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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The curious thing about idiots is that they never allow their intellectual disabilities to slow them down; always frightfully quick off the mark, they are. Mind you, it does help if you have the script already written beforehand.
As per usual the Guardian is the frontrunner (and I promise that I am not making it up this time):
“Short-sighted politicians in Washington, notably Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, are putting it about that there are links between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein. They have been trying desperately to come up with evidence to prove it, a task which they have singularly failed to achieve. But in trying they have diverted the resources of their intelligence agencies, including the CIA, and worse, they are trying to manipulate intelligence-gathering for political ends.”
So now the Australians know who to blame; it was Rumsfeld all along! And he would’ve gotten away with it too if hadn’t been for those pesky Guardianistas!
Hot on the heels of the frontrunner, comes the The Subservient:
“But some of the pool of grievances on which al-Qa’ida draws are real injustices – in particular the failure of the US to use its influence to secure a fair settlement between Israelis and Palestinians. These injustices ought to be resolved anyway, but resolving them may well reduce the supply of potential martyrs to murderous causes.”
Freedom for Zionist-occupied..er..Bali.
“The response of world leaders to this weekend’s attack should be to act to ensure that there is more justice in the world, rather than to deepen the sense of injustice that is the breeding ground of terrorists.”
Oh I’d wager that there are quite a lot of people just aching for a bit of justice, my old chum.
You know, in a world of rapidly spiralling uncertainties, there is a perverse comfort in knowing that some things never change.
183 people at least are dead, probably more as 220 Australians and 20 or so British remain unaccounted for. All the victims were civilians, mostly young backpackers on holiday or the Indonesian staff serving them. Yet judging by what I seen written by John Pilger or Robert Fisk or Noam Chomsky since September 11th of last year, I thought the reason terrorists are attacking ‘us’ was something to do with injustice in Palestine? Is Bali part of Palestine? How many Palestinians have the Australian Army killed?
I recall hearing that the WTC was attacked because it was a symbol and centre of exploitive capitalism and the US military industrial complex. And what exactly was the Sari Club in Bali a symbol of? Will the people on WarbloggerWatch or at New Stateman tell us how the forces of US imperialism have been thwarted by the death of so many young Aussies and others in a holiday resort?
What was that you said? It is all about oil? Ah, silly me.
Evil-white-male and immodest un-Islamic
Australian woman flee Bali attack last night
What with the England – Slovakia football match last Saturday and Brian Micklethwait’s visit to Bratislava, it has been an unusual period of publicity for the small country wedged between its better known Central European neighbours – the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary.
In his post What EU means to Slovakia Brian waxed lyrical about the sophistication of the Slovak high-school students and their ability to transcend the limitations of their environment. They managed to turn Brian’s perception of himself up-side down:
For the Slovaks, the Internet is the world. Suddenly I felt like a provincial oik, from a huge but basically non-central kind of place like Yorkshire or Texas, in the presence of the world’s true sophisticates.
Then we get the news of racist abuse aimed at two black players in the England team during the European Championship in Slovakia last Saturday1. Emile Heskey, along with Ashley Cole, says he was subjected to the worst racist abuse he has experienced in his career.
“We heard the racist stuff because it just wasn’t in one section of the stadium, it was virtually the whole ground… To hear it in this day and age is shocking and you would have thought that people might have moved on from that sort of thing by now.”
Quite. So what is Slovakia really like? A country of which we know little and care even less, it hasn’t yet found any symbolic associations that gets small, and big, nations through the day – Switzerland has cheese and cuckoo clocks, Scotland has whisky and tartan, Czech Republic has beer and Prague, Russia has vodka and chaos etc.
→ Continue reading: Slovakia in the spotlight
Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.
– Margaret Thatcher
Dogs and their owners could become the latest target of a clampdown on moral corruption in Iran after a hardline cleric called for canines of all shapes to be arrested. Gholamreza Hassani, Friday prayer leader in the northwestern city of Urumiyeh said:
“I call on the judiciary to arrest all long-legged, medium- legged and short-legged dogs along with their long-legged owners… Otherwise I’ll do it myself.”
Commentators noted that in his latest comments, Hassani appeared to be widening the net of his anti-canine campaign since last year when he thanked police for confiscating short-legged dogs in Urumiyeh. 
The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.
– Sir Winston Churchill
The Jemaah Islamiyah organisation, which is part of the Al Qaeda network, has killed around 180 people, mostly Australian, American and British tourists in the Indonesian holiday resort of Bali. I have been to Bali myself and it is a glorious place. Although Indonesia is the worlds most populous Muslim nation, Bali has a majority Hindu population.
People are already asking what can be done about the ‘root causes’ of this horror. Well sometimes the ‘root cause’ of violence is a justified struggle against injustice. To deal with the ‘root cause’, one should therefore work to remove the injustice. But sometimes the ‘root cause’ of violence is the unjustified defence of a collective order against those who would reject it. In such cases the way to ‘mitigate’ that violence is by putting a 7.62mm hole in the head of those who would perpetrate or enable such acts.
Find the people who planned this, the people who carried it out and the people who support them. Find them and you find the only ’cause’ that matters. Rip their ‘root cause’ out by the roots and apply a blow torch. Kill them. I don’t give a damn what their grievances are. Just kill them.
The only rational response
A suicide-bomber has exploded himself in a shopping mall in Helsinki killing eight people and maiming and crippling scores of others. [I find the word ‘wounded’ to be so anodyne and unsatisfactory. It implies that the damage done can be healed by the application of some bandage and a smear of antiseptic cream. Bomb explosions leave people limbless, blind or paralysed]
It appears as if the perpetrator was a 20 year-old student but there is no indication as to his motives. Of course, given the style of attack, thoughts immediately turn to Islamic radicals but there is nothing in the reports thus far to suggest this and, in any event, why they should target the Finns is beyond me.
More likely this young man’s head was buzzing with some other kind of savage insanity but the method he has used to vent it does have some significance nonethless. We have never been short of psychotics or dangerous malcontents in our midst but when they do finally unhinge they typically do so by taking pot-shots at their employers or attacking their landladies with a kitchen knife.
Is this changing up a gear? Could it be that the suicide-bombing is becoming the preferable modus operandi for the deranged and the grudge-ridden? It is certainly a far more dramatic way of leaving your forget-me-not impression on a world that you loathe and that you believe loathes you.
Maybe I am extrapolating too far here. It is, for sure, too early for anything like a cogent analysis. But, if it turns out that I am on the right track, then we all better start watching out for that twitchy guy on the bus; that thing on his shoulder could be a lot more than just a chip.
I think one of the biggest mistakes made by Classical Liberals in Britain was to allow (and, indeed, encourage) the government to start funding education in the 19th Century. He who pays the piper calls the tune and it was only a matter of time before the government took over education and began to run it as the state monopoly we are still lumbered with today.
As with all these monolithic government services they are indifferent to the needs of their customers, exisitng primarily as fiefdoms of a professional education establishment. Well-to-do families can afford to escape the system but not so modest income and poor families whose children are left victimised by the shambolic sausage factories through which they are processed.
To date, there has been insufficient challenge to this state monopoly but that could all be about to change. Last night I had the pleasure of meeting James Stansfield at the October ‘Putney Debate’ hosted by Tim Evans. James works with the famous James Tooley, a former socialist who has seen the light and now campaigns for a free market in education. Together they have established the EG West Centre at the University of Newcastle; an academic research body dedicated to spreading radical ideas about the provision of education by means other than the state.
The man after whom the project is named, EG West, was a British-born academic who did most of his work in Canada in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Swimming completely against the tide of the received wisdom of that era, this man who concluded, from his meticulously documented research, that state education was a disaster. Unsurprisingly, he was pilloried by the rest of academia and the education establishment as some kind of dangerous madman before being proved absolutely correct.
→ Continue reading: A single candle is lit
No man’s life, liberty or property are safe while the legislature is in session.
– Judge Gideon J. Tucker
After periodic, and if the truth be known, inevitable paedophile scandals in Britain of the sort that occurs in every school system in the world, checks on the backgrounds of teachers have been stepped up and made more rigorous. No problem there as if someone has a history of paedophile activities, it is entirely reasonable that a potential educational employer should want to discover that.
But then why does the state insist that as part of this information gathering process, that the prospective teacher reveals their banking details and how to access their secure password to get at their financial details?
It is because the Panopticon state regards privacy as in and of itself a cause for suspicion.
Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are a good person is a little like expecting the bull not to attack you because you are a vegetarian.
– Dennis Wholey
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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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