get Murray Rothbard's A New History of Leviathan ABSOLUTELY FREE

I take it that Justin and I are getting emails from the same person.

Me, I’m a bit less militant about stuff like this. If someone wants to send me a review copy of a new book, I’ll go ahead and review it and the publishers are welcome to make of that what they will.

What I’m actually being offered here is the opportunity to promote the book sight unseen as part of some atsroturfed internet buzz thing. I’m promised various snippets, videos and whatnot that I can feed to you as though ‘twere the food of the gods.

Now you lot aren’t my best mates or anything, but I do owe you all the assurance that whatever appears here is actually sourced locally, as the crusties insist, rather than being a marketing hand-me-down.

The other thing I’m less militant about is naming names: especially when people are trying to get me involved in a fraudulent guerrilla marketing exercise for the latest book by Ms No Logo herself, Naomi Klein.

And in response to that I’d like to point out that those seeking something a little more substantial in the same line can download the whole of Murray Rothbard’s A New History of Leviathan absolutely free. That, my friends, is the way to do it.

You know, it would be kind of cool if everybody who has been spammed on behalf of Ms Klein could link to a download of something really worth reading as a response.

Comments

[Justin]

Is there anybody who *didn't* get an email from Ms Klein's people this week?

[Alex]

Me!

However, I read the extract in yesterday's Grauniad and I thought it was shit; glib, ill-characterised flabble (didja know Margaret Thatcher started the Falklands War so she could crush the striking miners in the disorder that followed? After all, everyone remembers the Iraq-esque chaos of post-Falklands Britain; roving gangs of demobilised bandits, bread riots, people roasting cats on street corners..)

[Alex]

..although come to think of it, they probably did do that where Jamie lives.

[jamie]

Ar. When we weren't chonnuck knockin'.

[Dan Hardie]

Chonnuck knocking?

[Chris Williams]

Leave it, Dan. That's what he was waiting for one of us to say. You're only playing into his hands.

[Phil]

didja know Margaret Thatcher started the Falklands War so she could crush the striking miners in the disorder that followed?

IHNTA, except that I went to the article expecting to find that Alex had given a brutally summarised hostile paraphrase. Instead I found this:

"Some of the most infamous human rights violations of this era, which have tended to be viewed as sadistic acts carried out by anti-democratic regimes, were in fact either committed with the intent of terrorising the public or actively harnessed to prepare the ground for radical free-market "reforms". In China in 1989, it was the shock of the Tiananmen Square massacre and the arrests of tens of thousands that freed the Communist party to convert much of the country into a sprawling export zone, staffed with workers too terrified to demand their rights. The Falklands war in 1982 served a similar purpose for Margaret Thatcher: the disorder resulting from the war allowed her to crush the striking miners and to launch the first privatisation frenzy in a western democracy."

What disorder? I mean, seriously, what is she even thinking of? And even if the riots of 1980 or 1985 had happened in the right time frame, how would that have allowed... urgh. Brane hertz.

Still, at least there's nothing wrong with her reading of Chinese history, eh readers? (Chonnuck knockin' indeed...)

[jamie]

For the record: Chonnuck-knockin' is 'stealing turnips from a field', last current in stoke to my knowledge during thge Miner's strike. Of course, we all took the opportunity to go vegetable hunting in the disorder ocasioned by the Falklands war as well.

That China stuff...oh, dear. She's right up to a point in that Tiananmen was intended by Deng as a "reform" policy along with the economic opening, but it's a case of chonnucks and sticks, really.