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]
|
Chief Wiggles is is on the warpath. I wouldn’t approach him too closely today if I were a reporter.
He’s absolutely right. The correspondents in Iraq are lying to us by choosing to report only the negatively spectacular. It’s an inherently false view and doesn’t help anyone understand what is actually going on.
I personally saw the same thing happen here in Belfast. I can remember more than one lovely peaceful day on which I found out from the international news there had been rioting a mile away from where I live. From what I have heard, there were times when reporters outnumbered rioters. You can do wonders with the right camera angle.
You see, reporters are like flies. The entire forest can be full of sunlight through leaves and the smell of spring flowers… but they will manage to find and congregate on that pile the bear left behind in the back of its’ dark den.
In the heated discussion prompted by my statement that “I hope we win”, commenter Julian Morrison posted the following comment, much of which I disagree with but which struck me as worth “promoting” to a post to give it better visibility and its own discussion. I have removed the quotes from other comments in the discussion so it can be read as a stand-alone.
Terrorism is a tool to influence governments, via scaring the electorate. In the absence of governments to scare, it would be a pointless tactic, just stupid and non-effectual murder. By analogy with the famous quote, “terrorism is the continuation of lobbying by other means”.
There is no war.
I hear “terrorists”, but all I see is (a) “clerics” with more mouth than sense, but more sense than balls, failing to convince the rest of Britain’s moslems to rise up in Jihad (they would rather sell you groceries) (b) the security state having a big happy “who needed civil liberties anyway” party.
The western world is not under attack by moslems. It is, at most, “under rant” by a few hotheads, if that’s even a phrase.
There are no WMDs. Iraq didn’t have any. The terrorists don’t have any. They’re a bunch of illiterate backwater arab yokels. They wouldn’t know a nuke from a microwave oven. The nearest they come to microbiology is the infestations upon their own scabrous hides.
If there were real terrorists in Britain or the USA, then they wouldn’t need WMDs. They could drive either country into a blue shivering funk by randomly suicide-machinegunning a few crowded malls, while screaming “allahu akbar!” Far more bang for the buck. There’s nothing effectual preventing them. They haven’t. They don’t exist.
9/11 wasn’t indicative of a national malaise. It was a fluke.
It may be because I’m reading too much Rothbard, at the moment, but when you see the world through the tinted glare of Rothbardianism, even the tiniest stories acquire potentially ghoulish significance. One such story that caught my eye today, over a celebratory coffee espresso, was John Prescott’s decision to abolish polling booths for local elections, and introduce postal-only ballots.
No doubt once this has been hailed a great success in such paragons of civic virtue as Doncaster City Council, this policy will be transferred to General Elections and the much anticipated Euro referendum.
Again and again through Rothbard’s writings you find references along the lines of, “the state will try to acquire control of the roads, in order to march its forces to trouble spots more easily, it will try to acquire control of the schools, in order to more easily educate the public on the munificence of the state, and it will try to acquire control of the postal system, in order to more easily monitor and control its citizens’ communications”. Or possibly to get ‘Yes’ votes on Euro referendums, or to get vital councillors elected in hung councils, or to get marginal seat Labour MPs returned to Westminster?
No, surely I’m not accusing a clearly honest administration, like Mr Blair’s, of deliberately rigging elections via a state-owned postal system? Surely I wouldn’t even dare to suggest such a calumny? I wouldn’t put it past them for a second. These parasites, these useless feckless human beings, these politicians, I wouldn’t put a single corrupt thing past them, and if I was a politician in control of this country and I wanted to take full control of the ‘democratic’ process, for the long-term good of the people naturally, I would make all elections postal-vote only. And then get all my ‘democratic’ friends in MI5 to do the decent thing and fix all my election results for me. It’s nice work if you can get it. Just ask all those nice French people who made up the majority of those who voted ‘Yes’ in the skin-of-the-teeth Maastricht vote in the French 1992 referendum. If any of them actually exist, of course.
Democracy in the UK? It’s a holiday in Cambodia.
Reuters reports that Britain has become the second country in Europe to criminalise spam, that unwanted barrage of e-mail and mobile phone text messages that promise get-rich-quick schemes, cheap home loans and a better sex life.
The unsolicited messages, which industry groups say account for more than half of all e-mails sent, have become the scourge of Internet users everywhere. Under the new UK law, spammers face a 5,000 pound fine if convicted in a magistrates court. The fine from a jury trial would be unlimited. Spammers would not face prison, according to the new law, which was introduced by Communications Minister Stephen Timms.
The law does not however cover workplace e-mail addresses. Anti-spam proponents had been calling for a blanket law that would criminalise all forms of spam. Steve Linford, founder of anti-spam group Spamhaus Project says:
To say it is permissable to spam somebody at work but not at home could put an extremely large burden on British businesses. It says it’s okay to spam companies.
The biggest spammers are based in the United States and Asia. Strenuous anti-spam laws there are seen as key to shutting off the valve.
James Lileks has a piece today on the war and its critics that is worth reading (scroll down a bit, although the first few paragraphs about his daughter culminate in a nice insight into diplomacy).
James can certainly speak for himself, but his point is that there is a war on, and wars are all about who wins, which means that anyone who cares about the war has to pick a side sooner or later. He hopes that we win (as do I). While it is certainly possible to criticize a war effort in order to help it succeed (and indeed, such criticism is very helpful to ensuring success), it is clear, and has been for awhile, that some critics of the war do not particularly care if we win or lose. Some are quite open about their desire for us to lose, others seem simply not to care that the result of their preferred policies is the advancement of terrorism.
Quick sample, but you really should read the whole thing:
→ Continue reading: “I hope we win”
The BBC reports that Tesco branches in Sandhurst and Leicester are running trials of the controversial Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chips.
These chips – each of which contains a unique identification number – will be attached to the packaging of almost every DVD in the stores.
What makes this trial unacceptable is that the chips will not be deactivated when the customer leaves the shop. Instead they will remain functional and will be broadcasting the customers’ purchase details wherever they go until they dispose of the packaging.
A useful reference regarding RFID is notags.co.uk.
Cross-posted from Chestnut Tree Cafe
Great personal friend, long-standing libertarian and self-defence enthusiast Russell Whitaker is back with his blog Survival Arts after a brief hiatus. Good to have you back!
And I was particularly interested in his take on the California recall election. In a nutshell, he is profoundly unimpressed with Arnold, preferring Republican alternative Tom McKlintock. The latter has gone on record time and again vowing to shrink the State’s crippling government spending and is a hardline defender of the Second Amendment.
Of course, can you imagine a single major Tory MP on this side of the Big Pond arguing such views at the moment?
Exactly.
Two problems in subdeveloped countries: dumping of subsidised argicultural produce in local markets which destroys local agriculture, and in Iraq, I am told the big bottleneck in getting electric power services restored is the looting of power cables.
I wonder how expensive this problem is in financial terms, we certainly know that power outages are a powerful symbol of the failings of the coalition forces. I wonder if we could employ one of the EU’s most wicked weapons for a good cause?
I propose the dumping of a massive copper wire mountain in Iraq and neighbouring countires. Basically troops should hand out 500 yards of copper wire to every Iraqi who asks for it, in exchange for the price of a cup of coffee. For reasons which would be obvious to any British healthcare user, there had better be a price, or demand will be unlimited. The result of such a Cable Dumping Plan would be the destruction of the black market in wire theft from power lines as there would be no effective market to sell the looted product: the looters would find undercutting the subsidized rates very hard. Even if all the looters start saving their coffee money to buy miles of cable, they are not disconnecting the power supply.
We are left with the problem of deliberate sabotage, but this can be solved by normal occupying power policing techniques. The equation is: political cost of failing to get the power working versus the economic cost of a cable dumping policy.
Last night was a speaker at a blogging seminar in London at the IBM building, organised by Sp!ked called Gone to the blogs: The blogging phenomenon in perspective. The other speakers were Brendan O’Neill, James Crabtree and Bill Thompson.
The introduction to the seminar asked:
Enormous claims are made for weblogs, or ‘blogs’ – online publications in diary format, where individuals publish comment and links to other online content. In media and technology circles, it is often claimed that blogs are revolutionising journalism and enhancing democracy. Meanwhile, others complain that blogs are dangerously unaccountable, and that blogs are clogging up Google’s search engine results with insubstantial material, because an incestuous coterie of bloggers all link to one another.
Are blogs revolutionising journalism, or have people in the traditional media lost faith in their own authority, leading them to talk blogs up? Do blogs enhance democracy, or do they make a virtue of narcissism and navel-gazing? Does a dangerous clique of bloggers wield unaccountable power, or are these bloggers simply exercising their right to free speech on an exciting new platform?
The interesting thing to me was that there was really very little agreement as to what blogging was ‘all about’, either amongst the speakers or from the floor. One recurrent theme was endless blather about blogs being ‘good for democracy’ without really saying why that might be the case.
Paleo-socialist Bill Thompson of the BBC, about whom we have written on Samizdata.net before claimed to now like blogging and regarded the fact virulently anti-socialist folks like Samizdata.net also blog as ‘an acceptable cost’. He also egregiously mis-characterised Brendan O’Neill’s rather temperate remarks on the topic of Salam Pax, the Baghdad Blogger. Whilst a reporter mis-representing a person’s remarks is hardly news, for him to do so when the person in question is sitting a few yards away and is able to point out that is not in fact what they said is… interesting.
Below is the text of my opening remarks:
The intro to this seminar asks on one hand: is blogging revolutionising journalism and enhancing democracy? On the other hand, it is asked, are blogs dangerously unaccountable and are some bloggers wielding unaccountable power?
From the phrasing of the question, we are presumed to feel the first two of these things would be axiomatically ‘good’ if true and the later two axiomatically ‘bad’.
Well, I would answer that blogs are evolution–izing journalism, not revolutionising it: Brendan O’Neill is no less of a journalist for being a blogger and neither is Stephen Pollard, who also blogs. The dead tree publications for which they write are neither harmed nor helped overall… blogs push a great deal of traffic towards their websites, but are in direct competition with the part of a newspaper or broadcaster which editorialises. However blogs do not have reporters in Afghanistan or Liberia: blogs are mostly about punditry rather than reporting. So a journalist’s ability to write an article for a newspaper is much as it was, but his ability to act as a credible independent ‘commentator’ is enhanced by his blog articles, many of which might be overly opinionated for a newspaper editor mindful of his shareholders or ministerial chums…
→ Continue reading: Gone to the blogs
The Guardian reports that the charity commission will be given powers to use covert informants, track individuals and obtain email and telephone records under controversial legislation dubbed a “snooper’s charter” by civil liberties groups.
Orders laid before parliament last Friday will include the commission in the list of public bodies given powers under the Regulation of Investigative Powers Act 2000 (RIPA).
The orders will allow the commission to mount “directed surveillance operations” – monitoring people’s movements – use “covert human intelligence sources” – undercover agents and informers – and to obtain limited information about email, phone and postal communications, for the purpose of preventing and detecting crime.
Chris Stalker, head of campaigns at the National Council for Voluntary Organisations, said:
While NCVO welcome measures that will ensure greater trust, confidence and the integrity of charities, the use of RIPA by the charity commission does cause us some concern.
While the commission’s power to investigate is crucial to its work, we will be monitoring the use of this new legislation closely to ensure it remains proportionate to its role as regulator of the charitable sector.
There are reports China may launch its’ first manned spacecraft by as early as October 15th.
I fully expect the general media will not consider it a major story. They will be wrong. China is not going to park in Earth orbit for three decades like we have. Western complacency is up for a serious butt-kick. China is going to aim for the moon as soon as they can concievably do so.
Before you complain about how far behind their technology is, please note it is not technology that has kept us from colonizing the solar system the last thirty years. It is the iron triangle which has kept us here: NASA, Big Aerospace and Congress. Congress primarily looks on space as pork for the re-election. Big Aerospace sees it as a feeding trough. NASA chiefs see it as a means of turf expansion.
The whole system is bloated and risk averse. Getting people into space is a side issue from what really matters. Congress runs taxpayer funds through as many districts as possible. The government contractors want the most profit for the least possible amount of deliverables. NASA top management wants to minimize the risk of adverse media attention to their careers.
The end result is… three decades of next to nothing for our money but paper spaceships and imaginary engines.
Don’t tell me that NASA isn’t risk averse just because the bureaucracy missed a problem and lost a shuttle. We’ve lost fourteen men and women in spaceflight and three more on the pad in four decades of manned spaceflight. More aviators than that died in almost every single year at the dawn of flight whose centenary is but three months away. Individuals can accept risk and push boundaries forward rapidly; democratic governments cannot.
This is why the answer to the Chinese is not NASA and the Ministries of Aircraft Production (ie Lockmart and Boeing); it’s XCOR, Armadillo Aerospace, Scaled Composites, Bigelow Aerospace, TransOrbital and the rest of the small and the innovative. The ones who are ready to put their own lives and fortunes on the line.
As Ben Bova said many years ago: “The Meek shall inherit the Earth. The rest of us will have left for the stars.”
Sweden’s broadcasting watchdog was censuring an Oprah Winfrey talk show for showing bias toward a U.S. military attack on Iraq. The censure means Swedish television network TV4, which broadcast the show in February, must publish the decision but there are no legal or financial penalties. Annelie Ulfhielm, an official of Sweden’s Broadcasting Commission, said:
Different views were expressed, but all longer remarks gave voice to the opinion that Saddam Hussein was a threat to the United States and should be the target of attack.
The Swedish government strongly opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq, saying it lacked a U.N. Security Council mandate. A TV4 spokesman said the Oprah Winfrey show usually drew an audience of about 100,000-140,000 Swedes, making it one of Sweden’s more popular day-time television programs.
Just as people were getting carried away with the NO result of the Swedish referendum on the euro, the above news items is a timely reminder of the fact that the Swedes are even further down the statist route than most of Europe. A frightening thought indeed. Obviously, the Swedish ‘authorities’ felt that they had to ‘protect’ the country from the US imperialism as perpetrated by the one and only Oprah. Something’s rotten in the state of…er… Sweden?
|
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