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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Switzerland is a bastion of efficiency and rationality surrounded by the boiling maelstrom of stupidity that is Europe… and yet even they are falling foul of idiotic political correctness and absurd defensive ‘sensitivity’.
Swiss Santa Clauses have been banned from sitting children on their laps because of the risk that they might be accused of paedophilia […] Large groups of St Nicholases parade through the streets that day before visiting children. They traditionally sit them on their laps before asking if they have been well-behaved. “We want to counteract any possible accusations of paedophilia involving our members,” the Society of St Nicholas said in a statement. “We regret having to do this, but the public has become very sensitive about child abuse.”
Hardly the end of the world but it is not a good sign that even the dependibly sensible Swiss have this crap to deal with.
As already reported here, there are two conferences of possible interest to Samizdata readers this coming weekend, Novermber 19th-20th, in London.
There is this one about the theory and practice of Rational Selfishness. And (as already reported here) there is the one I will rationally and selfishly be attending myself: Liberty 2005: The Annual London Conference of the Libertarian Alliance and the Libertarian International.
The reason that I mention this latter gathering in particular today is that now is just about the last moment for booking yourself in to the banquet on the Saturday night. Sean Gabb needs to know by Wednesday at the very latest (so best to make that this evening) so that the National Liberal Club (a fantastic, must see before you die building, by the way) can be told the number of guests to cater for. If past versions of it are anything at all to go by, this banquet will be an excellent occasion, and a splendid opportunity to socialise with libertarians from all over the planet, so if you want to be there, email Sean Gabb now.
Turning up on the day on the day to hear all the speakers, waving banknotes, is okay, and you will be made very welcome if you do that. But for the banquet, if you have not already booked, it is now or never.
Sean tells me that the Conference is already sure to break even, but the more the merrier. It is a big place, as well as a great looking one.
By the way, unless I am much mistaken, the relevant stretch of the Circle and District Underground line will not be in action (see para 5) over this weekend. Watch out for that.
The Research Defence Society, a body supporting animal research in medicine, has started a blog. They intend to use it to keep people up to date with their activities, to counter disinformation and highlight how animal rights extremists use terrorism against scientists, and to support staff involved in animal research.
“Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.”
Robert A. Heinlein. Sackloads of other quotes by the great man here.
This Chinese banning of electric bicycles is placed firmly in the stupidity column at Beyond Brilliance Beyond Stupidity. Bicycles good, cars bad.
It is hard to disagree with BBBS when they oppose this particular piece of partiality towards cars and against bikes. My only uncertainty concerns the fact that someone has to decide about how roads are administered, and there just might be good reasons for this, besides trying to hurry along the making of a big home market for cars in China, and clearing the proles off the roads, to speed things up for fat cat limos.
That hesitation aside, this certainly looks like a classic case of a law to stop the potential future from competing with the established present. Cars are already big business. Electricity for transport has a long way to go, but will surely go that long way, if allowed to. Batteries, to name just one crucial aspect of electric transport technology, seem to be progressing well, judging by how much better digital camera batteries have got lately. So is China wise to be deliberately trying to rebuild old Detroit?
The libertarian line on all this, which of course is the one I prefer, is that road owners should price the use of roads, and then the market would decide whether electric bikes are a reasonable proposition or too much of a bother to other road users, such as cars. Something tells me that this solution will not be unleashed in China any time soon, although that something may be misinformed.
Whatever you make of this story, it is an interesting angle on China now. My personal policy towards China is (a) trade with it by buying cheap stuff, and (b) learn about it, good and bad, and (c) blog about it, ditto. And one interesting thing I learned from reading this story is that in China they apparently have something called the China Bicycle Association. Concerning this ban on electric bikes, the China Bicycle Association is “enraged”. Good to hear that associations in China are allowed to be enraged. I could not find any China Bicycle Association website though.
The whole issue of Walter Duranty’s Pulitzer Prize in 1932 has always pissed me off. It just rankles that he got away with it, so the least we can do is blacken the bastard’s name posthumously for the sake of the millions of dead Ukrainians he lied about.
Now that Harold Pinter has won a Nobel Prize for literature, I guess the tradition of lionising men of letters who are apologists for mass murdering leftists is still alive and well.
Want to make your voice heard on the issue of Walter Duranty’s Pulitzer Prize? Take a look at Cyber Cossack (and check out their great site banner) and if you are in the NY area, consider lending your hand to a bit of activism.
Better late than never.
Yes, make jokes about it, so says Afshin Ellian, an Iranian dissident.
There are a couple very interesting articles over on the Social Affairs Unit blog about Afshin Ellian. As I have been saying, the voices of intolerance cannot be appeased, they need to be uncompromisingly confronted and ideally they should be confronted not just by secular westerners but by other Muslims.
Okay, so did you hear the one about the Imam, his two wives and a goat…
P.J. O’Rourke, the Republican Party Reptile supreme, has some caustic things to say about David Cameron, who may become the next leader of the Conservative Party. He is not terribly impressed:
The guy obviously doesn’t understand the fundamental truth about politics, which is that the best minds only produce disasters. Scientists, for example, are famously idiots when it comes to politics. I agree with Friedrich Hayek, who said in The Road to Serfdom that the “worst imaginable world would be one in which the leading expert in each field had total control over it”.
Just once, I’d love to hear a politician say: “We’re going to bring the second-best minds together to work on this.” The second-best minds are all much more practical people than the first-class guys. More importantly, they are not going to try to do anything very much. They’ll fix lunch or take the dog for a walk before they get on to pressing political problems of the day – and by the time lunch is over, it’s time to take the dog for another walk and prepare dinner. That’s the right order of political priorities. The greatest danger in politics is people who try to do things.
By coincidence, Cameron has an article bashing Blair in the same edition of today’s Sunday Telegraph. It is not a bad article and correctly identifies much of the arrogance and reliance on a Big Government worldview. Like O’Rourke, I really would like this fellow to live up to his own declared scepticism about government activism and place the government of this country on a more modest, intelligent course.
For what it is worth, though, I could not care less about whether Cameron has gone to a smart private school or not. Even O’Rourke clobbers Cameron for this, much to my susprise. Social chippiness ill becomes advocates of classical liberalism.
Al-Quaeda has called Queen Elizabeth II an “enemy of Islam”, not least for her being the ceremonial head of the Church of England. I of course hope that the vast majority of Muslims living in this country do not think the same way. In any event, let’s hope Prince Charles takes notice.
Barter economics at its purest.
Start with one (1) paper clip, and see where it takes you.
The leader in this week’s Spectator kicks off with this zinger of a paragraph:
When history comes to make a final judgment on the Blair government — and we can be forgiven for hoping that moment is not too much longer delayed — there is one key statistic by which to assess the Prime Minister’s performance. Since 1997 the Labour government has created no fewer than 700 new criminal offences. This is supposed to be an age of increasing peace and prosperity. Yet the Labour party has been in such a continuous panic about the behaviour and potential behaviour of the British people that it has found 700 new ways in which to proscribe courses of conduct. In case you are wondering how that compares with any previous administration, Labour is creating criminal offences at a rate ten times greater than that of any other government.
No further comment required, surely.
Flemming Rose, an editor from Denmark’s largest newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, reacted to news that Danish cartoonists were too afraid of Muslim militants to illustrate a new children’s biography of the Prophet Muhammad, by doing exactly that, putting Denmark’s policies of tolerance to the test by commissioning a series of illustrations of Muhammad.
In response thousands of Muslims in Denmark marched in protest demanding the newspaper be “punished”, though interestingly an Iranian woman, Nasim Rahnama, has organised counter-protests in support of the editor, managing to secure one hundred and fifty signatures affirming freedom of expression.
As I have mentioned before, when I see more people like the commendable Nasim Rahnama taking a stand then I may conclude that things are improving and perhaps modern Islam is not a blight on any tolerant society it comes into contact with. But as it stands, clearly it is the ignorant bigots who can put the largest mobs on the streets and that is why the actions of editor Flemming Rose need to be strongly applauded. It is hard to overstate the importance of confronting intolerant Islam on a cultural as well as a political level.
So when Muslim scholars attack the newspaper for its cartoons:
Lawyer and author Shirin Ebadi, who received the Nobel peace prize in 2003 for her fight for human rights and democracy in Iran, told daily newspaper Jyllands-Posten that its decision to call for and print twelve caricatures of the Muslim prophet might have been a well-intentioned attempt to prompt a dialogue on democracy between Muslims and non-Muslims in Denmark. The effect, however, had been the opposite, and in fact risked harming democracy’s cause in Islamic countries.
‘I would like to stress that I do not personally have any problems with cartoons like these,’ said Ebadi, who is a devout Muslim. ‘The problem is the way the subject is approached. It splits more than it unites.’
But that is exactly the point: it is intended to ‘split’ rather than ‘unite’ and the importance of unity is vastly overrated. No one who values tolerant pluralistic western values should be seeking some sort of compromise with bigotry. There should be no attempt to ‘unite’ with the people who marched in Denmark demanding the government ‘punish’ Jyllands-Posten, in fact they must be confronted.
And please, the scholar is making a category error because it has nothing to do with ‘democracy’. Even if a democratic majority do not want to see cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad appear in the newspapers, it is still wrong to try and use the force of law to prevent it. Dislike the idea? Fine, do not buy the damn newspaper. The issue here is liberty and democracy is far from a synonym for that.
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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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