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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Where archaeology meets politics – on the banks of the Potomac, of course:
Archeologists digging near the Potomac River report they have found a partial human skeleton from the Magnusregimentumian era, also called ‘the era of big government.’
Scientists have dubbed the creature Homo Republicus.
“The cranium is rather large, but the spinal column doesn’t seem strong enough to support it,” said an unnamed archeologist working at the dig site. “Despite its impressive thinking capabilities, it apparently crawled along on its belly, often carrying opportunistic vermin on its back.”
Scott Ott of Scrappleface generally hits the mark with his satire, and in the fine tradition of going after the big slow targets first, his mark is often governmental fecklessness and political cowardice.
What do you call a country which is run by the police for the benefit of the police? Is that a ‘police state’? Yes, I think that qualifies. Surely it does?
SENIOR police officers will call this week for the DNA of everyone in Britain to be put on a national database from the moment they are born.
They believe that this would be a vital weapon in the drive to curb crime and help to solve hundreds of murders.
[From the UK Times]
Some nerve those plods have got! Assuming that nothing has been lost in the media translation, I detect not even a hint of humility. After all, they are supposed to be public servants. And what next, I wonder? ‘Police demand increase in income tax to help fight crime’? ‘Police demand greater integration with the European Union to help fight crime? ‘Police demand greater regulation of world trade in order to fight crime’?
What disturbs me here is not so much the idea of a national DNA database. Okay, that does disturb me but HMG hasn’t got the money to fund such a grand scheme so it isn’t going to happen (yet). No, the ugliness is more immediate than that; it lies in the casual assumption by police chiefs that they can simply demand such a thing and expect their will to be done without even paying lip service to the principle of democracy that most people in this country set great store by. Who died and left them boss?
The crime-solving canard has worn so thin that it is almost beyond mockery. Solving crimes is something that the UK police are not much interested in doing anymore. Population control is now their job (‘Social Management’ in NuSpeak). And as they now regard themselves to be a uniformed wing of the ruling elite, I suppose we’re going to get much more of this kind of thing from them in future.
So now we are the servants and they are the masters. How did that happen?
This must have happened before, but it’s the first big example of it that I’ve heard about at all recently. Tomorrow’s British press is apparently full of reports of what Mr Blair “said” to a bunch of trade unionists. In other words, the press printed the stuff that they had been given by Downing Street beforehand. They printed a whole load of stuff that he was going to say. The trouble is, BBC2 TV’s Newsnight has just reported, several trade union leaders who were present at the meeting at which all this was going to be said are adamant that Blair didn’t actually say it.
There must have been occasions where the print media have written reports in the past tense about events that had yet to occur, only for them not to happen as scripted, but it is somewhat unusual for our Prime Minister to be directly involved in such a mess-up. Why didn’t Blair follow his own script? Did he chicken out? Did he set the papers up on purpose? Did he think the whole thing would remain permanently in two separate compartments, with the trade unionists getting one message, and the rest of us getting another, without anyone comparing notes?
Maybe this sort of nonsense happens every day, and the government has (had) a gentleman’s agreement with the BBC that what it says it is going to say is what it said, regardless of what it really said. And if the newspapers print a load of bollocks they are too embarrassed to admit it, and it all dies the death without any embarrassment to anyone. Except, that – maybe, could be, I don’t know, I’m guessing – the government forgot that the BBC now hates it. → Continue reading: And the news is that … the news we just said may not have actually happened
Car tracking news from New Zealand:
Motorists face being taxed on how far they travel under government plans to generate cash.
Transport Minister Paul Swain said with vehicles becoming more fuel efficient, revenue from petrol tax would drop and alternative charges needed to be considered.
It is one of a number of transport schemes being looked at by officials, including a Big Brother-style project to equip every car with a personalised microchip so law-breaking motorists can be prosecuted by computer.
And Declan McCullagh offers a different angle on the same technology.
My name is Salam Pax and I am addicted to blogs. Some people watch daytime soaps, I follow blogs. I follow the hyperlinks on the blogs I read. I travel through the web guided by bloggers. I get wrapped up in the plots narrated by them. I was reading so many blogs I had to assign weekdays for each bunch, plus the ones I was reading daily. It is slightly voyeuristic, especially those really personal blogs: day-to-day, mundane stuff which is actually fascinating; glimpses of lives so different, and so much amazing writing. No politics, just people’s lives. How they deal with pain or grief, how they share their happy moments with anybody who cares to read.
— Salam Pax, summarising how quite a lot of us actually feel, writing in the Guardian. Actually, go read the whole thing. The descriptions of how the Ba’athists attempted to censor the internet and how people got around it that follow are quite interesting.
Here in the US, we have recently been diverted by the spectacle of a state Supreme Court judge defying the orders of a federal court in order to violate the Constitution. The state judge refused to move a gigantic copy of the Ten Commandments from the courthouse, where its prominent placement and enormous size at least arguably amounted to “the [state] establishment of religion” in violation of the US Constitution. Now, this is just the sort of topic that seems to exert an irresistible compulsion on people to wander off into the tall grass of irrelevance, so I will leave aside the legalistic arguments about whether the placement of the Ten Commandments actually violated the First Amendment to the US Consitution as applied to the states via the doctrine of incorporation (and I beg the commenters to do likewise).
While there are subcultures in the US that could undoubtedly recite all ten, I daresay most US citizens could not, although they are widely held in a kind of iconic way to represent the root of law and morality. Indeed, the claim that they are an historical source of US law was made in the campaign to keep them in the courthouse. Christopher Hitchens takes a look at what the Commandments actually say, and concludes that they don’t have much to do with morality or modern law at all.
The first four of the commandments have little to do with either law or morality, and the first three suggest a terrific insecurity on the part of the person supposedly issuing them. I am the lord thy god and thou shalt have no other … no graven images … no taking of my name in vain: surely these could have been compressed into a more general injunction to show respect. The ensuing order to set aside a holy day is scarcely a moral or ethical one . . . .
There has never yet been any society, Confucian or Buddhist or Islamic, where the legal codes did not frown upon murder and theft. These offenses were certainly crimes in the Pharaonic Egypt from which the children of Israel had, if the story is to be believed, just escaped. So the middle-ranking commandments, of which the chief one has long been confusingly rendered “thou shalt not kill,” leave us none the wiser as to whether the almighty considers warfare to be murder, or taxation and confiscation to be theft.
In much the same way, few if any courts in any recorded society have approved the idea of perjury, so the idea that witnesses should tell the truth can scarcely have required a divine spark in order to take root. To how many of its original audience, I mean to say, can this have come with the force of revelation? Then it’s a swift wrap-up with a condemnation of adultery (from which humans actually can refrain) and a prohibition upon covetousness (from which they cannot). To insist that people not annex their neighbor’s cattle or wife “or anything that is his” might be reasonable, even if it does place the wife in the same category as the cattle, and presumably to that extent diminishes the offense of adultery. But to demand “don’t even think about it” is absurd and totalitarian . . . .
It just goes to show that it never hurts to periodically reexamine first principles. With a little luck, I can probably get through the week without violating more than six (and no, it is none of your business which six).
And so, as the great heat swamp of Old London Town finally begins to subside towards the cold dark wetness of autumn, which for some of us is a very great relief, we in England can begin to think of Christmas. Oh yes, we can dream of Yuletide hymns, rich puddings with brandy sauce, and gifts under the evergreen tree of renewed pagan life. And what better a gift idea could there be, for this ancient festival of change, than a brand new book by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr, the current holder of the flame of Herr Hayek, Von Mises, and Murray N. Rothbard? No other gift idea comes close, in my humble opinion. And if you agree, you might want to slip over to the Mises Blog for hot-off-the-press details from the man himself.
Best of all, for intellectual pygmies, such as myself, the book, Speaking of Liberty, apparently comes in at under 500 pages, and is formed from a collection of Rockwell’s best speeches integrated into a cohesive whole, to create his personal manifesto on politics and economics.
As I’m trying to cure myself of impulsiveness, I paused for almost a whole nanosecond before deciding whether to attempt to get hold of a copy. And then I read this:
It is not, needless to say, my version of Human Action or Man, Economy, and State! Instead, while based on Mises and Rothbard, it’s aimed at just about anyone who seeks to understand the relationship between economics and freedom, and not to be fooled by the media-government complex.
Followed by this:
Mises was the intellectual fountainhead of the modern freedom movement — both here and in Europe — and I’ve always wanted him to get the credit. It is a great pleasure to explain his life and work and why they matter…Later in the book, I address other thinkers, including Henry Hazlitt, Hans Sennholz, F.A. Hayek, and, of course, the great Murray Rothbard, who had the most direct influence on me.
Sold, to the gentleman in the black slip-on sandals.
In some previous discussions on failings of the American forces I received a firestorm of protest. I never backed down on my opinion that annoying decent Iraqi’s and shooting wildly is not a way to win hearts and minds.
I’m rather chuffed the Marines agree with me… and so do the 101st Airborne. Both have done magnificent jobs in their regions. They are largely unsung on the nightly news. Reporters ignore them because success does not fit the discourse they write within.
It is interesting to note the Marines running the Najaf region have not lost a soldier since May. [Note that all casualties are declining].
Marines give the CPA (“Can’t Provide Anything”) low marks, closely followed by the forces around Baghdad. I must admit the central region around Baghdad/Tikrit is where the most bad guys went to ground and is thus inherently more dangerous. The Army hasn’t bolloxed the job but I think the Marines would have done a better one.
So let the inter-service flame war begin!
I found the link at Instapundit and thought it well worth the attention of our readers.
“Academic cheating is a major problem and has negative results on everyone involved.”
So goes the first sentence of a recently composed essay on cheating in academia. To get the whole essay, though, you’ll need to pay for a membership at DirectEssays.com, an Internet operation that promises access to “over 101,000 high-quality term papers and essays.” For $19.95 a month, you can see the anticheating tract in toto, and a lot more besides. DirectEssays is one of several Internet operations selling term papers that students hand in as their own work, and business is booming.
Cheating, especially Internet cheating, is becoming more and more the way of the academic world. A recent study found that 38 percent of the students polled had committed “cut and paste” plagiarism – that is, copying sentences or even several paragraphs from the Internet and implanting them in their own work. Forty percent of respondents admitted to copying without attribution from written sources – books, journals and the like – in the past year.
This year will go down in history. For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration! Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future.
– Attributed to Adolf Hitler, 1935
Emma, in a piece here entitled “Outnumbered 15 to 1”, touches on a problem that I find gruesomely fascinating, and have had to deal with a lot over the years. How do you conduct yourself when in company which you want to keep in with but which holds your opinions about some hot issue of the day in very low regard?
Scenario: you are at a dinner party with several friends with whom you enjoy discussing all sorts of things NOT including politics.
One friend, in passing, drops in a little “it’s all about the oil” or [with sarcasm] “well, the french were just cowardy custards, that’s why all good patriots hate them”, or [in tones of deepest contempt] “it’s just finishing off what Daddy left undone”.
Do you
A) Remove the rather good bottle of Australian wine that you brought, leaving them to drink some French blanc de plonk that one of the Guardian readers brought along, and never darken their doors again.
B) Reply “were the Normandy landings an equally unjustified completion of unfinished business?” (or equivalent riposte, depending on the precise nature of the comment), segueing neatly into a heated discussion in which no one will listen to anything anyone else says and everyone will go home riled up.
C) Change the subject to more neutral ground through whatever means necessary. “Oops, I seem to have spilt red wine on your yellow dress” would serve a dual function of diversion and oblique admonition.
What is the best strategy when talking to people about matters on which they disagree with you? – child rearing, say, to pick an example at random. Persuasion? Leading by example? Dropping in odd hints to indicate that there is an alternative and viable point of view? Careful avoidance of tension filled areas?
Help!
I suggest that for the purpose of this discussion we set aside the matter of whether we actually agree with Emma about the Iraq war. The point of these questions is to dig out some general principles for conducting ourselves in company which disagrees about some contentious public issue, but with which we wish to remain on cordial speaking terms. → Continue reading: On keeping friends by not trying to influence them
Our government is determined that we shall be numbered and identity carded no matter how long it takes or how much opposition has to be ground down, and if they can’t do it by persuading adults, they’ll do it by habituating (and I can think of ruder words than that) children.
Every child in England is to be given a credit card-style ID number in reforms aimed at preventing a repeat of the murder of Victoria Climbie, the Government has announced.
The long-awaited Green Paper on children’s services also included a proposal to create a Children’s Commissioner for England, whose job it will be to speak up for under-18s and ensure their views are “fed into” Government policy.
It set out a large number of changes to the structure of children’s services, which will see education, health and social care combined and dispensed from neighbourhood schools.
Tony Blair said the proposals were a “significant step” towards ensuring there was no repeat of the Climbie case.
One thing is very certain about this new ID numbered world which they are determined to create. It will still contain outbursts of evil like Victoria Climbie’s murder. ID numbers won’t stop that. → Continue reading: ID numbers and Hidden Europe
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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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