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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Robert ‘I don’t blame them for hitting me’ Fisk makes a rare intelligent point in the UK daily newspaper, The Independent. He points out that the U.S. government’s proposal to finger-print certain Arabs and Muslims from a set of Middle East countries will not apply to people travelling from Saudi Arabia, despite the fact that the men who attacked the U.S. on September 11th were mostly Saudis.
He is right to point out the absurdity of this. While I detest much of Fisk’s reflexive anti-American, anti-Israeli rhetoric, on this point he is right. Saudi Arabia is the country which has contributed the lion’s share of terrorists waging their war against the West. The sooner that Western policy-makers recognize that fact and reduce our reliance on their oil, the better. (This is already starting to happen due to growing ties with oil-rich Russia). Of course, whether fingerprinting will make an iota of difference to catching would-be terrorists is another point entirely. Predictably, Fisk does not object to the U.S. government fingerprinting persons on a matter of principle, but mainly to use it as a stick to hit Bush.
Of course, some libertarian parents don’t pay twenty grand a year to avoid state schools; they keep their kids out of school altogether. Which arguably costs more, as it can mean the loss of an income, although the older they get, the easier it is to do other things than run circles around them all day. And if you work out how many minutes of teacher-time a child in a class of thirty actually gets to himself (something like ten minutes) the prospect of home educating is less overwhelming. It’s mostly a matter of setting them up, and then letting them get on with it.
Advocates of the Taking Children Seriously school of libertarian parenting believe in letting their kids decide for themselves whether they want to spend all day in a classroom doing rote spelling followed by long evenings sweating over homework assignments. The impressive results of independent schools like the one where I taught for seven years don’t just come from their less violent and drug-crazed atmospheres; those kids are made to work like…well, I can’t think of any adult job where you do a seven hour day in a compulsory unpaid job not of your choosing followed by two or three hours of homework, plus regular testing. For, oh, eleven years.
What I remember most about attending school is its mind-blowing tediousness. This is not an experience I could honestly recommend to an innocent small person, and it always amazes me how so many people who patently hate school when they are actually there, suddenly decide it’s just wonderful fun when their kids get to the age of five, or four, or two months, or whatever the school starting age is in the UK these days. I personally think they learn more from “Spiderman” (narrative structure, characterization, moral theories) than from any number of weirdly patronising and contrived government tests.
However, as a home educating adult, I do vastly appreciate the ability of schools to keep huge numbers of noisy unruly children out of the places I want to go in the daytime with my flawless well-behaved angelic ones (ahem). Except that, the ones who have guns probably aren’t too bothered about whether or not their parents are jailed when they truant.
Alice Bachini
12 exabytes of unique information…
Humanity had created about 12 exabytes of unique information by mid-1999 and would double that vast quantity by mid-2002, researchers from the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California, Berkeley, predicted two years ago. There is an interesting article in the Financial Times about the vast heap of information being churned out by the networked world. An exabyte is 10 to the power 18 bytes, or a billion gigabytes, or 50,000 times the contents of the US Library of Congress.
Yet again our crappy pox ridden ‘tech-support-vanishes-at-Five-O’clock-on-the-dot’ domain host is down… so if you want to send us e-mail, send it using [removed] rather than the usual ‘libertarian-samizdata.net’ addresses. Grrrrrrrrrrr.
In the not so distant future, Libertarian Samizdata will be moving both to a different domain host and probably off blogspot in order to make everything more reliable.
 Both Blogger.com and Soho-uk.com are living on borrowed time Update : Problem fixed… normal e-mail addresses working again.
It’s been another seriously bad week for the French left. The consequences of telling French voters to “vote for the crook not the fascist” (“Votez pour l’escroc pas le facho!”) have come back to haunt them. After all, if the left reckon Chirac’s ok to vote for in a presidential election, why isn’t his coalition ok to vote for the legislative elections?
Whoops! The result is that a massive abstention rate (by French standards) of leftists unable to bring themselves to support quasi-market reforms by the socialist party, and a rout by the mainstream right. The new government has stolen just enough of the ‘far-right’ agenda to be able to plausibly claim that voter concerns have been taken on board: the government is apparently promising a socking cut in taxes and to tackle crime with something more substantial than platitudes.
French libertarians will be uncomfortable with the fact that Alain Madelin is backing the government which contains enough crooks and wets to bring down a British Conservative government many times over. Bill Clinton wouldn’t last a year with this bunch. Madelin isn’t as capable a political manipulator (and that isn’t an entirely bad thing).
However, looking at such Socialist ‘intellectual giants’ as Jacques Delors’ daughter Martine Aubry (the ‘mind’ behind the 35 hour week), Elizabeth Guignou and convicted haemophiliac-killer Laurent Fabius, the new French government may prove impotent, corrupt and paralysed by factional strife over reforming the French welfare state, but they won’t actually try to make things worse as the Socialist party would. I still think president Chirac makes Stephen Byers, John Major and Neil Hamilton put together look good, but a government with Aubry in it is even worse.
On a ‘least bad option available’ there is a case for kicking the Socialists out. It seems a large portion of the French electorate agrees.
I would like to say “Well Done” to all the libertarian comrades who attended the Liberty conference at the week-end. I’m sure it was rather tedious, frustrating and confirmed all the usual complaints we have against the leftist so-called defenders of liberty. However the first virtue of attending such events is that it clears up in their minds whether we’re in only favour of the right of our corporate sponsors to screw the poor, or in favour of freedom for white people, or whether we’re serious about liberty.
No doubt there are some leftists who come away from an encounter with the Libertarian Alliance with the private realization that actually, they hate freedom if freedom means other people being allowed to choose capitalism as their mode of dealing with the universe. As someone who values truth above delusion I suppose the Libertarian Alliance performs a valuable educational function when it allows fascists to discover their inner selves and come out of the closet.
The value of such an exercise is that it makes the claim that libertarians are closet nazis unsustainable. Being accused of being naive utopians is rather an improvement on being falsely associated with every horror of the 20th century.
Several comments stuck in my mind that were made by speakers at the Liberty Conference on Saturday in central London at which I was present along with David Carr and some other Samizdata and Libertarian Alliance members. The following will not be forgotten easily:
“Er, Mr Chairman, we live in a managed society. We all manage each other. We cannot have a world where we just have freedoms and certain rules”.
This was uttered by a man who claimed to be a member of Liberty, the civil liberties lobby. Perhaps he should lobby to have that organisation’s name changed to something more appropriate to what he thinks should be its true values, such as ‘Nanny’.
As David said, it was not a particularly encouraging event, although a few half-decent contacts were made and a lot of Libertarian Alliance pamphlets were taken away.
As with many such events, the best course of action is to behave like a decent human being. However, and at the risk of sounding arrogant, most of the people there did not have the intellectual equipment to figure out the exit route from a damp paper bag.
Pellerito wants more links from this to other blogs. Here’s a good one. It’s a better-late-than-never (I hope) link, culled from dodgeblog (dodgeblog June 5, sorry, couldn’t f**king get it to go straight to the dodgeblog reference and gave up in a rage), to a nice big dose of American anti-EUism.
All Americans should be anti-EU because the EU is anti-US.
Orwell’s vision of a Big Brother state that knew everything about everyone had, over the past five years, finally borne fruit. And it was a strange fruit, fertilised largely by computer scientists’ urge to do things the Right Way. At last, they had managed to get government to adopt universal standards that allowed the free exchange of data between official computers. And thus they had overcome the bureaucratic friction that had always been freedom’s invisible friend.
According to an article by Mike Holderness in New Scientist (May 25, subscription necessary, home page link only) it is compatibility of government databases that will destroy privacy, not surveillance. A standard definition of privacy, by Alan Westin, professor of public law at Columbia university, is ‘the right to control how much information other know about you’. The existence of a unified database, linking let’s say the Inland Revenue, Social Services, the County Court Service, the Passport Office, airline booking computers, Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency and the National Criminal Intelligence Service, oh, and health information database, would mean that few people could keep any important secrets from the British government. For decades it had collected a great deal of information. Each time it gave itself powers to collect more – the Regulation of Investigatory Powers (RIP) Act 2000 and the Anti-terrorism Crime and Security Act 2001 – civil libertarians had warned about the disappearance of privacy. But it was the gathering together of all this data, not its existence or deficiencies in the technology limiting access to it, that threw the whole notion of privacy into question.
Mike Holderness points out that the unification had been made possible by the development of XML, the Extensible Markup Language, described as ‘ the universal format for structured documents and data’. In November 2001, E-envoy, part of the British government’s Cabinet Office, mandated XML as the key standard for data integration.
“The best defence of our privacy until now has been that government departments are fed up with paying contractors oodles of money to produce custom-built links between databases that are five year late. XML solves that technological problem, because it allows a simple ‘wrapper’ to be built around each database to a standard specification.”
Although the Information Society Forum, which is charged with advising the European Commission on such matters, has recommended in January 2000
“Privacy and anonymity are human and citizen’s rights. They are vital to citizens’ and consumers’ trust in the working of the information society. People must have control over the use of their personal data. They must feel free to communicate without being subject to permanent surveillance.”
I wonder how much more it will take for the public concern for privacy and anonymity to rise… I think our only hope is that bureaucratic inefficiency will not let us down. Let’s hope that as various blunders such as coincidental misidentifications cause misery to individuals with increasing frequency, the public realisation of how much and who exactly is watching them will increase too.
The New Scientist article is laced with a narrative, which is a brilliant illustration of the point. Given the restricted access to the original article I reproduce the story below:
Wednesday 2 May 2007 will always stick in Professor Max Buttle’s memory. He was about to leave for a conference in Berlin, but was detained by the arrival of the US secret service. Three debt collectors, a social worker and a court bailiff were also anxious to talk to him. The arrival on Buttle’s doorstep of a district nurse with urgent news about his cervical smear test saved the day. Clearly he wasn’t the woman they were all after.
He could see why the secret service agents were jumpy, though. The previous day had been dubbed “Weird Tuesday”. Terrorists calling themselves the Atheist Revolutionary Fundamentalist Front had laced Wall Street’s water supply with hallucinogens. The dollar’s exchange rate against the euro had briefly been an imaginary number. And that evening, a suspected atheist had been seen getting into a friend’s car outside a derelict house in North London. A police-woman’s helmet-cam fed its image to the DVLA computer. It recognised the number plate as Buttle’s. The computer instantly cross-checked with other government agencies, which contacted the American authorities.
What Buttle would never discover – because it was officially secret – was the conclusion of the internal inquiry into the disappearance of Ms Max Tuttle, suspected atheist. The helmet-cam pictures clearly showed a moth alighting on the number plate at the crucial moment.
In the end, Buttle got off fairly lightly. Once he’d come to official attention, however, he faced a tax audit in the course of which his wife learned of an expenses claim for a stay in Bonn when he was supposed to have been in Barcelona.
He is now single.
In the recent Samizdata article American Perfidy it is claimed that “apart from the tax cut” Mr Bush has allowed his agenda to collapse.
Actually (as I and others have pointed out) “apart from the tax cut” Mr Bush did not have an agenda worth talking about (just a lot of waffle about being “compassionate” by handing out tax payers’ money to religious charities). To be fair if Mr Bush had gone into the 2000 election with a decent agenda he would have lost. The “window of opportunity” that existed in Britain in 1979 and the United States in 1981 has gone. Just over 20 years ago most people would have accepted real budget cuts and deregulation, but this mood has past. The public (in both the Britain and the United States) are now obsessed with the “public services” and see new regulations as the correct response to any problem from Enron to hay fever.
Sadly the judgement on Mr Reagan and Mrs Thatcher must be that they had a chance but failed (in terms of regulations and welfare state programs government is bigger than ever now) – although in both cases one can produce a case for the defence (Mr Reagan faced a House of Reps controlled by the Democrats, Mrs Thatcher was surrounded by traitors from day one…). As for Mr Bush – he never had a chance. The media were against him, the “intellectuals” and their universities were against him, the Republicans did not have firm control of the Senate – all these things might have been overcome. However, Mr Bush faces a general public the majority of whom are statist – and against that what can he do?
Oh by the way – no Mr Clinton did not favour free trade. Mr Clinton liked trade agreements if they led to regulations being imposed on countries (especially “pro labour” union type regulations) and he especially liked trade deals if they helped build up the old dream of a world government (replacing G.A.T.T. with the W.T.O. was a fifty year old dream in certain circles in the U.S.) – one step at a time was Mr Clinton’s way (after the health care defeat early on in his administration). However an actual free trade deal – no, Mr Clinton never very keen on them.
Paul Marks
Blogger N.Z. Bear has a cool feature on his blog “The Truth Laid Bear,” in which he attempts to quantify the flow of blog-to-blog links within the blogosphere. He identifies the blogs that are most often referenced by other blogs, and he also identifies the blogs that most frequently link to other blogs.
You can probably guess who is #1 on both lists. Where does Samizdata rank? We are tied for 18th place on the list of blogs most cited by other bloggers. However, we are way, way down there in terms of linking to other blogs, tied for 96th place. So, here is a link to HappyFunPundit, which is on a roll with its last two entries. HFP’s “music industry suckage report” is one of those pieces where you realize that someone else has just articulated what you thought all along but couldn’t quite express yourself. And while the Kevin Richardson vs. George Voinovich flap is funny enough as a straight news story, HappyFunPundit’s take is even funnier. Well done, Dan and Steve.
Over on Liberty Log there’s a long but good piece by William Cooke in praise of skycrapers and critical of the Prince of Wales for being critical of skyscrapers. Some while ago William Cooke asked me if the Libertarian Alliance might like to publish this piece. My problem was the way it ended:
If we resurrect the Twin Towers and make them better and stronger they will be living memorials and signs of hope for the resurrection to come on the great day of the Lord. Every family member who lost a loved one, when they look at the new Towers, will not only be able to see that we refused to surrender to the terrorists, but that we have hope and trust that in the end God Himself will set all things right and see that justice and peace are brought about on the earth.
Well they may be able to say such a thing, but what if they think that everything after “but that” is gibberish and don’t want to say it? And what if many more, who didn’t lose any loved ones in the outrage but who likewise don’t want terrorism surrendered to, feel similarly? This paragraph is a pointless exercise in coalition breaking, an attempt by a Christian to take posthumous possession of some classic symbols of don’t-care-what-religion-you-are-so-long-as-you-want-to-do-business secular materialism for his team.
But although Cooke’s piece ends very religiously, the thing as a whole is insufficiently religious. The religion is merely bolted onto the end. This means that it can’t really be a Libertarian Alliance Religious Note but would be a bit odd as anything else.
But the fact that I was unable to classify this piece of writing to suit my own editorial categories, and instead put it to one side (the side you never get back to unless prodded), shouldn’t put anyone else off reading a mostly very good piece.
Just before Cooke’s piece gets religion, it goes like this, agreeing with the Anne Coulter piece that I linked to on Friday 7th:
But, the best memorial may be two giant towers, like the ones that stood there before. Atta and his gang hated the Towers for their architecture and for what those buildings stood for – namely freedom, capitalism, western power, and modernity. To rebuild would send the message that they didn’t win and that our society and our culture will prevail. Those people who died there would want us to go forward in the world with that message.
Which is how and where the thing should have ended.
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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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