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 Prime Minister, Tony Blair, held a press conference today outside No.10 in response to the nationwide strike by civil servants.
Mr. Blair informed the assembled members of the press that the Government had decided to respond to the threat of industrial unrest among public servants by arranging for the entire British state sector to be outsourced to India.
Stunned journalists pressed Mr. Blair for an explanation for this radical and controversial move. Mr. Blair said:
We have considered the matter carefully and we have consulted with various experts in the field. The conclusion we have come to is that it is simply too expensive to go on governing Britain from Britain.
The news was greeted with a mixture of boos and cheers but the Prime Minister continued undaunted:
It is the only logical solution. Young, well-educated Indians are quite capable of running the British state at a fraction of the current cost. We have taken steps to ensure that there will be no reduction in either the quality or quantity of public services while saving the taxpayers money.
Though confronted with some angry questions about the fate of the NHS, Mr. Blair declined to comment further:
Look, I’d love to help you but the simple fact is that the NHS is no longer my responsbility. If you have any questions about the continued provision of public sector health care in the UK then I suggest you telephone 08700 4568000 and speak to Jasvinder in Bombay.
Mr. Blair then ended the conference and, ignoring the protests, walked back into No.10.
A spokesperson for the Civil Service Trade Union, Unison, said he was “shocked and saddened” by the news and that he would be ballotting his members on further industrial action.
Our most splendid Frogman has added another wallpaper to the Samizdata.net wallpaper page (scroll down to the bottom of the page). Check them out!
A 365 day per year strike of course, but I suppose that is too much to hope for.
Tens of thousands of civil servants of sundry favours are walking out in all manner of protests at plans to cut the vast throng of half a million or so people employed by the state by a paltry 80,000.
Yes, I realise those people will get paid for the time they are off the job but I wonder what might happen if folks noticed that the world did not come to an end just because chunks of the state stopped working? Perhaps people might actually get used to the idea of living without them.
More and faster, please.
Whatever happened to the phrase, which I believe was coined about a year ago by his überblogger highness, Glenn Reynolds, “A pack, not a herd” following his pointer to a Jonathan Rauch article?
If you recall, Reynolds attempted to show how the idea that there is a negative tradeoff between liberty and security is based on an error and that free societies, because they let citizens be vigilant as well as rationally self interested, are typically safer against threats than those in which folk assume the State will see to every issue.
What is so clever about Reynolds’ argument is that it means that opponents of Big Government measures to make us ‘safer’, for by example, crackdowns on various civil liberites, can instead point to positive examples of people figuring out problems without the need for endless government programmes.
I think that coming up with lots of positive examples of how individual men and women have worked voluntarily with others to fix problems normally felt to the province of the State can do more to advance the cause of liberty than a library of classical liberal tracts.
And if there is a supreme British example of voluntarism, heroism and the advantages of encouraging a “can do” philosophy in our lives, it is surely that favourite of libertarians, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI).
And the depressing question which arises for me is, if the RNLI were being contemplated now rather than in its time of birth in 19th Century Britain, would the health and safety bureaucrats try to kill it at birth?
Dear readers, you are ahead of me on that one.
Far from replacing newspapers and magazines, the best blogs – and the best are very clever – have become guides to them, pointing to unusual sources and commenting on familiar ones. They have become new mediators for the informed public. Although the creators of blogs think of themselves as radical democrats, they are a new Tocquevillean elite. Much of the web has moved in this direction because the wilder, bigger, and more chaotic it becomes, the more people will need help navigating it
– Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom
This is quite a little story, and with my libertarian stirrer hat on I say that the more it gets around the better, because the more it will draw attention to the existence of the libertarian journal Liberty, and of the libertarian movement generally. And when a little story gets written about in the New York Times, I guess that makes it not such a little story:
ALPINE, Tex., Feb. 16 — The first indication that Dr. Larry J. Sechrest’s neighbors and students had read his article titled “A Strange Little Town in Texas” was when he began receiving death threats and obscene phone calls and his house was vandalized.
The article by Dr. Sechrest, an economics professor at Sul Ross State University, was published in the January issue of Liberty, a small libertarian magazine with a circulation of about 10,000 and only two local subscribers, one of whom is Dr. Sechrest. But it was weeks before people heard about it in remote Alpine, which is three hours from the closest Barnes & Noble, in Midland, Tex.
The article lauded the beauty of West Texas, the pleasant climate, the friendliness and tolerance of the locals. But Dr. Sechrest, who has a Ph.D. in business administration from the University of Texas, also contended that “the students at Sul Ross, and more generally, the long-term residents of the entire area, are appallingly ignorant, irrational, anti-intellectual, and, well, … just plain stupid.”
Well, death threats and obscene phone calls does sound pretty plain stupid to me, so although Sechrest may regret his candour, he has nothing to apologise for.
Sadly, Liberty seems to be one of those paper publications which is reluctant to give all its writings away on the Internet until several years have passed (which you can understand), so the actual article by Larry Secrest that caused all the fuss is not linkable to. But in addition addition to the NYT piece linked to above, there’s also this from the Desert-Mountain Times:
Sechrest said he regretted publishing parts of the article that have caused such a strong reaction in the community.
“I thought there were two libertarians in the community,” he said. “If that’s true, I thought, ‘Who will ever see it’ – it never crossed my mind it would cause such an uproar. If I knew the reaction it would cause, would I have done it? Of course not.”
Ah, but the libertarian movement is bigger and more pervasive than you think!
The New York Times piece ends on a positive note:
Last week Dr. Sechrest said he had begun to receive more positive e-mail and phone calls. He noted in particular an e-mail message from a former student.
“As I read your article I found myself laughing out loud and saying things like ‘amen’ and ‘true,’ ” the former student wrote. “At the same time I felt somewhat guilty because it really did offend people I really care about. There’s no denying these are legitimate concerns. The lack of interest in anything beyond Brewster County lines also baffled me.”
The student added, “It is my sincere hope that all involved can extract what is true and good from your article, and get over the rest.”
The message was signed, “A former clod.”
Maybe getting a not unsympathetic write-up in the New York Times will stir Alpine into being less cloddish, and Sul Ross State University into improving its standards. It certainly sounds as if that could be the longer term outcome. Maybe Sechrest has done the whole area a favour, in other words. If he has, it would not be the first time in human history that criticism was met first with anger, but then with a resolve by the people criticised to do better in the future.
For a wonderful account of the BBC’s world famous dispassion and impartiality, check this out.
Some views are more welcome than others it seems.
According to yesterday’s Observer the HMS Beagle, the ship on which Charles Darwin sailed to the Galapagos Islands and around the world (and which later visited northern Australia, which ultimately led to Australia’s northernmost city being named after one of the greatest of all scientists) has been possibly located at the bottom of a marsh in Essex. There are no records as to where the ship was taken after being sold for scrap in 1870, but some historical detective work by Robert Prescott, a marine archaeologist from St Andrews University, followed by a radar survey appears to have tracked it down.
Given that this is the vessel onboard which one of the greatest of all scientific revolutions began, it would be wonderful if this ship could be raised out of the marsh and put in a museum somewhere, or perhaps it could be turned into a museum. Thematically it would be perfect in the Science Museum in Kensington, but I suspect that the 90 ft brig would be a little big for the building. And while it would presumably be possible to transport it up the Thames on some other vessel, transporting it through Chelsea to Kensington might be a little bit of a nuisance. So perhaps the Maritime Museum in Greenwich would be a better bet.
(Link via slashdot).
So what’s the difference between socialism and conservatism? Judging by the spitting and hissing of the Labour Party’s Douglas Alexander, in conversation this morning with Shadow Chancellor Oliver Letwin, it’s about £20 billion pounds. This is the vile slash-and-burn difference between the amount Mr Letwin says he can trim off the government’s future spending plans, and the amount the Labour Party are aiming to trim off the government’s own spending plans, at least according to a leaked internal government sponsored plan, from Sir Peter Gershon.
This trimming of £20 billion pounds is going to require immediate and severe cuts to skoolznozpitals, say Mr Alexander. Tish, says Mr Letwin, we’re simply going to grow public spending just ever so slightly slower than you are. Which as a British taxpayer, I found particularly reassuring this morning, while stuck on the M4 motorway trying to get onto the M25. → Continue reading: Dancing on the head of a pin
“It’s not the age, it’s the mileage.”
Like so many other bloggers have done, I could not resist generating a map of the places I have visited (though I feel India and Bahrain are a cheat because it was only changing airplanes)…
PS:
The sound Christopher Booker of his notebook in the Sunday Telegraph asks the age-old questions – What do we pay taxes for?
He then proceeds with a list of ‘mundane’ examples of people being charged for things done to them by government agencies such as HM Customs, the Home Office immigration department. He points out that the old principle that government is funded by taxpayers to carry out its duties seems to be breaking down in all directions. Well, it has taken him a while to notice but better late than never.
My reader concluded: “Presumably we can expect the same ‘user must pay’ principle to be applied to the cost of providing the health service, policing, prisons, libraries and state benefits.”
But the question remains, what then do we pay our taxes for? (Until the day, of course, when the Inland Revenue charges us a fee for reading our tax forms and taking our money.)
The answer is obvious – the taxes are necessary to support disabled black lesbian single mothers living in council estates…
This news has been around bits of the blogosphere but it is still shocking enough to write about a week later.
When linguist Sibel Dinez Edmonds showed up for her first day of work at the FBI, a week after the 9-11 attacks, she expected to find a somber atmosphere. Instead, she was offered cookies filled with dates from party bowls set out in the room where other Middle Eastern linguists with top-secret security clearance translate terror-related communications.
She knew the dessert is customarily served in the Middle East at weddings, births and other celebrations, and asked what the happy occasion was. To her shock, she was told the Arab linguists were celebrating the terrorist attacks on America, as if they were some joyous event. Right in front of her supervisor, one translator cheered:
“It’s about time they got a taste of what they’ve been giving the Middle East.”
It gets worse.
When Edmonds reported the incident and other breaches in security, mistranslations and potential espionage by Middle Eastern colleagues she was fired “without specified cause”. Edmonds’s supervisor, “a naturalized U.S. citizen from Beirut” reportedly told his employees to take long breaks, to slow down translations, and to simply say no to those field agents calling us to beg for speedy translations so that they could go on with their investigations and interrogations of those they had detained.
The FBI, which like the army suffers from a severe shortage of Arabic translators, instated a bureau-wide Muslim-sensitivity training program after 9-11. Edmonds is said to have detailed these allegations further in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee last month. Edmonds wrote Justice’s Inspector General Glenn A. Fine in a Jan. 5 letter.
I have alleged, and the FBI has confirmed (to Senate investigators), that there are in fact such persons in the language department.
I do not know whether these allegations are true, but I have no reason to doubt their validity. I have no problem believing that a government agency swamped with bureaucracy and with departmental biases can foster such shocking behaviour within its ranks. An allegded shortage of arabic translators seems to have opened floodgates to greedy and hostile behaviour of the Middle Eastern linguists in residence whose allegiances cannot be doubted.
Any chance of a more appropriate ‘sensitivity training’? Once more, without feeling…
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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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