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]
|
Paul Staines points out a splendid example of the French state doing its bit to support the world’s largest tyranny
As Taiwan’s democrats get bullets before ballots, France demonstrates its exceptionalism once again. This week the French navy began joint exercises with the Chinese navy. No, really.
Not content with just lobbying other EU countries to lift the arms embargo on China imposed in the wake of the Tiannamen Square massacre in 1989 (who says the French are always against free trade?), they are training with the Chinese navy. The official Chinese news agency, Xinhua, said they would be China’s biggest ever joint military exercises with a foreign power. (Note to Beijing, it took Churchill a single day to sink almost the entire French navy, but maybe you have not got many seafaring friends to learn from.)
Taiwan obviously is anxious about the situation – which they describe as a threatening show of force. The French not content with cruising the seas with Taiwan’s mortal enemy recently condemned President Chen Shui-bian’s plan to hold a referendum on missile defense as part of this coming Saturday’s election, prompting Taipei to suspend top-level ties with Paris.
I suppose with reduced opportunities for arms sales to Iraq the prospect of equipping the Chinese military appeals.
Paul Staines
Spotted at Samizdata.net HQ, a well known Samizdatista demonstrates multi-tasking…
… he may well have also been touch-typing on a laptop under the table using his toes.
The drivers of Britain’s famous black cabs, especially those widely used in London, are renowed for the robust independence of mind they bring to their job. Enterprising, hardworking and usually full of sharp intelligence, the drivers of our black cabs are a welcome reminder that parts of the British economy are in fine fettle. (My only beef is that they all seem to be West Ham soccer fans).
The same holds true north of the border, I am glad to say. This week I was up in Scotland for a business conference and on my way from Edinburgh Airport, the driver immediately felt free to tell me what he thought of British finance minister Gordon Brown (also a Scot) and his budget. (Brown delivered his budget speech to the House of Commons on Wednesday).
It is fair to say that this obviously hardworking driver despised the whole tax-and-spend culture of the present Labour government. The driver waxed lyrical in his hatred of Scotland’s new spendthrift and recently devolved parliament, wasteful public spending across the board, and of course, the ludicrously bloated costs of the new Scottish parliament building. The latter subject, in particular, is a scandal of monstrous proportions. The people of Scotland are truly steamed up on this issue.
My driver was true to the bracing laissez faire values of that great Scot, Adam Smith. My only problem, though, was that I understood only about a third of what the chap said.
Another election, another outrage, this time in Taiwan, where the President and his Vice President have been shot while out campaigning.
The injuries were not life threatening:
An unknown gunman fired at least one shot at Mr Chen’s campaign jeep as he rode in its open back alongside Vice-President Annette Lu, holding onto the vehicle’s roll bar and waving to adoring home-town crowds in the southern city of Tainan.
Mrs Lu felt a sharp pain near her right knee, then Mr Chen felt a blow to his lower abdomen, presidential chief of staff Chiou I-Jen said.
Mr Chen initially did not realise what had happened but realised he was injured when he felt blood seeping through his clothes. He ordered his motorcade to speed up and head for a hospital.
The Christian Science Monitor ponders what this might mean for the election. There is currently no word on the attacker, and what motives might be behind the attack. However, tensions in the area have been high, as President Chen is seen as a proponent of formally declaring Taiwan independent, a move that would infuriate China and possibly trigger a military confrontation.
The BBC reports that the European Parliament’s civil liberties committee has rejected the EU Commission’s agreement to automatically pass personal information about transatlantic passengers to US authorities. The committee concluded that:
“The agreement with the United States is not on a level that… gives enough protection to EU citizens”
Unfortunately, as the BBC article points out, the infamous EU democratic deficit means that “The parliament’s opinion has no legal force”.
It would appear from yesterday’s UK budget, before my accountant gets through the smallprint, that Gordon Brown has decided one million small UK businesses hold just too many awkward voters to browbeat in one go. So he has only smacked us with a light tap rather than the full hammer of state retribution he was muttering about earlier in the month.
There is still a Section 660 court case, with a judgement due in June, where he may yet succeed in fully wrecking the small business sector, just as he managed to do recently with the UK film industry, and the IT contractor sector several years ago, with his IR35 measure, but I’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.
What really puzzles me, however, is why whenever he deliberately introduces tax loopholes, to apparently encourage small businesses, instead of financial journalists just praising him in newspapers the damned small businesses actually take advantage of his faux largesse. Which means he has to get all moody and pompous before closing his own damned loopholes down again. → Continue reading: The cleverest man in the world
In the wake of the massacre in Madrid, and the subsequent election result, it has become the conventional wisdom that the election went according to al-Qaeda’s design. Robert Clayton Dean expressed this view concisely here at Samizdata a few days ago:
Spanish voters reacted to the election eve bombings by doing exactly what the bombers undoubtedly wanted: elect a Socialist who will take a soft line in the war on terror.
However, there is in fact little direct evidence that such was the goal of al-Qaeda. It does sound rather logical, of course, but there may well be other factors at work. And it is not clear that logic is a useful tool in analysing the methods and aims of this enemy.
What follows is a purely speculative guess to make the case that the political goal of al-Qaeda was in fact the direct opposite- their goal may well have been to ensure the re-election of the Popular Party.
al-Qaeda as an organisation has been going through a rough couple of years, and it has not achieved much in terms of murder and mayhem in the West. If we consider al-Qaeda as a company, it would aim to market itself as the organisation of choice to the Islamic Fundamentalist section of the Islamic marketplace. → Continue reading: What is Al Qaeda up to? An alternative view
recoup (v.) recouped, recouping, recoups
v. tr.
To receive an equivalent for; make up for: recoup a loss.
To return as an equivalent for; reimburse.
Law. To deduct or withhold (part of something due) for an equitable reason.
v. intr.
To regain a former favorable position.
So when we are told that a committee of the Irish parliament will tell the Irish government that it should…
…use taxes or development levies to recoup some of the windfall profits made by property speculators when their land is rezoned.
… we are being told the Irish government should receive an equivalent for; make up for: recoup a loss.
Now how exactly does a property owner profiting from a change in the manner in which the Irish state abridges their property rights (i.e. land use zoning), thereby cause the Irish state a loss that needs to be recouped?
It should be clear that what we have here is an example of our old friend ‘meta-context’ at work again. Underpinning the suggested tax increase is the unspoken axiom that the economy exists for the purpose of allowing the state to acquire resources and any profits derived from the economy which benefit someone else other than the state are in fact a ‘loss’ for the state. That is to say, this is just a slight variation on the bizarre economic fallacy that someone else getting richer perforce makes someone else poorer. The self-evident concept of wealth creation simply does not register.
I wonder how many people sitting in that Oireachtas committee set to tell the Irish leader to increase those taxes would find the notion that the only reason the state ‘allows’ people to engage in economic activity for their own benefit at all is so that the state can tax them? My guess is that it would not be a commonly held overt belief but if you were to actually strap a number of mainstream Irish journalists and TDs to chairs and question them, teasing out the unspoken underlying assumptions within which they see the world, that is indeed what you would discover to be the case.
This morning I caught a train from south London into Waterloo, as I often do. There was a significantly larger police presence at Waterloo station than I am used to. It was not intended to be large enough to cause anyone to panic, but it there were certainly more police there than there were last week. Some of the police were carrying handguns. (Police in Great Britain are not normally armed). I then walked over one of the Hungerford footbridges that connect Waterloo and the South Bank Centre with Charing Cross Station on the other side of the Thames. Walking across the footbridge were two policement, one of who was carrying a sub-machine gun. (One normally only sees such things at airports, or outside the US embassy, or somewhere like that). At Charing Cross over the river there was again a more substantial police presence than I am used to, and again quite a few of the police were armed.
This was all actually clearly intended to be pretty low key, but I could feel the unmistakeable sense that the police and security forces are nervous at the moment. After the events in Spain last week, they should be. I am nervous. But seeing this kind of response on the streets is certainly something that makes me feel closer to it.
The BBC are broadcasting a series of documentaries purporting to show crises that could affect Britain over the next two to three decades. It is already clear from the subjects tackled: the dangers of gated communities, the bankruptcy of pension systems, the rise of obesity and the superiority of women, that they were written from a left-wing viewpoint that hypes up the modish problems of the would be regulators. The striking omission is the nightmares conjured up by the Greens but they will no doubt form the subjects of a second series.
If you do catch these, then try to spot the technological innovations that spice up the world of the future.
As part of this conversation, the BBC asks for views of the world in 2020 and I thought that it would be rude not to oblige.
By 2020, we will no longer have to pay the licence fee to watch substandard populist rot that masquerades as quality TV, notably, the series of poor documentaries called If.
If Iran or Al Qaeda obtain weapons of mass destruction, then we can expect them to unleash a second Holocaust, in order to remove Israel from the Middle East. Half of Europe will revile this, half will be relieved.
One or more countries will withdraw from the European Union due to its institutional inflexibility and inability to compete with the United States or the Far East.
There will be further wars in the Middle East involving the West (without a UN mandate) due to the threat of Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism in oil producing areas.
It was an antidote to some nauseating missives extolling peace in our time and a World Union (based on the European Union). One would have thought the barbarities of twencen would have extinguished this Fabian and Wellsian nonsense.
Yesterday I marvelled at the notion that David Blunkett had the gall to suggest that victims of miscarriages of justice should be charged for ‘room and board’. That this has not featured on the front page of every newspaper in Britain is also shocking to me. It seems to me that when there has been a miscarriage of justice, the state should bend over backwards to make amends as fulsomely as possible and make lavish restitution for damages done both directly and indirectly for the life it has unjustly disrupted. If justice is administered ‘in the name of the people’ then surely amongst the endless litany of grotesque uses of the public purse that consume billions and billions of pounds, this would be a rare legitimate public charge that few would dispute.
However what is even more baffling to me that the Tory Party is not queuing up in the Commons to denounce Blunkett in the most extreme language allowed in Parliament. Why are they not trying to use this latest affront to common decency and natural justice and using it to paint the Labour Party as the party which tramples over civil liberties? They should be relentlessly calling for Blunkett’s head over this and what do I hear? The sound of silence. Anyone who harbours delusions that the party of Michael Howard will be their champion for civil liberties against the ever more authoritarian Labour government really needs to see them for what they really are.
Regardless of whether or not the government manages to get this measure accepted or not, the mere fact Blunkett can even suggest such a thing without sparking clamourous calls for his removal from office is both a damning indictment of the moral and political vacuity of Britain’s political parties and a chilling measure of state of Britain’s culture. I sincerely hope to be proved wrong and see a ground swell of anger emerging in the press and polity in the next few days but I am not holding my breath. It would be interesting to hear the views of some of Britain’s blogging Members of Parliament on this issue.
I should have gone on hunger strike for longer than 44 days: then the bill would have been less.
– Former prisoner Vincent Hickey, on the Home Office’s bizarre attempts to charge him for board and food for the time he spent imprisoned for a murder he did not commit.
|
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