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.
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There is a superb blog posting up today by Mr Eugenides, about Trafigura, and about Trafigura’s attempts to stop people voicing opinions about Trafigura. Trafigura? I know. Who are and what is Trafigura? Never heard of Trafigura? Well, if you hadn’t heard of Trafigura before this week, you have heard of Trafigura now. And you’ve certainly heard of Trafigura now. Says Mr Eugenides, in his blog posting about Trafigura and about the libel lawyers that Trafigura has unleashed:
One day these highly-remunerated libel lawyers are going to wake up and realise that they aren’t being paid in guineas any more and that, thanks to this thing called the Interwebs, they can’t shut down freedom of speech the way they used to in the old days.
Indeed. The story is that Trafigura recently hired Britain’s swankiest libel lawyers to tell the Guardian not to mention in the Guardian that Trafigura had been unflatteringly asked about in the House of Commons, by a Member of Parliament. You read that right. The Guardian may not report on the proceedings of the House of Commons. Trafigura has been doing allegedly bad things in Africa, it seems, and an MP asked about Trafigura, in the most supposedly public place in the land, but Trafigura want their name, Trafigura, not to be reported in this connection. To which end Trafigura’s libel lawyers have told the Guardian, in a libel lawyer way that you apparently have to obey, that Trafigura may not be mentioned in the Guardian. No Trafigura, Guardian.
Here is the question, about Trafigura, recycled by Guido, in which the word Trafigura appears at the end, where its says: Trafigura. And thanks to Guido for linking to the Mr Eugenides piece about Trafigura. I would hate to have missed Mr Eugenides’s piece, about Trafigura. → Continue reading: Trafigura
I would be willing to wager that the Nobel represented the time when, in retrospect, it started to go really wrong for Mr Obama. He could have come across all modest and statesmanlike and told the Nobel prize givers that their award was very touching, very nice, etc, etc, but he just did not feel he had done enough to receive it, and there were more deserving recipients. To have done that, of course, would have been to demonstrate a capacity for embarrassment, for shame. Now Mr Obama has shown us that he has no such shame, that his vanity is as bad as it appears to be from this end. And that will be his downfall.
Even some folk over at that haven of idiocy, the Huffington Post, are not greatly impressed by what happened last week. Michael Moore, of course, is. With friends like these…
I repeatedly read non-atheists saying that atheists are foolish in various ways. Strident, arrogant, irrational, even unscientific. I obviously read a better class of atheist because I seldom see this, but today I did come across a foolish piece in which atheist Paul Fidalgo tries to accuse Tony Blair of saying, in a recent speech at a Georgetown University get together of Muslim and Christian scholars, that atheists are terrorists.
I say “tries”, because Fidalgo himself admits that he was obliged to remove the word “equates” from his first version of the title, and replace it with “groups”. In other words to admit that he had failed in what he was trying to argue.
This article originally used the word “equates” in the headline, which I have changed to “groups.” Realizing that Blair never specifically makes a perfect equivalency between atheism and religious violence, I thought this was a fairer word to use.
But instead of admitting that his argument is holed below the water-line, Fidalgo leaves it there, accusing Blair of wanting to say or trying to imply, blah blah, what he never did say, and actually never even tried to say. → Continue reading: Siding with Tony Blair against his atheist critic
Britain’s National Health Service, so beloved by Michael Moore, is not what (most) supporters of Obama’s ‘reforms’ claim they want for the USA. They are of course lying through their teeth as a single payer system is clearly the desired endpoint (i.e. eventual de facto nationalisation) and anyone who thinks otherwise is delusional.
Well just look what you have to look forward to.
Yet as every UK politician will say when asked, the NHS is the ‘envy of the world’ and wanting to do away with it is clearly a sign of madness as the only imaginable alternate to state provided healthcare is, apparently, no healthcare at all, with anyone who is not a millionaire dying in the streets if they get ill.
Seriously, try and have a sober conversation about the NHS and the extent to which people have been propagandised will stun you.
Much has been written about Kindle in the last few days, but I for one am in no hurry to rush out and buy one.
I do like the idea of a searchable digital book reader, but being locked into a proprietary format, not to mention paying a 40% premium for content for not being in the USA, means I am not even considering this product.
If someone comes up with a well designed open-standards digital reader which does not force me to buy from Amazon, that will get me to look again, but until that happens…
More good sense on the current economic difficulties.
The intelligence of the creature known as a crowd, is the square root of the number of people in it
– Terry Pratchett
The destruction of British civil society continues apace…
New anti-paedophile vetting rules will threaten the 90-year tradition of Scout Jamborees, the Scout Association says. It has warned that major gatherings of packs from around the world may be cancelled due to the introduction of the scheme.
Under the controversial rules anyone working or volunteering with children must register for background checks. But organising checks on thousands of foreign Scout leaders was “just not possible”, a spokesman said.
Good. I have nothing against the Scouts, but I do like it when people are smashed in the face by the reality of the political order they tolerate. Let people feel the consequences and start to get angry. Of course I want people to stop even trying to comply, to ‘go Galt’ if you like, to wilfully break laws and subvert regulations, but here we have an example where they really cannot comply, and that works too.
The state is not your friend. Are you starting to get the message?
BBC Climate correspondent Paul Hudson asks What happened to global warming?:
This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.
No surprise to me about those dates. But yes indeed, big surprise that a BBC person is saying this.
But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.
No matter how hard we tried.
And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.
So what on Earth is going on?
What indeed? This is not the usual BBC line, is it? Whatever your opinion of A(nthropogenic) G(lobal) W(arming) – mine has for quite a while been that it is wall-to-wall made-up nonsense – I think you will agree that this is quite a moment, as is further illuminated by the fact that Instapundit has just linked to the above piece. Which is how I just heard about it.
I wonder if the BBC feels inclined to switch to being AGW-skeptic in order to try to make difficulties for David Cameron – stirring up his own party’s AGW skeptics against him etc. David Cameron has swallowed the AGW argument whole, or at least pretended to. With that man, you never really know what he really believes. Apart from believing in David Cameron, David Cameron probably doesn’t know himself what he really believes, and probably never will.
But I digress. Mainly I just have a question. Is it right that this marks a big shift for the BBC, or have I not been paying attention properly? This is entirely possible. I don’t follow this debate religiously, and certainly do not know the names of all the key players on this topic in the mainstream media. Maybe Hudson has been a known unreliable for some time. But whatever the truth of that, I will certainly keep my eyes and ears open for what others, especially people like Bishop Hill, make of this, in the days and weeks ahead.
There is a bizarre article over on liberalconspiracy (liberal as in “not-liberal-in-any-way” kind of liberal) called “Are all libertarians so childish?“, whose category error starts in the title, saying ‘mean things’ about a fringe Tory party conference outfit called The Freedom Zone.
The theme of the meeting was ‘the bully state’, and the panel included Roger Helmer, the MEP for East Midlands. Mr Helmer made a gallant defence of his rights to get pissed, stuff his face, pollute his lungs, and ruin the atmosphere by driving as fast as he likes in a great gas-guzzling monstrosity. People were sick of being told how to live, he said. The state should butt out.
Fair enough. But then, after making this impassioned defence of the rights of the individual, he jumped seamlessly to the rights of decent English sorts to tell travellers (”we’re not allowed to say gypsies any more”) to piss off. He told a story about how villagers in Bedfordshire had objected to proposals for a travellers’ encampment, because of what it would do to their quality of life. Ninety percent of those complaints had been disregarded, he said, because the powers that be considered them to be racist. This was an outrage. The state should be on the side of the people.
Is anyone else detecting just a hint of hypocrisy here?
[…]
Things don’t work like that, of course. Society has rules, to make sure that by exercising my freedoms I don’t crap all over yours.
Those rules don’t just apply to people we don’t like. The laws that stop Mr Helmer from getting pissed and going joy-riding in an SUV have nothing to do with a deeply felt desire to restrict his freedom, and everything to do with stopping him from buggering things up for the rest of us.
Now these are very reasonable observations, but the steaming pile of elephant poop in the middle of this pool table is that the people in question maybe Tories… but they are not in fact libertarians.
My reply in the comment section was:
I always laugh when I see the phrase “libertarian” and “Tory” anywhere near each other. And probably best not to conflate society with state when you talk about rules (and mean laws).
Rational libertarians understand that the “freedom” to get drunk in your SUV is trumped by my freedom not to have you impose clear and present risks to life and limb on me, but hardly anyone on the Stupid Party, sorry I mean Tory Party, are *any* sort of libertarian, let alone the rational kind. If a few souls are trying to move them in a libertarian direction, well power to them, but I don’t fancy their chances.
But regarding gypsies, really it just comes down to property rights, which are something very few Tories support any more than you do, as asking them questions about gypsies are indeed a wonderful way of showing: the issue highlights the fact they are not libertarians (people who support several liberty), they are (gasp) Tories (people who support “people like them”). It is simple: if the gypsies rent property from the legal owner, they have a right to be there and too damn bad if the neighbours object to their mere presence. End of story. If said gypsies then nick stuff and trash adjoining properties, then action should indeed be taken against those responsible. Also end of story (and it is a different story to the first one).
Nevertheless listening to you discussing the failings of libertarian thought, with some Tories as examples, is a bit like listening to two members of different religions discussing the failings of atheism. Entertaining but not very enlightening.
The official history of MI5 by historian, Christopher Andrew, has, again, directed us to the potential number of politicians and trade unionists who gave or sold information to the Soviet Union.
Three Labour MPs named in the history, written by the historian Christopher Andrew as Soviet bloc agents are John Stonehouse, who became postmaster general in Harold Wilson’s government, Will Owen and Bob Edwards. The three were “outed” by a Czech defector, but there is no evidence the politicians passed over sensitive information….
Andrew says Jack Jones, the trade union leader who the Guardian has been told was the subject of many volumes of MI5 files, was not “being manipulated by the Russians”, but the Security Service was “right to consider the possibility that he was”. Britain’s top KGB spy, Oleg Gordievsky, said Moscow “regarded Jones as an agent”, Andrew notes. He says Jones accepted some money from the Russians but there is no evidence that he gave them any information.
Now that remittances for socialist traitors have dried up, does this partially explain why some on the Left were so quick to adopt kleptocracy as a principle of government, perhaps in homage to their dearly departed ideals.
Upon reflection, I think all the mockery will cease when Barack Obama walks across the Atlantic Ocean to accept His prize.
– Robert Bidinotto
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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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