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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I am sending in a vital article from Bosnia-Herzegovina tonight. But the problem with being with my friends in here in Sarajevo is that I now have little sticky crumbs of baklava in between the keys of my portable computer (no, sorry, not the infamous biMac I was fantasizing about before but a real Titanium PowerBook) and there is cigarette ash everywhere. But if there was no baklava crumbs and cigarette ash, I would not believe I was here. Yes, I know I am rambling but I am slightly drunk on Stara Sljivovica and hopped up on endless tiny cups of nuclear strength Bosnian coffee.
Ok, the important information now: over on the wonderful blog Mind over what matters, there is a picture of Jay Zilber in bed. It is soooooo cute!
But what I want to know is who is that funny looking guy that he is lying on?
Tim Blair has written an utterly hilarious piece about a loopy article in the Sydney Morning Herald that contends that the appeal of Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings is fundamentally racist. Chris Henning writes
Harry and the hobbits, with their takeaway racism, offer the same comfort for the whole world: join our tribe, be special with us, despise our subhumans.
To which Tim Blair replies
Which is almost exactly what my eight-year-old niece told me after she’d read her first Potter book. “I feel better now about the destruction of my community, Uncle Timmy,” she said. “Now can we please go out and kill some Jews? Please, Uncle Timmy! You promised!”
Outstanding. Read the whole of Blair’s article, it had me howling with mirth.
And thus, when the pseudo-democratic authoritarian regime of Vladimir Putin, notable for crushing the free press in Russia, come out in favour of gun-control (victim disarmament) advocates in America, it becomes clear that supporters of well armed liberty are well and truly on the right track. According to World Net Daily, our liberty loving Russian ‘friends’ have done exactly that
Russia supports restrictions on U.S. gun ownership, according to official sources, pointing out that after the events of Sept. 11 gun sales in the United States increased. The blame for increased gun sales, according to Moscow and anti-gun activists, lies with gun manufacturers. “American firearms manufacturers saw their chance at profiting from the tragedy of people scared of threats from international terrorists,” Moscow declared. Asserting that “a nationwide campaign has been launched to advertise pistols and guns,” Moscow referred to a recent press conference held to “draw attention to gun makers’ marketing efforts.” The event included participation by Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, D-N.Y., and Nan Aron, president of the Alliance for Justice. The statements were reported by the Voice of Russia World Service, the official broadcasting service of the Russian government.
I can only assume that this is actually a plot by unknown well meaning NRA sympathisers within the Russian establishment, because I can hardly imagine a better way of encouraging a surge in US civilian gun acquisition than ‘The Official Russian State Media does not want you to own weapons’. Superb. Well done, Vlad. I knew you were on our side really.
Our most recent new link is the wonderfully named Recovering Liberal. The term ‘liberal’ obviously being used in it’s North American sense (i.e. illiberal). The subtitle is a particular delight: sacred cow slaughterhouse. Excellent. At first glance this blog seems more neo-conservative that libertarian but is a good read nonetheless. After all, us capitalists gotta stick together!
Whilst on the subject of interestingly named blogs, I would be interested to hear from readers what blog titles tickle their fancy (regardless of content).
My favourites are Opinionated Bastard, Fevered Rants and, possibly the best, Where HipHop meets Libertarianism.
What do you think?
Addendum: Yikes. What could I have been thinking? How can I write about interestingly named blogs without a tip of the hat to The Edge of England’s Sword and The Fly Bottle, both of whom we are already linked to (see side bar).
There is a good article by Douglas Carey called Wartime’s Lost Liberties over on the Ludwig von Mises Institute site.
Many others say that any lost liberties will be restored once the war is past us, or once terrorism has been eradicated. Although history has shown us that the most egregious laws and orders are usually rescinded eventually, each bold step by the government has led to even bolder steps in the future.
That is the trouble with laws: they are easy to pass but hard to repeal. One merely has to look at the idiotic British Pub Licensing Laws, introduced as a ‘temporary measure’ to curtail alcohol related absenteeism in the factories during World War I. They are still on the books today.
Samizdata reader Kate Redmond wrote in pointing out that view similar to mine regarding the dismal Taliban member John Walker are appearing beyond blogland. Kate writes
I have finally started to see some vaguely similar sentiments in the mainstream press. I don’t know if you saw this article by Mark Steyn this
week:
I’m not in favour of trying him for treason: Alan Dershowitz and the other high-rent lawyers are already salivating over the possibility of a two-year circus with attendant book deals and TV movies. But there is another way: on page four of John Walker’s US passport, it states that any American who enlists in a foreign army automatically loses his citizenship. Mr Walker wants to be Abdul Hamid: Mr Bush should honour his wishes. Let us leave him to the Northern Alliance and let his San Francisco fancypants lawyers petition to appear before the Kabul bar, if there is one. It would, surely, be grossly discriminatory to subject Mr Hamid to non-Islamic justice.
Actually, what it says in my U.S. passport is that, Under certain circumstances, you may lose your U.S. citizenship by performing, voluntarily and with the intention to relinquish U.S. citizenship, any of the following acts: […] (3) serving in the armed forces of a foreign state
So, I guess the crux of the matter for Steyn’s argument is whether Walker intended to renounce his citizenship. I’m not certain that it’s not possible to serve in a foreign army without losing one’s citizenship. I believe I’ve heard of American citizens who have served in the Israeli army and I know Swiss-U.S. dual citizens who almost certainly do their mandatory Swiss military service.
Similarly many US citizens served with the British military prior to America’s entry into WWII, notably the pilots who flew for the RAF during the Battle of Britain. There were also US ‘Internationals’ with the Croatian HV and HVO during the recent Balkan Wars and certainly the State Department never made any attempt to go after them. I think the ‘certain circumstances’ quoted above is intentional legal wiggle room, thus it very much depends on exactly whose military you have joined. Joining the French Legion Étranger is not likely to get people hopping up and down (though in reality most US members of the LÉ claim to be ‘Canadian’) but signing on for a jaunt with North Korea, toting a Kalashnokov with the Cubans or becoming Abdul Hamid and joining the Taliban is a rather different matter.
I must say the prospect of the likes of Alan Dershowitz turning John Walker into some cause célèbre is quite an unpleasant thought and I love Mark Steyn’s suggestion on that matter. On the contention that anything that thwarts Alan Dershowitz must surely be in the national interest, Walker should loose his citizenship on that basis alone.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
– Mark Twain
I’ve long thought myself reasonably knowledgeable on World War II, and in particular on the air war. I had heard Belfast was bombed by a few planes at some point. One friend told me his father sat up in the hills and watched the bombers flying in. I’d seen mentions of it in various histories of the air war, but one is left with the impression the entire Battle of Britain was in the south of England. In terms of strategic importance, it was. London, Coventry and various attacks on other English cities were the heart of the action. That is where the “The Few” fought and died in the Battle of Britain. Squadrons went north for training and reforming. Other raids happened here and there but nothing that was terribly important to the course of the war. A couple raids on Belfast? When you read that amidst the history of the war in the skies over London it hardly registered even if you were sitting in Belfast. The unbidden first thought to cross one’s mind as Belfast resident was that we were doing quite a good enough job blowing it up ourselves. Why on Earth would we have needed any help from strangers?
The first raid was what I had believed it all to have been like. A few bombs on a Harland and Wolff factory, a few deaths here and there. That is what I had always believed had happened here.
I was very, very wrong as I found out tonight from a BBC Northern Ireland commemoration taped in our new Waterfront Hall. Local artists (several of whom I know from my many wastrel nights as a working musician in Ireland) sang period songs in between the film clips and dramatic readings of the words of those who lived through the raids. It is well worth the viewing but since most of you can’t do that, the web site is the next best thing.
900 people died that night on April 15th, 1941 in a second raid on a nearly defenseless city. The first had been a revelation to the Germans. No fighters defended the city. A handful of anti-aircraft guns were the sum total of defences. That was all there was to face over 200 He111’s and Ju88’s that roved at will over the city. Even those few defending guns were silenced when the telephone exchange was destroyed and all coordination lost.
In terms of numbers killed it was the worst single raid carnage of the Battle of Britain but one. Did any of you know that? I certainly did not.
The third raid came on May 4th of 1941. Belfast was still nearly defenseless. There were a handful of defending Spitfires and Hurricanes. This time “only” about 200 people died in the rain of incendiaries that devastated the city. But the destruction was far more complete. It left Belfast as devastated as any city in England and perhaps worse than most. Vast areas of housing were levelled in the conflagration that was visible from the Glen Shane pass 45 miles away. Ships were sunk in the harbour; the city centre was half destroyed.
No matter how much one reads the history of that terrible time, it gives one pause to realize the scope of the war was so vast that raids as devastating as these are reduced to minor historical footnotes.
Can you keep a secret? Are you a good liar? Recent research in brain mapping suggests that all your carefully polished acting skills will be for naught. Your brain itself will betray you.
According to researchers at the rather startlingly named Brain Fingerprinting Laboratories, a device now exists that is 100% accurate in separating the innocent from the guilty. Through association with specific details of previous criminal acts or terrorist sites, this same device can even identify criminals and terrorists before another act is committed.
The science of brain mapping is explained more fully in the Brain Fingerprinting Laboratories (BFL) CounterTerrorism104 document. While it may have its roots in the MRI brain imaging done to identify neurological diseases, the mapping done at the BFL has taken a very different twist. Quickly put, the BFL mapping device works by identifying when your brain remembers.
It is a simple principle. Your brain knows everything you have said and done. It is constantly and automatically processing fresh input and relating it to stored images. When your brain recognizes something, it sparks a memory. With the brain-mapping device, we can now identify that spark. In both lab studies and real world tests, the device is an astonishing 100% accurate. You can fool a lie detector and you can fool a voice stress analyzer, but you can’t fool your own brain. Show a terrorist a picture of a training camp or a criminal a picture of a crime scene and his brain recognizes it. Gotcha! In essence, we know you know because we know your brain knows.
Implications for both security and liberty are enormous. With a simple headset and a few pictures, we can weed the terrorists out from our midst. No one will object to that, except perhaps the terrorists. The BFL says, “The truth will set you free.” The trouble is, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, and truth and freedom in a democracy are very different from truth and freedom in a totalitarian regime.
At the very least, it spells the end of all field espionage and intelligence gathering activities. Would you volunteer to be a spy if the enemy could catch you by showing you a picture of your own headquarters? Would you be a Jew or Jewish sympathizer in Nazi Germany if the Gestapo could catch you by showing you a picture of the inside of a synagogue?
In the old days, you could always keep your thoughts to yourself. Now if we can figure out the images that spark a memory, we can test to see if it sparks your memory. What the presence or absence of that memory means depends on the one administering the test. Are you harboring forbidden memories? Can you prove you have a “legitimate need” for that knowledge stored in your head? These are questions that will become increasingly important if BFL’s brain mapping device gets widespread adoption.
I have already had some peeved e-mails saying I am overstating things by calling Britain a Police State. Well, just yesterday Britain agreed to extradition to any country in the European ‘Union’ simply on the order of a foreign judge or magistrate. On nothing more than their say so that the person in question is a suspect in some crime, you can find yourself arrested and taken by force from your own country. This is regardless of wether or not the alleged crime is even an offence in Britain. You have NO recourse to a British court to prevent your extradition.
Thus British people can now find themselves in courts in which there is a presumption of guilt rather than innocence, under the Napoleonic legal systems that prevail in most of Europe. They will also be without any protection of habeas corpus. Is it any wonder the British state has ensured its population of subjects are well and truly disarmed? Given the option of shooting it out with British police attempting to serve a Greek arrest warrant on me or trying my luck with a corrupt Greek court answering to an establishment that sponsors domestic terrorism, that is not a choice with an obvious answer. In fact by accusing the Greek establishment of actually supporting the N-17 terrorist group, I am probably breaking Greek law and could soon be theoretically liable for arrest here in London.
Another e-mail questioned how any country with a free press could be regarded as a police state. Well, Britain has a free press only if you ignore the Official Secrets Act,the variety of Race Relations Acts and the fact the law will soon prohibit inciting ‘religious hatred’. Many of the anti-Islamic post found on numerous blogs will soon be illegal in Britain. There is no British ‘First Amendment’. And does no one remember the farcical situation of the TV media being prohibited from broadcasting the words of Sinn Fein/IRA leader Gerry Adams? The media responded by showing his image and having an actor dub over the words he was speaking. Free press? Sure, just so long as you don’t say things the state does not approve of. The capacity for self-delusion amongst British people never ceases to amaze me.
The fact the astonishing raft of repressive British laws is only lightly enforced (at the moment) just shows that the liberties of British society is now at the sufferance of the state, rather than by right. Given that it was largely British legal concepts that underpin the American legal system, this should serve as a salutary lesson to people in the USA as to what happens when a culture of liberty is allowed to decay… and please, I do not want e-mails from Americans telling me “Oh, but we have our wonderful constitution.” I have two words for you: forfeiture laws. So much for the 4th and 6th Amendments.
I am a great admirer of Western Civilisation and particularly the Anglosphere’s traditions of liberty. In many ways, we can see very encouraging trends as the communications revolution drives economic globalisation ever wider. Our ability to freely associate and trade outside the bounds of the state grow almost daily. Yet there are also trends in the other direction. As governments lose their largely illusionary ability to ‘control’ national economies, they are resorting to other means of applying power and coersion. Our liberties, regardless of where we live, do not come from judges or democratically ‘legitimised’ politicians or from a sanctified scrap of 200 year old paper. They come from us ourselves and are made real only by our willingness to refuse to let ourselves be the ‘things’ of any state. The best, no, the ONLY defence for liberty is a culture that values it and will fight for it by whatever means are required. There is no other way and there never has been.
We received an e-mail from Samizdata reader Kevin Connors asking why we do not focus more on the dire state of civil liberties in Britain and pointing us at an article in Regulation of Investigative Powers Act (aptly known as RIP) is one of the most draconian Big Brother surveillance laws of its type in the western world and that came into effect in October 2000. Not only is it intentionally worded as to be largely unintelligible (thus providing ‘wiggle room’ for whatever the state wishes to do), but it reverses the burden of proof when the state demands crypto-keys. The key holder, not the state, is required to prove they do not have access to them if they are demanded or face two years in jail.
Whilst on the subject of surveillance, Britain has the dubious honour of leading the world in closed circuit television (CCTV), with more per capita than that ‘bastion’ of civil liberties, Israel, which at least has the excuse of a genuine and demonstrable daily security threat.
This government is also attempting to restrict the automatic right to trial by jury. This is one of the fundamental ancient bedrocks of British liberty and yet it is under attack for reasons of crude utility. Although there is opposition to this astonishing assault, it is a testament to British apathy that people are not rioting on the streets at the mere prospect of such a huge diminution of a basic underpinning of liberty.
And civilian gun ownership in Britain? Oh, don’t get me started on that monstrous tale of confiscation and repression. That deserves an article of it’s own.
War involves in its progress such a train of unforeseen and unsupposed circumstances that no human wisdom can calculate the end. It has but one thing certain, and that is to increase taxes.
– Thomas Paine
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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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