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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The Hamas Prime Minister, Ismail Haniyeh, has issued a strong rebuke to the Pakistani Religious Affairs Minister for saying that the UK’s decison to award a knighhood to author Salman Rushdie was a justification for suicide bombing.
Mr. Haniyeh was quoted as saying:
“Ejaz-ul-Haq is a dog. The whole world knows that the reason for suicide bombing is the suffering of the Palestinian people. Now he is saying it is Salman Rushdie. Does he want the world to simply forget our plight? Is he in the pay of the Zionists now?”
The row has prompted EU officials to express concern that there was a “risk of public confusion” as to the genuine justifications for suicide bombers and other terrorist acts. EU Ministers are expected to convene an emergency session to determine the real root cause of terrorist acts which member states will be required to officially endorse.
At last, a blow is being struck for truth, justice and equality:
Gingerism in the workplace could form the basis of formal grievances or constructive dismissal cases, an employment lawyer has warned. The news comes in the wake of one Newcastle family having to move house because of abuse about its members’ red hair.
The Chapman family has moved home three times in three years in the Newcastle area because of abuse directed at its six red-haired members. Kevin Chapman told reporters that his 11-year-old son even attempted suicide after becoming depressed following years of abuse.
The story has led to speculation about whether insults over red hair could have the same legal status as insults regarding a person’s race or gender.
This country is plagued with ugly and unchecked gingerism which is completely unacceptable in a multi-folicle society. According to scientifically-proven statistics more than 100% of ginger-haired people die before the age of 6 due to ruthless oppression and rampant pilophobia. This has serious repercussions for their future employment and housing prospects. This is the worst problem facing the world today and it is high time that the politicians did something to combat it. Hirsuitism must stop. Full stop.
It’s a bit like walking into a Sunday meeting of the Flat Earth Society. As they discuss great issues of the day, they discuss them from the point of view that the earth is flat. If someone says, ‘No, no, no, the earth is round!’, they think this person is an extremist. That’s what it’s like for someone with my right-of-centre views working inside the BBC.
– Jeff Randall, formerly the BBC’s business editor. The BBC does quote this against itself, but my experience of the bien pensant left in the media suggests that it will not be much apprehended inside the corporation.
I missed this sharp and wise article by US columnist Jonah Goldberg a few days ago – but I had the excellent excuse of being on holiday – but his piece, which nicely sums up what is happening in Britain from a US perspective, demonstrates how some Americans are waking up to what a nannied country Britain now is. Of course, north American readers of this blog have been aware of this progressive infantilisation of the UK adult public for some time.
The question that keeps coming up, and which makes an appearance in Jonah’s article, is exactly when will the conveyor belt of nanny-state interference in our liberties stop? When, exactly, does the excrement hit the fan? Just how bullied do we have to be before something snaps?
I am still none the wiser as to whether we really know the answer to those questions.
“Make sure you are well-scrubbed, your nails are clean and your hair is washed. Remember that girls are as nervous around you as you are around them, if you can imagine such a thing. They think and act rather differently to you, but without them, life would be one long rugby locker room. Treat them with respect.”
From The Dangerous Book for Boys, page 127. Sound advice on every page. The book is a non-PC work of genius that has tapped into a sense among many folk that life has become too obsessed with safety and avoidance of risk.
Three weeks ago it was a long weekend in the UK, and on Monday afternoon I therefore somehow found myself wandering fairly aimlessly around the centre of Szczecin in Poland. After contemplating for a little while that one of the major differences between communism in Poland and East Germany was that in Poland churches were rebuilt lovingly, whereas in East Germany they were dynamited for ideological reasons, and just thinking about how many ghosts there are in sites of ferocious battles between the Wehrmacht and the Red army, I found myself staring at these advertisements on a wall.
Not speaking Polish myself, I was entirely baffled by what this was saying or why, other than whatever it was having a certain amount of latent Anglophilia in it. Therefore I just took the photo and walked on.
Last night, while having a few beers in a pleasant London bar with a fellow Samizdatista, I took the opportunity of asking a Polish waitress what it meant. She looked at it for a moment, paused, and said “That is very weird…… They sell vintage clothing….weird”, poured my beer into my glass, and walked off.
In truth that only enhanced the mystery. Further questions arise. What exactly does it say on the front of the bus? Do the proprieters of this business use mod fashion to express the essense of London’s street fraternity culture? I need to know Perhaps the readership can help?.
This guy does not like the Joseph Heller book, Catch 22, one little bit, and gives a decent takedown of the book:
This is by intention a humorous book, a work of social satire. But it consists of basically the same joke over and over again: military people are evil and stupid. They are also stupid and evil. (Did I mention that they are evil? Also stupid?) I found this pretty clever and amusing for about the first twenty pages. But by that time I still had about 450 pages more to go, and the rest of it wasn’t any fun at all.
Absolutely. The problem with such books is that they were written to appeal to folk who no doubt thought that military people were and are inherently ridiculous. In that sense, Heller succeeded: I can think of dozens of lefty acquaintances of mine who have Catch 22 on their bookshelves but they would not be seen dead reading Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, or for that matter, the Sharpe novels of Richard Cornwell.
But as Lester Hunt, the reviewer, goes on to argue, if Heller really wanted to show some guts as a novelist, he should have attacked the whole idea of WW2 rather than target the lunacies of military bureaucracy (admittedly a fair target). But then, he would have to argue that it would have been better to let a certain A. Hitler and Co. tyrannise Europe and Asia, with all that would flow from that. Tricky, no?
Perhaps more generously, Heller and other writers of a similar ilk – Kurt Vonnegut springs to mind – might have had enough of reading about the feats of “The Greatest Generation” and rebelled. Perhaps some of this was necessary and right; Heller’s book and others of its type hit a receptive audience. Published in 1961, Catch 22 was bound to gain a more avid following from readers increasingly disenchanted with the Vietnam campaign. Heller caught the mood of the times well.
But it is an over-rated book in my opinion, and it is occasionally reassuring to realise that one is not alone in holding that sort of view.
Not only is innocent until proven guilty on the way out. The idea of limited and defined punishment for crime is too.
It appears the Sex Offenders Register which is supposed to…. well, I am not really sure what it is supposed to do, other than provide meat for the slavering tabloids, creates an ad hoc police power to get you banned from performing on TV. The BBC reports Police alert over TV contestant, in which a police spokesman says:
“There were concerns that with him being on the programme he might be seen by his victim or the victim’s family and there would be consequences from that. Lancashire Police spoke with the producers and suggested that it would not be in anyone’s interests for him to continue with the programme.”
One does not suppose the “victim or victim’s family” could remain unaware after an entirely predictable national media alert. And the consequences for the man concerned of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people who had no reason to know being told in the broadest terms he is “a sex offender” and the rest left to the mob’s squalid imagination? While ‘sexual offences’ is a broad category, from thought-crime, to bad manners, to genuinely consensual but officially barred conduct, … to the most serious violent crimes, one can be registered for any of them, even if there is no trial and no other punishment. The public obsession runs only one way, however.
Among the rank-upon-rank quangocrats and glorious anomalies of the Queen’s birthday honours, I was struck by an example of the coyness that draws attention to itself:
OBE – William Anderson; Grade B2, Ministry of Defence; London.
No citation. No location. All other London awards carry the postal out-code (e.g. “SW1A”, “W8”) of the recipient or their office. Grade B2 is a junior executive grade, and one usually only gets an honour for being head of something, even in the civil service. This all stands out as odd.
So why do it? If Mr Anderson’s work is too secret to mention, then it seems just a tad silly to go to great lengths not to mention it in this ostentatious way. It would have been easy to invent something boring that insiders would know to be a cover story (most fellow OBEs are getting the award for work in organisations no-one outside them will have heard of before). Or the honour itself could have been made secretly.
One of the downsides of being stuck in a hotel is having ones breakfast browsing depend overly on the dismal International Herald Tribune, the incestuous off-spring of the Washington Post and the New York Times.
There was an article in the IHT about the Italian state cracking down on tax evasion which cause the customary eye rolling when a free marketeer reads statements of of unquestioned absurdity such as:
If tax evasion is Italy’s national sport, as many people say, then the government of Prime Minister Romano Prodi has been working to change the rules of the game since taking office last year. Prodi says he believes that cracking down on tax cheaters is essential for an upswing in Italy’s lackluster economy. This month, he warned that his government could not lower taxes until “the indecent level of tax evasion” was reduced.
So taking more money away from people, essentially destroying some of their wealth, will make the economy better? And the government will not reduce the amount of personal wealth it destroys until people start cooperating more with having their wealth destroyed?
Yes, that all makes perfect sense.
There is an interesting article on New West by Christian Probasco, called California Looms.
California is a trendsetter state. Much like the weather, every Californian fad eventually makes its way over the Sierras and diffuses into the intermountain West. That’s wonderful, and it’s frightening, because there are some pretty disturbing things going on in the Golden State right now. O.K., I’ll admit: disturbing to people who take their civil liberties seriously. But I’m one of them.
His description of California reminded me of… Blair’s ever more authoritarian Britain. Another example of creeping democratic totalitarianism?
Seen on a street in Addis Ababa, near the interesting Entoto market
So you reckon your job sucks, eh?
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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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