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]
|
How should we assess Britain’s success in its diplomatic efforts to release the hostages? Iran, more bellicose and intransigent, is now determined to use them as predigree prisoners for propaganda purposes and possibly put them on show-trials. The key to success is acquiring more levers to influence Iranian behaviour and exact a price for their actions.
Britain cannot bring military force to bear, due to the underfunding of our armed forces. We are unable to acquire a united diplomatic front following the debacle at the United Nations. Our sailers’ plight will not be met with a range of new sanctions. At a meeting of foreign ministers in Europe, there was strong condemnation on the bogpaper press release that all such meetings issue. None of the Member States were willing to entertain the notion of real action: freezing export credit guarantees to Iran. Let us hear their reasons for turning their back on their ally:
EU foreign ministers meeting in Germany called for the sailors to be freed but ruled out any tightening of lucrative export credit rules. The EU is Iran’s biggest trading partner. British officials are understood to have taken soundings on economic sanctions before the meeting but found few takers.
France, Iran’s second-largest EU trading partner, cautioned that further confrontation should be avoided. The Dutch said it was important not to risk a breakdown in dialogue.
Republicans in DC have rightly branded the government’s dependence on international law and sanctions as “pathetic“. Rightly, in this instance. The government prefers to maintain its reputation for upholding international law and ruling out other strategies that could exert greater influence in Iran, such as interdicting their oil trade. Blair’s prissiness in holding the moral high ground is achieved by making all the right noises and going through the (bowel) motions. Yet, after the EU and the UN, the cupboard is bare. What next, Mr Blair?
.. because someone else may be watching, too.
Pippa King is rightly outraged by the bad bargain Bury schools appear to be getting for taxpayer’s money with their their “cashless” fingerprint-based school meals systems. However, I do not think that is the most disturbing element of the story.
There is nothing wrong in principle with using a biometric instead of a separate token to charge an account. And cash-handling is expensive, so you need to minimise it. When I was a child, the school took dinner-money once a week and issued paper tickets: one ticket, one meal. What you ate for your ticket was up to you, though choice was limited. Poor children entitled to free school meals were handed the tickets free, and what money changed hands from whom was invisible to all other children. Each stage involved discrete self-checking transactions in truck/tuck, with no need for continuing accounting for individuals.
Having created individual accounts, the system might still be a simple acounting tool, if those accounts were private. But much more than that is happening here.
Pupils even register points for making healthy choices and are rewarded for healthy eating.
And this being information on ‘risk’ to children – the risk of eating chips, in this case – it will be shared with other authorities, common law confidentiality is expressly excluded [Children Act 2004, s12]. But the information need not be collected; it is because it can be.
The concept of limited government power under law is almost dead: any system in the hands of a British public authority, whatever its ostensible purpose, now acquires a function in surveillance and behaviour control.
I seldom encounter much in the way of verbal discussion attached to Flickr photos, because the kind of Flickr photos I usually look at are things like pictures of footbridges, concerning which there is really not a lot to be said, given how many such snaps abound on Flickr. But this snap (catchily entitled “DSC07222.JPG”) is different because it is a photo of a rather violent political demo in France. This was taken by an accredited photographer, who had his card examined by the Police but who was then permitted to keep his snap. But, says one of the commenters:
i got all the photos and videos i took yesterday on my camphone deleted by a policeman who told me he would arrest if he ever saw me doing again. I don’t know if he had the right to erase the photos, i should see about that.
Presumably not. My thanks and congratulations to Norwegian media blogger Kristine Lowe for the link to that, and for spotting the above comment. Kristine blogged earlier about the new French law.
If all French bloggers, podcasters, vodcasters, and even those snapping a picture with their mobile phone camera and sending it to a relative, could be put on trial or fined for publishing footage from the frontlines. How bizarre, troubling, surreal. …
Indeed. This is a huge issue. I was in Parliament Square not long ago and observed some hairy anti-war person being shoved into a Police van. The entire scene was surrounded by other demonstrators holding video cameras. They were subjecting to the Police themselves to surveillance, guarding the guardians you might say. I do not ever want that to be illegal in Britain, but in France, it would appear that it already is.
Expect a thriving market in fake “accredited photographer” cards. And expect things in France to get even more interesting, when, as they soon will, digital cameras become so small that it will be impossible for the Police or anybody else to spot them being used. In fact, expect things everywhere to get more interesting.
Meanwhile, I have been chronicling that brief moment when digital cameras are (were) quite small, but still visible in action.
Swedish globalisation advocate Johan Norberg looks up a picture in a beautiful Italian church, and sees an early sign of where individualism comes from. Nice thoughts, succinctly expressed.
I have always regarded it as reliably axiomatic that government departments are named after whatever it is they are trying to put a stop to. One need look no further than the Department of Education for practical proof of this principle in action.
For the same reason I have always regarded it as a blessing that the legal system has been administered by something called ‘The Home Office’. For all of its indisputable shortcomings, I took great comfort from the fact that we do not, nor have we ever had, a ‘Ministry of Justice’.
Until now:
New department: the Ministry of Justice
A Ministry of Justice will be created to provide a stronger focus on the criminal justice system, and on reducing re-offending.
This new ministry will take over the staff and responsibilities of the Department for Constitutional Affairs, and the National Offender Management Service (NOMS), including the prison and probation services, and have lead responsibility for criminal law and sentencing…
The Prime Minister said the new Ministry of Justice ‘will take the leading role in delivering a fairer, more effective, speedy and efficient justice system.’
I rather think that a more realistic appraisal will be opaque, incompetent and, above all, self-serving.
They may as well just go ahead and set up the Ministries of Truth, Prosperity and Freedom and I daresay that, in the fullness of time, they will.
“The severing of Britain’s economic ties with its Commonwealth partners as a price of European (Union) entry further strained those relationships. Today, Germans arriving at London’s Heathrow airport breeze through the domestic arrivals line, while Australians who fought against the Germans at El Alamein for Britain’s sake wait in the foreigners’ line with the Japanese.”
– Jim Bennett, The Anglosphere Challenge, page 279.
Not that I have a problem with Germans or Frenchmen “breezing through” customs.
An old refrain from protectionists and other fixed-wealth folk is that it is terrible that Britain does not have a major car manufacturer any more. Japanese and other nations’ car plants are in Britain, true, but we have little home-grown stuff. Jaguar is owned by Ford. Aston Martin has been taken over from Ford by a private equity firm. TVR has gone. Morgan is just about hanging on. Land Rover, Rolls Royce, Bentley, MG… they are all in the hands of evil foreigners.
This is largely a function of globalisation, with a bit of help from decades of restrictive practices, crap design and poor quality during the 1950s, 60s and 70s and early 80s. The car industry never really recovered. A whole generation of people learned to loathe British Leyland cars and bought Saabs, Renaults, Citroens and VWs whenever they could. Even though some gems remained – Landrovers and some of the Jags were fine – the reputation of the British car industry was devastated. The same nearly happened to Italian carmaker Fiat when Communist-run unions nearly destroyed that industry as well. But at least Italy had Ferrari.
However, the situation these days is quite bright. Many of the world’s top Formula 1 racing teams are based in Britain, like MacLaren in Surrey. And as this article demonstrates, while it may be cheaper to make cars in China or Brazil or Poland, many of the hottest car designers are still British. In the information economy, the value-added areas of design are what count, and it turns out that Britain is rather good at it.
“Beware of people who read poetry in public. They may have other nasty habits.”
– R.A. Heinlein, from the Notes of Lazarus Long.
I suggest that you read this before you sit down to eat breakfast and not afterwards, lest you spend the rest of your morning mopping semi-digested coco-pops off the kitchen floor. Here are a few tasters:
I’m in tune with the ‘I can’ generation
Wow! Is that anything like the Pepsi Generation? Like, totally kewwwwllll. Not to mention hot, hip, happening, in the groove and sexeeeeeee.
That is why social and economic change today require government leadership and profes sional innovation, as well as mass mobilisation.
Certainly, sir. Corporal Tremayne reporting for duty, sir (salutes).
In public services, an “I can” service will continually ask: how can we devolve power, funding and control to the lowest appropriate level, while maintaining high national minimum standards? Can teachers and children inject more creativity into what is learnt, where and how?
Well, ‘I can’ tell him what the ‘lowest appropriate level’ is for funding and power.
This is not a zero-sum game between government power and citizen power; it is a genuine partnership that breaks down the divide between producer and consumer.
Eh?
It doesn’t get any better than that. This man has penned a whole mainstream editorial vision every single syllable of which is complete bollocks. I have to ask myself whether he actually believes this horse-manure or is he just saying these things because he thinks that this is what the public wants to hear? What world does he see through his eyes? Does he actually see hordes of shiny, happy, clappy ‘I can’ people exalting at his feet and begging him to lead them to the Promised Environment? Is he so twisted by lies that he can open wine bottles with his fingers or he is so spaced-out on his own propoganda that he has drifted hopelessly away from anything that could reasonably be described as the real world?
Perhaps one of you ‘I can’ types out there can tell me.
Frequent commenter ‘Old Jack Tar’ has a rather different view than the one being offered up by the UK media regarding the conduct of some of the British naval personnel being held captive in Iran.
Ever since the capture by Iranian forces of fifteen British naval personnel, the UK news channels have been falling over themselves to praise female British sailor Faye Turney. I have heard her described as “professional” and “well trained” and “sensible”.
Really? I beg to differ. From the moment they were captured they should have responded with NOTHING except “Name, rank and serial number”. These people have a professional (and legal) requirement to keep their yaps shut and not give aid with their words to a clearly hostile foreign government.
Yet she appears to have written a ‘heartfelt’ letter home praising the ‘kind’ and ‘warm’ Iranians who kidnapped her at gunpoint, admitting the boarding party had strayed into Iranian waters, presumably in return for a kebab.
My equally ex-RN wife’s remark upon seeing Turney on TV wearing a headscarf was “I would have thanked them for giving me something I could use to strangle one of the guards with when I eventually make my escape, but if they want me to wear it, well I would have told them exactly where they can…”
My good wife is a forthright person and decorum prevents me from finishing her remarks.
“Professional” and “well trained” my arse. Yet I have the sickening feeling this woman will be lionised when she is eventually released.
Or at least he tried to, but her friends and family made sure she was never made aware of the sick actions of her daughter’s former schoolteacher.
As I say in the article, there is no law against being a jerk – nor should there be – but “It is a First Amendment right” is a coward’s excuse for trying to hurt a dying woman and her grief-stricken daughter. There are lots of things in life against which there are no laws, but which are heartless, meanspirited, and downright disgusting things to do to another human being. If you consider the US Constitution your moral guidebook, you need more help than any lawyer can offer.
Eliot Stein refers to himself as an “internet pioneer” (in gutless actions?) and takes great pride in the lengths he went to in order to distract Cathy from her waning health and to try to get her to focus her attention on him (“I WILL NOT BE IGNORED!”), which says almost as much about his character as you need to know. Eliot Stein, while Maia‘s schoolteacher, also posted nasty comments on Maia and Cathy’s blogs; when Maia’s school got rid of him, he came to work in a tuxedo on his last day and made sure to tell every class that his departure was Maia’s fault, which he must have known would lead to her being bullied and humiliated (which is exactly what happened).
Like I said, Eliot Stein is a real peach. And yet he still persists in the belief that Cathy could say or do anything which would make him seem more unfit to be around children than his own professed actions – of which he boasts with considerable pride. Would you want your kids to spend any amount of time around this man, let alone be stuck with him as a schoolteacher?
|
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