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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 a given in Middle Eastern politics that whenever a politician is feeling the heat, the default tactic for distracting people from whatever woes are pissing them off is to start throwing wild accusations at Israel. For extra added points they can even accuse the ‘Zionist entity’ of whatever it is that you are in fact doing.
Given that Israel had the opportunity to kill Yassir Arafat a thousand times over once he became a (more or less) regular political figure with a regular address in Palestine and a daily routine, for Assad of Syria to start suddenly claiming that Israel assassinated Arafat, a man who was well known to be sick and old and who was really an increasingly irrelevant figure towards the end, strikes me as the sort of thing that would be done by a man who is frantically looking to divert attention away from something else (like maybe his propensity to bump people off in Lebanon).
The Israelis are usually pretty upfront about their willingness to conduct assassination against their enemies, so perhaps it is time the Israeli airforce paid Assad a visit and when asked why they killed him, they should reply “Why not? We wanted to give folks in Lebanon something to smile about and in any case we would have been accused of killing him anyway regardless of how he eventually snuffed it”.
Efforts continue to use powers of eminent domain (UK = compulsory purchase) to take US Supreme Court Judge David Souter’s home away from him in order to use the land for a hotel and tourist attraction called the Lost Liberty Hotel.
However New Hampshire State Representative Neal Kurk, in spite of being behind worthy measures to prohibit in his state the sort of abuses of eminent domain that the US Supreme Court okayed with their monstrous Kelo judgement, is nevertheless opposed to the plan to use eminent domain against Souter.
“Most people here see this as an act of revenge and an improper attack on the judicial system,” Kurk said. “You don’t go after a judge personally because you disagree with his judgments.”
Why not? If Souter was part of the system underwriting a grotesque abridgement of liberty, who not grotesquely abridge his liberty? I suppose being a politician himself, the notion of using laws against the people responsible for them might be a little too close to home for Kurk even if he is sponsoring a measure to prevent such abuses in New Hampshire. Yet why should people whose liberty is abridged and rights to property threatened not want to punish the guilty parties with the tools they themselves have no problem seeing used against others? I am a great believer in revenge.
Do unto others as they do unto you.
Today is the anniversary of the execution of French monarch Louis XVI. If my reading of history is correct, the matter did not end terribly well for France. Not that most Frenchmen would want the Bourbons back, however.
Of course there is a huge body of historical literature on the rights and wrongs of the French Revolution, which in many ways created the model for totalitarianism in Soviet Russia, China and elsewhere. That the Bourbon monarchy was a corrupt institution and that the ordinary folk of France suffered under an oppressive system is not in much doubt, mind. I cannot help but think, however, that the violent overthrow of the monarchy and what followed was, in net terms, a disaster for Europe and sowed the seeds of much eventual trouble.
I recommend this book by Simon Schama and this item, which pinpoints the violent events in France as an example of “totalitarian democracy” and the dangers of folk who claim to have an unique insight into some fictitious entity called the General Will.
One of my favourite actors, Michael Caine, achieved one of his early breakthroughs in the film, The Ipcress File, based on the Len Deighton Cold War thriller of the same name. (I love the fact that Deighton, a fine historian of the air campaigns in the Second World War, used to write a cookery column for the Observer. Very hip). Anyhow, without spoiling the plot of either the book or the film, it hinges around the use of “brainwashing” techniques to make people do one’s bidding or erase the memory of certain information.
How much of this could ever be based on fact or indeed, did either side in the Cold War use such techniques? There is a long entry in the now-indispensable Wikipedia site on this topic, pointing to the origin of the word “brainwash” in the early stages of the Cold War during the Korean campaign. The entries raise some doubts about how widely used such techniques were, or whether the term simply refers to a particularly fierce form of propoganda. I have come across the term in various films of the period, such as the first version of the Manchurian Candidate (forget the remake, which is a pale imitation of the original). But to what extent were such techniques really all that effective in moulding minds? Steven Pinker’s “The Blank Slate”, which I have just finished reading and enjoyed immensely, queries the idea of an infinitely malleable mind, arguing that there are limits to how the brain can be influenced by certain techniques.
If this is true then it is encouraging that there are limits to how far the mind can be moulded in any way that those in authority, whether benign or malign, wish.
Anyway, I can strongly recommend readers rent out the Caine movies based on the Deighton books. Highly entertaining.
I spotted this in a Jane’s newsletter:
“Crash wipes out IRGC ground forces leadership”. A civil-registered Dassault Falcon 20E VIP business jet operated by the Islamic Republic of Iran Air Force (IRIAF) crashed on 9 January killing the crew and much of the senior leadership of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Ground Forces. [Jane’s Defence Weekly- first posted to http://jdw.janes.com, 13 January 2006]
I feel soooo bad!
One of the contenders for the leadership of Britain’s Liberal Democrats is Scot, Menzies Campbell, known as “Ming”. I am not sure how he got this moniker. Was it because his friends thought he resembled the villain of the Flash Gordon series, Ming the Merciless?
I feel sorry for his supporters. They are destined to be known as a lot of mingers.
(That’s enough adolescent humour, Ed).
No compromise with the main purpose, no peace till victory, no pact with unrepentant wrong
– Winston Churchill
Only a complete ass would make the cost of ID cards, rather than principle behind them, the main thrust of their opposition to such an imposition. And it would appear that Tory Blair David Cameron is exactly such as ass.
So presumably Cameron, who does nothing not somehow calculated to help return the Tories to power, thinks that such a stance will play well with people who actually care about civil liberties? Well if that really is his objective, does he really think that the NO2ID crew and the LibDems (the two main anti-ID card groups) are really just worried about another small tax? In short, is he really that stupid? And if he is trying to curry favour with ‘Middle England’, is this not the group we are told do not really care one way or the other on the issue?
All he needs to do to get the serious civil libertarians to cheer him to the rafters is stand up and say “regardless of what it costs, we oppose them because they are wrong and any government that tries to impose them is not just wrong, it is wicked. And if they are imposed, we will scrap them the moment we take power, again regardless of what was spent to impose them.”
There is of course no chance whatsoever he will ever say that because clearly the idea of that ID cards are all about civil liberties does not really resonate with a Blairite like Cameron… but of course I would love to be proven wrong.
Jacques Chirac has suddenly come out with a statement (French version here) that not only is France prepared to use nuclear weapons “against any state which launched a terrorist attack against it”, their nuclear forces had been “configured for such an event”.
As clearly this is a direct threat to nuke Iran, I can only wonder what the hell is going on here? Makes me wonder what exactly do they know in the Quai d’Orsay that they are not sharing with the rest of us.
I have been trying to get myself all worked up about how the UK Education Minister, Ruth Kelly, approved the appointment of a convicted sex offender to a job in a state school. All very terrible, she is obviously an ass, blah-blah. But nearly every commentary on this shabby business seems to be missing a wider point. What on earth is a politician doing approving or blocking the appointment of a teacher in the first place? There are tens of thousands of teachers, supply teachers and assistants. How on earth is a politician, or even a reasonably competent personnel manager, expected to keep track of all these folk?
The centralisation of our state education system has brought this sort of problem to pass. We need to return to the point where individual schools hire and fire teachers, and where parents have the freedom to put their children into a school or pull them out if they are not satisfied. It is not exactly rocket science.
The headline of the print Daily Telegraph today trumpeted ‘Mini-brothels get go-ahead to operate on your doorstep’. I immediately took a peek at my doorstep but alas nothing to report yet.
To recycle a well known quote: prostitution combines free enterprise with sex. Which one are you against?
There is an article by Simon Heffer with the simple title of Doing nothing in Iran is not an option which seems to be stating the obvious to me. Given the leadership of Iran are self-declared apocalypse enthusiasts, I for one do not regard just waiting until Tel Aviv gets nuked as acceptable and I rather suspect the Israelis heartily concur. The shit is going to hit the fan soon, that much is certain and no amount of risible European diplomacy will change that.
As for something that could be done more or less immediately, it was gratifying to see Mark Steyn has come around to my view on how to apply pressure in ways that might really destabilise this regime… do to the Iranians security services exactly what they are doing to British troops in Southern Iraq: fight a proxy war with them, only do it openly and without apology.
Fact is, Britain is already at war with Iranian backed forced in Iraq and has been for months. So the government just needs to take this to its logical conclusion and escalate the war so that the Iranian state finds itself at war with British backed Iranian insurgent forces in Iran. It is not like there is any shortage of Iranians who want to be rid of their theocratic nutters. Sounds like a nice convergence of interests to me.
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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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