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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Peter Cuthbertson has some pretty clear views about those who would control us for ‘our own good’
Any Brit who turns their television on to ITV or Channels 4 or 5 now will sooner or later see a vile new National Health Service advertisement, funded by their own tax money. Showing a young man running around bars and shopping centres spraying foul smells into the air and onto the clothes of others, it literally urges people that just as they would not tolerate anyone who does that, they should fight against the freedom of smokers to light up in bars and pubs. An obvious prelude to the government’s campaign to stop restauranteurs and landlords from allowing smoking on their own property, it is no doubt hoped the advertisement will edge public opinion in the nannying direction.
It is difficult to fathom the petty, narrow mind of the sort of otherwise unemployable bureaucrat who came up with this one. But one comes to understand the idea of people feeling aliens in their own country when one sees such things. What a profoundly un-British little broadcast it was. What a sickening way to impose the morality of the elite’s stateless global citizen onto a country whose famous tolerance and fair-mindedness is probably what left-liberal nannies feel necessitates such propaganda – sorry, such a campaign of public education – in the first place. One can only hope enough independently-minded people are emboldened by such spiteful nonsense to take stands on behalf of smoking, one of the few remaining mass activities that genuinely is not in some way anti-social, in an age where it seems few Britons can enjoy themselves in a group without being obnoxious to others.
Somehow worse than this, however, one sees explicit use of taxpayers’ money to campaign for one side on politically controversial areas, over behaviour that is perfectly legal and normal. This is a precedent that should worry everybody.
In any reporting on a quasi-tyranny, the state’s control and use of the media is usually cited to show that a country cannot be a genuine liberal democracy. Chile’s slide into dictatorship in the early 1970s is exemplified by Salvador Allende’s decision to eliminate criticism of his regime by nationalising the press. Today’s Russia is now widely described with the euphemism ‘managed democracy’ to a considerable degree because so much of its television is under state control: the elections themselves are free, but the state-run television stations campaigned strongly for Vladimir Putin in advance of last March’s Presidential election.
It’s because the use by the state of the media to advertise its own virtues and ideals is so symbolic of a wider lack of freedom that it is such a good indicator of the health of a society. The state is effectively limitless in its power to take by taxation anything people earn and produce. When it also feels free to use that money to take political stands, often stands opposed by the very people who pay these taxes, that is a signal of an overmighty government, wherever it exists.
When the state, as distinct from any political party, takes on the role of encouraging people to have the correct views and oppose the right habits, the liberty of everyone is made immediately more precarious. There is a very great supply of petty nannies with a favoured cause, and altogether more dangerous authoritarians and social engineeers with their own pet projects, who would love to get their hands on the power the NHS is now abusing. Rest assured, they will find ways of doing so if the precedent now being set is not reversed.
Seamus Heffernan takes Richard Gere to task.
It has become the unfortunate reality of all things political: celebrities love to chip in with their insights and opinions on the Big Events of our time. Following Yasser Arafat’s death, this weekend the Palestinians are holding elections. As a result, they have been treated to this television ad in an attempt to rouse them into voting, which starts with:
Hi, I’m Richard Gere and I’m speaking for the entire world.
Excuse me?
We’re with you during this election time. It’s really important. Get out and vote.
Wait – the entire world?
What is about being left-leaning and famous that makes most people so grossly overestimate not only their intelligence, but also their relevance? Does Gere really think that there are hordes of Palestinian girls out there getting all weepy over An Officer and a Gentleman?
Indeed, most Palestinians greeted the ad with a shrug.
But many voters, already struggling with the labyrinthine politics of the West Bank and Gaza, say they have never heard of the actor.
“I don’t even know who the candidates are other than Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas), let alone this Gere,” Gaza soap factory worker Manar an-Najar told Reuters.
It is too bad that Manar is not more familiar with the Gere canon. Surely he and his fellow Palestinians would just love to take political advice from an actor perhaps most famous for his role as a degenerate, imperialistic tool of American capitalism who falls in love with a prostitute. Or perhaps he would be more interested in hearing the views of Gere’s co-stars in the ad, one of whom has gone on record as saying:
[T]he Jews are destined to be persecuted, humiliated and tortured forever, and it is a Muslim duty to see to it that they reap their due. No petty arguments must be allowed to divide us. Where Hitler failed, we must succeed.
Nice work, Rich – the Dalai Lama would be proud.
(Hat tip to Little Green Footballs.)
Dominic Wellington see the hate filled collectivist attitude to private sector space flight as being the same attitude which feeds poverty in places where such sentiments actually control the political process
Rand Simberg points to this article in The Washington Dispatch. The author, Mark Whittington, writes about the sophomoric class-envy editorials on the X-Prize that have appeared recently in the UK press. Excerpt:
An editorial in The Scotsman on October 3rd [online here] seemed to set the tone. “Virtually every child does fantasise about space travel,” The Scotsman sneered. “But most then grow up. Branson reckons he will have no difficulty attracting customers for his space venture. Sadly, he’s probably right. Arrested development is a common trait among the super-rich, a fact which explains the market for Lotuses and Lamborghinis.”
Speaking as someone who would love a Lotus or a Lamborghini, and would kill for a ride into space on one of Mr Branson’s craft, I have no idea what the Scotsman editorial writer has been smoking. What is his problem?
Well, actually, I know perfectly well what his problem is – he thinks that nobody should be rich, and we should all live in dour council flats and drive Ladas and Trabants. I only have one response to that, and it’s not printable.
I do not have much time for those who inherit wealth and squander it, but self-made men or people who work with their inheritance and grow it command my full respect. This is one of the reasons why I like Berlusconi and his kids. He came from nowhere, and made some very clever deals. Nobody would have bet on private TV in Italy when he was buying stations up, but once it took off the howls of outrage from slower competitors and suddenly obsolete State broadcasters were deafening. The same sort of thing happened with many of his real-estate deals. His kids, with an inheritance the size of the national debt, are working their tails off in the family businesses.
Gerard DeGroot, the bitter ankle-biter of the Scotsman, is instead a professor of modern history at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Surprisingly, he approves of space travel per se – see for instance this Christian Science Monitor article from earlier this year – it is just private space travel that he dislikes. I wonder how he can combine the vitriol quoted above with positive sentiments such as the following:
Through history, every vibrant culture has pushed horizons outward. They’ve done so not simply because of the practical benefits of exploration, but also because discovery is a touchstone of cultural vigor.
I would argue that individuals doing things for their own reasons and benefit are much more of a “touchstone of cultural vigor” than massive State-run programs dropped onto the populace.
There is an expression in Italian: cattedrali nel deserto. Literally, it means ‘cathedrals in the desert’. It refers to the practice of building a shiny new factory, motorway, hospital or whatever in the economically backward South of Italy. The problem with this practice was – is – that the factory had no workers or transport links, or the motorway went from nowhere to nowhere, or there were no doctors to work in the hospital. These projects were as absurd as building a great cathedral in the desert, far from any worshippers. The ‘cathedrals’ bred only corruption, and many of them never even entered service. This is what State-run projects look like.
By contrast, the North of Italy, which has a GDP on a level with Switzerland and fearsome productivity, is driven entirely by small to medium businesses. Sure, there are a couple of Fiat-sized colossi, but mainly we’re talking little companies that you’ve never heard of, that are making their owners rich, that bring jobs to the area, and that supply such a level of diversity and resilience to the economy that it can drag the South along with it into Europe without being crippled or even slowed down too much.
The entrepreneurs driving this new space race and their prospective super-rich passengers are productive members of a vigorous culture. Gerard DeGroot and his intellectual compatriots, despite pretensions to the contrary, are most emphatically not.
Taylor Dinerman, a professional New York City journalist and long time Samizdata reader, sent us this short and incisive article on the impact of blogs and libertarian ideas on the current political environment.
Over the years I have come to the conclusion that most things in this universe revolve around a) The law of gravity and b) The Law of Supply and Demand.
The best case for this is the way the US election is being impacted by ‘New Media’. The combination of Talk Radio, Fox News and the Blogosphere made it impossible for the traditional Big Media to ignore the Swifties. Thus John Kerry’s character and personality were exposed in ways that would never have come out if it were up to just the New York Times etc.
The demand, in the US, for a non left wing media was always there, it was just when Limbaugh and the others showed that one could make money at it that others came in. The Blogs were more a pure product of technology but the demand for people all over the world to make themselves heard could not be held back. The flow of ideas is frankly, amazing.
Libertarian ideas have tended to triumph over the long term because they are better adapted to human nature. Sadly, resistance to these ideas is also deeply ingrained in the hearts of men. It is interesting to see how difficult it is to make people accept things that are manifestly in their own interest. While the ideas tend to win, libertarian leaning politicians tend to loose. Newt Gingrich was probably the most libertarian major politico in recent history, he was easily defeated by Clinton even while slick willie was grabbing his major ideas such as welfare reform.
Bush on the other hand pays little serious attention to libertarian ideas, but he may move America closer to those ideals with his ownership society set of proposals, than Newt ever could.
The point is that Libertarian ideas have become the ‘default’ position for the Republicans in the same was that socialist EU-centric ones are for most European politicos.
Mark Ellott has a thing or two to say about the Norwich Union’s pilot scheme for pay-as-you-drive motor insurance.
While we are sleepwalking into a surveillance society, the Norwich Union is egging us on… They are trialling a system of in-car monitoring (a black box by any other name) that records details of the vehicle’s journey. Where it went, how fast it travelled etc.
The box records real-time vehicle usage and sends the data to Norwich Union securely using mobile technology.
Each month or quarter, the motorist will receive a document similar to their mobile phone bill advising them of their journey details. Pay as you go insurance – sounds innocuous enough. During the BBC piece it was suggested that the monthly or quarterly bill may provide advice for improving the cost effectiveness of one’s driving (from an insurance point of view) by providing alternatives to the routes taken.
Even more worrying, perhaps is the quote from the Norwich Union director of the pay-as-you-drive scheme, Robert Ledger:
The interest in the pilot scheme has been phenomenal. We could have filled the pilot twice over with the amount of requests we’ve had from interested motorists, not just within the UK but from drivers around the world.
Sleepwalking indeed…
According to the BBC’s Breakfast programme, there is no clear indication yet about how the data will be stored, used and accessed – will the Norwich Union sell it? Will the police or other agencies have access to it? So far these are unanswered questions.
One motorist volunteer thinks this will give her control over her insurance costs. For a low mileage user, this may be so. For the rest of us? It is always worth remembering that insurance companies are not charities – they are investing in this because they see a revenue opportunity. Oh, how simple it all could be – analysing a driver’s record and declaring his insurance void due to, say driving several hours without a break or breaking the speed limit – or, just hiking the premium.
Personally, I prefer to control my insurance costs by playing them off against each other come renewal time.
Serial commenter Verity wants to share her thoughts regarding why she has also done what Samizdatista Alice Bachini did (well, sort of)
I’ve legged it. ‘opped it.
There was no defining moment. No shock of recognition. No clap of thunder.
There was nothing, really. I had regarded Europe and Britain with lazy distaste for so long it had become woven into the woof and warp of my daily thoughts, barely surfacing.
The encroaching communism-lite of the EU, supinely submitted to by the 400m or so people who live there, most of whom have never experienced real democracy… that revulsion was always in the background…
…and the eagerness of the repellent Blair to give away our country, which he does not understand, or even know very much about, to ‘Europe’, an area of the world that sinks deeper into global irrelevance with every silly little ‘summit’ with red carpets and photo ops, every self-involved, fidgety little treaty between themselves that has no relevance to the rest of the world, every encroachment by anonymous apparatchiks into the lives of the citizenries. With their happy blindness to the fact that world has long moved on from regarding Europe as a beacon of intellectual and political sophistication, and the diminishment of the continent’s economic influence on international events, the EU has begun to take on the comedic, self-involved air of a light operetta.
At home, Blair is chasing indigenes out of the country at a rate of knots. People fear for their lives in the most lawless country in the advanced world. The overweening ego that oversaw the dissolution of the civil society, outlawed self-defence and nurtured a sense of grievance among the criminal classes, promoted thought fascism and other forms of bullying of the electorate, impudently routinely over-stepped his remit as PM, created ever more taxpayer-funded slots for the lumpen nomenklatura, awarded special privileges to selected segments of the public – not because they had earned them by making a contribution, but because their inexplicable privileges threw the people whose families have lived on this turf, and formed its civil society, for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, off their stride.
Who dared say him nay? No one. OK. Peter Hitchens has been a brave voice. And a few others. But by and large, the Brits don’t seem to mind. They get tax credits for the large wodge of their income taken from them by the state, some of which is returned to them as supplicants. Don’t worry. Be happy. → Continue reading: Verity doesn’t live here any more
Chris Goodman revisits Waller R. Newell important 2001 article Postmodern Jihad: What Osama bin Laden learned from the Left and looks at from where the Islamists really draw their inspiration
It is noticeable that when followers of Osama bin Laden film themselves cutting off the heads of non-combatants, they seek to extinguish the still small voice of their conscience by shouting out the name of God [‘Allah’]. Either they believe Allah to be Satan or they do not believe that God – in the sense of objective goodness – exists. An act of moral goodness does not require you to blank out your conscience.
You could argue that they exist in such a primitive state of mind that they view the taking of life as worship. Indeed you do not have to go back very far in European history before you find people being burnt as offerings, and it is possible that they view exploding a bomb in a crowded night club, market, or bank as an act of devotion, possible but unlikely.
The people who decided to murder over 3,000 citizens of the world in New York came from the most educated strata of their societies. To seek to comprehend their actions with reference to a medieval religion is to neglect the extent to which they are a product of modernity.
The ideology that motivates the followers of Osama bin Laden is derived more from European Romantic Nihilism than it is in Islamic conceptions of God. I think that Waller R. Newell explains it well in an article that is available on the internet called Post-Modern Jihad: What Osama Bin Laden learnt from the Left which I have just read. → Continue reading: The western roots of Islamism
Imagine the European People’s Democratic Front.
Imagine their first press release…
We, the people of Europe, hold the following truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. – That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Unfortunately, we don’t consent to a junket-ocracy, which is what the proposed EU will be.
As such, we undertake to occupy and subvert any referendum in Luxembourg, a country with a conveniently tiny voting population of less than 350,000. One residential mailing address (with 50,000 registered residents) later, and the constitution will be consigned, where it belongs, to the dustbin of history.
Naw, it could never happen…
SlowJoe
And now for something completely different. Matthew Maly writes in with a fascinating and challenging essay about Islam, civil society, Iraq, Western Civilisation, American politics, Jennifer Lopez, the fixed quantity of wealth fallacy, strange Shiite self-flagellation, tribesman with no clothes… well, about all those things and much, much more. Whether you agree with the general thrust of it or not, it is very interesting stuff
Having bombed some mosques, George W. Bush has built a Protestant mosque at Abu-Ghraib prison. Here, the Iraqi Moslems are taught that pork may be good for them and that the teachings of the Holy Koran are supposed to be subordinated to the teachings of Democracy, as represented by handpicked Iraqi exiles protected by American armor.
As many people before him with a gleam in their eye and fervor in their speeches, George W. Bush wanted to do good. As many revolutionaries before him he fell victim to technology, too awesome to reveal its implications.
Technology as the main cause of revolutions
Martin Luther, George W. Bush’s intellectual predecessor, correctly sensed that thanks to improved manufacturing processes, people were becoming economically independent. They no longer wished to be led blindly, to be told to behave “just so” without being given a reason that they could intellectually accept. People were becoming literate, able to read the Bible by themselves, and to think about their lives in a more rational way. The Germans, British, and Dutch did not speak a Romance language, and now they wanted church services in their own language since they simply did not understand Latin. Suddenly, they had become mature enough to want their Mass to be more meaningful, that is, understandable, to them. And when the language of the Mass became an issue, there were other matters to discuss. The Catholic Church failed to account for the social change that manufacturing brought about, and Germanic peoples turned Protestant as a result. The French, Italians, Spanish, and Portuguese remained Catholic, since a Latin Mass was understandable to them. Thus the Protestant revolution reflected the fact that manufacturing technology had made people more self-sufficient, able to read and to think for themselves. → Continue reading: George W. Bush: Martin Luther for the Islamic world
Scott Baines calls for the government to allow an fair debate on smoking.
There is conserable pubic debate at present about the role of government in regulating smoking. The Prime Minister has called for a “Big Conversation” on whether local authorities should be able to ban workplace smoking. Yet the government seems unwilling to allow a fair debate. Instead, it is hugely bankrolling one side.
Action on Smoking and Health, which calls for smoking to gradually be made illegal, received £177,640 last year from the Department of Health. It also received £136,936 from the Welsh Assembly. This is money earned by taxpayers, including the especially heavily-taxed smoker, which goes towards an organisation that persecutes them. Ash offers an entirely negative contribution to society. Its funding should be stopped.
Scott Baines
Paul Staines has some views on the interesting changes going on in India.
My initial disappointment (and surprise) that the world’s largest democracy had rejected the right wing BJP-led coalition for the Congress party, the former home of Gandhian-Nehruvian socialism, has turned to near joy with the news that Sonia Gandhi has stood down in favour of Manmohan Singh, a man described by the Grauniad as “the poster boy of India’s reforms, the architect of policies that turned India from a socialist behemoth into a regional economic power.”
Manmohan Singh as Prime Minister means India will have an avowed admirer of Margaret Thatcher in charge. In 1991, with India facing financial crisis, he convinced Rajiv Gandhi to implement liberal reforms in one month. He has described the changes he made:
We got government off the backs of the people of India, particularly off the backs of India’s entrepreneurs. We introduced more competition, both internal competition and external competition. We simplified and rationalized the tax system. We made risk-taking much more attractive… [and] much more profitable. So we tried to create an environment conducive to the growth of business. We removed a large number of controls and regulations, which in the past had stifled the spirit of innovation, the spirit of entrepreneurship, and restricted the scope for competition, both internal competition and external competition. As a result, in the ’90s, productivity growth in the Indian industry has been much faster than ever before.
He is pro-globalization and a critic of US and EU agricultural subsidies:
Globalization creates opportunities. As I said, freer trade, if it is genuinely free, and India’s labor-intensive products can find markets abroad that will help to get new jobs in our country. That will help to relieve poverty.
I am sure he faces many challenges, the Congress party is allied with communists, but international investors and Indian entrepreneurs are sure to welcome a man once voted “Finance Minister of the Year” by European bond investors. Indeed his first mission has been to re-assure that he would implement a “responsible macro-economic policy… We’ll bring in policies that will not hamper India’s progress – policies that are pro-growth.”
Paul Staines
The pseudonymous ‘Slowjoe’ sends in this article to ponder on the subject of ID cards. Incidentally, anyone with articles on that subject would do well to consider submitting them to our sister site White Rose, which really specialises in civil liberties issues such as this.
The Register has the story of a man jailed because of a flaw in a fingerprint identification program which appears to have been chosen as the basis of the UK ID card scheme.
A number of disturbing points:
- The victim in this case didn’t realise that the software was flawed until 4 years after he’d been jailed.
- There have been at least 97 cases where mistaken identification took place that the state of Oregon was aware of. Since these involved fingerprints, it’s likely that this means “97 cases of wrongful arrest”.
- This story appeared in the Register on May 11th. No mainstream news site has considered it worth covering. (My basis for this is are two searches at new.google.com, a search of the UK site and of the US site. For the lazy, these links show that no mainstream news organisation has gone beyond printing Mr. Benson’s press release. A couple of finance websites and trial lawyers sites seem have also run it.)
- The defendants are crass enough to ask for the suit to be dismissed because the victim didn’t know about their software bug in time.
Next time someone suggests that “fingerprints are flawless”, the kicker is, the chosen system apparently cannot distinguish between men with 10 fingers, and those with only 9. How anyone can trust such a system is beyond me.
Is anyone still in favour of ID cards?
Slowjoe
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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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