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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The air attack on the Beirut airport in Lebanon has put me in an unusual position: I must condemn Israel’s act as one of egotistical stupidity of the highest order. it is in no one’s interest to push a newly liberated and tentatively democratic Lebanon back into the throes of barbarism and chaos from whence it so recently came. I cannot help but imagine this attack has solidified even the most open minded of the Lebanonese population into a common distaste of their southern neighbor. Should this cause violence amongst factions with Lebanon to flare again, it will be an open invitation for Syria to once more crush Lebanon under its dictatorial tank treads.
Their action is about as negative to American and British strategic interests as it is possible to get. I am certain they are getting exceedingly harsh and less than diplomatic words behind the scenes words from Condileeza Rice and from Tony Blair’s envoys as well.
The damage this has done to Israel’s cause is almost inestimable.
You have lost an awful lot of friends guys. Actions have consequences.
Remember not so long ago?
As readers of Samizdata may know from my previous articles, I do not think highly of British bookshops and recent visits have reminded me why. John Adamson (of Peterhouse Cambridge) has had a new book published called The Noble Revolt – it is an important work arguing the case that the resistance to Charles the first was mostly organized by great lords. Adamson’s work has been widely discussed, not just in academic journals but in popular magazines. So I visited a few books shops to have a look for it.
Borders – not there.
Waterstones – not there.
W.H. Smith (which owns Waterstones I believe) – not there.
History books sell well in Britain and this was an important new book – and it was not in the shops. “You could order it” – if I am going to order the book why should I not just buy it over the internet, where it would be cheaper anyway? So what new books did the bookshops have?
Almost needless to say there were three new death-to-America books.
One by Chomsky, one by Pilger and one by Mark Thomas.
I could not miss them – they were shoved in the most prominent places in the stores (sometimes side by side in a sort of unholy Trinity). The Thomas book ended up with him denouncing Radstone technology (a company I used to guard) for selling electronics to the evil Americans which they use in their unmanned Predator aircraft.
Mr Thomas boasted that the evil Americans had failed to kill a prominent terrorist (something he described as an attempted “extra judicial killing” – something which non-scumbags call “killing the enemy in time of war”), but had killed women and children (the fact that other terrorists had been killed in the attack was something he did not mention – no doubt because the death of comrades upset him too much). I could not bring myself to look at the new Chomsky and Pilger books – but if they are any different from the death-to-America stuff they have written a hundred times before I am six feet tall and have a full head of hair.
So there we have it. An important history book that would likely sell well is nowhere to be found (so people who pop in to book shops will not see and and therefore will not buy it) and another three books coming out with the same death-to-America stuff that their authors have written a hundred times before are displayed as if they were wonderful new works. I am told that the British bookshop enterprises are getting into financial trouble and they may eventually go bust.
Well, the sooner the better
There is now a very high chance that Eurotunnel, the Anglo-French consortium operating the Channel Tunnel rail-link between London and the continent, could be liquidated by this September, having failed to reach a key agreement earlier this week with creditors. The saga of how the operator would persuade a group of banks to let it restructure a huge pile of debt has been chugging along for months. Now there is a real risk that this marvel of civil engineering could be known as one of the biggest transport commercial flops in history. The free-marketeer in me says well, the venture was never based on fully commercial grounds in the first place. The folks concerned probably no doubt rightly thought that if the project was a flop, then the fortunate taxpayers of Europe would pick up the tab, just as they did with that other venture of high-tech wonder and dubious economics, Concorde. The romantic in me would be very sad to see this wonder of rail come to an end. I have used the Eurotunnel service several times, both for work and for short breaks to France in recent years. Every time I have marvelled at the smoothness of the service, only occasionally marred by delays in the English side of the operation, or by the odd rude French ticket inspector.
It certainly beats messing around in airport lounges, that is for sure.
Bob Bigelow’s one third scale inflatable space station is in orbit after a launch from Russia. This is the first of several unmanned test articles which will lead to a full scale station by 2015. Even so, at 8 feet in diameter and 14 feet in length when inflated, this habitat is not exactly small.
You can read a bit more about it at CNN. I would also recommend checking space.com and the other usual suspects for more detailed accounts, something I am about to do myself.
I was just watching a BBC Two special on the TV on political youth movements in Putin’s increasingly repressive Russia. During the programme a member of Yabloko was interviewed, the voice-over describing it as a ‘liberal’ (in the British sense of the word) opposition group, which according to its stated platform it sort of is (at least by local standards).
And on the wall behind the Yabloko spokesman being interview was a large picture of… Che Guevara.
So let me get this straight, some of their activists have a fondness for a mass murdering communist whose ‘philosophy of the wall’ was to simply execute ‘class enemies’, but they are ‘liberal’? Really? How liberal exactly? It reminded me of the commentary during the attempted military coup d’etat against Boris Yeltsin in August 1991 in which a CNN reporter described the orthodox communists in the military attempting to roll back the collapse of the Soviet Empire as ‘right wing’. Well what constitutes ‘left wing’ if being a communist does not? I would say that CNN reporter was just using the term to mean ‘the bad guys’.
Thank goodness we have the Republicans to protect people from themselves and limit international on-line commerce.
The U.S. House of Representatives voted on Tuesday to restrict Internet gambling, a move Republicans hope will boost their popularity before the November election. By a vote of 317 to 93, politicians approved a controversial bill that tries to eliminate many forms of online gambling by targeting Internet service providers and financial intermediaries, namely banks and credit card companies that process payments to offshore Web sites.
Net gambling “is a scourge on our society,” said Rep. Bob Goodlatte, a Virginia Republican who’s tried for the better part of a decade to enact legislation that combats Net gambling.
‘Our’ society? Bob Goodlatte should really get out of the coercion business and follow his natural career as a barista and leave the series of social interactions we call ‘society’ to its members, rather than using force to distort it.
Now can someone remind me why the Elephants are supposed to be trusted with imperfect edifice of American capitalism and civil liberty but the wicked ol’ Donkeys cannot? A pox of both parties I say but at least the Democrats were on the right side of this issue.
My prediction: People who want to gamble on-line will start registering with trusted on-line off-shore providers, who will change a forwarder URL of their sites every few days and notify their clients of the new URL via or-mail or SMS in order to get around ISP blocking for those unable to use proxies and other ways to confuse the ISP where you are really going. Payment will be between the client and a series of disposable off-the-shelf companies in Panama or Grand Cayman which shut down, only to be replaced by a new company, as soon as the US credit card companies identify them as receiving money from gambling.
The US state can make it harder but if people want to wager their own money, they will always find a way. If i was a betting man (i.e. statistically challenged, which I am not), I would put my money on the Feds getting their arses kicked when they try to shut the off-shore sites down (particularly as they are legal in the countries they operate in and can take clients from the rest of the world without much difficulty).
Can anyone say “Drug War”?
It seems there is a shortage of certain drugs in Britain’s National Health Service.
Joe Fortescue from Alfreton, Derbyshire wants the government to provide more diamorphine, which has been in short supply since 2004. He said his 49-year-old ex-wife from Nottingham was screaming in pain in the days before her death because it was not available.
Horrendous. We are not talking about sophisticated and costly cutting edge drugs here, just a strong painkiller. As someone personally currently gobbling none-too-effective codeine painkillers every four hours after a close encounter with the NHS yesterday, dare I say I ‘feel the pain’ of those relying on the NHS in their time of need.
Perhaps the ex-husband of the hapless woman who died in agony for want of the correct drugs should have just scored some himself, available to anyone driving slowly with their windows open in the crappier parts of most large British towns and cities. Diamorphine is essentially just heroin after all and needless to say the ‘free market’ in heroin has no difficulty supplying public demand. Only the state could be inept enough to be unable to find heroin for a dying woman.
Truly the state is not your friend.
It now looks like the death toll in the sickening atrocity in Bombay will probably top two hundred innocent civilians, with hundred more injured, many of them horribly maimed. But then as any Indian could have told you years ago, evil horrors like this perpetrated by Islamist psychopaths do not just happen in New York, London and Tel Aviv.
So tell me, how long before the good folks at Democratic Underground find some way to blame BushMacHitler for this? This is a truly ghastly attack and we all know that America-centric buffoons infected with Bush Derangement Syndrome cannot even conceive of something bad happening which does not somehow involve the United States.
I invite the commentariat to find the articles somehow blaming the US administration for this. You know it is going to happen.
More here on the arrest of Labour head fund-raiser Lord Levy over allegations about tapping up folk for party donations in return for peerages. (See Alex’s post immediately below this one). First question: is this really the silver bullet that might finish off Blair? He has shown incredible resilience in the face of a huge dollop of scandals since 1997: Bernie Ecclestone affair, Mandelson’s various transgressions, a delinquent and violent deputy Prime Minister; Cherie Blair’s interesting spending habits, David Blunkett’s abuse of office and manifest failings, the sheer uselessness of his successor, Charles Clarke; the suicide of government scientist David Kelley and the whole spin-doctoring of arguments about WMDs in Iraq. In less than 10 years, the Labour government has established a record for venality, corruption and rank incompetence that it took the Tories 18 years to acquire. Quite some achievement, of sorts. Of course, although its economic record is not quite as splendid as some would claim, the relatively-good performance of the economy under Gordon Brown has kept the government of the day in reasonably good shape.
But for how much longer can even this part of the Blair record be relied upon? Yesterday, the Bank of England warned in one of its regular publications that there remain significant risks in the UK financial system, particularly concerning the amount of debt and consumer borrowing there is. Our public finances are slipping deeper into the red despite what has been a relatively decent run of economic growth, so goodness knows how bad those finances could get if there were to be a serious slowdown, or some shock to the financial system.
As a side note, it would be churlish not to praise indefatigible digger-up of news about the Levy saga, blogger Guido Fawkes. If I were the publisher of Private Eye magazine, I would be worried about the competition. Guido has been all over this story for weeks.
Mr Phelps:
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to explore an ultra-secret North Korean missile launch facility located several kilometers inland from a section of due south facing coastline not far from the Chinese border. There is a small town about 1-2km south of the pad, directly under the most probable launch trajectory. A mad ruler is thought to be building nuclear capable ICBM’s at this site. We do not believe their technological level makes them capable of success at the task at present, so we recommend you do not use the town as a base of operations.
Find the various facilities and report back to us. Should you be captured or your computer be eaten by starving North Korean peasants, Samizdata will disavow all knowledge of your existence.
Your targets may be found near N40°51’17” E129°39’58” via http://maps.google.co.uk/ at the 50 meter per 2.5 centimeter scale.
Good luck and good hunting.
My thanks to Jonathan Schwarz over at Slate for pointing out that various Islamic terrorist organisations including Hamas and Al Qaeda include of all things Rotary Clubs amongst their lists of anti-Islamic organisations that they believe are waging crusades on them. From the Hamas charter, for instance
…you can see [the enemies] making consistent efforts by way of publicity and movies, curriculi of education and culture, using as their intermediaries their craftsmen who are part of the various Zionist Organizations which take on all sorts of names and shapes such as: the Free Masons, Rotary Clubs, gangs of spies and the like. All of them are nests of saboteurs and sabotage.
My first thought is to almost wish it were true: if my local Rotary club was in fact on organisation of saboteurs fighting the Jihadis, I might almost want to join. It sounds quite exciting. My second thought, however, is I think the sort of uneasy thought that Group Captain Mandrake gets in Dr Strangelove when Gen. Ripper explains to him that he has just launched a nuclear attack on Moscow to fight fluoridation of drinking water. In this war one occasionally feels that the enemy does not need to be fought so much as it needs to be medicated, and this is one of those times.
Then again, I suppose this makes no more or less sense than blaming the Jews.
One of the science fiction predictions, that has not yet come to pass, is the ability to categorise individuals by measuring certain thoughts or actions, with implications for individual freedom and status. That time may have drawn slightly closer. A forthcoming study, “Dehumanizing the Lowest of the Low: Neuro-imaging responses to Extreme Outgroups” published in “Psychological Science”, the Journal for the Association of Psychological Science, claims that prejudicial states can be measured through the imaging of the brain.
Medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) brain imaging determined if the students accurately chose the correct emotion illustrated by the picture (according to pretest results in which a different group of students determined the emotion that best fit each photograph). The MPFC is only activated when a person thinks about him- or her-self or another human. When viewing a picture representing disgust, however, no significant MPFC brain activity was recorded, showing that students did not perceive members of social out-groups as human. The area was only activated when viewing photographs that elicited pride, envy, and pity. (However, other brain regions – the amygdala and insula – were activated when viewing photographs of “disgusting” people and nonhuman objects.)
Emotions themselves were not responsible for generating this brain activity. Rather, it was the actual image viewed that produced a response.
One article does not count as evidence that people viewed as “disgusting” are subjected to a process of dehumanisation, reinforced by social interaction. It is an interesting example of how neuroimaging can inform our understanding of the entanglement between emotion, perception and prejudice, although the study only reveals the complexities of this area. By implication, one must keep the broadest definition of humanity.
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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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