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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’ve had a busy day, so do not have time for much Samizdata-ing, but I think that most of us will be agreeing that this is quite good news:
Irish homeowners can now legally use guns to defend themselves if their homes are attacked under new legislation.
Yes it’s not good when your home gets “attacked under new legislation”. Sorry. Carry on.
The new home defense bill has moved the balance of rights back to the house owner if his home is broken into “where it should always have been”, say top Irish police.
The police association of superintendents and inspectors, the AGSI, stated that “the current situation, which legally demands a house owner retreat from an intruder, was intolerable”.
I know, I know, it probably doesn’t go far enough, but it is a step in the right direction. I particularly like what “AGSI” said. Wish we had something like AGSI here. Our policemen have the default position which just goes: leave everything to us sir. As in: leave everything to us and if you dare to do anything except surrender, just because we only got there a day late, we’ll arrest you.
Thank you Guido, where this piece is currently number two on his list of “Seen Elsewhere” stuff.
Oh, and anyone in the government opposing [calls for Islamic dress for women to be banned in Britain] is to be conditionally applauded…
…they are right to reject this vile authoritarian notion…
…but if they opposite it because “Islamic dress is ok” then they are a horse’s arse and need to called that.
A burqua or any item of islamic dress for women is as “ok” as a Nazi arm band… and people’s ability to wear Nazi arm bands also should not be banned, but they sure as hell should not be applauded.
– Perry de Havilland
I am watching Newsnight with my wife. Kirsty Wark does the intro – something like: “When a Syrian university bans the niqab on campus, why is Britain defending it?”
“Good point,” says Sue.
“Because we’re not bloody Syria!” I yell, “thank God!”
Glad to see a fully veiled Moslem woman interviewed in the street making exactly the same point.
So we live in a society where head teachers make kids wear goggles to play conkers and policemen are forbidden from rescuing drowning people on health and safety grounds… and then they make you drive at 70mph in pitch darkness to save the polar bears?
– Mr Eugenides is not a happy baby concerning the latest environmentally motivated imposition.
I just did a posting about iScream at my personal blog, iScream being a type of ice cream which I tasted earlier this evening when I dined at Chateau Perry. And then I thought, why confine the news of this delicious dessert to such a tiny demographic? The whole world should be told about this superb dining experience.
I guess one reason why people make things like this, concentrating entirely on making them tasty rather than making stuff that tastes like cardboard, and spending all their time, money and tender loving care on a lot of ridiculous and expensive advertising, is that word of whatever it is will now spread far and wide at no cost, provided the product tastes good. In my opinion, this iScream ice cream tastes wonderful, and word of it will surely spread fast. I suspect that “iScream” may prove to be a rather silly name, but better a silly name for superbly tasty ice cream than superbly named frozen mediocrity.
The website is here, but is not that informative about iScream ice cream. So if you live in or near London, or if you are ever in London, why not visit the Artisan du Chocolat shop in Lower Sloane Street, just to the south of Sloane Square, where the above supply of iScream ice cream was purchased.
I’m told their chocolate is very good too.
I am not talking about classical revolution by arms, but a revolution of ideas. I have been watching, and in may ways participating, in the growing split between world views that is contemporary America. I have little time for the fabric of the leftist views, although I have little problem with many of the lifestyle threads they support. They have now moved so far away from my own ‘center’ that I am much more inclined to throw in my lot with the ‘Country Party’ discussed in this The American Spectator article.
It is well worth reading, and although not perfectly congruent with libertarians, it is certainly far closer than the positions of contemporary liberals.
The Ministry of Defence employs 29,000 people in its procurement branch. Its equivalent in a country under actual military threat, Israel, employs a reported 400. Few would say that Britain’s Armed Forces were better equipped than Israel’s.
– Andrew Gilligan
One of the biggest eye-openers you can have is seeing a story in the press which you have personal knowledge of…
Of course, it could be that you just got unlucky and that all the other stories out there are 100% bang on, deadly accurate.
But that seems rather unlikely, doesn’t it?
– 6000 ruminates on false media prophesies of doom regarding the organisation of the soccer World Cup in his native South Africa.
The Controller’s Monthly Note from Radio 3 informed me of a new role that may fail a test of utility. They have appointed the artistic director of Music and the Deaf to sign a prom.
This Prom will be the first ever ‘signed Prom’. Dr Paul Whittaker, artistic director of Music and the Deaf will guide the audience in the hall through the music of Stephen Sondheim in the company of the BBC Concert Orchestra conducted by David Charles Abell (above).
Music and the Deaf is a worthwhile charity that aids deaf pupils who wish to learn how to read music and play instruments. Supporting this minority endeavour through private philanthropy and voluntary contribution is admirable for those who are interested in this cause.
One must ask if private encouragement requires public support: and if it does, whether a ‘signed prom’ meets that requirement. Music is enjoyed by people who can hear, not by the deaf. This is a fact. Allowing the Orchestra of the Deaf to play gives public evidence that the deaf do not need tobe prevented from studying music.
A ‘signed prom’ is a sop to the irrational and a waste of public money.
Indeed. Bulletproof custard. Thank you Instapundit. The spirit of Q lives on.
This reminds me of a Winston Churchill story that Stephen Fry likes to tell. During Churchill’s last stint as Prime Minister, in the fifties, he was regretfully informed that one of his backbench MPs had been arrested the previous night for exposing himself on Hampstead Heath. After a pause, Churchill asked about the weather. Was it not very cold last night? Indeed sir, one of the coldest nights on record. Said Churchill after another thoughtful pause: “It makes you proud to be British.”
I try always to take my camera with me whenever I go out, because I never know what interesting thing I will encounter, and because I have a superstitious fear that on the one day when I don’t take my camera with me when I go out, that will be the day when an Airbus A380 flies over the middle of London, much too low, with one of its engines on fire, just when I have a perfect view of it.
Which means that when, on a recent late night visit to a local food and drink store that I don’t usually frequent, I spied the following mildly interesting collection of objects, I was able immediately to photograph them.
Okay, not an especially startling thing to see. A fizzy drink named after a murderous bolshevik who, because he died young just after being very well photographed, and because a lot of stupid and dishonest people worshipped him while concealing exactly why, is remembered as beautiful, and cool, and wise, and virtuous.
This peculiar cult of Che the Beautiful has been much discussed here, over the years, and not in a polite way. However, this fizzy drink does not by any means completely disgust me, by which I mean that the idea of it does not completely disgust me. I haven’t actually tasted Che and am in any case quite happy with the Tesco own brand version of such “energy” slop. Yes, these Che cans perpetuate a silly cult, but they also make it look, I think, rather ridiculous. For what we have here is not so much an anti-capitalist message as capitalism co-opting the iconography of anti-capitalism. Many of those seriously stupid people who not only love Che but who actually having a real inkling of what he stood for and of what he tried so ineptly to foist upon the world, well, they hate that. Their hero reduced by marketing opportunists to selling little cans of a generic fizzy drink to a target demographic of adolescent and agingly adolescent fools! Their precious revolution reduced to “the revolution of energy”, and it’s not even proper energy type energy, just stuff to keep kids awake for a few more hours. The horror. And I love that. This is the kind of thing that may eventually cut this beautiful, dead, deluded, murdering incompetent down to size.
Also, this is a photo-opportunity for the likes of us to remind ourselves, yet again, just what a bastard this particular bastard was, and just how stupid it is that so many people still worship him.
By the way, it was most gratifying how quickly google yielded up all those links. As one of the authors linked to above says, I forget which one, it is not at all hard to learn the ghastly truth about this ghastly man. Typing “Che Guevara” into google doubtless engulfs you in evil delusions. I don’t know. I didn’t do this. What I typed into google was: “truth about Che Guevara”, and most of what I very quickly found was very good and very anti-delusional.
According to one lady writer, when Che was a child he used to kill dogs for fun, a sure sign, she adds, of a psycho. Is that true? “Che Guevara killed dogs for fun” only got me back to the article I read this in. But if it is true, I think we might spread this around. Perhaps some little labels should be printed saying “When Che was a child he killed dogs for fun”, or maybe just “dog killer” because that’s quicker and simpler – and maybe tactically more effective because more cryptic and weird and disconcerting – and could then be stuck on Che tee-shirts, on Che posters, and on these little Che tins.
Thanks to Patrick Crozier for pointing me to this essay by Paul Kennedy. I urge you to read the whole thing, but here are a couple of paragraphs that stuck in my mind:
Like it or not, American policy makers, pundits, strategists and high-level military officers cannot avoid the Appeasement story. Frankly, the tale of Britain’s dilemma during the 1930s is still far too close. Here was and is the world’s hegemon, with commitments all over the globe but also with pressing financial and social needs at home, with armed forces being worn out by continuous combat, with an array of evolving types of enemies, yet also facing recognizable and expanding newer nations bearing lots of increasingly sophisticated weaponry. So, what do you do: Appease, or not appease? Appease here, but not there? Declare some parts of the globe no longer of vital interest?
And, yes, there comes a time when you have to stand and fight; to draw a line in the sand; to say that you will not step backward. As did Great Britain in September 1939. But those British and Commonwealth citizens fought the war with such fortitude and gallantry because, one suspects, they knew that their successive administrations had tried, so often, to preserve the peace, to avoid another vast slaughter and to offer fair compromises. After the German attack on Poland, appeasement vanished. And rightly so. Now the gloves were off.
As Kennedy says, it is sometimes smart to back down, to make a concession, to buy time and avoid bloodshed if at all possible. Interestingly, he brings up a number of rows between Britain and the United States in the late 19th Century, around issues such as control of the Panama Canal and other territorial issues in the Caribbean basin. Fascinating.
The other point worth mentioning, particularly to those who argued that Britain could and should have stayed out of any conflict with Germany/Japan indefinitely, is that Western governments clearly did agonise for a long time before the eventual decision to fight was taken.
Compared to the sometimes piddling issues that our politicians talk about these days, I find this whole issue rather more interesting.
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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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