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Doubtless co-ordinated with gun-attacks inside Israel, Arab/Al-Qaeda terrorists have also bombed a resort hotel in Kenya. The death toll from the hotel bombing is now 14 people, 11 Kenyans and 3 Israelis (two children). Even more ominously, there was a simultaneous rocket attack on an Israeli civilian airliner. Mercifully unsuccessful, but a very worrying development. November 28th, 2002 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
 I reported on the Twente University server room fire last week. According to this item in the Debian News mail list it was arson:
One has to wonder about motive. It’s just not the done thing to go burning down a university computer centre. November 28th, 2002 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
If, like me, you avidly devour everything this man ever writes, but get a little impatient trawling the blogosphere seeking out his hitherto-elusive brilliance, then get ready to be happy. Mark Steyn now has has his own website! Now that’s what I call progress. [My thanks to Tim Blair for the link] November 28th, 2002 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
 This poster can be seen all over London. In it a young man standing at a bus stop chats on his mobile phone, a sight one sees all the time on London’s busy streets. What the Metropolitan Police are saying is that doing this, talking on a mobile phone in London, in public, is unwise behaviour. Okay, fair enough, London is a big city and all big cities have their fair share of street crime, so what is the problem with this message from the boys in blue? The problem I have is that this poster is not warning criminals who might attack us and steal our phones of the sure vengeance of the law. Not it is calling on us all to refuse to tolerate thieves in our midst and to resist to the best of our ability. Hell, how about suggesting “if you have a mobile phone in your hand and you either witness a mugging in progress or think you are in danger, dial 999 and the Police, whose paychecks and cars with flashing lights come from your taxes, will come rushing to the rescue”. No, it does not say that at all. The real message here from our appointed protectors is not “we will protect you from crime” and certainly not “protect yourself from street crime”, but rather HIDE from street crime. The state cannot protect you, it will not permit you to protect yourself effectively, so all it can do is offer advice… and the advice is hide. Do not show anyone you have something worth stealing. I expect we will soon see posters across London saying “it is safer not to wear Armani suits, you might get mugged” and then “don’t wear short skirts, you might get raped” and finally “don’t go out at all, the streets are not safe”. Perhaps when the state has taxed everything and we no longer have anything left to hide, we will indeed have ‘safer streets’. The state is not your friend. November 28th, 2002 | 31 comments - (Comments are closed)
The main differences between a British libertarian gathering and an American one is the attitude towards foreign affairs and their own governments. During the Cold War many American libertarians, Murray Rothbard especially, denounced the US federal government’s attempts to “encircle” Communism, build alliances, station troops in Europe etc. Most British libertarians, being somewhat closer to the Iron Curtain, and feeling that the English Channel might not be a huge obstacle to the Asiatic hordes of the Red Army, were rather happier with the presence of large, well equipped armies. We also took a more relaxed view of state violations of individual rights when the persons concerned were Communists, pro-Soviet peace protesters or “useful idiots” who acted spontaneously in a manner which would have delighted Stalin, Hitler or Napoleon. We tended to admire the antics of the security services as they “bugged and burgled their way across London”. Some of us cheered when police officers on horseback smashed their way through ranks of protesting miners in 1984. I know no one in British libertarian circles who wondered if it might not be our turn some day, although Sean Gabb came closest. The gloom among British libertarians today is partly the result of the realisation that now the apparatus of state oppression is randomly destroying people’s lives like in the final chapters of “Atlas Shrugged”. But there is something particularly awful about the gloom engulfing British libertarians. No one born in the mainland of the United Kingdom and alive today has ever seen a group of police officers march up a residential street, knocking at selected doors and leading families away to some awful fate. Yet in every other member state of the European Union except Finland and Sweden, the are people who remember watching their neighbours being taken away. In the case of recent refugees from the former Yugoslavia, such memories may be very recent indeed. The problem for British libertarians is that they aren’t really used to the idea that the state really is our enemy. This is one reason why I don’t think that the UK withdrawing from the European Union is an automatic recipe for joy. November 27th, 2002 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Canadian government official who branded U.S. President George W. Bush a “moron” has resigned, news services report. Consider the recent actions and achievements of this ‘moron’:
Okay, okay, I hear you libertarians cry, what about the Patriot Act, the Farm Bill, the steel tariffs? All fair criticisms. But the oft-repeated claim from the chattering classes that Bush is a dope is plainly silly. They are making the same mistake they made about Ronald Reagan. November 27th, 2002 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
Today I read the obituary of John Rawls (who died on Sunday) in the Daily Telegraph. Dr Rawls was a brave soldier, a loving husband and a good father to four children – he was also kind and polite to all who encountered him. However, Dr Rawls was also the author of “A Theory of Justice” (1971) the main modern justification for the ever increasing burden of the welfare state. According to Dr Rawls no one had any right to increase their income or wealth unless they could prove that by so doing they improved the economic life of the “least favoured”. Just not harming the least favoured would not do – as inequality harmed the “self esteem” of the poor. Interestingly I also read in today’s Daily Telegraph a little example of how Rawlsian type thinking works out in practice. In the Spanish region of Valencia the government is working in a public-private partnership to improve the lot of the least favoured. Private developers produce a plan for the creation of urban zones (flats, shops, places of business and so on) in sparsely populated coastal areas, the government judges the plan and then levies a tax on land owners in the area to provide such things as roads and drainage. What a wonderful thing – from either a Rawlsian or a utilitarian point of view. However, the plan means that retired people who have bought properties by the coast have to pay the government lots of money (or have their property taken away) for roads and drainage (and so on) that do not benefit them. Why do I think that Rawls (kind and decent man that he was) would have been disgusted by this sort of thing? before you say “but that is the corruption of the idea” – maybe so, but that is statism in practice. Paul Marks November 27th, 2002 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
In one of the most utterly wrong headed articles I have ever seen in the Daily Telegraph, called Watch out America, the 7st EU weakling may kick sand in your face by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard posting from Brussels (naturally), he would have us believe that, in response to criticisms from the USA that the EU is “a status quo power that resists and resents being hurried into a turbulent new post-Cold War era”:
The EU is about to swallow the poison pill of the basket case post-communist agricultural economies of Eastern Europe, eager to feed at the massively subsidized trough of protectionist Europe and Evans-Pritchard holds this up as evidence of dynamism?
The European Union… filled with heavily taxed, highly regulated and subsidy ‘protected’ economies… is going to overtake lower taxed, less regulated and slightly less subsidised USA? Oh give me a break. The whole reason that the ruling classes of Eastern Europe want to join the European Union, is that the EU seeks to lock in the position of the all its political classes, to insulate them from the reality of de-politicised markets and the consequences of that anti-market politics brings. Eastern European businesses, at least some of them, see subsidy and protection from global competition from the USA and Far East beckoning, voters likewise see membership of the EU as meaning the end of restrictions on their ability to travel, work and reside in the more developed West… a ‘brain drain’ heading west of the best and brightest that the middle European former ‘eastern Bloc’ has to offer will soon ensue (good news if you live in the ‘west’), followed closely by an army of welfare parasites looking to help themselves to taxpayer money in Britain, France, Germany, Denmark, The Low Countries and Italy (extremely bad news of you live in the ‘west’). The very essence of the EU is stasis and yet paradoxically, it is spreading, like some Nordic legend of winter eternal sends its deadening cold fingers into everything. The only people who really benefit are those who are sucking at the teat of the state and even them only until the curves of the EU’s spectacularly aging demographics and that of its increasing tax burden cross, like some cruxiform tombstone. The First World used to be ‘The West’ and Japan, the Second World used to be the Socialist Eastern Bloc… soon ‘First World’ will come to mean the USA, Switzerland, Japan (maybe), Canada (maybe), Australia and new Zealand and, if it finally breaks clear of the European suicide pact, Britain and possibly even Ireland. ‘Second World’ will just come to mean sclerotic Europe, forever sidelined by more dynamic economies eleswhere and more assertive polities everywhere. EU as future ‘superpower’? Don’t make me laugh.  November 27th, 2002 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
The German Chancellor is clearly feeling just a wee bit insecure these days. Why else would would he actually go to Court to sue a news agency because they claimed that he used dye in his hair:
Would that be his image as an incompetent, plundering, unreconstructed tax-and-spend socialist who is wrecking his country’s economy? Oh right, that image. Anyway, in order to avoid any legal complications here at Samizdata, I hereby categorically refute any suggestions that the German Chancellor has ever dyed his hair. After all, why would he need to? It is a wig. November 27th, 2002 | Comments are closed
I don’t suppose any of our readers can have failed to notice the patina of despondency that has, of late, descended upon this corner of the blogland. I am the usual and evergreen suspect. Optimism has always stood in stark contrast to my natural grain and my comrades have long-since stopped denouncing me for it and learned to live with my periodic predictions of impending doom. However, I am but Pollyanna herself compared to Paul Marks, the poster-boy of the Euthanasia Movement. There was a time when our brooding presence was felt but nonetheless heavily diluted by the ebullient, thematic jolliness of the remaining Samizdatistas. But now Perry de Havilland seems to have stumbled into a pit of despair and even the stomach-churningly cheerful Brian Micklethwait has ‘fessed up to an onset of the highly contagious Carr-itis. But why, I hear you inquire. Is this a neurological condition brought on by over-exposure to the internet? Is it because we are perenially-disappointed libertarians? No, it’s because we are British:
See, for all these years I was not being contrary, I was merely ahead of the curve and now that all my compatriots are conforming to national type, I can take nought but scant consolation in feeling vindicated. All exhortations to cheery optimism are futile. It’s too late for therapy and prozac won’t work. We’re not depressed, we’re just British. Pity us. November 27th, 2002 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
I saw an interview on ITV news tonight of a fellow in NYC who has seen all of the new proposed designs for replacing the World Trade Center. He said unequivocably the selected design will restore the New York skyline, make it as it was. All designs are tall and some are even taller than the WTC buildings were. All are said to be stunning. The man could hardly stop from grinning as he spoke. You could see the glee in his eyes. This sounds more like the America I grew up in. November 27th, 2002 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
The way that the blogosphere in particular and West in general is slowly but surely focussing in on the all-too-human life of the very founder of Islam himself reminds me strongly of the way that we anti-Soviet elements in the 1980s finally stopped pratting around with nonsense about how Communism had been “betrayed” by Stalin, and said, no, it had just been done, by Lenin himself, and by Stalin, and by all Communists since then. This from Scrappleface last Friday is a send-up correction note by the Nigerian newspaper that had sparked off the rioting by venturing a few mildly humorous observations about the Lenin of Islam:
And how about this, from the “in fact” section of the December 2002 issue of Prospect (no link, you have to subscribe to view), picked up from the November issue of Commentary?:
→ Continue reading: Muhammed and Lenin – the similarities and the differences November 26th, 2002 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
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