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 London based Libertarian Alliance has issued a press release about an outrageous case in Britain in which a man who defended himself from knife wielding home invaders finds himself on the wrong end of the law:
“Drop all charges against householder who killed burglar. This man is a hero“, says free market and civil liberties think tank.
58 year old John Lambert, of Spalding, Lancashire, has been released on bail following two days of arrest after the death of one of two burglars who had broken into his home and put a knife to the throat of his wife, according to press reports.
During a struggle to defend himself and his wife Mr. Lambert killed the burglar with his own knife. Rather than suffering the indignity of arrest and police inquiries Mr Lambert should be hailed as a hero and public benefactor. So claims the Libertarian Alliance, Britain’s most radical free market and civil liberties think tank.
Libertarian Alliance spokesman and Director, Dr Chris R. Tame, says:
“It is a sign of a morally corrupt society that Mr Lambert should have been held by the police for two days and is even now facing the insult of further police inquiries. In a free and moral society the individual has the complete right to self defense, including the use of deadly force, against those who attack and rob them. Any one who invades the home of another constitutes a deadly threat to its inhabitants, and should be dealt with accordingly. Mr Lambert has behaved both honourably and morally in defending himself, his wife and his property – and is a public benefactor by ridding society of one more predatory looter who threatened the safety of us all.
Yet again it is quite clear that the police, like all nationalised industries, have no real interest in their “customers”, but would rather persecute both those who defend themselves and other easy targets. Whilst the restoration of law and order in this country depends upon many things – including the removal of legal impunity from children and adolescents, the restoration of strict sentences and real punishment for real crimes, the return of capital punishment, full restitution by criminals to their victims, the abolition of victimless “crimes” and pointless persecution of politically incorrect lifestyles, and the overthrow of the culture of socialist excuses and social determinism – a great step forward would be the full legal recognition of the right of individuals to defend themselves and others – and indeed, the restoration of their right to do so with firearms and other weapons.
A message must be sent to the criminal vermin that the workers of this country are not prey, that people will fight back, and that the police and the judicial system will no longer side with the predator rather than the victim.”
The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom is courage
– Thucydides, Pericles’ funeral oration
A 16 year-old boy has been killed in a drive-by shooting in Nottingham. At this stage, there appears to be no motive.
40 years ago today John Glenn rode his Mercury-Atlas rocket into the pages of history. His short mission in the Friendship 7 capsule was the first American manned orbital flight.
A meta-context is not a philosophy or a political belief, but rather the lens through which someone sees the world. It is a tradition of thought, a vibe, set of ‘givens’, the frames of reference within which questions are posed and answers found.
A person’s prevailing meta-context has an enormous impact on the way they make decisions and evaluate evidence. Imagine a series of laws has been enacted to create programmes for alleviating poverty in London or Warsaw or Accra or Miami. Imagine also that year after year poverty remains in those places much as before, regardless of the well intentioned programmes. Many would say, most in fact, that clearly better laws are needed and better programmes. This is not a matter of ‘left versus right’. The socialist (or ‘liberal’ in the USA) might argue that the reason the worthy programmes have not succeeded is that the root causes remain, and more needs to be spent on state education/racial sensitivity training/murals on playground walls. Laws must be adjusted to serve the objectives of ‘social’ need. The conservative however might argue that what is needed is less dependency on state handouts and demand that people take whatever jobs can be found or lose all state benefits… and maybe a partnership between state and faith-based organisations to do something or other would be good. Laws must be adjusted within the bounds of some form of ‘constitution’. The state does much the same sort of thing, just a bit less of it and favouring different ‘social’ objectives (discouraging single mothers/pornography/extroverted sexuality etc.).
Both left and right see themselves as opposed, and on some levels indeed they are. Yet both are arguing with each other within a profoundly statist meta-context: if only the unitary state was organised this way with our safe pair of hands on the political tiller, things would get so much better.
An example of this mindset on the right can be found in the United States when people cannot have a discussion about economics, philosophy or even morality on the Internet, addressing a global audience, without bringing up constitutionality, in every case meaning the US Constitution, and not the constitution of Uzbekistan or Australia or Senegal. Not only is this amusingly provincial, it presupposes that all matters of morality and interaction revolve around boundaries defined by the state and its legal documents.
A leftist example however is something I heard on the BBC News just today, reporting that disgruntled university students in England are ‘forced to work part-time due to the fact they now receive student loans rather than student grants from the state’. The news reader put emphasis on the word ‘forced’. Clearly it is implicit, a meta-contextual ‘given’, that the fact a person is having to earn the means to support a service they are receiving (education) for their own benefit, is regarded as an imposition, a questionable compulsion. I wonder if the BBC feels students are ‘forced’ to pay for the food they eat, the beer they drink and the clothes they wear? Perhaps they do.
To view the world within a statist meta-context is to view the world as being entirely politicised and politics is just a euphemism for the application of force-by-proxy. No interaction between people can therefore be truly free of the state. Unregulated interaction becomes interaction not yet regulated. Most people would not care to have their neighbours provide unsolicited and mandatory input on their conduct as parents. Yet the democratically mandated state does that all the time, politicizing the act of raising your own children. Only a pervasive statist meta-context allows this to happen at the same time as people bizarrely think they live in a ‘free society’. In fact they hardly live in a ‘society’ at all, but rather a state which has nationalised private life itself.
Tom Paine would not have approved.
That sound is the return of Will Wilkinson to the blogosphere. He has writen an excellent piece on the psychology of the post modern/anti globalization left called Pathologizing Dissent
In short, the rational, progressive ideology of the left came to be perceived by its adherents not so much as an ideology, but as a definition of social “health.” And as the case for socialism shattered, the conviction that the state must benevolently tend to the pathologies of its citizenry remained quite intact. Indeed, it was only too easy to substitute the rhetoric of health for arguments of reason. If you disagree with the left, you are not so much wrong as you are sick. Bring evidence against affirmative action; find yourself assigned to sensitivity training. In a brilliantly Foucauldian turn of phrase, Gottfried argues that the left undercuts disagreement by “pathologizing dissent.”
Terrific stuff.
Or perhaps language ‘lesions’ might be a better description over on Spanglolink‘s page Inside Europe: Iberian Notes. Their resident ‘cranky yanqui’ seems to be living up to his billing! Not for the delicate of disposition. 
I was just checking in at Xcor to see what they’ve been up to the last week or two. No new flights listed, but they are selling this really neat poster. Go for the signed copies. If they manage the next step – suborbital – it will be like having the autographs of the Mercury 7 team from 1960.
Besides – all you old net heads from the days of Space Digest know at least three of the people in the photograph besides Dick Rutan: Jeff Greason, Doug Jones and Aleta Jackson.
By buying one you’ll help fund the research program which will let you to go up some day soon.
Yes, I do have an interest in this. I know and like some of these people, I want them to succeed… and I want to go myself.
As many of you may already know, blogger.com and blogspot hosting was down for most of today. We will be looking to move off the blogspot server in the near future.
Also thanks to Sandra who sent us the 100k screen shot. We hope you like your extorted prize. We blew through 100,000 visitors fast.
I was fully expecting Steve Thoburn and the other ‘Metric Martyrs’ to lose their appeal before the Lords today. That they did, however, still resulted in my spending almost the entire day in a bug-eyed rage. I spent the afternoon doodling designs for giant siege engines that we could use to surround Brussels and reduce it to brickdust.
But, upon examining the actual rationale behind the verdict, the veins in my head have stopped throbbing with quite such gusto. I am forced to examine the small-print as both a Libertarian and a lawyer and I find myself largely agreeing with Brian Micklethwait below.
The application of EU Directives in British Law is, in fact, governed by British Law, namely the European Communities Act 1972 which rendered all British law as being subject to override by European Community Law. However, the Communites Act itself is a Constitutional Act. As such, it cannot be side-stepped by any subsequent legislation but it can itself be amended or even repealed by the British parliament.
There is a way out of the EU; all that is required is the parliamentary will.
I will disagree with Brian, though, that the Lords ruling is an implied ‘Declaration of Independence’. That ‘Declaration’ can only be made by a sovereign British parliament and, given the near-blanket commitment of our current political class to the EU project, the manifestation of that ‘will’ is still along way off.
From this little article lifted in its entireity from today’s JPMorgan Chase Tech Industry Daily, it would appear that the corporate world is starting to take notice.
Will bloggers compete with journalists?
In January alone, at least 41,000 people created new Web logs using Blogger, Wired News reported yesterday. A Web log, or “blog” for short, is a tool for self-publishing on the Web, and often features links to Web sites that the writer finds interesting. It’s like a one-person discussion group. Web logs have now crossed a tipping point, leaping from a “self-contained community” to a group “large enough that there’s many different Web logs,” according to Evan Williams, who runs Blogger, one of the most popular services for creating a blog. Some have put the total number of Web logs at more than 500,000.
Blogging boosters have proclaimed Web logging a new form of people’s journalism. Now comes the backlash. John Dvorak of PC Magazine said that while a few blogs were insightful, many new webloggers were getting into blogging for all the wrong reasons. They are “wannabe writers” who are looking for “ego gratification,” Dvorak wrote.
[Tech Daily] Editor’s comment: Starting a blog is just like creating your own Web homepage for those who don’t know how to create one. Blogging software is a PC-based “client” that enables the writer to use a browser to post a blog to a server. That server can be inside or outside a firewall. To start a blog you first go to Blogger or one of the other blogging-service sites and download a small piece of software. You’re given a URL of your own, and you can then start publishing your thoughts right to that URL. Will bloggers replace journalists? Bloggers are to journalists as ubiquitous video camera owners are to professional photographers. It’s the talent and not the tool. Still, amateur video has a place in recording the events of our time.
Blogging has some potential in a corporate context in support of knowledge management, workgroup collaboration, or corporate communications. But blogging will take time to find a home in the corporate environment. The key to its adoption will be to find one-to-many communication requirements where other tools like e-mail and Web pages aren’t as effective. Blogging within corporations will probably follow the same route as instant messaging. IM started with kids and spread to adults as its effectiveness within corporations became evident. I’d be interested in hearing from anyone who knows of effective corporate blogging solutions.
Fellow bloggers, hang on to your hats. This ride could get wild.
I followed the link Perry gave us re the Metric Martyrs case, and read the piece by Helen Szamuely with interest, indeed fascination.
Now I realise that nothing involving the EU is ever quite what it seems, but my understanding of Helen Szamuely’s understanding of the case is not that the EU now rules Britain, but that the EU now rules Britain on British sufferance, which can, any time we like, be unsuffered. The basis of EU rule in Britain is that Britain switched it on with a Parliamentary Statute, and Britain can switch it off. The British Parliament is and will always remain sovereign.
At the heart of the EU project is the claim that once you’re in, you can’t leave. Not so, say our judges.
The Metric Martyrs lose, not because the EU says so, but because the EU says so and we say, for the time being: okay. But in the future, we could decide to say: not okay. Britain is not yet a province of the European Superstate, according to these judges. It would be complicated to unravel, very complicated, and it would require a great and highly self-conscious, so to speak, Parliamentary convulsion, in the manner of, say, contriving a new amendment to the US Constitution. But, say Their Lordships, we could unravel it if we chose to, and declare national independence again.
Which means that, in a sense, they just did.
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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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