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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I found this gruesome story in a letter to Editor in today’s Telegraph:
Sir – Julius Strauss’s report on the lost prisoners of the Soviet gulag (News, Jan 3) reminded me of a wartime experience.
As an 18-year-old seaman aboard an escort destroyer out of Scapa Flow in 1943-44, I recall that, after shepherding the convoy in the Kola inlet north of Murmansk, we moved to the small dockside at Polyarni.
During one of our arrivals, when some of us were stretching our legs ashore, a well thrown snowball caused me to stagger against a snow-covered stack of logs. I recovered my balance to find that I was hanging on to a human foot, naked and frozen.
We found that the stack was not of timber, but of human bodies, laid five upon five, approximately 30 to a stack, piled along the jetty. We surmised that they were casualties of the war to the south, could not be buried in the frozen ground and had been moved by rail to an ice-free port for disposal at sea.
Having read your report, I am inclined to suggest that they had perished in the gulag Vorkuta, not far to the east.
From:
Leslie James Cousins, Petersfield, Hants
The article mentioned in the letter talks of horrendous conditions of gulag prisoners at the Vorkuta camps.
Even in the context of the times, the suffering at the Vorkuta camps was extreme. In the winter, temperatures on the tundra can drop to minus 50C.
Inmates were provided with ill-fitting, poor quality clothes and forced to work 12 or 14 hours a day on a starvation ration. During the 1940s and 1950s a million prisoners passed through the Vorkuta gulags, according to Memorial.
At least 100,000, perhaps many more, died. They were buried in the rock-hard permafrost or simply left by the roadside to be covered by snow.
Many of the survivors are now trapped by poverty as the hyperinflation following the end of communism wiped out their meagre savings. For years Vorkuta was a political gulag. Today it has become an economic gulag.
As Natalie Solent mentioned in a Samizdata.net article yesterday, Robert Kilroy-Silk is taking heavy flak for his remarks about the Arab world and has been brow beaten into a rather ignominious apology.
I was just interviewed on BBC News 24 to put my views on this affair and I pointed out that whilst I found his remarks full of nasty collectivist generalization, many of the points he made about what passes for civilization in the Arab world are simply facts… people do indeed get their limbs chopped off as punishment in Saudi Arabia, women are indeed second class citizens (if they are even citizens at all), human rights are ghastly across a great swathe of the Middle East, the last time the Muslim world was a hive of innovation was in the 12th Century etc. etc… all these things are simply facts.
Yet my point is not to defend Kilroy-Silk, of whom I am not a particular fan but rather to wonder why it is that Robert Fisk and John Pilger can make equally sweeping and egregiously collectivist statements about Israel and the United States without so much as a murmur from the Guardian reading classes?
I check this site day by day, and found this cartoon today.
By the way, there is a curious transatlantic rift over the Beagle: the British media call it a ‘British Mars probe’ and the US media call it a ‘European Mars probe’.
I completely missed this posting at Freedom and Whisky on Boxing Day, until F&W supremo David Farrer rang me on another matter of mutual concern, and he mentioned it. I forget why, but I’m glad he did. (He also gave me some very helpful tips in how to use my Canon A70 camera. He now has a Canon A80, which is the same only rather more so.)
To tickle your fancies, and to ensure that a decent number of you do investigate, try this:
It was all part of this terrible attack on people by those who had nothing better to do than to give advice on all sorts of subjects. These people, who wrote in newspapers and talked on the radio, were full of good ideas on how to make people better. They poked their noses into other people’s affairs, telling them to do this and to do that. They looked at what you were eating and told you it was bad for you; then they looked at the way you raised your children and said that was bad too. And to make matters worse, they often said that if you did not heed their warnings, you would die. In this way they made everybody so frightened of them that they felt they had to accept the advice.
Who do you reckon says that? Clue: look at the categories for this posting.
As an F&W commenter points out, we spend half our lives telling, if not everybody, then at least a great many people how they should be behaving better, so maybe we’re as bad … But, if we don’t, who will interfere with the interferers, meddle with the meddlers, nanny the nannies? Anyway, go there, and enjoy.
The Vision of the Anointed: Self-congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy
Thomas Sowell
Basic Books, 1996
The title illustrates the difficulty of captioning and characterising the problem the author is up against. “Touch not the Lord’s anointed” seems to be the sentiment behind the title – except that “the anointed” are the self-anointed. To some extent the sub-title of the book helps: “Self-congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy”, defining as it does the moral complacency of the left-liberal consensus and its absence of self-doubt even when policies fail. Sowell does not like the classification into left and right, but it is difficult to avoid.
He also points out that while the attitude of controversialists on the right to those on the left is that they are misguided or foolish, the converse attitude of the left is that the others are evil and “Problems exist because others are not as wise or as virtuous as the anointed.”
Ch. 2 defines a “Pattern of Failure” when the anointed initiate a program as involving four stages “The Crisis”; “The Solution”; “The Results” and “The Response” and illustrates this with three examples – President Johnson’s “War on Poverty”, Sex Education (starting at about the same time) and Criminal Justice (the new “criminals’ rights” initiated a little earlier). Matters had actually been improving in all three, so that whether any of the changes were needed is questionable. After all these programs or initiatives had been in operation for some time, all three situations were manifestly worse.
The “response” was usually to talk about something else rather than to admit the problem wasn’t solved. The War on Poverty was to abolish dependency; it increased it, but, naturally “it benefitted a lot of people”; sex education was to reduce teen-age pregnancies; these increased but “people felt better about sex”; crimes increased after criminals were given more rights, but Chief Justice Earl Warren, who had been most responsible for this merely claimed that people were “overlooking the root causes of crime” – without explaining how these must have got worse after 1960. This chapter is perhaps the most tightly argued in the book, but other chapters are also valuable, pursuing the contorted reasoning of those who know they are right, despite everything that happens to the contrary.
Later, he introduces the instructive concept of “trade-offs” (see Index): that improvements in one direction may result in deterioration in another and that cost is something that must always be taken into consideration.
There are also “mascots” (Index), normally “undeserving” sorts of people who are treated as if they can do no wrong – vagrants, homeless persons, the “handicapped”, homosexuals, AIDS sufferers. Just as some hazards are exaggerated (ignoring the “trade-off” factor), others are pooh-poohed, perhaps the most tragic being AIDS. Transfusions had been proclaimed safe (without testing); about half of all haemophiliacs in the US became infected with AIDS from them, because homosexuals were “mascots”. And there are extraordinary contortions of logic to let criminals off. The victimisation of business and the professions is nothing short of frightening.
What is not so clear is where the mind-set comes from that so persistently flouts conventional wisdom. It seems to result from the idea that, because any situations is not perfect – and is therefore a problem – some alternative must be better. What could be simpler than to carry the honourable Anglo-American tradition of dissent to its reductio ad absurdum and proclaim that to do the opposite of what always has been done must be the solution? But who started this Gadarene rush?
Glenn Reynolds blogs about a happy ending to the story of imprisoned Iranian blogger Sina Motallebi. This is very good news. The icing on the cake (the cake being release from prison) is that he credits blogs for playing key role in the events.
OJR [The Online Journalism Review]: So why do you think they let you go?
Motallebi: They didn’t expect the pressure from Webloggers and foreign media in my case. They think I’m an individual [freelance] journalist and not affiliated with any political party, I’m not an insider. So they think that when they arrested me, there wouldn’t be strong pressure to release me… I think they found the cost of arresting me more than they thought before.
There will probably be much written and made of this (quite rightly). What caught my attention was this bit from the ‘post-release’ interview with Sina Motallebi.
At newspapers, an editor can change your article. They’re [ed. Iranian authorities] afraid of Weblogs because in Iran we don’t have the experience of an [open] society. We have a [closed] society. Weblogs are a good experience, where everyone can explain their ideas. And the government is very afraid of them.
…
Socially in Iran, we haven’t experienced a [free] society where everyone can express their ideas. We don’t experience the freedom of expression that much. But Weblogs give the opportunity to Iranians to speak freely and share their ideas, their views, and even the details of their personal lives.
Freedom of expression was also important for people talking about their personal life, especially for girls and women. That’s the reason you see many Iranian females blogging now. Under Islamic rules, many things are prohibited for young people. Each week many Iranian youngsters are arrested only for going to a party or walking with a friend of the opposite sex. So normally, they can’t even talk about their personal life. But online with their fake names, or in some cases their real names, they can mention their personal lives and experience freedom of speech.
The Bloggers of the World Unite!
Aargh! Typing this almost hurt and the instinctive reaction is one of: Over my dead body…but you get the drift.
This intriguing, tickling, curiosity about China may well be something I share only with Brian Micklethwait but perhaps he, like me, is forever being goaded into continuing scrutiny by these little streams of fascinating information coming out of the place.
No sooner have the Chinese authorities decided to amend the constitution to provide for private property protection than their Courts start implementing it:
The court in Beijing ruled on December 18, 2003 that Beijing Artic Ice Technology Development must return the virtual goods to the player, Li Hongchen. Hongchen had spent two years and over US$1,200 on ‘pay-as-you-go’ access cards playing the online game “Hongyue” (Red Moon) and had built up an account of virtual money and weapons in his playing account.
In February 2003, Hongchen discovered that his account had been hacked through the game’s central servers. He complained to the company but was told that the virtual goods had no real world value. The company also refused to identify the hacker, saying that it could not reveal private details of players, reported Reuters, an international news agency.
So not only are Chinese Courts going to protect private property, they are even going to protect virtual private property.
A columnist for TechNewsWorld, a U.S. news Web site, said the Chinese court case appeared to be the first in the world.
I am not aware of any similar ruling in either the UK or Europe so maybe the chappie from TechNewsWorld is right and this is a world first. Who would have imagined even a few short years ago that property law precedents would be set in China?!!
All shock and awe aside, I wonder if it is a precedent that will followed elsewhere, especially in the West? It just might. I noticed some time ago that laws relating to technology in general, and the internet in particular, are taking on a very global hue.
If that Court in Beijing manages to start a global ball rolling then I foresee very interesting implications for the future of ‘cyber’ wealth.
Some are real trainspotters, and seek them out in all their literal dullness. I am a virtual skyscraperspotter, and surf the net looking for photos and descriptions. And I have just discovered a new one, the amazing Ryugyong Hotel, in Pyongyang, North Korea. When I say “new”, all I mean is I’ve only just heard about it. The thing has been in existence for well over a decade. I only encountered it because it is on the left here. Good grief, what the upper case top row of my keyboard is that? – I expostulated.
I have my answer. Says Wikipedia:
The Ryugyong Hotel is a towering, 105-story, 1,083 foot empty concrete shell in Pyongyang, North Korea. If the building ever was completed it would be considered the world’s largest hotel, and one of the tallest buildings in the world. Today however, the building remains uninhabited and unfinished.
The North Koreans began constructing the pyramid-shaped Ryugyong Hotel in 1987, reportedly aiming for 105 stories to beat out a structure the South Koreans were building in Singapore. The building was to contain 3,000 rooms and 7 revolving restaurants. The estimated cost of building it ran upwards of $750 million, which is 2% of North Korea’s GDP. It’s generally assumed construction came to a halt in 1991 because North Korea was suffering from famine, acute electricity shortages, and lack of necessary funding. The basic structure is complete, but no windows, fixtures or fittings have been installed. According to http://www.skyscrapers.com, the concrete used in building the Ryugyong Hotel is of unsuitable quality and therefore is unsafe – it cannot therefore be completed as currently built. With annual tourism numbering less than a hundred, some question the logic of building such a massive hotel. Pyongyang’s few existing hotels remain to this day, virtually empty. The 3.9-million-square-foot concrete structure continues to dominate Pyongyang’s skyline.
In other words, this building is going to supply the world with the second most dramatic demolition video ever (I am afraid it will not be the winner), and nothing else. I love that bit about how “some question the logic” of this ludicrous structure. In general, anti-collectivist propaganda does not come any more damning, and is all the more damning here because it is done so delicately. “Some question the logic …” in a country “suffering” (like it just happened to turn out that way) from “famine, acute electricity shortages, and lack of necessary funding”. Yeah, I had heard about that.
I was going to put that this makes our little Dome look like very small potatoes, public-spending-wise. But actually our Dome seems to have wasted about three times as much as the Ryugyong Hotel. (Hah!! You call that wasting public money?) The difference is that we could afford our Dome without very much mass starvation, and even now our electricity supplies are hardly ever interrupted.
Until just now, as I say, I had no idea about this ridiculous edifice, no idea at all. I guess they are not that eager to advertise it, what with it being made of cheese and having no windows and being unliveable in and liable to collapse at any moment.
The sooner President Bush finds a way of shutting down this evil joke of a country and merging it into the sensible one to the south of it, the better.
I have been slightly ill for the last couple of days, and I still am. And one of the consequences of feeling ill is that if you are quite old, you also feel old. And one of the symptoms of advancing age is that you start to fret about how almost all the news seems to be bad. (Well, course it is bad. That is its nature.)
But today, not all. From today’s Independent:
The vast majority of people from ethnic minorities feel British even if they were not born in this country, according to a report from the National Statistics department.
Racial attacks and recent political gains by the British National Party are leading to long-established immigrants becoming increasingly determined to assert their right to be in this country, it is claimed.
The research by the department, formerly the Office of National Statistics, is the first time that ethnic minorities have been asked how they feel about their national identity, rather than about their actual origin. It revealed that both first generation immigrants and those who were British-born had a strong sense of identity with their adopted country.
It would seem that we here all have one thing to thank the BNP for, which is that by claiming loudly that all these newcomers are not British, they have provoked them into insisting that they are.
I recall attending a meeting about five years ago, it must have been, at which we all talked about ethnic issues – issues meaning when people with different coloured skins fight with and shout at each other – and I was struck by the vehemence with which some of the least white people (both visually and sociologically, so to speak) present were most vehement about being British. Struck, and rather pleased. And it seems that my merely anecdotal research has been duplicated nationally, and has come up with the same answer. And I’m very glad.
After all, one of the nightmare futures for this country was that it would stop being one country at all, to the point where different fragments of it became identified not just with different bits of the ex-country, but with different bits of the world. Like the Balkans, in other words, where three different world religions (Eastern Christianity, Western Christianity, and Islam) contend at one explosive meeting point. Was that the future my generation (the last “British” generation) had bequeathed to its descendants? Apparently not.
Of course this new Britain will be – already is – very different from the old one I grew up in, and in which my mother still lives, in the leafy suburbs of the extreme west of Surrey (the bit where Surrey, Middlesex and Berkshire meet, mostly peacefully). But since when was the deal ever that your country remained the same from one century to the next?
In many ways what this means is that Britain has become rather more like the USA, more a country of immigrants and less a country of people who can trace their ancestry back to the Norman Conquest (the Norman Conquest being the event that turned this country into an Anglo-French melting pot).
Many further questions remain unanswered by surveys like this. I wonder, how would the young son or grandson of a family recently arrived in Britain from India, say, have felt watching the brilliant production of Shakespeare’s Richard II that I watched last Monday evening on the television. And I wonder exactly what he would have made of the fact that the actor playing the Duke of Aumerle, one of the doomed Richard’s favourites, was played by a black (Afro-Caribbean) actor? (Maybe nothing at all.) Did that young man feel that this is his history he was watching, as well as mine? I don’t know, but I hope he did.
I went from her to him to this.
Quote of beyond America interest:
The Bush administration’s anti-protester bias proved embarrassing for two American allies with long traditions of raucous free speech, resulting in some of the most repressive restrictions in memory in free countries. When Bush visited Australia in October, Sydney Morning Herald columnist Mark Riley observed, “The basic right of freedom of speech will adopt a new interpretation during the Canberra visits this week by the US President, George Bush, and his Chinese counterpart, Hu Jintao. Protesters will be free to speak as much as they like just as long as they can’t be heard.” Demonstrators were shunted to an area away from the Federal Parliament building and prohibited from using any public address system in the area.
For Bush’s recent visit to London, the White House demanded that British police ban all protest marches, close down the center of the city, and impose a “virtual three day shutdown of central London in a bid to foil disruption of the visit by anti-war protesters,” according to Britain’s Evening Standard. But instead of a “free speech zone” – as such areas are labeled in the U.S. – the Bush administration demanded an “exclusion zone” to protect Bush from protesters’ messages.
And the concluding paragraph:
Is the administration seeking to stifle domestic criticism? Absolutely. Is it carrying out a war on dissent? Probably not – yet. But the trend lines in federal attacks on freedom of speech should raise grave concerns to anyone worried about the First Amendment or about how a future liberal Democratic president such as Hillary Clinton might exploit the precedents that Bush is setting.
Precedents hell. I agree with Kim Du Toit. This is already bullshit. Never mind all the bullshit it brings on in the future.
The Conservative Party (or as Monty Python would put it, the Silly Party) has a cunning plan to cut bureaucracy. Appoint bureaucrats to decide how much bureaucracy is really necessary!
Now why didn’t I think of that? 
This morning I was watching the news about the US requiring UK passport holders to either provide biometric information on it or stand in queues and pay money for visa for any visit to the US. Bugger. And I was looking forward to travelling to the US more regularly in the future. It did strike me as a move out of the blue and rather harsh in the light of both the Anglo-American relationship and the global trade and tourism links between the US and the UK. But, I thought, the terrorism meme has won the day and the US is going to ‘protect’ itself back to the Middle Ages.
However, as the day progressed I have learnt that the situation may not be as bad the media represent. Apparently, the news reports that talk about passengers having to have biometric passports containing fingerprint details as well as digital photographs are, quite simply incorrect. It is true that discussion has been taking place between the USA and all of the 27 countries on the visa waiver programme regarding mandating this information on the machine readable passports currently being issued and it may be that some countries will have to comply. However, at present, no such stipulation has been enforced and it is felt “unlikely” that such measures will be forced upon the UK.
For the time being nothing has changed. The position remains as originally stated by the US – all travellers from the UK had to be in possession of machine readable passports by 1st October 2003 or would require a visa. The deadline was subsequently seen as unachievable and it was extended until 26th October 2004. Advice given to corporations by their agents acting as liason to the US Embassy and the Foreign Office remains that UK travellers will have to be in possession of a machine readable passport by the 26th October in order to gain entry into the USA under the visa waiver scheme. (A machine readable passport is one with the electronic strip on the back and containing a digital photograph of the holder).
I am still confused. Despite my reservations about the BBC and other major media I find it hard to believe that they would report such a huge factual error about this matter and got ‘biometric’ confused with ‘machine readable’. I am quite anxious to know the truth not only for the impact such measures would have on my personal travel arrangements but also their implications for introduction of biometrics into documents in the UK in general. Daniel Johnson points out in the Telegraph today:
British passports are not, of course, biometric; nor, for that matter, are American ones. But you can bet your bottom dollar that the Government will be speeding up their introduction – as a form of ID card – before you can say “David Blunkett”.
The Telegraph also has doomsday reports about his issue. Can anyone tell us what’s really going on?
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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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