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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Yesterday we has a Samizdata.net Bash (rather than a general Blogger Bash) to greet fellow Samizdatista Frank McGahon on the occasion of his visit to London… and seeing as it was also Waterloo Day, we were delighted to have a guest at the party whose name is Wellington!
For once the London rain was conspicuous by its absence!
We have started a policy of recruiting Samizdata.net contributors as early as possible in their careers
Some familiar faces and some new ones from downunder
As usual there was a plague of digital cameras
Much booze was disposed of…
My last posting has provoked a storm of comment, which I hope relfects the controversy of the issue and not any inflammatory tone on my part. I tend to let the commentators discuss the issue, because frankly they do a very good job!
However, adam raises a very interesting point:
Isn’t this kind of argument fallacious, as you’re assuming the phrase “assumed consent” has the same moral status in all circumstances?
Compare with other phrases, eg “killed”. “I killed him cause he got in my way” – moral status = bad. But, “I killed the rabid dog because otherwise it would have eaten those poor babies” – moral status = good.
Now this could invalidate my argument if I had used euthanasia as an example of ‘presumed consent’, because then the motive for killing becomes central.
However, I was pointing out that someone having sexual intercourse with a minor or a person with diminished mental faculties would want to defend himself of herself of the charge of ‘rape’ by claiming ‘presumed consent’.
The point is that sexual intercourse is not a criminal offence, despite the attempts of puritans of both Left and Right to make it so. Therefore it is the question of consent that is central, and whether a person’s inability to give consent allows other people to take decisions for them. Because minors and persons with diminished mental faculties are generally unable to give their consent, we have a presumption that consent is not given in such cases, hence the notion of ‘statutory rape’.
The main moral issue about statutory rape is that an age of consent will not protect some immature adults whilst unreasonably assuming a lack of moral faculties for fast-devlopers.
To blur the distinction between a crime based on the lack of consent (rape) and an abhorrence of sex to create the concept of (sex crime) is something straight out of Orwell’s nineteen eighty four.
I find it fascinating that a commentator should jump from sex to murder. One is a crime. The other is not.
Yes. The day approaches. Tech work all across planet Earth will grind to a halt. Programmers will twitch in their sleep (if they sleep at all). Network centers will groan under the load and there will be no answers from helpdesks. All this and more will happen in a mere fifteen days. A bit more than two weeks… DOOM 3 hits the stores on August 3rd!
Linux and OSX versions are to follow soon thereafter.
Used with the kind permission of Idsoftware
Addendum: Buying Doom3 makes money for Idsoftware. One of the Idsoftware founders is John Carmack. John Carmack founded Armadillo Aerospace, perhaps the number two contender for the X-Prize behind Scaled Composites. So… buy Doom3 and support your capitalist future in Space!
Candida Moss, writing in the Spectator, suggests that ‘presumed consent’ ought to apply for donating organs. On the basis that my comments my not appear in the magazine, here’s what I wrote:
Presumed consent is not consent. If it were, then minors or people suffering from dementia might not enjoy the protection from sexual assault that they do at present. Sexual predators could no doubt claim “presumed consent” for their crimes.
There is a difference between medical expedience and morality. There can be no doubt that there would be enormous medical benefits from performing vivisection on human beings, instead of on animals: dosages, differences in metabolic rates etc. would be far easier to calculate.
Rightly, we abhor this and consider controvertial using the results of Nazi experiments on Jews, because it can be considered the partial condoning of horrific actions.
Is it Candida Moss’s wish that the state (probably at EU level) ought to nationalize our bodies and redistribute organs according to need? At least Gordon Brown only wants my money.
I might add that the issue of designer babies giving their own consent to being used as experimental animals is another current topic. It seems pretty sick to me.
Rand Simberg is at the Return To The Moon Conference this weekend and is providing live blogging of the talks by key speakers. Frank Seitzen’s talk is of particular interest to those with a commercial space bent:
Taking questions now. Jeff Krukin: “Is there any sense that all of this could be made irrelevant by things happening in the private sector”?
Answer: “Yes, O’Keefe has met with Musk, and O’Keefe is very skeptical about the ability of the conventional space industry to do things affordably. Was particularly disturbed by cost estimates for OSP. Has been reaching out to the smaller players.”
“Estimate cost of getting to the Moon by 2020 is 64 billion dollars. They found nine billion for a down payment by 2009, but they won’t be able to afford it all without much lower costs from the private sector (and that doesn’t mean traditional contractors).”
I have known the disarticulated skeleton of this story for some time but this is the first I have seen it put together and with flesh on the bones.
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Bill Bryson
Black Swan paperback, 687 pages
This is one of the best books of scientific popularisation I have ever read. Bryson brings the skills of a hugely successful and confident travel writer to bear on the Entire History of Science, no less, and does so in a way that chalks up another huge success for him.
Being an established writer of best sellers, Bryson was confident enough of his own ability, and of the support of his publisher, to be able to spend some serious time getting to grips with his mighty subject, knowing that whatever he finally came up with would be read. Yet, he also brings to it the humility of the seasoned travel writer, who knows that he cannot possibly say everything about Science, any more than he could have said everything about America or Europe or Australia, and who concentrates instead of saying as much as he can, as entertainingly and engagingly as possible.
Tone of voice is a lot of the reason Bryson’s books are so successful. His politics are vaguely leftish to middle of the road (like those of most of his readers, in other words), and his number one aim is not to change the world, simply to explore it and to describe what he has found. He doesn’t badger you every other page with what he thinks you ought to do about it all. Nor does he have big personal scientific axes to grind. He does have his own opinions about various things, but these are secondary to his principle aim which is to learn, and to continue to make an honest living by passing on what he has learned. → Continue reading: Bill Bryson journeys through science
Britain has been rocked this past week by shocking and totally unexpected revelations that have ripped apart the fabric of our national complacency and destablised our settled worldviews.
Prior to this week, it was an unquestioned given that the British National Party was an organisation that was fully committed, both in principle and practice, to multiculturalism and ethnic diversity.
But this article of faith has now been torn to shreds, thanks to the efforts of brave, crusading BBC reporter who went undercover to join the BNP and discovered (brace yourselves, please) that some BNP members are racist!!!!
The evidence he collected includes one BNP member, Steve Barkham, confessing to a violent assault on an Asian man, and a prospective election candidate admitting to a campaign of pushing dog excrement through the front door of an Asian takeaway.
I can hardly believe my own eyes and ears but I have to accept the terrible truth. We must be grateful to the BBC without whom we would all still be wallowing in ignorance and delusion. → Continue reading: You can take that to the bank
As a general rule, I am not a huge fan of Microsoft. I am not tremendously keen on their software from a design or reliability point of view, and I find their business practices at times to be a bit dubious.
However, yesterday they won 3.95 million dollars in damages from a spammer in Washington DC, who sent out huge numbers of e-mail messages that claimed to come from Microsoft in order to encourage people to download a toolbar that then downloaded all manner of nasty spyware and advertising.
Microsoft have won a total of $54m in recent judgements in their campaign against spammers. Generally the judgements have not been against the practice of spam per se but against the deceptive practices of the spammers (ie the spams have been full of lies).
Might I wish Bill and the boys continued success in this campaign.
And now the important news of the summer: a record crop is expected of grapes in the Champagne region [French link]. The absence of frost last Winter and mild weather in Spring is a hopeful sign for a good vintage, although quantity and quality do not necessarily follow. Over the coming weeks vines will be pruned of some of the grape bunches to ensure a greater concentration of sugar and acidity.
So the next time some tree-hugging Greens moan about penguin habitats, they can console themselves with a nice bottle of Veuve Cliquot.
“Minister rejects Bush reliance on abstinence, and backs use of generic drugs”
If I did not know this was about treating AIDS in the Third World, this would be very funny. Spotted in Salon.com.
I suddenly find myself writing more and more about the Middle East.
Kidnappers demand less corruption.
Only in Palestine…
Wired has more on the government’s controversial plan to screen passengers before they board a plane. The Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-Screening System II (CAPPS II) is dead – but it may return in a new form with a new name.
Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge bluntly told a reporter Wednesday that CAPPS II was effectively “dead” and jokingly pretended to put a stake in its heart. His comment went far beyond Tuesday’s statement to members of Congress by the Transportation Security Administration’s acting chief, Adm. David Stone, who said the program’s main components were being “reshaped”.
For its part, the American Conservative Union warned that it would oppose any successor program that is not fundamentally different from CAPPS II. ACU spokesman Ian Walter said:
Renaming a program does not satisfy the civil liberties concerns of conservatives so long as that program turns law-abiding commercial airline passengers into terrorism suspects. Civil liberties-minded conservatives will never support it.
Any new program will likely not be deployed anytime soon, as the TSA will likely need to reissue a Privacy Act notice detailing how the system will work, collect comments on the notice, issue new rules or a secret order to force airlines to provide passenger data to the system and have it certified by the GAO (General Accountability Office).
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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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