetected regardless of the huffing and puffing of the large US media companies and the finest politicians their money can buy.

But no, do not write to Samizdata asking where to find this stuff… that is what UseNet and Search Engines are for.

I’ve been reading how some NGO’s are worried whether the al Qaeda prisoners held at the Guantanamo Naval Base are being given “culturally appropriate” treatment. They were upset the US military shaved off prisoner’s lice-infested beards. The Horror! And not to mention the mortal fear Americans might commit nightmarishly inhuman tortures like… Allah Forbid! providing a side portion of Bob Evan’s spicy pork sausage for breakfast!

This got me to thinking. In 6 months or a year the trials will be over and it will be time to send the lot of them to their patiently waiting Houris. We really should be culturally sensitive about how we go about this. We wouldn’t want to insult the Muslim Street now would we? So… I’ve a suggestion that should satisfy everyone’s requirements: we send them to Yankee Stadium for a good old fashioned stoning! What could possibly be more culturally appropriate? After all, they do it to women in Saudi Arabia don’t they? So doesn’t that make it an appropriate death for terrorists?

Instead of rocks, we’ll use baseballs. After all, this is an American-style stoning we’re talking about here. Baseballs are also better because each person can write witty little messages on them. It’s really, really hard to print legibly on your average rock.

There are problems of course. Where do you come up with a couple hundred thousand baseballs? And what do you do for people who are just too far away? But these are problems I’m sure good old Yankee ingenuity and mass production can solve.

First toss at tickets must of course be reserved for the family and friends of the victims. Remaining tickets would be auctioned, with all proceeds going to the New York Fire Department and charities they endorse. Why, the Fraternal Order could build an Historically Correct (HC) memorial statue with only a fraction of the money raised!

Imagine the cheers as President Bush throws the first baseball! Just to be inclusive Hillary or Bill (depending on which one can throw a baseball) get to throw the second ball. (The reasons why they can’t cast the first baseball should be obvious even to the retarded). Even more money can be raised by auctioning off a few other early throws. Grandma’s get to take turns on batting practice machines with laser sights. Think of the fun of smacking your favorite al Qaeda in the gob with a Bob Feller fastball! Imagine what new meanings will be injected into quaint old Bronx colloqualisms like “In your ear!” or “Up your nose!”

The mind just boggles at the possibilities.