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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Unlike the British press, we at the Samizdata are keeping our eyes on what appears to be the increasingly deteriorating situation in France. Because, say what you like about France (and, let’s face it, who doesn’t?) but it is still a major and important country and also one that happens to be but 26 miles away from us.
If the stream of reports from Claire Berlinski (who lives in Paris) are anything to go by then that country is in the process of meltdown. I am not sure whether anything can or will be done to reverse or halt this process but at least this Frontpage Symposium may go some way to shedding light on the context of this disintegration:
France behaves more and more as if she does [sic] belong to the West anymore and as though she is the leader of the third world. Doing this, France has nothing to win, maybe just second-rate contracts and an ephemeral popularity among all the frustrated in the world. France will win only one thing, and for a short time, peace inside France: it will avoid riots among Muslims living in France now.
The opinions and prognoses range from melancholy to apocolyptic but this is still well worth reading because it is not just another familiar orgy of Anglospheric Frog-bashing; the symposium participants are all French.
[My thanks to reader ‘Rich’ for the link to the Frontpage article.]
I was just watching a report on early morning TV which was in itself a rather mundane piece about how the authorities in Britain are clamping (immobilising) cars which are stopped on the road and found to have unpaid vehicle tax. Yeah yeah, whatever.
But then came a remark which astonished me…
“Unpaid annual Vehicle Excise Duty costs the British economy millions of pounds per year”
Now without getting into the rights and wrongs of vehicle ownership taxes (as opposed to road use taxes), the implication is clear: money not paid to the state for the privilege of owning your own several property does not create wealth… only when that money is safely in the hands of the state does the British economy benefit. Note, the words use are not “costs the British state millions…” but rather “costs the British economy millions…”
And with that tax money taken out of private hands, the state creates a net gain in wealth how exactly? Hiring more wealth destroying bureaucrats? And of course that money you selfish tax dodgers have not paid to the state is going to be flushed down the toilet rather than being used for some alternative economic activity, right? Likewise immobilising people’s transport because they have not paid an annual ownership tax, and thereby preventing those people making deliveries or getting to work, that does not British economy a penny, right?
Arrogance and ignorance in equal measure. The state is not your friend.
Our RDF & XML syndication feeds were buggered up…
…and now they are not. Hurrah 
Tomorrow night my disembodied voice shall be appearing on BBC Radio 3, on the programme Night Waves at 9:30 pm UK time (also via Internet).
Along with George Monbiot, John Lloyd, the eminent journalist and former editor of New Stateman, and possibly one other person, we shall be discussing democracy, globalization and politics.
A democracy is a form of government in which the people, either directly or indirectly, take part in governing. The word democracy originates from Greek, and means rule of the people.
– From Wikipedia
In my recent trip to the FACT centre in Liverpool to evangelise for the blogosphere, it was suggested to me by a young lady that one of the great things about blogs is that in contrast to the established media, they are inherently democratic.
She was somewhat surprised when I disagreed. The young lady then suggested that as blogging empowers the common man by allowing them to express their views to the world without big business media owners or the government getting in the way, that it must surely be democratic. I agreed that blogs do indeed give people an unprecedented means to express themselves directly by disintermediating both the established media and the state, but there was nothing democratic about that whatsoever.
Democracy is about politics, and politics is about the use of the collective means of coercion. Democratic politics thus refers to systems by which the people who control those collective means of coercion are chosen and made accountable via one of several methods of popular voting. For something to be ‘democratic’ therefore, it must be amenable to ‘politics’. Therefore for a blog to be ‘democratic’ that does not mean it is empowering or that it disintermediates the state. In fact it means the state, which is to say democratic politics is very much involved.
But you, the reader, do not get a vote on what get written in the articles on Samizdata.net. You may agree with what an article says or you may utterly disagree, but what gets written does not depend on how popular those sentiments are. We write what we want to write.
Where you do get to choose is whether or not you decide to come back and read us again. Much as in an open market, I might decide to try and sell my fruits and meats to those who pass by, yet I cannot force them actually purchase any of my goods if they do not wish to. They cannot stop me offering for sale those things I think makes economic sense but if I am wrong about what the market wants or if others make a better offer, then the passers by will choose to shop with someone else.
Where potential clients do get a vote, albeit indirectly, rather than a ‘market choice’ regarding what I sell, is when the polity regulates what can or cannot be sold. For example it may be up to me if I wish to try and sell veal or chickens or bananas, but I may be prohibited from selling crack cocaine or flamethrowers. So to that extent a market can be made more subject to politics and less to several choice.
And so it is with blogging, at least to a point. But to the extent that if Samizdata.net was to suddenly and highly improbably start advocating Nazi politics (such suggestions are illegal in Germany) or rather more plausibly call for the overthrow of Islamic law wherever it pertains (such suggestions are illegal in Saudi Arabia) then the very fact it is so extraordinarily difficult to prevent such sentiments being proffered by us makes us the very antithesis of ‘democratic’. You can do the ‘equivalent of refusing to buy’ in a market, i.e. you can just stop reading what we write, but you cannot actually stop us from writing. You, the reader, do not get a vote on that.
Blogs are therefore something which empowers the individual, the blogger, regardless of the wishes, and therefore the votes, of a collective who might wish to have a say in what a blogger writes. The correct analogy is therefore the market place… a blog is a open air stall in a marketplace for ideas called the blogosphere. If you find the ideas we are ‘selling’ interesting (even if you do not agree with them) you will come back for more. If we horrify you or even worse, bore the pants off you, you will probably not come back. But we will write what we will write. There is nothing democratic about that… and long may it be so.
Thousands were slaughtered on the streets of Liberian capital of Monrovia during the intermittent civil war in the mid-1990s. Now there is more killing as clashes between troops loyal to President Charles Taylor and the well-armed rebels have intensified. The French military commanders based in nearby Ivory Coast felt they had no option other than to order an evacuation of United Nations staff and foreign diplomats from Monrovia.
But unlike in Sierra Leone in 2000, when British troops remained in large numbers on the ground for months, the French commanders ordered their men to leave Liberia as soon as the foreign passport holders had been rounded up.
Our sole mission is to proceed with the evacuation of Europeans and other foreigners upon the demand of the French government.
The rebel groups now fighting for control of Liberia have been accused of voodoo-driven atrocities that have almost become the norm in west Africa – with prisoners cut to pieces so rebel soldiers can eat their vital organs.
For Liberians who did not have the option of being rescued, the immediate future looked grim and thousands of Monrovians continued to gather around the city’s main soccer stadium desperate for sanctuary. Fanny, a Liberian refugee who had trudged for two days to reach the stadium said:
There’s no food anywhere. People are dying. The Americans must come. We want peace.
Thanks to Dissident Frogman for the link.
I just did a random link from the list on the left here such as I like to do from time to time, and I got to this blog, and to a link from it to this article. What is being described here sounds amazing, and although I did look to see if the date April 1st was involved, this seems to be for real. Someone thinks it’s for real, at any rate.
Someone called Appel is busy developing a process which turns rubbish into riches.
The process is designed to handle almost any waste product imaginable, including turkey offal, tires, plastic bottles, harbor-dredged muck, old computers, municipal garbage, cornstalks, paper-pulp effluent, infectious medical waste, oil-refinery residues, even biological weapons such as anthrax spores. According to Appel, waste goes in one end and comes out the other as three products, all valuable and environmentally benign: high-quality oil, clean-burning gas, and purified minerals that can be used as fuels, fertilizers, or specialty chemicals for manufacturing.
…
“The potential is unbelievable,” says Michael Roberts, a senior chemical engineer for the Gas Technology Institute, an energy research group. “You’re not only cleaning up waste; you’re talking about distributed generation of oil all over the world.”
“This is not an incremental change. This is a big, new step,” agrees Alf Andreassen, a venture capitalist with the Paladin Capital Group and a former Bell Laboratories director.
I’m always impressed by the savvy and general informedness of the best Samizdata comments on technology issues. So, people, any comments on this stuff? Is this thing all that these guys are cracking it up to be? Or is it fatally flawed? Miracle or mug’s game? Genius or madness? Alchemy or insanity? Or maybe just somewhere in between, and boring? I’d love to know.
If it’s half as good as they’re saying, this looks like another wonder of capitalism to add to the collection. But then again, maybe this has all been gone into weeks ago, and proved idiotic.
If it does work, how long will it take for the environmental lobby to decide that they hate it? Because if this is a wonder of capitalism, they will hate it.
The mainstream news outlets in Britain are abuzz tonight following today’s statement from Chancellor Gordon Brown that now is not the right time for Britain to abandon sterling and adopt the Euro. Dressed up in the mawkish tinsel of lovey-dovey Euro-warmth, Mr.Brown told the nation that, with great reluctance, he must rule out adoption of the Euro because his ‘economic tests’ have not been met.
Cue shrugs, eyeball-rolls and ‘whaddaygonnado?’ sighs from Mr.Brown and a chorus of booing, hissing, spitting and puppy-kicking from an assembled throng of federasts in both Parliament and the nations newsrooms. It is all a pantomime, of course. Blair and the rest of the executive want to the Euro with the kind of slavering intensity with which an alcoholic needs a shot of gin. The so-called ‘economic tests’ that must be met beforehand are purely a fig-leaf to mask the fact that they cannot convince an increasingly skeptical and surly British public to go along with them. The very nano-second the government thinks it can win a referendum on the issue the ‘economic tests’ will have miraculously been met.
But let no-one be fooled into thinking that Euro-geddon has been postponed. Beneath the blizzard of high-falutin’ fiscal gobbledegook being whipped up by the ‘meeja’ talking heads, an even more sinister tentacle of the Belgian Empire is slowly and quietly coiling around us. → Continue reading: The real EU threat
The nanny state is invited to strike again. The British Medical Association (BMA) is proposing a 17.5 percent VAT on high-fat foods like biscuits and processed meats to solve obesity-related problems, which cost the NHS roughly 500 million pounds a year. BMA spokesman Dr Martin Breach informs us:
There is an epidemic of obesity in the UK. You are what you eat and if that is the case the British public have a huge problem. Charging VAT on saturated foods found in processed meat products like sausages, pies and pastries, butter and cream, may help save some lives.
According to government statistics, one in five men and one in four women is obese. Obesity is a serious risk factor for heart disease, high blood pressure, stroke, diabetes, muscle and respiratory problems and certain types of cancer.
One of the opposing arguments is that a punitive ‘tax’ on fatty foods would in fact work as a regressive tax since those on lower incomes generally tend to eat larger quantities of cheap, high-fat food.
Belinda Linden of the British Heart Foundation has the solution:
We need to educate people about the benefits of eating healthy foods and make them more responsible for their health. We also have to be sure that a ‘fat tax’ does not just end up penalising the poor without actually changing eating habits.
That’s right. Change their eating habits, educate the masses! Be a nanny to the whole nation!
But the BMA has even a better answer. They say that the tax would hit food manufacturers hard and have little effect on the poor.
A fat-tax will remove food manufacturers’ incentive to pump food full of fat. Instead they will fill processed foods with healthier ingredients and better selections of meat. Fat is a cheap by-product of the meat processing industry – they have mountains of the stuff and are desperate to use it, so they use it as cheap padding in foodstuffs.
Yes, let’s fool around with the markets, the food manufacturers, supply and demand. That always works! And it is much more fun that finding out what really makes people fat!
They are assuming that their medical conclusions are absolutely right when it come to understanding the way human body processes fat and what its fat consumption ought to be. They are not taking into account results of recent research that more or less vindicated the (in)famous Atkins diet that sees higher consumption of unsaturated fats as positive and desirable. No, they are going to tax fat in one big lump regardless of whether there is any scientific rationale other then three decade of their stale dogma. Atkins may not be absolutely right either, who knows, but rather than finding out, let’s mess with the markets, prices and taxes to teach people that they are not allowed to eat what they want.
Ah, but they need to be treated for serious and expensive ailments resulting from their over-indulgence on the National Health Service and at taxpayers’ expense. Fine, denationalise the health service and let people carry the responsibility for their actions.
Soon there will be a tax on dangerous sports (serious injuries), driving, cycling or walking in towns (high accident rates), watching TV (makes you fat and stupid), and breathing in London (likely to get asthma and allergies).
This is the world in which the Big Brother marries the Nanny.
We Samizdatistas are in the blogging business for the long haul and so it is very gratifying indeed to be involved with a highly a successful blog… we may not be in the same league popularity wise as Instapundit or Andrew Sullivan but we are nevertheless a significant fixture in the Blogosphere.
However as our hit rate steadily creeps upward, so do our bandwidth costs. As a result, Samizdata.net has finally succumbed to the economic facts of life and our sidebar now has buttons which give our truly global readership the option to send us a donation via PayPal to help defray our mounting bandwidth expenses.
Miceal O’Ronain spotted a new item in the Times of London yesterday. He has also looked between the lines and seen where this will eventually go
The issue is, at least for now, congestion on the roads:
“…Satellite equipment to monitor every car journey will be ready only in a decade or more.”
[…]
“Satellite tracking and charging will be tried out on the lorries that use Britain’s roads under a scheme that will begin in 2006. If the experiment is successful, the system could be extended to cars as well.”
Here are the technical specifications for the system:
- EU network is preferred system
- A nationwide system would be likely to use the EU’s Galileo global-positioning network, an array of 30 satellites scheduled for launch in 2006 and 2007.
- The alternative, the US military GPS network, used by the current generation of satellite navigation and tracking devices, does not guarantee access to civilian clients. Galileo is designed for civil use and guarantees an uninterrupted service.
- Galileo will be accurate to 1 metre, GPS to only 30m. The lower accuracy of the US model could cause disputes on whether vehicles had actually entered charging zones.
But why stop with cars? Just surgically implant a transponder into each citizen of the UK. If you can do it for cars and wild life, you can do it to people.
Miceal O’Ronain
There is quite a procession of folks headed for Mars at the moment, according to this BBC report. Coming relatively soon after the awful Shuttle disaster, it is heartening to see some actual stirrings of decent activity in the space field at the moment.
Godspeed to them all.
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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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