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Be watching for a full page ad in the New York Times tomorrow, Sunday, February 10, 2002. We The People Foundation has purchased one in the main news (first) section of the nationwide edition, titled “IRS and Department of Justice: Why Won’t You Answer Our Questions?“
You may remember the organization leader, Bob Schulz, who fasted last summer to force a congressional hearing on the legality of the US income tax. He and many, many others have long held this tax is unconstitutional and passed into law under very shady circumstances.
Mr Schulz was prepared to fast unto death but was reprieved near the end. The government agreed to a hearing under the requested terms. Then came September 11th… Mr Schulz quite reasonably agreed to a delay, as would any decent and honourable man. According to Schulz, the delay has turned into an unadmitted cancellation:
[January 28, 2002] Congressman Roscoe Bartlett (MD), Assistant Attorney General Dan Bryant, and IRS Commissioner Charles Rossotti have broken their written agreement with the American People and have betrayed the United States Constitution.
While I cannot speak to the correctness of Mr Schulz’s legal arguments, I can comment on the character of the people he is dealing with. They are liars, cheats and scoundrels whose word is of no worth.
To those brought up as I was, a man whose word is no good is not a man at all.
Porn has been around longer than written language. It has been around since humans first started drawing on cave walls. If porn is unnatural, then so is writing and agriculture and high heels and teddy bears and antibiotics. As for causing emotional and physical damage, you could just as easily be describing most close personal relationships, or football, or being a war correspondent or riding a horse come to that. Are these also things to be ‘discouraged’?
One big trouble I have with so many conservatives is the implicit arrogance that underneath it all, people basically see the world the way they do and feel as they do. Now I am as guilty as them of seeing the world through the filters of my own experience and emotions, but at least I do not claim that I think most other people secretly agree with me when it is quite clear they do not. Conservatives can claim that there is deep meaning in sex and certainly that can be true. But the truth is that sometimes sex is the banquet at the wedding feast and sometimes it is just a quick trip to MacDonalds.
The evidence is clear that much of the time people see sex as an end in and of itself. You do not have to even read Playboy to see that. Look through Vogue and you will see page after page of exaltations of female sexuality… not female commitment, female sexuality, with a strongly bisexual/sapphic overtone at that. It is all about elegant, lovely, lustful and largely unobtainable sexual perfection. We all want to look like exquisite Christy Turlington wearing Hervé Leger, Bulgari and exchanging enigmatic eye contact with Linda Evangalista. Of course we all know in our heart of hearts that the only person who can actually do that is Christy Turlington, not us. Yet I still buy Vogue every month… Italian edition, German edition, Russian edition, British edition.
And so it is with pornography. Maybe we need to look at unobtainable uncomplicated thrilling sex for the same reason we want to look at unobtainable expensive sophistication in Vogue. For the same reason preliterate man made sexual cave paintings and extravagantly male outlines on hillsides, we still need to experience the animal side of our existence. Do you think the conservatives roaring fiercely as they watch their favourite sportsman on television are getting in touch with the spirit of Aristotle? So why do they find it so hard to understand the nature of pornography? It is impossible not to trip over people’s true attitude to sex every time you walk down the street or turn on the television or pick up a magazine. People do not use marriage as a marketing devise, they use sex, because that is what people actually think about much of the time. Pornography is just the essence of that. In reality most well adjusted people do not get porn and real life confused, keeping them in different boxes in their heads.
Yet I don’t read Vogue primarity for the articles anymore than most people read Playboy for the articles (which are mostly crypto-socialist drivel anyway). I read them both for the sex. I don’t have a problem with pornography because unlike many conservatives and their socialist-feminist friends, I do not have a problem with the reality of human nature. I just wish those conservatives and their statist allies on the left would stop trying to use the force of law to impose peculiar world views on everyone else.
Greg Nemitz, one of the founders of TransOrbital has reported in the Artemis Society e-mail digest that Paypal will be going public early next week, possibly Monday. What is particularly interesting about this IPO over others is Elon Musk, the largest shareholder of Paypal, has dedicated his wealth to opening Mars.
Paypal presently has 12-13 million members.
Check out a first-class summation of Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia by Alastair Palmer in the latest edition of the British weekly magazine, The Spectator. Very good, particularly in bemoaning Nozick’s failure to give a substantive defence of natural rights. Otherwise Palmer has nice things to say about Nozick, not least the fact that he makes it clear that Nozick was certainly not an apologist for Big Business or the Republican Party. What is so good about this review is how the author manages to draw out the essence of Nozick’s critique of egalitarianism and ‘social justice’ theories generally.
I thought Microsoft had plumbed depth’s of tastelessness none could match. But the Opinion Journal has pointed me to a cartoon from the Concord (N.H.) Monitor (clipping courtesy of PoliticsNY.com) that takes the prize.
Where are the rocks these people crawl from under? Wherever they are, we should build a parking lot there so they’ll be an endangered (or even better an extinct) species.
Can anybody think of any historically-significant cultural or technological innovation to have emerged from Continental Western Europe since World War II?
[Editor: does Catherine Deneuve count?]
[Other Editor: how about the World Wide Web?]
[Reader Ken Hagler: “How about the VAT? You didn’t say it had to be good…”]
[Reader & blogger Mark Byron: SCUBA, Velcro]
[Reader & blogger Steven Den Beste: Audio cassette, laser disc]
[Reader Aaron Dickey: ABBA] hmmmm.
Update: Of course although the World Wide Web was created in CERN (Switzerland) Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor, was an Englishman
Nobody wants to get shot with any sort of pistol, which brings us around to the first principle of gun fighting, which is “Have a gun!”
– Jeff Cooper
Suman Palit on the Kolkata Libertarian has some interesting links and commentary about hawala, a system of trust based independent networks for transferring money across borders completely outside ‘official’ financial systems. I have touched on the subject of hawala in previous articles and Suman points out the absurdity of US (and other) efforts to try and stamp it out
Criminalising such a large-scale human endeavour that is rooted so deeply in history is laughable and idiotic. Like the failed drug war which penalizes consensual behavior and therefore can never be effectively enforced, stigmatizing hawala simply drives it deeper underground.
The fact is that there are millions of people who simply do not see why the state, any state, should have oversight over their business. The usual demands that people must simply ‘trust the authorities’ is seen as fundamentally irrational in many communities. Too many people have both direct experience and deep societal folk memories that such contentions are simply foolish, leading to a whole culture of economic activity occurring under the radar. The very essence of hawala is that of an audit trail-less trust within a closed and multiply redundant distributed network.
Not only do I predict the US will fail utterly to regulate hawala, I expect that their actions will once again prove the law of unintended consequences is alive and well and living in a town near you. The very actions of the financial regulators will reinforce support for it by proving why hawala is still as needed as it ever was: to enable genuine free trade when princes and policemen try to restrict it, and to avoid confiscation of the proceeds of that legitimate trade by the same people.
Perry, question. Did not one of your dead relatives preside over the manufacture of an airplane named like the above? Was it not one of those post-war jet-propelled contrivances with a pod in the middle for the driver and the engine, and then two sort of strut things going backwards from the two wings to support the tail, in the manner of those flaps they have on the back of grand prix cars?
If I’m right about this, and following on from David Carr’s outing of himself and myself as vampires, do we not have a collective name for us all, or at least for David and me? Yes I think I finally have an answer, after more than half a century, to that Question you always get asked in bars and at parties: “What do you do?”
“I am a de Havilland Vampire.”
Whilst I often agree with Glenn Reynolds over on Instapundit, there is one pet theory of his that he has mentioned several times before that I find baffling:
I still say that what’s going on right now is that the Israelis are dismembering the Palestinian Authority and all the various terror groups there so that there won’t be any significant resistance when the Jordanians move in and take over.
To which I say, and have said before, what on earth is in it for the Jordanians? Why would the Hashemites want to risk another Black September uprising against their Bedouin dynasty five to ten years down the road by adding 2 million pissed off, radicalised, impoverished Palestinians to an already complex Jordanian 5 million strong ethnic Palestinian/Bedouin mixture? Quite apart from the horrendous political and security nightmare the occupied territories would present to Jordan if they were handed back to them, they are an economic booby prize. The Jordanians have a GDP of about $3,500 per capita, hardly rich…compared to the West Bank Palestinians GDP per capita of about $1,500, which is truly dire.
So whilst it might well take the pressure off Israel, so what? I must ask Glenn to say what on earth is in this for Jordan? They would have to be bonkers to want the West Bank back!
[Update: Glenn responds on Instapundit. However I do not doubt that Jordan and Israel will continue to cooperate in security matters, just that Jordan will accept the poison pill of reacquiring the West Bank. The article to which Glenn links seems to strengthen my case regarding the lack of enthusiasm on the part of the Jordanian monarchy for having the West Bank Palestinians within Jordanian borders]
Ah, those famous lines from the Stealer’s Wheel. Brendan Nyhan over on American Prospect drew my attention to the fact that Ted Kennedy was not the only one making a total ass of himself over the meaning of a game of American football.
Now there was a time when Rush Limbaugh was actually witty and insightful, hell I went to see his show live once in New York some years back. Yet after listening to his radio remarks (available via the Brendan Nyhan article linked above) I am forced to the conclusion that Rush has finally completed his journey from right wing punditry’s doyen to its doofus. I guess the bailiffs must have come calling and repossessed that ‘talent on loan from God’.
Limbaugh contends that because the Patriots Football Team market themselves to ‘the soccer mom’s season ticket base’ as a team rather than by emphasising the individual players, then the Patriots are in fact ‘socialist’. Never mind that it is just a capitalist marketing ploy and never mind that socialism is a political system in which the means of production, including labour, are controlled by the state (unlike a voluntary football team of millionaire players).
And so there we have it: Rush Limbaugh and Edward Kennedy in agreement as to what the Patriots Football Team actually represents. Two of a kind: a brotherhood of absurdity, spouting fallacies that must surely reduce anyone who actually knows what the word socialist really means to either stunned silence or embarrassed laughter.
Thanks for all the kind reactions to Brian’s Lament. No-one said, American style: “Get over it!”, which is a big part of why I probably will. I’m among friends.
However, the Vampire situation has become complicated. According to David Carr I’m one, and thanks to me, so is he. And then about one day after that startling revelation, we were all given an award for our prowess in hunting Communist vampires. I suppose if you’re hunting vampires, it helps to have a couple in your own team.
I’ve also been cheered up lately, following on from Tom Burroughes’ complaints about television, by Britain’s two current late night chat shows. On Channel 4 on Friday (repeated the following Thursday) is the sublime Graham Norton. Less commonly noted in Britain these days is that over on BBC1 (Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays) Johnny Vaughan is doing just as well as the heterosexual community’s answer to Norton. Before Vaughan, on BBC1, there was Jonathan Ross, and that show caused everyone involved, Ross, the help, the guests and the viewers to ask themselves: “Is this as good as Graham Norton?” and to answer: “No”. The Ross show was full of embarrassing gay references, because, you know, er, that’s what late night chat shows have to have these days. Before Ross, there was Parkinson and he’s past it. Vaughan, on the other hand, is the genuine article.
Vaughan’s politics are not right wing exactly, more masculinist. A fortnight ago there was, for example, a short but respectful interview with a train strike trade unionist, a buddy of Arthur Scargill’s, the point being not: here’s a stupid lefty dynosaur, but here’s a “forgotten man”. Man, is the point. He also specialises in getting glamorous women on, and then a bloke, and Vaughan and the bloke then get deep into some ultra-bloke topic while the woman’s still there. The other night he had this fat and hairy comedian on and they assembled this big three-piece Star Wars toy with three Star Wars characters fighting each other, and there was this actress watching it all … Well, you had to see it. Both Norton and Vaughan have in common that the agenda is pleasure, not politics. Norton ignores politics completely. He’s too busy celebrating the uncensored joys of the Internet. Vaughan does the occasional sneer at things like £40,000 research projects paid for by the government which reach such conclusions as “traffic jams can seriously frustrate the travelling public”, before getting stuck back into the serious business of finding out what it was like being an actor in Blackhawk Down or how some farmer nearly got chewed to death by his own bailing machine and has a Captain Hook hook on his arm to prove it. When American superstar visitors appear on these two shows they seem genuinely to enjoy themselves
I know what Tom Burroughes means. Capitalists get a horrible rap on the telly. But the products of capitalism get a good showing. Look at it this way. Lefties don’t produce any decent stuff. The only decent thing about them is that some of them do decent impersonations of decent people (which is perhaps why lefties dominate the TV advert voice-over profession). But capitalists produce all that great capitalist stuff, and that’s what they’re selling. They’re not selling themselves.
I have another even better answer to Tom’s problem, about how the capitalists might sell themselves, but I’ll save that for later.
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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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