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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It’s the danger of tidy-minded people…
– Andrew Marr, in an extempore line, almost thrown away, to close an item on the surveillance state on the BBC’s radio talk-show Start the Week.
I think Marr pins it down precisely. Oppressive regimes are frequently driven by a desire for order, seen as conformity to explicit rules. The most insidious, most universally oppressive castes, don’t seek order because they want to be obeyed. They seek order for its own sake. They want the security of rules for everything, and recording everything.
The attempt assassination in London of a critic of Vladimir Putin, Alexander Litvinenko, almost certainly carried out by the Russian intelligence services, highlights that it is long past time to stop treating Russia as ‘just another European government’.
But there is another rather interesting twist to this story that I did not spot in the media yesterday, courtesy of the UKIP.
Update: sadly it is not longer an ‘attempted’ assassination.
It looks like Congressman Rangel is at it again.
I guess he just thinks enslaving your fellow man is a great idea.
Our thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the link.
As regular readers here all know, the state is not your friend… but sometimes its petty tyrannies and inanities are bloody funny:
The makers of Welsh Dragon Sausages were warned they could face legal action if they did not specify which meat they were using. “I don’t think any of our customers actually believe that we use dragon meat,” said Jon Carthew, of the Black Mountains Smokery at Crickhowell, after receiving a warning letter from trading standards officers.
A quick check and sure enough, these people fail to mention their sausages are not in fact made from dragon meat (which I had assumed was ‘self-smoking’). Hell, I only bought them because I thought they contained the ultimate in ‘endangered species’.
A brigadier general (retired) writes to The Times:
Last week, a security scanner at the Waterloo Eurostar terminal detected a credit-card-sized toolkit in my overnight case as I set out for Paris on business. …
Read the whole thing. It is not long.
I am reminded that we are only a fortnight since St Crispin’s day.
He that outlives this day and comes safe home
Will stand a-tiptoe when this day is named
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall see this day and live t’old age
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbors
And say, “Tomorrow is Saint Crispian.”
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars
And say, “These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.”
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day.
What did you do in the “War on Terror,” Daddy?
I wonder why this has not set any fur flying yet?
The Dutch cabinet has backed a proposal by the country’s immigration minister to ban Muslim women from wearing the burqa in public places.
The burqa, a full body covering that also obscures the face, would be banned by law in the street, and in trains, schools, buses and the law courts.
The cabinet said burqas disturb public order, citizens and safety.
Is it because the French did it first? Possibly. Though it does seem to me that the Dutch prohibition is much broader than the French one. Perhaps it is something to do with the fact that France is a more prominent and important country than Holland.
Anyway, whatever the reasons, this news from the Netherlands remains (for the moment at least) on the mere periphery of the radar. The more interesting question, as far as I am concerned, is whether this is (a) an unacceptable state repression of personal liberty and freedom of choice or (b) a necessary and welcome bulwark against the growth of radical Islam in Europe?
NO2ID has demonstrated how it is possible to clone the Home Office’s wonderful new ePassport while it is still in the post, without taking it out of the envelope.
The Home Office is unconcerned: with classic disingenuity its spokesman told The Guardian, which carried the first part of an unfolding story:
By the time you have accessed the information on the chip, you have already seen it on the passport. What use would my biometric image be to you? And even if you had the information, you would still have to counterfeit the new passport – and it has lots of new security features. If you were a criminal, you might as well just steal a passport.
But of course the Home Office does not care. If there is a conflict between your personal security and official convenience in logging the details of passports at borders – which is what it means by ‘improving the security of passports’ (note plural) – then there was never any doubt which would win.
An Anonymous Coward on slashdot pinned it down:
The basic problem isn’t the algorithm they choose. It’s that their goal is incompatible with security.
They wish to establish a world where all people can be instantly identified, correlated with commercial profiles, and tracked wherever they travel.
How can this be done “securely”? It cannot.
Thank you, Admiral Poindexter.
Milton Friedman has died at the age of ninety four. Others will list the vast number of honours that he achieved in his life time and will speak of him as a husband, father and friend.
I remember Milton Friedman from my youth via the mainstream media, because he belonged to a time when it was still possible (although difficult) for a free market thinker to have large scale exposure in the mainstream media. I remember the interviews, I remember the television series (Free to Choose – and the book of the same name being in every bookshop and library in the land), and I remember the articles in Newsweek magazine.
Milton Friedman replaced Henry Hazlitt, but he was given an article only every two weeks (Hazlitt had a weekly spot), These days of course it would be almost unthinkable for a free market thinker to be given such space in a main stream magazine – and it is not really a question of modern free market folk being inferior writers to Professor Friedman (it is the message that is no longer tolerated, not a higher standard of writing that is demanded).
If ‘conservative’ voices are heard in the mainstream media it is more likely to be voices like that of President Bush who was speaking today (in Singapore) – the normal confusion of ‘freedom’ with ‘democracy’ and the normal promises of aid from the Western taxpayer to various governments in return for these governments ‘investing in people’ (“schools ‘n’ hospitals” and the rest of the standard speech).
Milton Friedman refused to meet President Bush, perhaps this was intolerant of him (for all I have written above President Bush is not a bad man and he means well), but Professor Friedman’s argument was that as he had tried for eight years (during the Reagan Administration) to explain the basic concepts of liberty to George Herbert Walker Bush, to no effect, he was not going to waste what little remained of his life talking to the son.
As for Milton Friedman’s message I (and many others) could argue over many matters. Were “right to work” statutes (i.e. bans on the closed shop) really bad things (as Professor Friedman believed) or were they a counter weight to pro-union laws (as some of us political folk believed)? Was the ‘negative income tax’ really a good way to save people from poverty, or would it lead to people not working if they could not find a good job? Were education vouchers a way of combining freedom in education with support for poor parents, or would they corrupt private schools?
The arguments were endless, but they (by all accounts) tended to be debates conducted in a good spirit – and Milton Friedman always at least held his own in debates (against anyone). → Continue reading: Milton Friedman RIP
If you cannot state a proposition clearly and unambiguously, you do not understand it.
– Milton Friedman
After an hour or so scanning the ‘Region A’ which Jeff Bezo’s BlueOrigin’s environmental impact statement says is the launch area, I have found one reasonable possibility.
If anyone else feels like doing some detective work and having a bit of craic, feel free to carry on and report back to Samizdata HQ on your findings.
“The only way that has ever been discovered to have a lot of people cooperate together voluntarily is through the free market. And that’s why it’s so essential to preserving individual freedom.”
He forced back force by the power of argument. His epitaph might be: the pen is mightier than the sword.
When I write, self-comfortingly, that Britain is a very irreligious country indeed (for all its other vices), many of our more conservative readers are not at all comforted and don’t wish to believe it. Now comes some very impressive support for my view, from a proper poll conducted on behalf of a Christian think tank.
“42% think faith is as evil as smallpox” is the stunning headline from UKPollingReport.
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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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