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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It is such a comfort to know that our public authorities are prepared to crack down hard on this sort of thing:
A prison officer was sacked for making an allegedly insulting remark about Osama bin Laden two months after the September 11 attacks, an employment tribunal heard yesterday.
Colin Rose, 53, was told he had to go because, although he did not know it, three Muslim visitors could have heard his “insensitive” comment about the world’s most reviled terrorist.
The assistant governor at Blundeston Prison, near Lowestoft, Suffolk, gave him a ticking off at the time. But he was sacked after a six-month investigation.
Mr Rose, a former Coldstream Guardsman with a 21-year unblemished record in the Prison Service, is claiming unfair dismissal.
The Norwich hearing was told that on Nov 15, 2001, he threw some keys into a metal chute at the prison gatehouse. When someone said it sounded as if he had thrown them so hard that they were going through the tray at the bottom of the chute, Mr Rose said: “There’s a photo of Osama bin Laden there.”
Just in case Mr Rose happens to be reading this, he should memorise and repeat the following statement:
“Osama bin Laden is merely the poor, desperate victim of oppression and social injustice”.
With sufficient sensitivity training, I am quite confident that unpleasantness of this nature can be avoided in the future.
It’s useless new law time again in the UK.
From today it will be an offence to drive a vehicle on a public road while using a mobile telephone (or ‘cellphone’ for our North American readers).
A complete waste of time. Which is not to say that driving a vehicle while using a mobile telephone certainly can be dangerous, so is driving a car while unwrapping a sandwich, tying shoelaces, fiddling with the buttons on the radio or playing the accordion. Whatever the object of distraction, the point is that the motorist is driving without due care and attention and since that is already an offence, surely no elaboration is required.
If the police are unable or unwilling to prosecute motorists for extant offences then what on earth is the point of merely enacting more?
Really this all smacks of the the short-term ‘something-must-be-done’ mentality and the impulse which requires the demonisation of objects rather than the uses to which those objects are put.
The UK media are blitzing the issue as a part of which I have been drafted in as libertarian voice-du-jour. I have not long returned from the BBC studios in Central London where I got my oar in on the Jeremy Vine show and, this evening, I will adding my piece to a similar debate on Classic Gold radio.
For anyone interested enough to listen in or phone-in, the show will be streamed live on-line at just after 8.00pm UK time.
When a government starts to slide seriously into the dustbin of history, the very things which it tries to do to halt the slide become part of the slide. All occasions are now starting to inform against this government:
Labour’s new initiative to listen to voters, The Big Conversation, appears to be a big con: a Telegraph investigation has revealed that party officials have handpicked contributors – and have then edited out their negative comments.
The disclosure will be an embarrassment for Tony Blair, who launched the exercise on Friday, saying it was proof that the Government was listening to the people of Britain.
The Prime Minister called for “an honest and serious debate about the future”, and urged voters to text or e-mail their views to a special website, www.bigconversation.org.uk.
The Telegraph discovered yesterday, however, that many of the stories on the website were crafted by Labour officials who interviewed carefully selected individuals known to be broadly sympathetic to Labour – and then cut out any negative comments.
This government started quite impressively, with temporarily persuasive talk of not increasing taxes, and of reforming public services in ways that might have worked, e.g. by sort-of privatising them. But it is all now dribbling away into incompetence. As a devoted opponent of collectivist delusions of all kinds, I supported and still support the invasion of Iraq and the toppling of Saddam Hussein. No doubt some still have high hopes for the future, but frankly it doesn’t look as if there’ll be many achievements to come.
Let’s someone who is not me rephrase that. The government started impressively. I support the toppling of Saddam Hussein. High hopes. Many achievements to come.
“Have your say” says this fatuous website. I especially loathe that expression. You have your say, and then they do whatever they were going to do anyway.
We at Samizdata are anxious to hear from all our suckreaders. Any critical comment on this post will be severely edited in a way which will completely change its overall meaning until we approve of it, and will then be ignored.
I heartily endorse this, from Telemachus:
Recently, Ruth Lea, Policy Director at the Institute of Directors, was fired as Blair pressured her boss to rid her of this troublesome priestess, with the possible promise of honours. Anyone who can be such an effective thorn in the Government’s side should be on the Tory frontbench, and the Tories would be wise to offer her a peerage. While Theresa May holds her job solely due to the politically correct faction in the party demanding that a woman have a place in the Shadow Cabinet, Ms Lea would not need such backstops, as she has an agile mind and a good grasp of key issues. Besides, what could be better than the IoD director entering the Lords only to find Ruth Lea already there, attacking anti-business and anti-choice policies (like current higher education policies)?
And this guy not known to me until now, comments in agreement. (The link to Samizdata Illuminatus’s Samizdata piece about Lea was in the original Telemachus piece, by the way.) And here’s another guy who concurred, at the time when Ms. Lea was in the process of being ousted from the IoD.
I recall once, a long time ago now, doing a radio show with Ms. Lea and I can confirm that she is just the kind of woman who needs no womanist policies to get ahead in the world. Smart as a whip. With luck, this posting may stir up some more support for the advancement of this most admirable lady.
Original content is nice, very nice, but it can take rather long to concoct. So it is that the lifeblood of the blogosphere is the copying and pasting, and linking to, of (pardon me if my prepositions are in a bit of a twist there) an online newspaper article, interspersed with some comment, hopefully shrewd and maybe sometimes well informed.
But what do I know about a story like this? I’m no anti-terrorist expert. Yet clearly it is of significance (as Alice Bachini also notes) that some bad people are apparently being pursued and captured by some good people, and that we are all somewhat safer as a result. Do we ignore events like this merely because we have nothing much to add?
Anti-terrorist officers are searching a second property close to the home of a suspected al-Qa’eda operative arrested yesterday.
The flat in Gloucester, near to Sajid Badat’s terraced house where explosives were found yesterday, is to undergo forensic examination. Officers executed a search warrant on the property at 1am this morning.
A police van was parked outside the second property, a shop with a flat above it. The shop, directly opposite a police station, was shut up but the curtains of its first-floor flat were open.
And so on. It seems that London’s Metropolitan Police (The Met, as we say here) were involved, which would strongly suggest that London was the target of all this explosive collecting, not some place in rural Gloucestershire.
So, speaking as a Londoner myself, and assuming as I now do that it wasn’t all planted … good!
First, they came for the tobacco.
With the ‘junk food’ demonisation campaign in full swing, now is the time for our heroic public officials to do their stuff:
All foods – including fast food and snacks – should carry clear warnings about their calorie content, MPs suggested on Thursday.
Top executives from McDonalds, Cadbury Schweppes, PepsiCo UK and Kelloggs faced questions from the House of Commons Health Select Committee.
Obesity levels are soaring in the UK, but the firms said they did not believe that this was their fault.
The Food Standards Agency has described the problem as a “ticking timebomb”.
Well, they would, wouldn’t they. If food were not a problem then we would not need a ‘Food Standards Agency’ and then we would all be on our way to hell in a handcart (and we all need a handcart because we will simply be too obese to walk there).
This Court of Inquisition is merely Step 2. Step 3 is a choice of either legislative force or ‘voluntary code of conduct’. Step 4 is another public campaign (disseminated by a reliably compliant media) because Step 3 ‘is not working’.
Then on to Step 5: the levying of ‘sin taxes’ on hamburgers to ‘encourage a change of behaviour’. The money raised then pays for a lot more Food Standards Agents.
There it is. Step-by-step. Simple when you know how.
We are all in the wrong business.
Many weeks ago I wrote a posting here about how (a) England just might win the forthcoming Rugby World Cup, and that (b) this might work to the advantage of the Conservative Party. Well, England did win the Rugby World Cup, so how might this help the Conservatives?
I certainly didn’t have in mind that England’s front rooms will now be echoing with the claim that “now we’ll all vote Conservative then”. No. This is more the sort of thing I had in mind, from Adam Parsons in yesterday’s Scotland on Sunday.
It is easy in such times for the rest of us to fall prey to hyperbole, so let’s tread carefully here. But I think it is true to say this is an achievement of great importance, something that everybody can cherish. Not just because a British team has won the cup, nor that it is at last crossing from the bottom of the world and going to the top. It is something to do with the people who won it, and what they stand for.
England’s squad are a decent bunch of people. The likes of Josh Lewsey, Ben Cohen, Jason Leonard, Iain Balshaw – these are genuinely engaging characters, blokes you’d have a drink with.
In other words, they feel so very different from the image most footballers have come to represent over the past few years. On the one hand, we have people who have become the best in the world by training relentlessly, yet retain the level-headedness to acknowledge their supporters as their emotional crux; on the other, players who increasingly come to represent a streak of overpaid self-importance.
It is naive, I suppose, to hope that rugby could, even for a short time, replace football in the national affections, but I hope this victory will at least reverberate.
British soccer (as opposed to merely the English version) took two further knocks last week, when, in among all the England rugby fervour, both Wales (agonisingly) and Scotland (humiliatingly) failed to qualify for the European soccer championships next year.
This relative rise of rugby in the affections (England) and respect (elsewhere in Britain), and the relative decline in the esteem felt towards football, has, I feel, something of an end-of-era feel to it. It all adds to the sense of that New Labour/Princess Di/Things Can Only Get Better bubble bursting back into nothing whence it came. To put it rudely, that brief moment when the English told themselves (or were told by their newspaper columnists) that they preferred emotional incontinence to the old manly virtues of stoicism, calmness under stress, and grace and dignity whether one is victorious or defeated, to the uncontrolled emotional display of weeping copiously and in public when someone utterly unconnected with you dies, or running about like an escaped mental patient when you’ve scored a goal. → Continue reading: England’s Rugby World Cup win and the retreat from emotional incontinence
This remark by ‘G’ posted by Iraqi blogger Salam Pax pretty much perfectly sums up why I have such contempt for most of the protestors:
[T]ell your friends in London that G in Baghdad would have appreciated them much more if they had demonstrated against the atrocities of saddam. And if you could ask them when will be the next demonstration to support the people of north Korea, the democratic republic of Congo and Iran?
Amen to that, Bro!
Some literary wag (and I think it was Gore Vidal but I am sure I will corrected in short order if it wasn’t) once quipped that politics is showbusiness for ugly people. Regardless of the provenance of the quote, I am quite sure that it must have been coined in honour of the Stop the War Coalition. Never in all my days have I cast my gaze upon such a motley collection of bedraggled, unsightly, grotseque and snaggle-toothed specimens as gathered today in Central London. An alarmingly high number looked as if they had been dragged from the wreckage of a motorway pile-up.
I can attest to this first-hand because, as your intrepid Samizdata correspondent, I took it upon myself to get ‘down and dirty’ with the Anti-Bush protests this afternoon.
I took my camera along because, frankly, I was expecting sparks to fly but as I stepped out of Goodge Street Underground Station into the pre-demo melee, I detected an atmosphere that I judged to be disappointingly muted. Perhaps I had set the bar of my expectations too high. The gathering protestors seemed to me to be quite bouyant but way short of combustible. You don’t spend three decades attending soccer matches in England without developing a sense of smell for impending mob violence. There was not even a whiff of it here.
But there was a full compliment of ‘usual suspects’ complete with the by-now-ritual paraphernalia of street protest; whistles, drums, claxons, flags, banners, costumes, papier-mache puppets, rubber masks and pink cardboard tanks (I was sorely tempted to point out that it more closely resembled a half-track but I suspected that displaying even that rudimentary level of military knowledge would be sufficient to mark me out as an infiltrator). → Continue reading: “Bush, Blair, CIA… How many kids did you kill today?”
David Frum has a strong editorial in today’s Telegraph writing about the anti-Bush demonstration in Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London last night.
The war on terror has glaringly exposed the moral contradictions of contemporary political radicalism: a politics that champions the rights of women and minorities, but only when those rights are threatened by white Europeans; a politics that celebrates creative non-violence at home but condones deadly extremism abroad; and, perhaps above all, a politics that traces its origins to the Enlightenment – and today raises its voice to protect militantly unenlightened terrorists from the justice dispensed by their victims.
He talks about how obtruse the ‘protesters’ were about answering his questions or generally engaging with him, warning each other about how he is bound to misquote them or quote them out of context. This is what he has to say to that:
I agree that context is everything, and the context of this week’s events is that many thousands of British people intend to converge on central London to protest against the overthrow of one of the most cruel and murderous dictators of the 20th century – and to wave placards calling the American president who ordered the dictator’s overthrow “the world’s number one terrorist”.
It’s a deeply shameful context, and though I would not quite endorse the verdict of the taxi driver with the poppy stuck in his dashboard who dropped me off at the demos (“Not many of them traitors out tonight, I see”), he at least saw something that they, with all their apparently abundant education could not: that the two leaders they most scorn are the latest in the long line of Anglo-American statesmen whose willingness to use force to defeat evil secured them their right to make bloody fools of themselves in Lincoln’s Inn Fields and through the streets of London to Grosvenor Square.
Although there is no love lost for Bush on this blog and we do endorse the taxi driver’s verdict, the article contains sentiments that we hope are shared by more people in Britain than the current coverage seems to suggest.
There are a wealth of compelling and passionate arguments both for and against capital punishment and I do not intend to go into them now.
I would rather comment on the state of British politics in the light of what I regard as a rather surprising development:
David Davis, the shadow home secretary, yesterday demanded the reintroduction of the death penalty.
In his first interview since his appointment last week, Mr Davis backed the return of capital punishment in cases of “clearly pre-meditated and cold-blooded murder”. He favours the use of lethal injections over more antiquated methods such as hanging.
I must admit that this came as something of a shock to me. From what little I know of Mr Davis I gather that he is a man possessed of definite principles but (in common with the rest of his Conservative colleagues) has been too timid to give voice to them.
This is quite revolutionary really. For the last decade at least, the Conservatives have been on the run. Having lost every scrap of moral legitimacy to their opponents on the left (even before they were booted out of office in 1997) British Tories lost whatever ability they had to influence the national discourse. In fact, so beleaguered and timid did they become, that no senior Tory could stick his or her head over the parapet of national life without getting promptly chased back into their hidey-holes by a contemptuous and excoriating press.
It would have been sufficiently comment-worthy had Mr Davis merely made some squeaky, semi-apologetic noises about taxes and regulations. But this? This is a bombshell. Capital punishment was abolished in Britain in 1965 and while there was some serious campaigning for its re-introduction for many years afterwards, the issue has since lapsed into total disrepute. For the last decade at least, calls for restoration of the death penalty have been considered ‘beyond the pale’ – a hobbyhorse for neanderthals and wierdos but not the kind of thing that proper, grownup people discussed in proper, grown-up circles.
By puncturing this taboo, Mr Davis is not just launching an attack, he is going straight for the meta-contextual jugular and I get the feeling that the predictable eruption of spluttering outrage will not make him back down an inch. He must surely have realised what impact his statement would have and he still felt sufficient confidence to utter it publicly and utter it now.
This was not a policy statement. Not yet anyway. It was a shot across the bows of the Guardian-reading classes. It will not be the last. The Conservatives have got their nerve back.
There’s an interesting – more to the point decidedly respectful and even somewhat nervous – profile in the Guardian today of the “Chief Executive in all but name” of the Conservative Party, Maurice Saatchi. You can feel the political wind shifting around by the day here in Britain. Maybe it won’t shift enough to shift Labour at the next election, but it will surely make some sort of a dent in them.
This bit about soundbites particularly caught my attention:
In a swipe at William Hague, who scoffed at the “slickness” of New Labour, Lord Saatchi said that the Tories should embrace the new media age by overcoming two key “myths” – that soundbites and focus groups are wrong. “If you can’t reduce your argument to a few crisp words or phrases it probably means there’s something wrong with your argument,” he wrote.
He said the history of the world had been built on slogans, including ones loved by Tories. “The next time a senior Tory tells you that soundbites are ineffective or immoral, remind the speaker of these: ‘Your country needs you’; ‘One man, one vote’; and ‘No taxation without representation’.”
We wouldn’t endorse any of those soundbites here with much enthusiasm, but the point is, good or bad, soundbites bite. Part of the point of things like Samizdata, it seems to me, is to craft good ones – good not only in that they get around and strike home, but in that they embody good and true ideas.
By the way, I’m not saying that I lie awake at night telling myself that the Conservatives ought to win the next election, nor do I think that if they do it will make that big a difference. I’m just saying that Conservative chances are now visibly improving. But, given the scorn which both the Conservative Party and the Labour Party have heaped upon them at this blog, I perhaps ought some time soon to do a posting about why party politics, disgusting though it is, does make some difference.
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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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