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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Central London was the venue for another demonstration by the Countryside Alliance today, timed to co-incide with a parliamentary debate on the proposed regulation of fox-hunting.
“”We don’t want an unjust bill, which does not have the support of the community to which it applies and I think we are looking at a serious amount of trouble if that happens…”
Judging from the latest reports from the broadcast news, that ‘serious amount of trouble’ is upon us as some 1500-2000 countryside insurrectionists are locked in battles with police and traffic in and around Westminster has been brought to a standstill.
It appears that not everyone in Britain cravenly rolls over when confronted by authority.
After being fined for a very trivial motoring ‘offence’, Leon Humphreys reponse was, ‘fight me for it’:
“A court has rejected a 60-year-old man’s attempt to invoke the ancient right to trial by combat, rather than pay a £25 fine for a minor motoring offence.”
Not surprisingly, his invitation was declined and the fine increased. Still, you’ve got to award the guy some brownie points for his sheer cojones.
Patrick Crozier has seen a round in the ongoing debate regarding state imposed ID cards… and he did not like what he saw.
Please don’t ask me why I was watching Richard and Judy (a sort of British ‘Oprah’) the other day but I was. They were having a discussion on ID cards with Tony Blair’s Big Buddy Lord Falconer on the pro-ID card side and Mark Littlewood of the pressure group Liberty putting the case against… and Littlewood lost.
I had better explain the way the argument went. Falconer said that it was all about cutting down on social security fraud and immigrants working without work permits. Falconer made a mistake in insisting on calling it an Entitlement Card (shades of the Community Charge) but otherwise he did fine. “Nothing to worry about” was the message.
Littlewood made two points. The first was that it didn’t work – there was plenty of experience on the Continent to show that was the case. The second was that it would be used by the police to harrass and intimidate members of racial minorities.
I have to say I didn’t find this particularly convincing. There is a rather odd belief in Britain that Continentals do everything so much better than we do. This is allied to the even odder belief that to criticize anything the French or Germans do is tantamount to xenophobia. To any “progressive” the argument simply won’t wash.
And as for the harrassment argument I am sure any self-respecting policeman can find ways to harrass people ID cards or not.
Which got me thinking – how would I make the case against ID cards? Well, for starters, I wouldn’t make it by making appeals to abstract notions like freedom and liberty. From what I can work out the vast majority of the British public simply have no concept of the term let alone a desire to see it preserved or extended.
The problem is that if you abandon abstracts you have to start talking in practicalities. You could mention that it is expensive, maybe a billion or so, but frankly in government spending terms that’s peanuts. And anyway, it does kind of miss the point. We are trying to make the claim that ID cards are a bad thing not merely an expensive thing which might do some good but that the costs outweigh the benefits.
You could say that it will prove very useful to future dictators and tyrants. But no one in Britain (outside libertarian circles) believes that will ever happen. “Goose-stepping Nazis here? Don’t be daft!” would be the attitude.
So, what on earth should we say? I think it is best to consider where the drive for ID cards comes from. Falconer himself said it: social security fraud ie the state and immigration ie the state again. This is a state policy to patch over the failures of previous state policies.
I think this is the line of attack that is likely to work best. Something along the lines of: “Isn’t it amazing. For a thousand years we Britons have been amongst the freest and most prosperous peoples of the world. In all that time not once outside a grave national emergency has our government ever forced us to possess identity cards. Even Bloody Mary had no use for them but this government does. What does that say about this government? I’ll tell you what. It tells us that it is uniquely incompetent…”
Well, that’s my stab.
Patrick Crozier
The following posting was written with my education blog in mind. However, although in general this enterprise is rattling along fine, it is for the time being ungettatable. I’m hoping that this is (a) because this is now Sunday afternoon and every internetter in the world is internetting and my blog empire’s hardware can’t cope, or even better (b) because Atlas (he knows who he is) has unshrugged and is finally getting Brian’s Culture Blog going, but in a way that has interrupted normal service. Alternatively, (c) one of Richard Branson’s slaves read what I put about his Lord and Master on Transport Blog the other day and has turned the Virgin army of hackers loose on my life, in which case it was nice knowing you all.
Anyway, I read what follows through again and found that it will do okay also for samizdata.net so here it is:
Joanne Jacobs links to the following piece of dialogue, originally posted on Notes From The Ghetto Teacher on October 29th.
Today, we were discussing 15th century literature and the invention of the Gutenburg Press. I asked them to write a short essay on what they’d learned from the chapter and lecture. One of my students tentatively raised his hand:
Student: Miss?
Me: Yeah, baby?
Student: When was the 15th century?
Me: Between the 14th and 16th, baby. Do you mean what years are in the 15th century?
Student: Aww … dawg … naw … I’m sayin’ … what century was the 15th century in?
Me: [pause] Write it down a piece of paper then read it back out loud.
Student: [writes it down slowly] Fif-teenth century.
Me: Right. So, what century is that?
Student: That’s what I be aksin’ you.
Some days, I just want to throw my chalk.
Now I have far less experience of teaching in a ghetto than does the Ghetto Teacher (she presumably has quite a lot and I have none), but what I want to know is: what would have been the problem with just giving the answer, along the lines of: “The fifteenth century means the one hundred years between the year 1400 and the year 1500”?
→ Continue reading: Well when was the fifteenth century?
Today I shall be leaving the wet and mouldy Albion for a snowy and frosty Mittel Europa. This means much lower temperatures but also fur coats, Christmas markets, hot mead, mulled wine, slivovica and lots of lovely, lovely traditional Christmas food. Provided I can heave myself away from all that feasting, I shall post about whatever catches my meta-contextual eye. Or may be I’ll just write about anything that still makes sense after drinking the fierce regional spirits.
I shall return to celebrate the New Year in London with the rest of the Samizdatistas.
Few weeks ago I blogged about China’s pressure on Hong Kong to pass an anti-subversion law. According to the law, people found guilty of acts of treason, sedition, secession from, or subversion of, the mainland government could be imprisoned for life under the new law. Also, concepts like “state secrets” and “national security” in the law are too vague, leaving them open to abuse.This may be – and I’d certainly argue that it will be – exploited by authorities in Beijing and Hong Kong against anyone they dislike in the former British colony, promised a high degree of autonomy when it was handed back to China in 1997.
Tens of thousands of Hong Kong people (march organisers say 50,000) have taken part in one of the territory’s biggest marches in years, denouncing the plans they fear will erode freedom and civil liberties. As many as 100 civil and religious groups joined in the march, including the Falun Gong spiritual movement, which is banned in China.
Mr Wong, a marcher says: “This law will threaten the rights of many, many people in Hong Kong, how can I not protest?”
Quite. I wonder what John Smith or Joe Bloggs would say…
You never know who’s trying to get into your computer:
“The phone rings: tech support: “hello computer tech support ” customer: “hello my computer was making a strange hissing noise last night and this morning when I turned it on there was a crackling noise and some smoke then nothing, if I bring it in can you fix it?”
This time, though, the intruder was caught on camera.
Mark Steyn is in rare form, delivering a splendid satirical roasting of the detestable Harold Pinter.
‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer had a very shiny nose,’ Pinter continued. ‘You know why that is? Depleted uranium’?
[…]
“George W Bush says he’s dreaming of a white Christmas,” sneered Mr Pinter. “But for the rest of us it’s a nightmare. I wake up feeling like a man trapped in a snowy knick-knack with his face pressed up against the glass howling, ‘Let me out of here’, only to be buried under another ton of artificial flakes.”
Splendid stuff. It is a continuing marvel to me that Pinter can still appear in polite society in Britain without having doors slammed in his face.
…about people living in miserable material conditions. It is a measure of relative poverty, or a difference in material goods. This is obviously most useful for the promotion of envy and class hatred. It also allows the glossing over of the twin Marxist errors of the “pauperization of the proletariat” in advanced capitalist economies, and the notion that people have no identity outside their membership of an economically determined class.
It is handy for promoters of class hatred to use ‘poverty’ as an issue. First the relative measure is easy to falsify. It is notorious that in the UK, satellite television dishes appeared disproportionately (in the late 1980s early 1990s) among low-income families before spreading to higher income brackets. On the other hand the only people I’ve ever met who didn’t own television sets in the UK were both in the top 20 per cent of incomes.
What value does one put on television ownership? The price of the set? How does one measure the value of the service provided by broadcasting? What about foreign holidays? If a low-income family travels to Spain for the same relative price as their parents once went to Morecombe on the British coast, are they really no better off?
Taking the measure of a household 60 per cent below the average household I once discovered a cute fraud in the British Household Survey (I’m sorry I don’t recall the year but it was in the early 1990s). “Household” is not the same thing as a house full of people. The bottom fifteen per cent households in the UK in the early 1990s had an average of 1.1 people living in them. The top fifteen percent had over four people living in them. The age distribution was equally revealing. I forget the exact figures, but elderly people and students were the bulk of the bottom fifteen percent of the population. This of course fits with what we know of individual people’s incomes over a lifetime: low-income as a youth, rising income until retirement and a drop in income except where large capital savings have been made.
I calculated that the income per person of the top fifteen percent households was about five times that of the bottom fifteen percent per person households, after taxes and cash benefits were taken into account. Considering that students and elderly people aren’t generally earning salaries, or of they are, these would often be part-time or seasonal, British “poverty” isn’t all its cranked out to be by campaigners for class hatred.
This has intriguing consequences for ways of “tackling poverty”…
More on this subject tomorrow
Paul Marks takes an interesting look at the relevance of Britain’s bloody history
How can a civil war, in the 12th century, between rivals for the throne of England be relevant to libertarians today? Surely the war was simply as it was presented by the contemporary (pro Stephen) writers – a lot of needless bloodshed brought about by the lust for power of wicked women?
However, I think the war is of interest.
First some background. Henry I was the youngest son of William the Conqueror, he based his claim to the throne of England (after the ‘hunting accident’ death of his brother William II) on the grounds that he was the only son of William I to be born after the conquest (i.e. after William I had been accepted as King of England) and in England itself.
To some people (such as Robert of Normandy – Henry’s older brother) such a claim appeared weak. However, by a combination of diplomacy and war Henry I made good his claim.
Henry had issued a charter of liberties limiting the lawless power of the Crown (in such matters as taxation and the security of property), he appealed not just to the Norman but to the Anglo Saxon (English) population and married Matilda (formally Edith) – daughter of the King of Scotland, but also direct decedent of the Anglo Saxon Kings of England going back to Alfred the Great. → Continue reading: Stephen and Matilda
TANSTAAFL Times is dead. In early 1996 I founded a libertarian newspaper called TANSTAAFL Times. The title was based on Robert Heinlein’s coined motto: There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. To date the publication has made me a small profit (under $100). The original intention was to publish twice monthly and as material became available I would shift to a weekly format.
The first edition carried two cartoons I drew (badly) myself, a news report and an opinionated feature article. It sold for 50 pence and went like hot cakes at a Libertarian Alliance conference. I had little trouble finding subscribers, my peak being 97 and with a peak print run of 250. I doubled the price without any problems.
Despite these low circulation figures and the fact that I paid contributors, I never made a loss. I managed to sell advertising space which alone covered all my costs except postage.
So why did only 24 editions appear in six years? After all if Samizdata offered to pay $50 for a 500 word article or a cartoon, I’m sure our editors would be at risk of being crushed in the stampede of eager wannabe contributors.
I took a lot of criticism, some of it to my face, for the failure to produce regular editions of TANSTAAFL Times. True, 24 editions is six times more than the average periodical achieves in a lifetime (anything more than five editions is a sort of success). The critics didn’t help, because they failed to understand the nature of editing a periodical.
I calculated that there were 74 distinct tasks involved in producing TANSTAAFL Times properly. As owner, editor, chief columnist, sole reporter, designer and subscriptions administrator (I’m forgetting some of my job description) I estimated that the job could not properly be done in less than eight days a month. But this assumed that I had material to publish. The reason that I offered $50 per article was twofold. First I wanted to be able to refuse rubbish. Second I wanted to attract lots of libertarians with something to say.
In six years I received exactly three unsolicited articles one of which was 10,000 words long. One was published. I had one offer of cartoons, but no samples. For two years every week I begged a cartoonist (who complained that he was broke) to let me have a look at the rejected material he offered to Private Eye which they found too “politically incorrect”. I offered £20, £30, once going as high as £150. Nada. In total I managed to scrape fewer than twenty articles out of different authors, most of which refused payment. I note that Samizdata gets more contributions than that every single week.
I had intended to produce a glorious 25th edition of TANSTAAFL Times, I’ve written four articles for it. But the fact that I knew that I wouldn’t get any authors without a fight was simply a battle not worth fighting.
So I’ve decided to write this blog and acknowledge that Samizdata.net is achieving what I had hoped for, and that I’m better off, at least for the time being, as a regular contributor to this blog, than ruling my own dilapidated kingdom.
I hope in due course to put an on-line archive of the 24 editions of TANSTAAFL Times. In the meantime they can be accessed through the British Library. I like to think that TANSTAAFL Times was ahead of its time: offering a libertarian slant on current affairs. I will miss it.
It’s a done deal!
“Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovenia and Slovakia are all set to join the EU in May 2004.”
Following an intense round of Gallic shrugging, Belgian glad-handing, German tax raising, Italian bribing and Swedish introspection, Brussels has munificently agreed to don the mantle of the late Soviet Union and squat like a toad on the peoples of Eastern Europe.
My message to the ten lucky winners of ‘Economic Jeopardy’: you guys need your collective heads tested! Don’t you know that there is no destination printed on that ticket you’ve just bought to ride the Great Rattling Train of Regulation?
Still, there is hope for the Turks, left yapping like angry terriers outside as the stone gates of the Belgian Empire slammed shut in their faces:
“European leaders meeting at a landmark EU Summit in Copenhagen this week thwarted Turkish and Anglo-American hopes for early negotiations for the country’s entry into the European Union, opting instead for a review of its progress on its economy, human rights and democracy by the end of 2004.”
A review!! Oh come on, we all know what that means. Sometime towards the end of 2004 a roomful of enarques in Brussels will take some time out from their daily task of grinding out reams of pointless legislation to call up Jacques Chirac and ask him if he has changed his mind about the Saracens. ‘Non’. Review complete.
No, the real mystery is why the US appears to be so keen to stuff Turkey into the Euro-oven. Do they think it will strengthen the EU? Why would they want to do that? Have they not been keeping up with current events in the State Department?
Or, alternatively, perhaps they realise only too well that the French and Germans are never going to accede to Turkish membership and are therefore sponsoring the proposition in order to lever open a few nascent cracks?
Of course, if Washington wants to be really smart they could always drop a line to Ankara offering them membership of NAFTA. The Turkish terriers would snap at it, I’d wager. They clearly want to join the West. They want to be in the rich boys’ club. Oo-oo-oo I wanna be like you-oo-oo. So let them. In fact, Washington could really set the cat amongst the Princely pigeons by going further and offering NAFTA status to the ten soon-to-be-strangled-in-red-tape candidates above as well.
Of course the EUnuchs would be furious. Wouldn’t want that now, would we (snigger!).
My message to the Turks; we Brits are in and want out, you’re out and want in. Fancy a swap?
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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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