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.
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P J O’Rourke weighs in with a modest proposal on public transit in the Wall Street Journal. A choice tidbit:
The Heritage Foundation says, “There isn’t a single light rail transit system in America in which fares paid by the passengers cover the cost of their own rides.” Heritage cites the Minneapolis “Hiawatha” light rail line, soon to be completed with $107 million from the transportation bill. Heritage estimates that the total expense for each ride on the Hiawatha will be $19. Commuting to work will cost $8,550 a year. If the commuter is earning minimum wage, this leaves about $1,000 a year for food, shelter and clothing. Or, if the city picks up the tab, it could have leased a BMW X-5 SUV for the commuter at about the same price.
That, my friends, is a sound bite that can stop a light rail train (proposal) in its tracks if it gets in front of the voters before the referendum passes. Of course, as we all know, these kinds of facts emerge only after the horses have left the barn, so to speak, because of the bare-faced lying that always accompanies the run-up to large public works projects.
Like many others I have been watching events in the Middle East, hoping of the best, and remembering that it could still all turn very nasty, and hoping that the White House has that possibility at the front of its collective mind. So far so obvious, and I for one little to add to such responses as these.
But, it does occur to me that, what with all the agonising about, e.g., what the Syrians will do next, and what with all the pro-warriors crowing about how they must not crow, and the anti-warriors trying to talk their way out of giving President Bush any credit for what is happening, there is one significant consequence of these events which may have escaped immediate and widespread attention.
9/11 was bad, but almost worse was the amount of celebrating about it that seemed to be going on, and presumably was going on, in the Muslim world, and among Muslims generally.
These latest demonstrations have, surely, changed the idea that will from now on be held in the West of popular opinion in the Middle East. For the first time since 9/11, these people no longer look like “these people”, that is to say, utterly foreign and barbaric, all either exulting in the deaths of the innocent, or else silently acquiescing to such exultation, out of fear or out of semi-barbarism.
It is not that millions of people of the Middle East have spent the last month marching about with signs saying: “Sorry – We Were Wrong About 9/11 – It Was Horrible And We Should Not Have Celebrated It”. It is merely that a whole lot of different people are now getting their faces into our camera lenses and onto our front pages and magazine covers, with messages that we in the West can thoroughly relate to, like: “Let Us Govern Ourselves Intelligently”. My particular favourite in this connection was the one that went: “Let Muslims and Christians Unite Against The Syrian Occupier”. That sounds very Western to me.
Clearly, “these people” are not all barbarians, and from now on, any Westerners who persist in believing that they are will be in a small minority.
It may well be that this new message is almost as misleading and un-nuanced as the previous one. But it is very different. And in many ways, the big point here is as much the desire to communicate this new and dramatically more West-friendly message as the matter of whether the message itself is completely accurate.
The long term consequences of this different message now emerging from the Middle East are surely huge.
And talking of Muslims and Christians uniting against those damned Syrians, let us also notice that we are surely witnessing a come-back of a kind, and a rather interesting kind, for Arab nationalism. → Continue reading: Democracy in the Middle East: good news and bad news
Over the span of international and domestic flights covering some 11,000 miles in the past fortnight, I have spent a lot of time reading magazines. I tried to limit myself to fluff – gossip and pictures of celebrities wearing ugly clothes – because reading about wrong-headed business ideas and even more wrong-headed political ideas really is not my idea of a fun way to spend several hours in a confined space where screaming at the top of one’s lungs is frowned upon.
Alas, alas. I avoided idiocy but the idiocy sure did find me, and in Cosmopolitan magazine of all places. Okay, no surprise there: Cosmo articles telling women to wear animal prints if they want to make a guy attracted to them are hardly the height of intellect and good sense (or taste). But at least I could kick back with some mindless articles about makeup and men and not worry about being hit over the head with loopy politics.
Or so I thought.
An Israeli fashion photographer – coming from an industry that is surely the great unsung incubator of brilliant legislation – wants the Knesset to put a law on the books that would make it illegal to use women as fashion models if they are not deemed “healthy” enough by the government. The aim is to produce:
legislation insisting all models undergo an examination by a Government nutritionist. Those deemed healthy would get a licence while any who were too thin would be given nutritional advice and a two-month deadline to put on weight or be barred.
All this is based on BMI (body mass index), which is not a reliable way of determining health anyway. Even if it was, such a law would not magically make the population healthy. But junk science being accepted as gospel is hardly a shock. What did surprise me is that 53 per cent of polled Cosmo readers said that the US should introduce similar legislation of fashion photography.
In short: I would have been less enraged if I had watched a Michael Moore “documentary” festival on the plane. Thinking about it, though, I wonder how long it would be before such legislation would make any image of someone deemed unhealthy fall into the realm of the banned and illegal. The upside of that would be no more pictures of Michael Moore in our faces, but the price for such a benefit seems a bit steep.
There is a question concerning the relationship between guns and gangsterism that bedevils third world countries but the control of arms sounds suspiciously like that other ‘success story’: the war on drugs. Jack Straw’s keen attempt to follow the NGOs on this matter was publicised at a press conference today where he attempted to internationalise this issue through an “arms control” treaty. It is not surprising that this immoral act is perpetrated by the Blair administration: a clique that is unable to understand the simple connection between the rule of law and a well armed citizenry.
Straw argued that existing treaties covering chemical, biological and nuclear weapons should be matched by a new treaty covering smaller weapons. And he acknowledged that such weapons “account for far more misery and destruction across the world”. “The new treaty needs to include a wide range of signatories, including the world’s major arms exporters,” he said. “I certainly do not underestimate the difficulties of that. Many nations are concerned that a new arms trade treaty may restrict their defence industries; constrain their foreign policy; and lead to constant legal challenge of export licence decisions. Their approach may initially be one of scepticism, at best. “But in order for it to work properly, a new arms control treaty will need to include as many of the world’s nations as possible – especially those with strong defence industries of their own.
T
he NGO campaign for this solution stems from the revolutionary liberalism redolent of Enlightenment manure. Instead of undertaking the patient steps of building stable laws in these territories and defending property, these organisations prefer to build a bureaucratic edifice of controls, inspections and treaties, a job creation scheme for peace studies graduates.
The Control Arms Campaign is co-ordinated by Oxfam and Amnesty International. They view the proliferation of firearms as a key threat to peace and security. They are right in that technology has lowered the cost of owning firearms and has allowed the strong to plunder the weak; governments or gangs to maim, murder and steal. (although the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 did not require firearms, just edged weapons).
However, their solution is old-fashioned, insensitive to local conditions, and designed to reinforce the status quo in many states, rotten as they are. Their solution is global arms control:
Governments must introduce new laws and measures to incorporate the principles of the Arms Trade Treaty. They must also close the loopholes in their arms controls so that they can strictly monitor end use and effectively control arms brokers and licenced production overseas. They must stop the misuse of arms by security services and introduce systems of accountability and training for them, introduce measures for disarmament when a conflict has ended, develop good justice systems for prosecuting those who misuse arms, enforce all arms control legislation and develop and implement a national action plan to address and solve the country’s arms problems.
Communities and local authorities must help collect and destroy surplus and illegal weapons, introduce community education programs to end cultures of violence, provide assistance to victims of armed violence, and provide alternative livelihoods for those who depend on violence for a living.
Only the police are considered suitable to carry guns in protection of communities if they follow the requisite standards, set down by the United Nations:
International standards do exist to control the use of guns and other methods of force by police and other law enforcement officials, but in many countries they are not being followed.These standards centre on the UN Code of Conduct for Law Enforcement Officials and the UN Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms by Law Enforcement Officials. At their heart is the principle of what constitutes legitimate force. Police must sometimes be permitted to use force or lethal force, in order to do their job of keeping communities safe and protecting themselves and the public from life-threatening attacks. But the force used must not be arbitrary; it must be proportionate, necessary and lawful. And, crucially, it must only be used in self defence or against the imminent threat of death or serious injury.
Self defence for the private individual in defence of life, liberty and property is not included within this ‘solution’.
“Other news today” in today’s Telegraph makes cheerful reading.
Here are the first four stories:
Convicted man who cooked victim’s brains admits killings
Teenager killed boy for his baseball cap
Elderly woman stabbed to death by thieves
Waiter accused of axe murder
And that last one was not just a murder, it was a decapitation. A few feet away from where her boyfriend works, apparently.
George Orwell wrote a famous essay called Decline of the English Murder. It would appear that England, has, murderwise, bounced back since Orwell’s time.
If you are at all interested in matters British and constitutional, or even in matters British or constitutional, you really should read this, the latest from Sean Gabb.
Final two paragraphs:
The headline news is grim. We have just had imposed on us a Prevention of Terrorism Act more subversive of due process than any law made in peacetime since the 1650s. Add to this the Civil Contingency Act, the abolition of the double jeopardy rule and the allowance of similar fact evidence made by the Criminal Justice Act 2003, the Proceeds of Crime Act, and all the lesser invasions that have come and are yet to come from this current Parliament, and we might suppose all was already lost. And look before this Government, to the Thatcher and Major Governments – those, to be fair, laid the foundations on which the present structure of despotism is now being raised. But look beyond Parliament, to those quiet places where the lawyers gather and discuss what the politicians have in mind for us, and there is a counter revolution under way.
It may be worth giving our support and best wishes to those charismatic outsiders who are now beating on the doors of Parliament. It is still more worth while, though, to thank and support those old men in wigs, whose often pedantic and always long decisions about pounds of bananas and hunting bans are restoring to fact what once seemed the theory of a limited constitutional order.
“The Jaws of the Trap Are Closing” says Sean’s title, and that will almost certainly lead you to think that he reckons, as per usual, that we are all doomed, doomed, etc. But it is not that kind of trap. On this matter, Sean is guardedly optimistic.
I have just read the whole thing, and urge you to do so also, if for no other reason that Sean Gabb is one of the great unsung prose stylists of our time. I read him with pleasure about anything – which is why, in defiance of his oft-stated-to-me wishes, I wish he would become a blogger, instead of just a set-piece essayist.
The recent judgement to which Sean is referring to is to be found here (more disintermediation!), and Sean’s earlier (Feb 2002) piece on this same subject of judicial challenge to the politicians, about the Metric Martyrs case, is to be found here.
Stephen Pollard, a former member of Britain’s Young Conservatives who is now a New Labour guru, has an article in the Times called: My easy ride in the Senate seat.
Life after his easy ride is getting a little more tricky, with a savaging from Global Growth, the free-market NGO.
According to the New York Sun, most if not all of the Iranian exile organizations have come together at a Los Angeles meeting.
“After 20 years, this is the first time all Iranians are together,” said Sirus Sharafshahi, the owner of a Farsi-language daily newspaper for Iranian expatriates, Sobh Iran (Iran Morning). “We want to tell the administration of the United States, all Iran is together. If you want to change the government, come to us.”
Some of the delegates feel the current US diplomatic carrot and stick approach to Iran and its nuclear program are a mistake:
Several attendees at yesterday’s meeting of Iranian dissidents said Mr. Bush’s decision to back the European approach of offering concessions to Iran was a mistake. A leader of the Iranian Freedom Front, Dariush Hashempour, gave a PowerPoint presentation yesterday that highlighted Mr. Bush’s pro-reform remarks in his State of the Union address last month. In an interview, Mr. Hashempour said he was startled by the president’s new stance.
“All of a sudden he just flip-flopped and was willing to work with Iran,” Mr. Hashempour said. Asked if it was a mistake to try the carrot-and-stick technique the Europeans have advocated, he answered, “Definitely, for any period, even for 10 seconds. … Their approach not only didn’t help, it was a disaster for the last 20 years.”
This meeting and sense of co-operation is an important development for pro-freedom Iranians. The words of Benjamin Franklin, “We must indeed all hang together, or assuredly, we shall all hang separately”, are as applicable to Iranian Patriots’s today as they were to the signers of America’s Declaration of Independence two and a quarter hundred years ago.
This IRA versus the McCartneys (aka civilisation) struggle is truly amazing. First a bunch of IRA thugs murder Robert McCartney. Then, in defiance of all precedent, the McCartney family complains, loudly, in public, and demands justice. The IRA obviously cannot allow IRA people to be tried in a court of law, so they offer to shoot the rogue elements who committed the murder. Not good enough say the McCartneys (they are not anarchists, they want it done by the state. I can see their point).
Now one of the leading IRA/Sinn Fein thugocrats, a repulsive exhibit by the name of Martin McGuiness, has perpetrated another public relations clanger:
Sinn Fein has warned the sisters of murdered Belfast man, Robert McCartney, to stay out of politics.
The party’s chief negotiator, Martin McGuinness, told them to “be careful” and not to step over the party political line.
The sisters insist the IRA was involved in the murder with one of them accusing Sinn Fein of taking part in a cover-up.
The family are to fly out to the US on Tuesday to continue their fight for his killers to be brought to justice.
Mr McGuinness said their campaign could leave them open to political manipulation.
He ought to know.
This is not the kind of thing you should tell people who are bereaved, who are good looking (which the McCartneys are, very) and who are on the telly a lot. One of the rules of the modern, TV-dominated world is that bereaved and televised families may say and do whatever they choose and may not be criticised. They certainly cannot be told by a politician-stroke-terrorist not to do politics. But McGuinness is only following another rule, a Northern Ireland rule, which says that if the IRA tells you to shut up, you shut up. So you can see how hard this must all be for him to comprehend. When he issued his warning, he was only doing IRA business as usual.
But business for the IRA is no longer business as usual.
The equally revolting Gerry Adams is now over in the USA, where he usually gets a free ride and choruses of When Irish Eyes Are Smiling. (The BBC showed Clinton and Adams singing along together in happier IRA-USA times.) But this time it is different. Not only have the IRA carried on murdering people. They have also been blamed for a truly enormous bank robbery. President Bush, comparing Adams to Arafat, has told Adams to get knotted, and now not even Ted Kennedy will give Adams the time of day. All of which is just one more little consequence – yet another of those knock-on effects – of 9/11. Suddenly the friends (the IRA) of their enemies (Islamist terrorists) no longer look so appealing to the Americans. They look more closely, and do not like what they see.
Adams was accordingly very much on the defensive. Challenged by the McCartneys, who are also over in the USA drumming up support for their quest for justice, Adams was then shown by the BBC protesting piously that if, God forbid, he had become involved in anything as nasty as the murder of Robert McCartney, then as soon as he had realised the enormity of what he had done, he would have handed himself in to the relevant authority (although he was a bit vague about who that would be exactly) and would have made a full confession. Like hell he would.
Mark Steyn goes into a bit more detail, and has a few more swipes at the IRA. Patrick Crozier (to whom thanks for the link) asks if this is a first for Steyn. Is it?
As Steyn points out, this is a mess which the British and Irish Governments have done a lot to perpetuate, along with all those idiot American IRA-donors. The UK and the Republic have followed a policy of relentless appeasement, and it has not worked. The appeased have taken and taken, and carried right on terrorising.
I have always suspected that if the British Government had said, about a quarter of a century ago, that they would stop even discussing a change in the status of Northern Ireland until the IRA had pretty much ceased to exist, and that if the IRA chose to exist for ever, that would mean Northern Ireland remaining British for ever, that might have settled this thing long ago. But appeasement, for all its fatuities, does at least have the advantage that it makes the nature of the appeased beast unmistakable, and unites all but the most casual of onlookers against the beast. So, now that Bush has changed the rules, the rest of us can all join in and give the IRA the kicking they deserve.
I certainly hope that this is what is now going to happen.
Sometimes, new clusters of immigrants coalesce in London, under the radar of the media, until such time as a whimpering hack from the Review section of some unreadable broadsheet notices that an article provides local colour or anthropological observations, depending upon their political bent.
Whilst at Smart Alec’s in Wimbledon, enjoying a late pint (though disappointed by the fact that Winterwarmer, a fine drink, was no longer on tap as its replacement, Waggledance, is less refined), I started to notice that the entire bar was filled with white immigrants from Zimbabwe, attending a birthday do.
There is no evidence for the length of time that this community has been established or how large it is. Moreover, Googling does not provide any documents for this phenomenon. However, over the last few years, Zimbabweans, many of them thrown off their farms, have travelled to London and set up shop in Wimbledon. The numbers are sufficient for the community to have acquired its own name amongst travellers from the southern hemisphere, Zimbledon.
How many other communities are gradually emerging amongst the suburbs, unnoticed and unlooked for? Does anyone know where the Berbers, the Bugandans or the Shona drink? What are their names for London?
A journalist never reveals his sources – that is the stern injunction issued to any reporters. Reporters have even gone to jail in the past than reveal a source. Journalists who reveal sources are unlikely to be trusted again, and without trust, it is very hard for an ambitious correspondent to grab a great scoop. The problem for me, though, is how can one protect a “source” for a story if there is an allegation that the source stole an item for the story? How does one deal, for example, with alleged theft of industrial secrets? In my view theft trumps the right to keep a source private.
A test case in the United States is pitting three bloggers against Apple computer concerning their release of details about Apple products yet to be put on the market. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is acting for the three bloggers in this case.
Apple’s lawsuit accused anonymous people of stealing trade secrets about the Asteroid music product and leaking them to the PowerPage, Apple Insider and Think Secret websites.
All three are Apple fan sites that obsessively watch the iconic firm for information about future products.
Apple is notoriously secretive about upcoming products which gives any snippets of information about what it is working on all the more value.
The lawsuit to reveal the names of the leakers was filed against three individuals: Monish Bhatia, Jason O’Grady and someone else using the alias Kasper Jade – all of whom wrote for the Power Page and Apple Insider sites.
This case could remind us, rather sharply, that weblogs are as subject to the laws of libel and the rest as any part of MSM. Stay tuned.
I would like to start this posting with a long-windedness warning. Basically I have only recently thought of the notions that follow. The separate bits of these ideas have mostly been present in my mind for quite a while, but the bundling of them is, for me, new. And stuff you are still excited by on account of its extreme recentness is generally the stuff you write least well. Apologies, but there you go, that is blogging for you.
Anyway… here it is. Cough, all sitting comfortably, begin. (Or skip, of course.)
Much is made, and quite rightly, of the empowering effect of the Internet for the little guy. We can all have our blogs and our say.
Recently I have begun to wonder if a similar Internet impact might be about to become unmistakably clear at the very top end of society, the bit where Great Men (as opposed to us little guys) try to have their say.
Great Men trying to have their say?!? But do they not do this already, all the time? Well, yes they do, but they are often either misunderstood or just plain ignored, and often relentlessly so.
I have lost count of the number of times when a Great Man has given what he hoped would be a Big Speech, laying out a major strategy for the months and years to come, only for all the questions from the assembled mob of hacks to ask only about the latest scandal that they have either observed or invented, concerning the petty details of the life of the Great Man. So, what about your wife’s astrologer? What about those crazy daughters of yours? About this intern. About your mortgage. This dodgy land deal you and your wife did ten years ago. How about this National Guard skiving then?
In a kind of hybrid category are the scandals that are less personal but equally demeaning and diminishing, like the scandal of Blair and Bush invading Iraq in pursuit of weapons they knew were not there, or Reagan doing whatever wicked thing he did with the Nicaraguan Contras.
Now I certainly would not want the hacks to neglect such questions. The idea that they should be compelled to ask only about the high and mighty abstractions laid before them in the Big Speech, is repellent not to say totalitarian. But one of my many complaints about our mainstream media is that they have a tendency only to ask the embarrassing questions. The attitude of the mainstream media when reporting a speech given by a Great Man is to look only for clay at the bottom end of his body, rather than to pay any attention to the noises emerging from the top end. → Continue reading: The smartening up of the culture: thoughts on some recent speeches by President Bush
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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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