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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Alice Bachini is a blogger in her own right and supporter of Taking Children Seriously
I read in The Telegraph the depressing statistic that even when the police know a child has been killed by one of his parents, they still only convict 27 percent of murderers, as opposed to 90 percent when the murderer is a stranger.
“This failure to convict arises when parents blame each other or refuse to disclose any details about the injuries and there is no independent evidence.”
So the law against murder doesn’t exactly guarantee children’s safety. And I’m not sure giving them guns is the answer. The trouble goes deeper than anything libertarianism is qualified to solve, because it is about what goes on behind closed doors, and libertarians are only interested in protecting the rights of door-owners.
Except that I don’t think this is true. I think there are some libertarians who believe in right and wrong, and who think that the reason freedom matters is that it is morally a good thing, and that children benefit from it just as much as adults do.
At the moment, the family, or the parent/child relationship, is a largely private institution. This benefits those of us who want to improve on the norm in radical ways without being scrutinised, but those who want to do evil to their children sometimes abuse this private freedom in the most horrible ways imaginable.
Libertarians are right, I believe, that subjecting all families to more state interference would, even on this kind of balance, be wrong. But this does not mean that murdering children should be more legal than murdering adults. Nor does it make hitting kids OK. It just means that legislation is too flawed and clumsy a mechanism for improving children’s lives.
What’s the real answer? You really need to ask?!
Alice Bachini
As they are both about to drop off the front page and we are still getting visitors looking for them…
The article mentioned by Kathleen Parker:
…To those suffering anger deficiency, click over to http://www.samizdata.net/blog (linked by Instapundit.com) to jump-start your moral outrage. The Web log features a photo – of a man plunging headfirst from one of the towers – that ought to help us remember exactly what no one deserves…
The article Kathleen refers to is called News from another universe.
And the article mentioned by James Bennett:
…However, after I returned to my office, I began looking at some of the Web logs I like to follow. On one, samizdata.net, there was a modest little posting. Perry de Havilland, one of the site’s contributors, based in the posh London neighborhood of Chelsea, had walked out at lunchtime, and had been stuck by the fact that “shop after shop are displaying signs saying words to the effects of ‘At 1:46 p.m. today, we will be observing two minutes silence in remembrance of the atrocities on September 11th of last year in the United States.’ Others are expressing memorial sentiments, still others just displaying small American flags.”…
The article James refers to is called The real England speaks.
Just another fine service from samizdata.net!
In case there is one person in the world who doesn’t read Instapundit… you really have to read this.
We can only hope the error was due to Soviet era inflated production numbers. I’d much rather believe the 200 “missing” nukes were never actually built than imagine them in the hands of the Russian Mafia. That just does not bear thinking about.
Real Estate on isolated Pacific desert islands is a good investment possibility with an expectation of a very high near term ROI. Samizdata’s cracked investment advisory team also gives a strong buy recommendation on abandoned hard rock mine shafts in the Rocky Mountains…
We’re seeing more and more software ending up under GPL after it becomes abandoned or the original company goes out of business. I know how many lines of code I wrote in the 70’s for a company no longer with us, and if I imagine that multiplied by all the other hackers in the world, the total loss of human effort and creativity is simply staggering.
Times have changed. It appears people are now willing to buy the source for important packages rather than let them die. According to this week’s Debian News:
Blender is Free Software. After the company behind Blender, a very fast and versatile 3D modeller and renderer, went bankrupt, the Blender Foundation was created. The purpose was to secure and maintain the Blender source. 100,000 Euro were required to purchase the source from the company, and this was donated by many volunteers from around the world. To celebrate this, a conference will be held in October, closing with a party at which Blender 2.26 will be released as free software.
Although I am not a graphics person myself, I have it on the best of authority Blender is a magnificent piece of kit.
Graphic from ‘Blue Skies of Freedom’ blog (click)
Part II of III
What would be the requirements of a libertarian just war? Libertarianism permits the killing of another if it is an act of reasonable self-defence. Nothing in libertarianism precludes the possibility of a collectively exercised right to self-defence. This has been accepted by most libertarians as one of the few valid functions of a ‘night-watchman’ state. As long as every individual in a society agreed to be defended by a state and the state acted against only those individuals who were actual aggressors, e.g. an invading army, on what grounds could a libertarian object?
Given that it is not practically possible to fulfil the above conditions, especially the first one, it seems to me that many of those who engage in the debate about war on Iraq for genuine and morally inspired reasons are trying to choose between two evils. Their side in the debate usually depends on which of the two evils seems more morally unacceptable to them. There are also those who find it impossible to choose, their instincts oscillating between the need for self-defence and protection, and fear of compromising their fundamental principles by condoning killing of innocent civilians. One of those is Chris Newman whose comment captures the agony of such moral choice.
The statement ‘as long as harming innocents is not the objective, if a given use of force is justified then innocent bystanders are often just a regrettable consequence’ is based on the acceptance of the doctrine of double effect. It is a useful rule, often used in moral dilemmas that can be summed up as “damned if you do, damned if you don’t”. An act with both good and bad effects is morally permissible if and only if the following conditions are all met:
- The action itself is not forbidden by a moral rule.
- Only the good effect is intended.
- The bad effect is proportional to the good.
- The bad effect is not a direct means to the good effect (e.g. bombing cities to demoralise a population and hence hasten a war’s end).
And since Michael Walzer’s influential book Just and Unjust Wars (1971), in the context of war it is common to see added the following condition:
- Actions are taken to minimise the foreseeable bad effects, even if this means accepting an increased risk to one’s own combatants (e.g. one’s own soldiers)
In modern warfare the principle of the double effect is frequently applicable. In waging a just war a nation may launch an air attack on an important military objective of the enemy even though a comparatively small number of non-combatants are killed. This evil effect can be compensated for by the great benefit gained through the destruction of the target. This would not be true if the number of non-combatants slain in the attack were out of proportion to the benefits gained, as is clear from the fourth condition. Furthermore, if the direct purpose of the attack were to kill a large number of non-combatants, so that the morale of the enemy would be broken down and they would sue for peace, the attack would be immoral because the third condition for the lawful use of the principle would not be fulfilled. It would be a case of the use of a bad means to obtain a good end.
Chris Newman takes a similar route but ends up with a different point and in the utilitarian camp:
“…our moral calculus has at least three variables: the importance of the objective, the efficacy of a given type of force in achieving that objective, and the cost in innocent lives of using that type of force. Presumably, for any given values of the first two variables, there will be a point at which the value of the third becomes too high, so that the action cannot be justified…”
There appears to be a conflict between a moral justification for waging a just war and a strategic aspect of it. But does exploiting the advantage of superior military capabilities amount to using incommensurate or disproportionate force? It doesn’t because force is defined by effect on the enemy including the civilians, not by the amount of firepower. You can use superior fighting force and technology in order to shorten the war and ensure you destroy enemy fighting forces rather than civilians. → Continue reading: Just war and libertarians
Award-winning french author Michel Houellebecq is being victimized by Islamic groups in that country. It is well known to all who read their statements, interviews and translations of articles that these sorts of organization wish to bring Europeans under their medieval, violent and dismal religious law. It is just one more attempt in a campaign to turn the institutions of a liberal society against itself.
Fortuneately many others see this case as a travesty so Michel will have ample support from members of the french literary establishment.
If Islamists can’t handle his dismissal of the Koran’s literary style, tough. Let them publish their own counter critique and see if anyone wants to read it. If Michel thinks Islam is a silly religion, he is free to say so and others are free to listen or not as they choose. If he takes joy in the death of Palestinian terrorists…. well, we wouldn’t go along with that, now would we? I absolutely swear I take no more joy in the death of Palestinian fighters than Palestinians did in the death of my countrymen on 9/11.
… and we all know they are really nice people who wouldn’t dream of celebrating the deaths of our friends and relatives..
Thanks again to Instapundit for the link to this, about the history of gun control in England, and about the various Americans who seem to be doing most of the serious arguing about it.
The focus of the debate this time is professor of history at Bentley College Joyce Malcolm‘s new book Guns and Violence: The English Experience.
Time was when, as the sandal-wearing corduroy-jacket gun-wimp chick-flick-preferring libertarian that I still am, I opposed gun control only out of duty and only with difficulty. Now I’m utterly convinced, and it didn’t take the fact that recent British gun control tightening has made gun crime even worse. It was books and arguments like those of Joyce Malcolm – although not her actual book because I’ve yet to see it.
Time for another spook outing. Former US Marine and former UN arms inspector, still playing flat out for the home team, laying down his reputation for his country: Scott Ritter.
You’re the US government. You decided, soon after 9/11, to redo Gulf War 1 and this time finish it. You need inside intelligence. You dig through your mountains of electro-data with your electro-diggers. You exhaustively debrief everyone who ever has any remotely significant dealings with the Iraqi regime, and you put it all together as best you can. You’re looking for any sign of Saddam trying to get his retaliation in first, one way or another, and you’re looking for information about just how he is setting about defending himself, so that you can come at him from different directions to the ones he’s ready for.
One way in is to get your spooks onto that “UN” WMD inspection team. And … another is to set up your very own peacenik pro-Saddamite appeaser, who can tramp all over various Iraqi red carpets, shake lots of hands, talk to lots of assemblies, conspire with or be deluded by lots of Iraqi dirty tricksters and generally shine a different light on all the things and the people and the places you want to know about. Whatever happens, however Ritter’s treated and by whom – trusted, distrusted, used, abused, whatever – you learn things, and possibly (when you combine it with all the other things you’ve learned) important things. Ritter himself may never know how well he’s now doing. → Continue reading: Scott Ritter – All American good guy
…or how to die in aeroplanes.
Brian fears that the bracing postion is no good in a plane crash. May I offer a few words of reassurance. This is how I see the pros and cons of passenger jets.
The most comfortable ride (i.e. the least stomach churning) is as close to the centre of gravity as possible, generally near or over the wings and away from the windows. But this is usually between the engines and fairly close to the main fuel tanks. Sometimes the wings snap off tearing this section of the fuselage to shreds.
On the other hand the noisiest and least pleasant ride is usually right at the back, it’s also near the wash rooms which means that the queue will be leaning on your seat. However, provided the tail section doesn’t snap off too high above the ground, this is where survivors seem most likely, especially if they unfasten their seat belts and are thrown clear of the blaze.
Closet smokers who put gum in the smoke detector whilst sitting on the loo having a puff always seem to survive (airlines don’t like to admit this). The forward section is where the best service and most legroom tends to be found, and it is easiest to tell if anything is going wrong (lots of shouting or drunken singing coming from the cockpit are a give-away).
Perhaps they should put laughing gas in the masks which drop automatically when there’s a sudden drop in cabin air pressure… 
I once asked this literary agent what kind of writing paid best. He said: ransom notes.
– Harry Zimm (struggling film producer played by Gene Hackman in Get Shorty, shown on Channel 4 last night)
noun. Someone who writes for a corporate Knowledge Log (qv).
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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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