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]
|
With the 60th anniversary of the end of British rule in the sub continent, there is the normal talk of whether the vast numbers of rapes and murders during partition could have been prevented. The British will, perhaps quite rightly, get the blame for not delaying independence and for not using enough force to try and prevent the violence on partition.
However, it is almost forgotten that Nehru (the leader of the Congress party and first Prime Minister of India) was demanding that the British leave (every day we stayed was a day too many for Nehru), and even claimed that it was mainly where the British were that violence took place.
This was the exact opposite of the truth (and Nehru knew it) – as it was where British forces went in (sadly much too rarely) that the mass rapes and killings were prevented. Nehru had “form” in letting his “get the British out of India” obsession cloud his judgement.
For example, in 1942 he had gone along (whatever doubts he must have had) with the demented “Quit India” campaign. Had the British actually “quit India” the Japanese would have come in (they were at the gates of India) and the Congress party would have found out what “slavery to an Imperial power” really was.
As Prime Minister of India Nehru followed a policy of armed aggression (so much for “non violence”) against such places as Portuguese Goa. But also did not bother to prepare against real threats to national security.
The classic example is relations with Red China. Nehru ordered a policy of confronting China in the border area – but did not send a decent level of troops or equipment (the Indian troops did not even axes to cut down trees and where forced into trying to use spades for the task – much to amusement of the watching People’s Liberation Army). Nehru also refused to approach the United States for aid – he could handle matters.
When the Chinese invaded in 1962 the Indian force fought bravely, but was hopelessly out-numbered and out-equipped – their defeat was inevitable. The Chinese captured the entire disputed area (which they had no legal right to) and Nehru was left begging the United States for aid – in case the Chinese decided to take any more of India.
But the worst aspect of Nehru was his domestic policy:
Nehru loved talking of “five year plans” and an industrial revolution for India. However, his policies condemned the population of India to poverty, often extreme poverty. Not only was overseas competition virtually banned (for almost all goods and services), but the “permit Raj” meant that almost all domestic competition was crippled as well.
The “freedom” that the Congress party promised India turned out to be so many rules and regulations that it made the British Raj look almost libertarian by comparison (although the British Raj was bad in many ways).
I doubt that most of the above will be mentioned in many places, but people deserve to know.
A report in the Times (of London) states that one of the UK’s leading charities, Voluntary Services Overseas (VSO), has told gap-year students (students taking a period of time off between school and university or whatever) not to take part in costly and often useless aid projects.
Indeed. Far better to encourage students not to take a gap year off at all, but to work hard, get a job, and then use all their energy and idealism to campaign to scrap all tariff barriers, trade “pacts” and other distortions of the world trade system.
As a subject for reading, this I highly recommend. I wonder if any university dons care to put it on their students’ reading lists?
The simple fact is that advertising doesn’t compel anyone to buy a product. At best, it can create some warm and fuzzy associations. A person can act on those random impulses — or he can choose to think about his purchases. It’s wholly up to him.
Diana Hsieh, stating what ought to be bleedin’ obvious as we Brits say. But good on her for saying it anyway.
David Shayler, the ex-M15 spook, always struck me as being only 90 cents to the dollar. I bumped into this character a few years ago at a bash hosted by Privacy International, a perfectly sensible campaigning group. This item if it is true (via the Register), suggests I am right about the dark-haired one.
Methinks M needs to tighten up the recruitment criteria.
Evidence that East German borders guards had a clear ‘license to kill’ anyone who tried to cross the country borders. By the way, I just love how the BBC uses the communist term ‘defectors’. So leaving a totalitarian, communist hell-hole counts as ‘defection’? WTF?
But I digress.
Border guards in East Germany during the Cold War were given clear orders to shoot at attempted defectors, including children, a senior official says.
The seven-page document dated 1 October 1973, was found last week in an archive in the eastern city of Magdeburg, among the papers of an East German border guard.
I am sure it was not the only document in existence. At least there is some tangible evidence now. It reads:
Do not hesitate with the use of a firearm, including when the border breakouts involve women and children, which the traitors have already frequently taken advantage of.
This has not come as a surprise to me. What was a surprise is this has not been officially known, confirmed, understood before. It is as if the societies that went through (and were complicit in) the communist ordeal are reluctant to confront the full horrors, the corruption and destruction that were at their core for decades.
I whole heartedly agree with Marianne Birthler, director of the government office that now manages Stasi archives, when she says.
We have a long way to go in reckoning with the past.
Barely started, I would add.
On a related note this is my reaction to the movie The Lives of Others when I saw it not too long ago.
A weekend co-optition. Here are two BBC stories about politicians promising to reduce regulation. Let’s see how many differences in presentation we collectively can spot.
May 24, 2005: Brown pledges law to cut red tape
August 12, 2007: Tory plan for business ‘tax cut
Let me start:
1. Headline: the first is personal; the second is treated as the collective decision of a party.
2. Comparing standfirsts, the first talks about cutting “the burden of red tape on business'” as if an altruistic act, in the second the cutting is “radical” and “for UK businesses” hinting that this is a dangerous scheme undertaken on behalf of business.
3. In the second story, there is a direct quote from a political opponent; in the first, no criticism of the proposal appears.
4. Indeed, in the second story the boxed quote is ad hominem party-political criticism, whereas in the first it is a press-release quote about the policy from its proponent.
Over to you.
Many intelligent things were said at the Republican debate broadcast by the American Broadcasting System the other week. But, being of a negative cast of mind, I was more interested in the stupid things that were said.
Ron Paul listed “Korea” as one of the wars that American should not have fought and “lost” (well there goes the Korean American vote).
Mitt Romney said that government should back “universal healthcare”, as he had introduced in Massachusetts, because otherwise “people turn up to Emergency Rooms and this is expensive” – of course people are still turning up to Emergency Rooms and demanding free treatment in Massachusetts – in spite of Mitt Romney’s expensive new government scheme (which will get more and more expensive over time).
However, I believe that the most stupid thing said at the debate was from Mike Huckabee (a big tax increaser from Arkansas) who said that health care would be fixed if “everyone in America had the same healthcare as the members of Congress were given”.
There are 100 members of the United States Senate, and there are 435 members of the House of Representatives. And there are about 300 million Americans.
Paying the health costs costs of 535 politicians is a rather smaller burden than paying the health care costs of 300, 000,000 people.
Yet this piece of populist bullshit (for that is what it was) was cheered and applauded.
Okay, that’s quite enough seriousness. My question for the weekend is, if you were organising a dinner party and could invite six famous people around, alive or deceased, who would you pick? Mine are:
My wife, obviously (she will be famous, some day)
David Niven.
Joan Collins
PJ O’Rourke
Diana Rigg
Groucho Marx
Choices are not based on trivia such as looks – Mrs P being very good-looking, however – but on style, wit and elegance.
I’d naturally ask Stephen Fry to work as the butler for the evening.
There is a strange furore brewing over pharmaceuticals giant Johnson & Johnson suing the American Red Cross over their use of… the Red Cross… on certain commercial products.
My first reaction was “What the…? Have J&J gone completely nuts?”
But then I actually read the background to the story from someone who works at J&J, and also got some background from someone I know who works with them, whereupon I realised actually it is the American Red Cross who have gone nuts. In fact they are worse than nuts, they are acting both unreasonably and quite dishonourably.
Clearly J&J must be aghast by the PR mess that taking legal action against a venerable institution like the Red Cross is going to stir up… and the Red Cross knows that. And so it is very clear to me that when you read the Red Cross press release, what is going on here is a cynical bit of capitalist bashing so that the Red Cross can use their sainted reputation to tear up an agreement they reached over the appropriate use of that Red Cross symbol in… 1895.
Now you might think that how can J&J claim to own the rights to the Red Cross symbol in the USA? Sure, that seems weird, but the fact is the American Red Cross did agree that J&J did indeed own it all the way back in 1895, so that is an indisputable fact, and in return for J&J’s forbearance for the Red Cross using that symbol (not to mention a century of monetary and product donations… but then as we all know, no good deed goes unpunished), the Red Cross undertook not to use the symbol as a logo on products in the USA that directly compete with J&J products that also use that symbol. And so it was for one hundred years.
Until one day the Red Cross decide it no longer suits them, no doubt on the advise of some overpaid shister. It is a shameful think that an institution that people take to represent charity and honour can quite literally trade on that perception in order to act dishonourably. Sometimes big companies act appallingly, but sometimes they are just big targets for other who act dishonourably. J&J have no choice but to defend their trademark but the only winner in all of this will be a bunch of crapulous American lawyers. Such stupidity.
Update: some more background here.
When people start blaming Big Evil Capitalists for the latest SNAFU in the global capital markets – the collapse of many debt products linked to what are called sub-prime mortgages in the US – remember that the problem stems in part from how lenders have been positively encouraged by some states to lend money to risky borrowers and people with a history of debt defaults and late payments (thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the link).
Of course, ultra-low interest rates in many nations, such as Japan, have also fuelled a vast rise in the levels of global monetary growth, which in the near-term encouraged people to invest in any asset class offering a decent return regardless of risk of assets held, like bundles of sub-prime mortgages repackaged into exotica called collateralised debt obligations (please do not ask me to define these, it is too early in the morning and I have only had one coffee). Low interest rates have cut the price that investors typically demand for shouldering risk; now that rates have risen to curb inflation, the price for that risk has gone up.
Milton Friedman and Robert Heinlein may be dead, but the truths they espoused are very much alive. As they said, there is not, and never has been, such thing as a free lunch.
A fund has been set up to help the families of those killed and injured at Mojave. If any of you are interested, you can find out more at the July 29th entry here.
Scaled Family Support Fund
c/o Scaled Composites
1624 Flight Line
Mojave, CA. 93501
Acct # 04157-66832 / Wire xfer ABA Routing # 0260-0959-3 (Bank of America) /
Please make your check payable to “Scaled Family Support Fund”.
This is not a tax deductible donation.
Many will fall on the road to the stars. We must remember them as best we can.
Paul Staines takes a very gloomy view of the situation in Britain’s two wars
I take no pleasure in reporting this, but it seems to be going unsaid in the British press. British forces are painted, particularly by broadcasters, as having achieved a measure of success in Basra due to superior British peace-keeping techniques honed in Northern Ireland.
The truth is very different. To quote from a report;
Three major Shiite political groups are locked in a bloody conflict that has left the city in the hands of militias and criminal gangs, whose control extends to municipal offices and neighborhood streets. The city is plagued by “the systematic misuse of official institutions, political assassinations, tribal vendettas, neighborhood vigilantism and enforcement of social mores, together with the rise of criminal mafias that increasingly intermingle with political actors,” a recent report by the International Crisis Group said.
The Washington Post reported a senior U.S. intelligence official yesterday saying that “The British have basically been defeated in the south”.
The article went on to say that British forces
… are abandoning their former headquarters at Basra Palace, where a recent official visitor from London described them as “surrounded like cowboys and Indians” by militia fighters. An airport base outside the city, where a regional U.S. Embassy office and Britain’s remaining 5,500 troops are barricaded behind building-high sandbags, has been attacked with mortars or rockets nearly 600 times over the past four months.
In May Blair visited the Basra HQ and came under mortar attack – not a sign of pacification.
The head of the armed forces, Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, told the BBC that success depends “upon what your interpretation of the mission was in the first place… I’m afraid people had, in many instances, unrealistic aspirations for Iraq, and for the south of Iraq.” The reality is that once British forces exit Basra the fighting will escalate into a full-scale civil war: Mission failure.
This begs the question – what now is the plan in Afghanistan? They are a people who fought the Red Army and won. The Soviets were brutal and were still defeated. Is NATO going to match and exceed that brutality in pursuit of “victory”? Afghanistan should be monitored closely and elements that present a clear and present external danger should be eliminated. It is not the job of NATO to impose Western values by force as Rome’s Imperial Armies once imposed Roman law.
|
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.
|
Recent Comments