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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To my complete lack of surprise, the latest inquest into Princess Diana’s death in 1997 is expected to state that she died because her chauffeur was drunk and lost control of the car whilst evading paparazzi. Sad but it happens all the time.
Why is it that people have such need to concoct weird conspiracy theories to explain so many events when recourse to good ol’ William of Ockham usually provides a far simpler explanation for why things happen? In particular, government conspiracies are either obvious (revealed by ineptitude or crassness) or non-existent due to the extraordinary difficulty of any group of more than three people have in keeping anything secret for more than a short period of time. It is not that conspiracies do not happen, it is just that they cannot stay secret for very long.
The other day I wrote about the charms of Suffolk, that county in East Anglia in which I was brought up. A place famous for gentle, flattish countryside, nice buildings, coastal scenery, fine beer and a once-very-good football team (Ipswich Town FC won the FA Cup in 1978 and the European UEFA Cup in 1981 in the glory years when the team was managed by Sir Bobby Robson).
Alas, Ipswich is now likely to be known some time for very different, appalling reasons.
Now is not the time to really go into much analysis of the crimes themselves. My heart goes out to the friends and families of the victims and like most people, I hope the piece of scum that carried out these killings is quickly brought to justice. While I have my doubts about using the death penalty in a world when so much of our Common Law has been damaged by stupid governments, it is hard not to feel sympathy for despatching such a lowlife rather than leaving him – I assume it is a he – to rot in jail for years at the taxpayer’s expense.
The victims in this case are described as prostitutes. Blogger Tim Worstall has thoughts about the nexus of drug use and prostitution and, being the pro-liberty guy he is, reckons that the women who ply this trade would be safer if prostitution was legalised. I agree (I had quite a joust with an authortarian if probably well-meaning chap by the name of Martin on Tim’s comment thread). I think that a person who sells his or her sexual favours for cash is entitled to do so with consenting adults and it is no business of the state to say otherwise. The harms that people usually associate with prostitution stem from the fact that it is often illegal and thus controlled by organised criminals, many of them drug-pushers as well. Legalising it, and taking prostitution out of a legal twilight zone is not a cure-all for the ills some people associate with it, but it would reduce problems, I think, such as sexually transmitted diseases, and perhaps reduce the sort of horrors that we have seen in the Ipswich area. Of course, if this monster strikes again and this time attacks someone from a very different set of circumstances, then the debate will shift.
This terrible saga also prompts me to wonder what could and should be done to encourage people to learn and practice self defence, but that is a whole topic in itself and I don’t have the time right now to explore it, but I am sure that commenters will want to think about it. I’d be interested to know if there are comparable recent incidents from other parts of the world and what happened subsequently. Send in any examples.
Perceptive article on the local area by Times columnist Libby Purves.
(Update: fixed silly typo in original).
Bragging about low unemployment under hyper-inflation is like bragging about the airspeed of aircraft in a power dive towards the ground.
– Commenter Shannon Love responds to a Salvador Allende admirer’s lionising of the Chilean economy under the socialist leader.
A great thing about capitalism is that people pay for the consequences of their own stupidity. So staying on the topic of Russia as per my last article, I have no sympathy with Shell Oil now that they are getting shafted by the Russian state after making vast investments in that country. The word of the Russia government (even more so than most governments) is worth less than nothing. As a result, anyone who makes agreements with that government and puts big money into a place which has for years clearly been a kleptocratic sink hole is the author of their own misfortune when things inevitably go pear-shaped.
So now that odd organisation Interpol has joined the ever more multi-national hunt for Alexander Litvinenko’s assassins. This all completely pointless. If the Kremlin or anyone else had wanted Alexander Litvinenko dead with no one knowing who had killed him, they would have simply have hired some thug in London to push him under a bus or stick a knife in him. But no… instead the murderers chose an absurdly sophisticated method of assassination by using an exotic toxic isotope only available to someone with access to the resources of a nuclear industry. The conclusion to draw from this is screamingly obvious: Vladimir Putin wants his critics to know who killed Litvinenko in order to frighten them into silence. I can see no other plausible explanation.
So why keep pretending it is a mystery who murdered this man? He was killed in London by agents of the Russian government and as a result the only discussion needed is how to react to a foreign government using violence to decide who can say what about people in Britain. At least the sort of response directed at Iran in the aftermath of the Salman Rushdi affair must be implemented. At the very least.
Other people will debate whether Augusto Pinochet, who died yesterday, was a wicked man who led a regime that killed three thousand people, or whether he should have killed rather more than three thousand as his communists foes have never had much of a moral problem with killing their enemies. My own opinion is that one should never kill an unarmed enemy – no matter what he or she might have been planning to do.
In the interests of honesty I should note that was not my opinion at the time. Many other communists regarded the independent Marxist President Allende as too rash and it is worth noting he was never a member of the official Communist party of Chile. Indeed when I heard the story about a group of communists mostly from outside Chile had been building forces from all over Latin America and beyond, had been told that President was about to deliver a speech and that they should come (leaving their firearms behind) and, when they got to the place the speech was supposed to take place, they were greeted with 50 calibre machine guns – well I laughed. But I was a child when I heard that story and children tend to be cruel.
Everyone has different levels of being shocked. For example, Pinochet either did not care (or did not want to know) about torture and summary execution. But when he got to hear of a rape of a prisoner he went through the roof (I heard this story from the prisoner via a BBC radio interview years ago) – the ‘holy army’ of Chile, based on the army of pre World War I Prussia – with joining up to the officer corps at the age of 15 and a monk like existence to one’s early 20’s, must not behave like ‘Argentines’, the prisoner must be released – and whoever was responsible must be…
On the democracy issue: It is true that Allende got more votes than any other candidate for President in the 1970 election (he got about a third of the vote), but he had violated the Constitution so much since then that the Congress had voted to outlaw him. Of course Pinochet did not turn over power to the Congress – he dissolved it (whatever it thought of Allende, the Congress with its majority of socialists and Christian Democrats would not have favoured someone who had just killed a lot of people – that it a problem with picking up a gun and doing some killing, how do you put it down again and not get punished?). By the way it was not, as is often claimed, the “first military coup in the history of Chile” as there was the coup of 1924 (but perhaps that does not count, as it was a leftist coup). → Continue reading: Augusto Pinochet
I have just run across a copy of the South Park Episode [RealMedia file] (from ‘Operation Clambake’) which was blocked from airing in many places… and I thought our readers might enjoy it.
Steve Edwards has administered a particularly welcome hatchet job on critical aspects of the ostensibly benevolent, world government-loving Bahá’í religion. Check the comments – the Bahá’í faithful have piled in.
Let us consider, my lords, that arbitrary power has seldom or never been introduced into any country at once. It must be introduced by slow degrees, and as it were step by step, lest the people should see its approach. The barriers and fences of the people’s liberty must be plucked up one by one, and some plausible pretences must be found for removing or hoodwinking, one after another, those sentries who are posted by the constitution of a free country, for warning the people of their danger. When these preparatory steps are once made, the people may then, indeed, with regret, see slavery and arbitrary power making long strides over their land; but it will be too late to think of preventing or avoiding the impending ruin.
– Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, to the House of Lords in 1737 (though reported rather later)
The Times reports that Rickshaw pullers reach end of ‘inhuman’ road
Rickshaw pullers … could soon be out of work after the Indian city of Calcutta banned the trade as inhuman.
The vote was boycotted by the Opposition, but Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, the West Bengal Chief Minister, told the state legislature: “In the 21st century it is not right for a human being to pull another human being.
I shall try not to be diverted into asking what the date has to do with it and go straight to the main issue. Why, out of all the millions of possible services that one human can perform for another is pulling a cart someone else rides on deemed “inhuman”?
It certainly would be inhuman if the rickshaw pullers were forced to this labour – but they are not. The only force involved is that Mr Bhattacharjee is forcing the rickshaw pullers to give up their livelihood. Compensation is promised but the plan for that seems haphazard and uncertain. In any case compensation diminishes but does not annul the wrong done to people who were making an honest living.
What is so bad about human muscle rather than batteries or internal combustion engines being used to power a conveyance? There are plenty of dirtier jobs, plenty more dangerous, plenty (if it were any business of Mr Bhattacharjee’s, which it is not) in which the generally perceived difference of class between the person paying for a service and the person providing it is greater than it is between a rickshaw puller and the person riding on the rickshaw. (Though if the class aspect is what bothers you, bear in mind that according to the leader of the Opposition in the state Assembly, quoted in Kolkata Newsline, many of the users of rickshaws are “school goers and senior citizens”. Not that it matters. If every rickshaw user were a sneering rich businessman with a villain’s moustache, it would still be a private matter between the sneering rich businessmen and the rickshaw pullers whether and at what price the latter sold transportation to the former.)
Such has been the strength of the idea of socialism for a century or more that even those who explicitly reject it often adopt its assumptions.
Socialists have always claimed to defend the dignity of labour, and have always been lying. If they really believed that the man who labours with his body was fully equal to the man who labours with his brain they would not have presumed to deny him the right to direct his own life and sell his own labour in the way he thought best. Rickshaw pullers are only one example of people whose dignity has been violated in this way, and India is far from being the only place where it happens. Readers will be able to think of many other examples closer to home.
Incidentally, pound to a rupee the twenty first century will not have run its course by the time the city of Calcutta bans everything but human-powered rickshaws on evironmental grounds.
Despite it being a highly sinister state, one of the most notable aspects of the façade North Korea presents to the rest of the world can be found in the unintentionally rich comedic value sincerely dished out by Pyongyang’s global network of propagandists. Exhibit A would have to be the depiction of the country’s kooky leader, Kim Jong il, who was famously and brilliantly lampooned in the movie Team America: World Police. Further evidence can be found in Samizdata postings on earlier oddball giggles courtesy of North Korea’s propaganda machine – review these here and here.
But wait, there’s more. A brief glance at recently-discovered Songun blog (looking through the comments threads there, it is quite remarkable how many people do not realise the site is satirical – hint, hint) prompts further amusement at the cack-handedness of the North Korean P.R. people. Did you know that North Korea is planning to host an international rock festival in early-mid 2007? It’s true. According to the North Korean English language website, Voice of Korea, ROCK FOR PEACE
will be the 2007 version of Woodstock rock festival in 1969 but in a different location and with a different goal.
Riiiight. And like crazy ol’ spontaneous and unregulated Woodstock of 1969, Rock For Peace promises
few restrictions and conditions on participation but any band will be considered even though you are from USA. The lyrics should not contain admirations on war, sex, violence, murder, drug, rape, non-governmental society, imperialism, colonialism, racism, anti-DPRK, and anti-socialism. There are few restrictions and conditions on participation but any band will be considered even though you are from USA. The lyrics should not contain admirations on war, sex, violence, murder, drug, rape, non-governmental society, imperialism, colonialism, racism, anti-DPRK, and anti-socialism.
I am not sure there are any American acts who would satisfy the criteria. Perhaps the Brits could send Rolf Harris, preferably on a one-way passage.
There are, however, indications that the North Korean propaganda machine is starting to come to terms with the concept of producing convincing copy. Displayed at the bottom of the Voice of Korea website is a photo of a few hot and bothered middle-aged Euros posing with a group of male teenage soccer players. Songun (and this Guardian article) quotes the caption of the picture in question as reading
HEY, AMERICANS, YOU SHOULD LEARN A LOT FROM OUR NORWEGIAN FRIENDS WHO ARE HAVING REALLY GOOD TIME WITH NORTH KOREAN YOUNG SCHOOL BOYS.
No doubt to the Norwegians’ immense chagrin, a really good time with the boys is no longer being had over at Voice of Korea. They’re learning – one step at a time.
I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.
– Winston S. Churchill, war leader, soldier, journalist, historian, painter and amateur pig-farmer.
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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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