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]
|
We know that it took Ian Blair a day to find out that an innocent man was killed by his officers. We know that he foresees little difficulty in retraining ex-soldiers on short-term contracts to act as armed police officers, accelerating the trend towards paramilitary forces in British cities.
Sir Ian’s suggestion that soldiers could be used as firearm officers is specially controversial after the shooting in London in July of Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian electrician mistaken for a suicide bomber the day after the failed July 21 attacks.
A Scotland Yard spokesman later said that retiring servicemen were just one group with pre-existing skills that could be hired on short-term contracts to allow police officers to focus on core policing activities. “It is absolutely not about hiring in soldiers for use on London’s streets,” the spokesman said.
We also know that, infected by memes of ‘command and control’, he wishes to shortcircuit archaic constitutional liberties that protect the individual, reduce the accountability of the police and give them additional quasi-judicial powers:
Radical proposals for a new breed of supercop with on-the-spot powers to confiscate driving licences and issue Anti-Social Behaviour Orders have been put forward by Britain’s top policeman.
Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair, whose proposals were backed by the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), admitted allowing officers to impose instant punishments could blur the line between police and magistrates…..
Director of civil rights group Liberty, Shami Chakrabarti, accused the Commissioner of behaving like Judge Dredd, the post-apocalyptic policeman-come-executioner in British comic 2000AD, whose catchphrase is “I am the law”.
Ian Blair stated that he thought of resigning (as if it were a particularly hard day at the office?) :
However, he told Mr Sakur he did not come “very close at all” to quitting. “Because the big job is to defend this country against terrorism and that’s what I’m here to do.” He added it would not have been right for the force, “the country or the city of London” for him to resign.
Yes it would.
Respect for property rights in America seems to be at a new low these last few years. Just a few months ago we heard the Supreme Court announce that any government can apply Eminent Domain to steal pretty much anything it wants.
Now we have the Federal Government using a technology for ‘secret’ purposes and making sure the inventors cannot sue for fair recompense.
I do not know about you, but I do not find it surprising enough to warrant high secrecy that the US government is using submarines to tap undersea cables. They have been doing this for decades, albiet with copper. They even had a special submarine for it, the USS Halibut.
I can understand sensitivity to which cables and what data… but to pretend that we do not already know what they are doing is much like the 3 year old with a cake smeared face confronted with the empty cake plate proclaiming: “I didn’t do it!”
Comrades!
I am terrored! A film has just arrived on the markets of Cameroon, this film the American Police Team or some name that is similar. My nephew, purchased this and asked me to watch because he said is had something to do with DPRK. The shock I see! The general, beloved general, Kim Jong Il is a puppet character in this film and speaking the most offending things! He swears in English, kills his interpreter, and turns into a small insect at the end. They make the Dear Leader to be evil man, and lonely man. They find risible the undying love of the Korean people? They think the leadership of DPRK and the revolution is a joke? Forgive me for saying but makers of this film are bastard people! I denounce them and curse them! Bastard people!
Can we not complain to someone about such slander? Why has not the KCNA denounced this piece of capitalist propaganda? To think that they make light of the general and debase his greatness!
Angered
– J Nelson reacting to this – thank you Mark Holland
I love the internet. I went from this, which I posted here, to this, to this, to this, to this:
. . . to this:
. . . . which is the work of Ha Qiongwen. Of this particular poster, Stefan Landsberger says:
The design reproduced above was at the root of Ha’s problems: why had he depicted a bourgeois woman instead of a female proletarian? Where was Chairman Mao? Why didn’t the poster praise the Chairman more explicitly? Every time the literature and arts world held a criticism session, he was dragged out as an object of public abuse. As a result, Ha was publicly beaten and humiliated more than thirty times.
Personally I think the Red Guards were on to something. I think these delightful and amazing Chinese propaganda posters and China’s current, rampantly aspirational and bourgeois rise towards superpowerdom are cause and effect.
I offered further thoughts along these lines in this ASI blog posting . This is the bit that is relevant:
I recently encountered, in a remainder shop, a big book containing hundreds of Chinese Communist propaganda posters, much like these ones. They depict a vivid and colourful fantasy world of industrial excellence and economic triumph, of collective progress and personal fulfilment, of joy. The people who now preside over China’s current economic miracle were teenagers when posters like these were at the height of their influence, and I think this is no coincidence. It makes perfect sense to me that the more imaginative and impressionable people brought up on imagery like this would turn away in disgust from the lumbering state centralism that these posters were intended to sell, once they realized that state centralism could never deliver such wonders, and instead switch to being enthusiastic pro-capitalists and even capitalist entrepreneurs. After all, only if China switched to capitalism could a real future like this be even hoped for, let alone rationally anticipated.
If you follow the link in that and scroll down to the bottom, you get to this:
Red Guards eat your hearts out.
(I now possess that book.)
Did Ayn Rand have anything to say about these Chinese posters? She should have.
If the Iraqi local administration in Basra was, as claimed, about to hand over a pair of captured SAS under-cover soldiers that were in their custody to a hostile militia, then it seems that the escalation of tension and violence in Basra should be escalated further… by the British army.
Lesson One of occupying a country has to be to let any local administration know that it is the occupying army that is ultimately in control. The logic is clear: if we are there until Iraq (or whatever comes after the break-up of a unitary Iraq) has been sufficiently stabilised, then we must expect the army to use force to stabilise things, and that is a euphemism for being willing to kill people who oppose that process or interfere with military operations. If the local administration has indeed been infiltrated by enemies with antithetical aims who are cooperating with the enemy, then politics is probably not the answer at this juncture, force is. Unmake the local administration and replace it with another one at bayonet point. Show people in Iraq that some options are simply not on the menu. This is not a normal functioning civil society and should not be treated as one, any more than post-war West Germany was until acceptable institutions were in place to allow it to function as a viable post-totalitarian nation.
If Britain’s government ever wants to extract its forces at some point in the future without leaving behind something almost as bad as what was there before, it needs to be ruthless and none too squeamish. If this is a revelation to the UK government, I cannot imagine what it was thinking when this whole process started. When the decision to use force is made, use it effectively and resolutely, giving the Army the resources and support it needs to prevail… or if Tony Blair is not willing to do that, he had no business using force in the first place. What else was he expecting?
The BBC is reporting that the British film industry – however defined – cut its total payroll by about 20 percent in 2004, caused in part by uncertainties over the future tax treatment of said industry. It is a familiar tale.
British governments, especially the current Labour one, liked to attract the plaudits of the film-buff classes by promising to shower grants and tax breaks on the film business, but the returns on all this activity have been mixed at best. I am not sure whether tax is the prime reason for choosing to avoid Britain or not. Surely the availability of top talent, on both sides of the camera; good locations, ease of access and relatively decent labour market conditions also play a big part in all this. The latter point gets overlooked, particularly given the still-severe armlock on the industry by the acting union Equity, which operates a closed shop system on the industry.
Another thing – far too many British films try to go for the “quirky” or period-piece route and I suspect that the industry is now saddled with a fairly set image. Brits continue to ply their trade around the world – some of the best movie directors, special effects artists and so forth are Brits – so maybe some concerns are misplaced. Film-making is a global industry anyway and I would not be at all surprised if a lot of work is getting outsourced to cheaper locales like India.
I do not believe the government should dangle even bigger tax breaks under the noses of our would-be Spielbergs or Ridley Scotts to get them to make movies here. Cutting taxes overall and keeping labour costs free of regulatory red tape would be a better long-term bet. The film industry is a nice thing to have but it does not deserve and should not get, special treatment from the State.
Reading Perry’s story below reminded me of the word ‘canard’. In English, canard is a word often used to describe a hoax, or tall tale.
It comes from France, where the word also means duck. Now, it was a legend in my family that the reason this word came to mean a hoax was that there was a 19th century French farmer, who had twenty ducks. He killed one, and fed it to the other nineteen ducks, and then he killed another, and fed it to the surviving eighteen, and so on, until there was only one duck left, which had therefore eaten nineteen ducks. And that apparently, this tale was widely reported in the newspapers of the time, until it was revealed to be nonsense.
Hence, ‘canard’ entered the English language as a word meaning a hoax. Or so my grandfather told me.
Despite my best efforts, I have found no evidence of this story online. Perry’s jog of my memory causes me to ask the wide knowledge of the Samizdata readership this question- was my Grandfather telling me a ‘canard’ about the origin of the word?
Now this gaffe by the French foreign minister in Israel would seem to defy belief…
The French satirical magazine Le Canard Enchaine reported in its September 14th issue that during the visit of French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy to the new Holocaust museum in Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem on September 8, he asked – while perusing maps of European sites where Jewish communities had been destroyed – whether British Jews were not also murdered. Needless to say, Douste-Blazy’s question was met by his hosts with amazement. “But Monsieur le minister,” Le Canard quoted the ensuing conversation, “England was never conquered by the Nazis during World War II.”
Now please, somebody, tell me this is a piece of gross mis-reporting by Haaretz (not the first time that would have happened). Surely, the foreign minister of France cannot actually be that utterly clueless. It would be funny if it was not so scary to think someone like that can hold high office in a nuclear armed First World nation.
Or could he have been thinking about England in 1190 and just got a bit (ahem) confused about the dates?
Hat tip to the Dissident Frogman for unearthing this gem
I pledge allegiance to the curve
Of supply and demand in equilibrium
And to the principle for which it stands
Market pricing, with low transaction costs
Yields utility and profit for all
– Commenter thoreau, at Hit and Run.
I see that Instapundit has started a bit of a blogstorm with his campaign against government spending. Together with the Pork Report blog, a grass-roots campaign against government excesses might well take off.
I just wish I could imagine this happening in Australia.
Be that as it may, I wonder what the anti-Porkers will make of the latest NASA plans to resume manned missions to the Moon. It is all very good, but NASA admits it will cost $104 Billion and what is the betting that figure will grow as time goes by?
And this drives to the heart of any anti-Pork campaign. What is pork, and what is legitimate government spending?
For centuries, philosophers and poets have tried to understand what happiness is, and what might contribute to it. In recent decades, scientists have started to come up with the answers. Happiness is electrical activity in the left front part of the brain, and it comes from getting married, getting friends, getting rich, and avoiding communism.
– Johan Norberg
Though I am without a car, and without a prospect of a car, I love Jeremy Clarkson. The motoring information is not useful, but the snide asides are glorious. And usually spot-on (if exaggerated for effect).
But here the striving for effect goes horribly wrong:
The Olympics are a test designed to quantify and celebrate human physical achievement. They are not an opportunity for a bunch of stupid, left-wing, weird-beard failures to make political points.
Jeremy, Jeremy, Jeremy. For once, you have missed the point entirely. The Olympics are only the grand jamboree they are because they provide an opportunity to make stupid political points for collectivist monsters with funny macho facial hair. (Moustaches mostly — you should recall cuddly Ken is a recovering moustache-wearer — though the beards do get a look in.) Any human physical achievement is the incidental means not the end.
For anyone who doubts me on this, imagine an alternative Olympic movement. There are no anthems; no national teams; no equipment the competitors cannot personally carry; sponsorship, fine, but of individual achievers not collectives. The venue is chosen by lot, 18 months in advance only, among those places that already have facilities adequate for staging the narrower set of events, so there’s no auction using other people’s money.
Would such an event still constitute a celebration of human physical achievement? Would there still be sporting heroes and heroines? You bet.
Would it be beamed 20 hours a day to the state television channels of all the world’s nationalist socialist régimes (i.e. almost all the world’s ré:gimes)? No. It would be relegated to the status (too high for my taste, but that’s the market) of ordinary sports programming, with each sport taking its usual audience share. The main news would turn back to “Prime Minister greets Chinese Foreign Minister and signs Human Rights Treaty” news, where a quota of flags, anthems, parades, and national self-importance could be assured.
|
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.
|
Recent Comments