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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The trick to beating student unions is to force them to follow their arguments to conclusion. Student politicians tend to be the sort of student who enjoys controlling other people’s lives. They hear fond stories of student protests in the 1960s, but are disillusioned by the lack of interest in student politics among today’s undergraduates. Boycotts particularly appeal to this mindset.
Let’s say a student politician proposes that the union ceases trading with any business with involvement in Burma. The result of such a ban would be minimal. But why should only Burma be included? The boycott is because the country has a poor human rights record. Surely, therefore, the union should cease dealings any country that abuses human rights? It is much better to student politicians the idea that lots of products ought to be banned. That way, there are two possible outcomes. The boycott will be stopped by the Tory wets (who would put up with a boycott of Guinness but couldn’t cope if Gordon’s disappeared too). Alternatively, half the drinks in the union bar disappear overnight, in which case people stop going to the union, and its power therefore decreases. It’s a win-win situation.
The problem is that this strategy is far too risky when it comes to national politics. If you tell the government to be more consistent, it might actually do what you say, and mess up the entire country. It’s much better for governments to mess up the economy inconsistently than do it properly.
Prompted, no doubt, by the hugely successful prohibition on the private ownership of handguns, UK police chiefs are planning a gun amnesty:
“A firearms amnesty is being planned for early in the New Year to try to reduce levels of gun crime.”
An inspired idea! I am quite sure that Britain’s urban desperados will be rushing, RUSHING down to their local police station to meekly surrender their Browning Autos and AK-47s.
“A ban on ownership of handguns was introduced in 1997 as a result of the Dunblane massacre, when Thomas Hamilton opened fire at a primary school leaving 16 children and their teacher dead.
But even since the ban, gun-related crimes have soared, with one study suggesting handgun usage had gone up by as much as 40 percent two years after the ban.”
The truly galling thing about this is conspicuous absence from the media of the various anti-gun campaigners who were infesting the airwaves barely five years ago assuring us that a complete ban on private gun ownership would reduce crime, make us all a lot safer and eradicate what they referred to as ‘gun-culture’ from Britain. Not a single one of these people have been brought back on air to be challenged or asked to explain themselves. I doubt that they ever will not least because many of them are still in government.
“The Home Office is considering a minimum five year sentence for anyone caught possessing a gun and setting up a national database and a new agency to trace illegally held weapons.”
In that paragraph, the future lies mapped out. The ‘amnesty’ will prove useless and the criminal use of guns will continue to spiral. Faced with mounting pressure to ‘do something’ the Home Office will impose minimum sentences for handgun possession of five years (or, possibly, ten years as some are arguing for). The result will be that heat-packing gangsters will be far more likely to shoot it out with the cops rather than surrender as well as more likely to ‘silence’ anyone they believe might snitch on them. I see dead people.
Because there is no foreseeable prospect of a policy re-think, I suppose that this whole horrid panoply of unintended consequences will simply have to play out. The British have a penchant for learning things the hard way.
…But nobody can be a great economist who is only an economist – and I am even tempted to add that the economist who is only an economist is likely to become a nuisance if not a positive danger
– Frederick Hayek
The dependably clueless Prince Charles wants the state to require tax funded institutions like Britain’s nationalised public health service and state schools to add insult to injury by not even attempting to get ‘best value for your stolen money’… which is to say he wants such arms of the state to be required to buy British farm products even if foreign products are cheaper/better… not only does he say they ‘should’ buy British, but that the government should force them to.
Like most people with socialist & fascist understandings of economics, producers are all and consumers are nothing to Charles. Why will people like him not be more honest and just admit directly that they want productive taxpayers to be compelled by force to prop-up less efficient areas of the economy and they should not be given any choice in the matter.
The Royal Family usefully occupy the same seriocomical niche as the Flag and ‘Hand-on-heart’ pledge of allegiance do in the USA… and like that inanimate object and rote chant, are largely empty of real meaning beyond their warm-fuzzy-glow value. If only we could devise some means of permanently depriving Charles of speech, leaving him only with earnest looks and poses, then the British monarchy could have another couple centuries of seriocomical semi-usefulness ahead of them.
The Raelians are a truly weird cult, that is for sure, and the fact they are claiming to have produced the world’s first cloned human is hardly going to calm feelings about the technology. However even if their contention to have done so is true (not surprisingly I am disinclined to just take the word of a group which claims humans are the descendents of bio-engineered clones created by space aliens), I must say that I find it hard to get all that excited about the whole matter.
Although I do have worries that the technology and underpinning science is sufficiently immature that there is cause for concern for the health of a cloned child, the principle itself does not bother me at all… a child is a child is a child, and the manner of its creation does not give it any less worth or intrinsic rights.
However the issue of how to assign paternal and maternal responsibility for the child is, of course, going to keep a small army of lawyers busy for quite a while! I would be quite interested to see what people’s views are as to “who is left holding the baby”, if you will forgive the expression 
I have just watched part of a left wing John Wayne film (I did not see it all – I got so irritated I turned it off)… In Harm’s Way (1965) blames American problems in the Pacific war against the Japanese, on stuffed shirt Conservative officers – people who call the war ‘Mr Roosevelt’s war’ as people from their evil wealthy families called WWI ‘Mr Wilson’s war’.
Of course there is no mention of the film that President Roosevelt deprived the Pacific front of resources so that he could prop up Soviet Russia. Nor was this policy confined to the United States. Why did Singapore have no Spitfire fighters for air defence? Because the Spitfires earmarked for Singapore were diverted to Soviet Russia. 100, 000 troops of the British Empire were captured at Singapore – and they were left to rot and die. About 80, 000 Americans were captured in the Philippines – and they were left rot for years as well (many thousands died).
This was not because American commanders (Navy or Army) were poor in the Pacific (although some of the British ones were poor indeed). It was because the New Dealers in Washington D.C. did not care – all they cared about was their sacred Soviet Union.
Before anyone says that the Soviet Union saved Britain from German invasion think about the following: Thousands of allied sailors died taking supplies to the Soviet Union (not Soviet sailors dying taking supplies to Britain). Whether operation ‘Sea Lion’ (the German invasion of Britain) was practical or not (and the Germans certainly lacked the resources vital to operation ‘Overlord’ the allied invasion of France in 1944), the choice by Hitler to switch German air attacks from British airfields to British cities made operation Sea Lion a dead letter.
This choice was made before the Germany invasion of the Soviet Union. The ‘Battle of Britain’ was won before the invasion of the Soviet Union (not after it).
Of course there would have been no WWII anyway if Hitler and Stalin had not allied in 1939 – but the New Dealers (and their friends in Britain) blanked that out.
It looks like there are some very interesting air defense systems being brainstormed for future US aircraft carriers:
“The discussion about the CVN-21 has been around quite a bit, and again reminds you that the Navy was looking to start with what they call CVNX-1 in ’07, and then follow that with a second ship in FY ’11, that they call the CVNX-2. I think you are all familiar with sort of the general characteristics of it. And we had a long and very fruitful conversation with the Navy leadership on this, and they proposed — the Navy leadership proposed what we are now calling the CVN-21, which is a ship which will have roughly, give or take — don’t hold me to the number here — but roughly 80 percent of the kinds of new capability that as anticipated by the time we would have reached the CVNX-2. So that includes crew reductions, new flight decks, and maybe most importantly of all a new nuclear reactor power plant, which will provide upwards of three times the electrical output of the current power plant. And, that being so, it opens up the opportunity to begin experimenting with the kinds of weapons systems that heretofore were not possible with the kind of electrical power available. So whether those are electromagnetic rail guns, free electron lasers — I mean, there are all kinds of proposals that one has heard in the past which were impractical given the unavailability of power in large quantities that could be focused down for those kinds of purposes.”
The above item is from a DOD background briefing.
Since I was once an anti-draft demonstrator, I find it heartening to read the DefSec of the United States state pretty much what my feelings were then and are now: a draft is slavery. In his words:
“My guess is that if one looks over a span of time, the history of our country, we’ll see that we have tended, during the periods that we had a draft, we tended to pay people about 40, 50, 60 percent of what they could have made in the civilian manpower market and use compulsion to have them serve.
Once that ended, we then were forced — properly in my view — to go to incentives that can attract out of the public sector the people we need and reward them properly so that they will in fact stay and serve and develop the kind of educational background and the kinds of skills and the kinds of time in position so that they can perform well for the country.”
A nation whose citizens will not defend it does not deserve to survive, and a government which must rely on volunteers must be more circumspect about the use of those volunteers. Wars must be for the protection of family and society or else volunteers will not be forthcoming.
I think one could make a very strong “original intent” argument here. The times may require the “standing armies”, but a volunteeer service at least acts as a brake on adventurism.
Prodded by a recent conversation with my eldest brother who is a UKIP (UK Independence Party) member, on the subject of British nationalism, I recently put the pieces of a puzzle together concerning the dramatic events of 1940 that I want to try out on the readers of samizdata. (Apologies in advance to all those who see the only puzzle as being how long it took me to puzzle out the obvious.)
At the risk of publicising my own slow-wittedness, it has always puzzled me that British nationalists these days almost to a man now worship the ground that Winston Churchill walked on, because he saved Britain in 1940, despite the fact that Churchill himself wasn’t a British nationalist.
Preliminary digression. Did Churchill actually save Britain in 1940? I tend to accept the orthodox view that Churchill did indeed save my country, and that it really was one of our finer hours.
The case against how Churchill behaved in 1940 is that an accommodation with Hitler was there for the taking, which would have been less harmful to British interests than even the events that subsequently unfolded, and certainly than any events that looked at all likely in 1940 if we did fight on.
As to that, I’ve always been fond of the words spoken by Ralph Richardson in the early stages of the film The Battle of Britain. Richardson plays a British diplomat who is squaring up to his German equivalent, played by Curt Jurgens. The Jurgens character speaks of how the Fuhrer is willing to offer “guarantees” to Britain. Replies Richardson: “Experience shows that Herr Hitler’s guarantees guarantee nothing.” Exactly so. The case for not trying to accommodate Hitler in 1940 in one pithy sentence.
(I’ve heard it said that this is also the basic case against Saddam Hussein. The man simply can’t be relied upon to refrain from what he has promised to refrain from. He is therefore not, and never can be, a member of the club of Heads of State who, no matter what they may do to their subjects, can at least be relied upon to tell the truth to fellow club members.)
Well I’m not entirely sure about that. Maybe there was a good deal going which Churchill spurned. But this I do know. Churchill was, as I say, not a British nationalist. He was an Anglospherist.
Chruchill’s mother was an American. In his youth Churchill roamed the earth in the service of the British Empire and of his own fame and glory. When the time came for him to write his historical magnum opus, he called it The History of the English Speaking Peoples.
It was Churchill’s political adversaries, like Chamberlain and like Halifax (his rival in 1940 for the British Prime Ministership), who were the real British nationalists. It was they who spoke to each other in 1940 of the beauties of the English countryside and of how it was now threatened with being turned into scorched earth. Churchill was willing to fight, and they were not. And as soon as Churchill got into power, he orated about blood on the beaches and set about organising an anti-German resistance-to-the-death scorched-British-earth policy, for the “defence” of Britain. Some defence.
Churchill was able to do this because Britain, for him, was not the ultimate point. Britain was, in the end, merely a slab of territory near the front line in the fight. And it was, ultimately, expendable. → Continue reading: 1940 – How the non-nationalist saved his nation when the nationalists could not
Reading David Carr’s criticism of the Galileo system reminds me of the Lord of the Rings.
Specifically the question is whether it is better for there to be one superpower, or several powers. David seems to take the view that the EU is evil, but the US is good… or at least less evil). As a centralised state emerges on the European continent, this may appear to some British Libertarians like nothing less than the re-emergence of the Dark Lord in Mordor.
Tolkien would possibly see as more complicated: the US acting perhaps like the doomed kingdom of Numenor. The US military hegemony as analogous to Galadriel taking the One Ring:
[Sam Speaks]
“But if you’ll pardon my speaking out, I think my master was right. I wish you’d take his Ring. You’d put things to rights. You’d stop them digging up the gaffer and turning him adrift. You’d make some folks pay for their dirty work.”
[Galadriel replies]
“I would” she said. “That is how it would begin. But it would not stop with that, alas! We will not speak more of it. Let us go!”
The Fellowship of the Ring, Chapter Seven, The Mirror of Galadriel
How many American readers of Samizdata would agree that the British Empire was a force for world freedom? Not many judging by the numbers who think it was wrong for the US to intervene in both World Wars. The problem is that the British Empire was at times a force for free trade and at other times a mercantilist extortion racket.
The US empire to come is unlikely to be as restrained as the British Empire, because of the socialist ethos of state imposed education, and crusades such as ridding the Third World of cheap (child) labour, the War on Drugs, the War on Tax Evasion, trying to impose a worldwide age of sexual consent, banning alcohol before 21, but making it almost compulsory thereafter, the imposition of American patent law worldwide, and of course, global weapons control.
In other words, although US global supremacy starts better than the Soviet dream of a worldwide Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, it could end up the same:
“That is how it would begin. But it would not stop with that, alas!”
Which is why I hope the Galileo system works, and that other countries develop stealth bombers… and that nuclear weapons proliferate.
The story so far: The Labour government which promised to nationalize the railways in 1996 has regulated (with massive public support) the private railway companies to the verge of bankrupcy. History repeating itself in other words, as this is exactly what happened between the 1880s and 1945.
What is new is the Conservative Party’s reaction? If I understand this correctly, the Conservatives believe the following:
- The government may have acted illegally in bankrupting Railtrack and in the accounting rules which allow the debt of the new company to remain outside the national debt.
- Costs are spiralling out of control in the absence of any shareholder value or accountability.
- Therefore the Conservative Party promises to leave things as they are for the foreseeable future.
I note that the world’s best railway is privately owned (Japan) and that the French government is likely to move towards privatisation soon. Having pioneered privatisation the Conservative loss of nerve means that we could soon live in the only country in the developed world without a capitalist railway system. Unless of course that the Labour government decides to re-privatise, as it is doing with the Channel Rail link.
Conservative ‘spokesperson’ Tim Collins also has this dire threat for the government:
“When there were future accidents, he would not be calling automatically for a public inquiry or saying it was the fault of the government.”
The government must be quaking in its boots with mirth. The railway fiasco of its own making will not be challenged by the opposition. The Tories are committed to matching Labour’s wasted billions.
And this is the first transport policy of that new leader with the nervous cough the Tories elected a year ago… what compromises would they make if they actually won? (aargh!)
Azedine Berkane, held in France for the stabbing of Bertrand Delanöe, the homosexual Mayor of Paris, in October this year, may be refused a trial on the grounds that he is a nutter.
Two psychiatrists have concluded that the Islamic fundamentalist who was assumed to have acted in accordance with Islamic hatred of homosexuality, is in fact suffering from a psychosis which often leads to violent behaviour “within a religious context”.
A second opinion is expected before prosecutors have to decided whether Mr Berkhane, 39 years old unemployed and without fixed abode, can be considered mentally fit to stand trial for attempted murder.
In fairness to the psychiatrists, Mr Berkhane has a history of mental illness, and has allegedly claimed that he was being pursued by a “satanic cult”. In 2001, Mr Berkhane was a voluntary patient at a psychiatric hospital in the Paris suburb of St Denis. In March 2002, he was reported missing to police by his mother.
If the French authorities deal with homophobic attacks by Muslims by shaking their heads, saying “poor chap, he’s off his rocker”, locking them up indefinitely, and giving them drugs or electroshock treatment, it doesn’t seem a very glorious path for a young Mudjaheddin to follow. Might this be better than the death penalty? Or is it too cruel?
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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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