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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When you spend as much time reading think-tank proposals as some libertarians do, there is a danger of losing all sense of proportion. For instance, there is a proposal to “reform” the state pension system, because it is due to become bankrupt in the next twenty years. Unfortunately, it may cost more to implement the changes (and bankrupt the system anyway). There is the call for “social justice”, using the term in exactly the opposite way that it is understood to mean, in the hope of confusing your opponents into voting for you. Instead, they call you a liar and your normally loyal supporters stay at home. Then there is railway privatisation. Instead of allowing train operators to own the track themselves, we end up with the shambles of “National Rail” (and no doubt more subsidies wasted in the long run).
I have been looking for a term to describe such cunningly silly policy-making. So here goes:
Willetts, n. [pron. whil-itz] A policy proposal that is exactly twice as complicated as the problem that it is designed to solve.
David Willetts is by no means the only culprit, and his policy proposals are not always wrong, but with a nickname like “Two Brains”, you’re asking for trouble.
I am aware of the arguments in favour of home-schooling. The educational standards tend to be higher. Children are usually brought up as reasonable human beings and not part of a pack of savages. In principle, home schooling allows for an upbringing that is tailored to each child. The conscription of children in schools is removed.
And then something like this comes along.
There are two benefits of even the most useless schools. Children meet other children their own age, which is useful if one is not intent on becoming a hermit.
Of course there is plenty of unreported abuse that occurs in full view. In some schools abuse is ignored or even inflicted. But most basically of all, a 12 year-old child turning up weighing 35 pounds with burn marks and bruises in rags might be noticed. So having children turn up somewhere where their disappearance or injury will be noticed is a valuable function of schools. Perhaps they need to open twice a month for roll-call and then let them go home?
Today is the anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in 1916 that income tax is a violation of the Constitution.
So the politicians had to change to Constitution.
A full recount of Ohio’s votes in the recent presidential election has been ordered by a federal court, following lobbying by the Libertarian and the Green presidential candidates. I have covered the story here. There is no way a full recount could be completed by December 13, when the Electoral College has to formally cast its votes.
It occurs to me that it is a very strange way of promoting the Libertarian message to waste $1.5 million of Ohio taxpayers’ money. The recount is not going to change the overall result and could only conceivably cause the Libertarian candidate to finish behind the Constitutional Party or the Greens finish behind a local independent.
The real purpose is exposed by Badnarik’s musings about TV exit polls. He appears to be the only person not taking medication in the US to believe that the exit polls were right (Kerry win) and the ballot counting wrong (Bush win). This beats Dan Rather anyday:
From what I can see, there’s no reason to believe the exit polls were wrong, and fairly good reasons to believe that it was the election process that was faulty.
I can see some benefit to the Democratic Party in all this. Without spending any money, or attracting the tag of “Sore Loserman” from the 2000 election, the Kerry camp gets all the benefit of the Libertarian and Green lawyers trying to put their guy in the White House.
December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbour attack.
The image says it all.
The Democratic Leadership Council, a faction of the US Democratic Party, is calling for the resignation of Kofi Annan as the only way to restore the UN’s credibility. The litany of condemnation includes:
Annan’s handling of the fallout over the past week has done nothing to improve his perceived credibility: He has refused requests from congressional committees for access to the United Nation’s 55 internal audits and other reports, or for the chance to interview U.N. officials who oversaw the program, saying that it would interfere with the Volcker inquiry. That inquiry is expected to release an interim report in January. The full report could take another year and cost as much as $30 million — to be funded with leftover cash in the oil-for food program.
The British diplomatic response as reported by the BBC is to condemn Americans as a “lynch mob”. Someone supposedly called “Lord David Hannay”, a former British diplomat is defending Kofi Annan from those redneck peasants (including the DLC).
Apart from the fact that calling someone “Lord David Hannay” is a most improper form of address, it turns out that this creep was “first secretary of the negotiating team for entry into the EC” according to the UN’s global security website. So if anyone got kickbacks for betraying the British fishing industry or agriculture, or the excessive payments by British taxpayers to the European Economic Community (as it was called then), Lord Hannay should know who got the brown paper envelopes. He may even know a thing or two about the massive fraud going on at the European Commision, as he worked there, but I prefer to believe that he is simply blind to the wrong-doing of others.
It seems that a bi-partisan alliance of critics of the UN may be forming in the US Congress. Obviously some Rebublican sceptics want the UN reformed others want it abolished. What the DLC report suggests is that the less blinkered supporters of transnational government can see that getting rid of Annan is their best hope for restoring credibility.
Shame that the BBC and “Lord David Hannay” are such provincial ignoramuses that they don’t get the message.
Three months ago, I was ‘an extremist’. Today, I am merely ‘controversial’. I have not changed my opinion, but what is called “the public mood” has changed, at least in London.
The Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir John Stevens, interviewed in the Daily Telegraph (free subscription needed), has shifted the official middle-ground:
Householders should be able to use whatever force is necessary to defend their homes against criminals, even if it involves killing the intruder, the country’s most senior police officer said yesterday.
Sir John Stevens, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, said those who defended their families and property should only face prosecution over injuries to intruders in “extreme circumstances”, where they could be shown to have used gratuitous violence.
Curiously the blame for the present insane situation where burglars can sue for damages if they are injured whilst invading a home, and where people can be prosecuted for resisting burglars, seems to lie with the common law and judges.
The solution according to Sir John, is a statute:
There should be a presumption in law “that the person using the force to defend themselves is acting within the law, rather than the other way round”.
Even if a struggle led to the death of an intruder, Sir John added, the law would presume that the person in that house had acted lawfully “and let the law change that presumption because of fact in evidence”.
He said: “The message it sends to the would-be attacker is, `Do not think you can come into people’s homes and people will not defend themselves with the right type of force that’s necessary.’ At the moment it seems it’s the other way round.”
Margaret Hodge makes speeches about the unsung virtues of the Nanny State.
She forgets to remind us of her record as leader of Islington council, when a shocking series of terrible abuses against children were covered up…. by the Nanny State.
Unfortunately for people like Hodge, some of us remember the reports of child brothels being run from local government premises, where children were hooked on drugs and rented out for sex by local government employees and bullying older children. I remember the exposures (after years of cover-ups), the harrassment of anyone daring to protest against the paedophile rings operating in Islington and Lambeth, to name only the worst cases in London.
Unfortunate too, the Guardian, not noted for its crusading against the welfare state, details the case neatly, including recent attmpts by Hodge to prevent the BBC from telling the story of one of the abused children who were unsung recipients of Islington’s special care. I was especially impressed with Hodge’s rubbishing of a victim of sexual abuse as “an extremely disturbed person”.
Never mind the unsung virtues of totalitarian welfare statism, how about the unsung victims? Margaret Hodge is a government minister with a nice salary, lifestyle to add to her already considerable wealth before becoming a national politician. Instead of devoting herself to helping the victims of her administration with her own time and money, Hodge wants to tax the rest of us to create more opportunities that would allow ‘public servants’ to destroy even more lives than at present.
What a fine signal she sends to the most vulnerable in our society. And what a fine signal from the present government. I feel sick.
According to Dutch health investigators, going to church can cause lung cancer and other respiratory problems, because of the carcinogenic effects of candles and incense. Dr Theo de Kok, says that it is “very worrying”. With Christmas approaching, levels of pollutants would be expected to rise.
The solution is obvious. The European Union must immediately ban church-going for all children, impose a tax on adult church-goers, put health warning signs on the outside of all churches and copies of the Bible.
Oh, and ban Christmas.
Obviously, the EU must also impose diplomatic and economic sanctions on any country that does not comply with this (the USA).
In dreaming up appropriate health warnings for church-going, I like the following:
God kills!
Do not worship God in the presence of children
and cutest of all:
God can seriously damage your unborn child
Reading several pages of interesting reports and discussion on the BBC’s website about Somalia, I wonder:
Is Sudan a better country to live in than Somalia?
Do refugees travel between the two countries (probably via Ethiopia) and which is the better place to live?
How would Somalia score on a human rights questionnaire? Compared with say North Korea. I think of the official line from the worker’s paradise about homosexual rights: “There is no homosexuality in the Republic of Korea, it is a bourgeois disease.”
How obstructive are Somali warlords of international trade compared with say, the EU’s regulatory of tariff restrictions on agriculture? Is it easier and cheaper for a Kenyan farmer to sell food to Somalia than to Sudan or Spain?
I also note that multiple currencies are operating in Somalia, with US dollars, private currencies and old banknotes being exchanged in markets. Are Somalis really so much more intelligent than Europeans who had to be protected from currency choice?
The BBC reporter makes the mistake of comparing Somalia today with Holland Park in London today (except that some types of crime are probably more frequent in Holland Park). He is appalled that guns are for sale and that the entry fees finance qat instead of state schools and state hospitals. I think it is much more interesting to compare Somalia today with neighbouring countries today. On the face of it anarchy seems a lot like Robert A Heinlein’s depiction in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Ken Macleod’s The Star Fraction and The Stone Canal. Despite my quibbles with the BBC on this issue, full marks for going to Somalia eyes wide open, if not quite minds wide open.
I hear the term “Anglosphere” as meaning that there is some community of the English-speaking nations on either side of the Atlantic Ocean. But when I come across this site, I feel like I am living in a foreign country to Americans.
Trying to list all the reasons why Adopt a Sniper is definitely not an English website would take hours. And that is a shame.
[via Instapundit]
In the leafy suburb of Clamart to the South-West of Paris, the rumor is breaking that Jacques Chirac’s second favourite Arab (after Saddam Hussein) is dead.
CNN reports that Yasser Arafat has passed away this afternoon after spending a week in a coma.
Meanwhile in the Ivory Coast, demonstrators are parading banners that exclaim:
“Chirac is an assassin” and “Chirac= worse than Bin Laden” [thanks to millena at les libertariens, the French Libertarian newsgroup]
I thought the rednecks were all in the red states of the USA? 😉
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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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