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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Government-fetishists are always trying to justify their demands for ever-bigger state by claiming that only the state can ride to the rescue of the public to correct what they call ‘market failures’.
So, who is going to come riding to the rescue to put this right?
Thousands of parents who had children taken away from them on the evidence of the controversial paediatrician Professor Sir Roy Meadow will not have them returned.
Ministers are to review as many as 5,000 civil cases of families affected over the past 15 years by Prof Meadow’s now-discredited theory of Munchausen Syndrome By Proxy. This accused mothers of harming their children to draw attention to themselves.
Many mothers say that they have been vindicated in their insistence that they were wrongly accused and now want their children back. However, Margaret Hodge, the minister for children, has ruled out any widespread return.
Mrs Hodge said that the exact number of civil cases where Prof Meadow’s theory had been used to remove children from mothers was unknown, but could run into “thousands or even tens of thousands”.
She added, however: “If a miscarriage of justice was made 10 or 15 years ago, what is in the child’s interest now? If the adoption order was made on the back of Meadow’s evidence and that was 10 years ago, what is in the real interest of the child? If they were taken as babies the only parent they know is the adopted one. It is incredibly difficult. It is a really tough call to make.
“The sort of families that are coming forward are heartbroken families. But if the child was adopted at birth the sensible thing to do is to let it stay. As children’s minister my prime interest has to be the interests of the child.”
I would be willing to wager that the ‘prime interest’ of Margaret Hodge is Margaret Hodge.
As for the thousands of parents who may have had their children abducted by the state, well, tough titties. Live with it.
What the government puteth asunder, let no man join together again.
I’ve just read an article in Fox News which has left me both speechless and in a fury:
A 14-year-old New Jersey schoolboy — whose dad and stepdad are in the military — was suspended for five days because he drew a “patriotic” stick figure of a U.S Marine blowing away a Taliban fighter, officials said yesterday.
It further notes:
Scott Switzer, of Colts Neck, was sent home last week from Tinton Falls Middle School after a teacher saw the image on a computer and described it to the principal.
Scott, who turned 14 Tuesday and was headed back to school Wednesday, said he was unjustly disciplined for his sketch of “a war scene.”
This sort of treatment of a young lad for simply being a young lad is incredibly destructive. You can’t repress the natural expression of, well, being a boy. Boys like imaginary wars and fighting battles in the back yard, climbing trees, hiding under porches, jumping off porch roofs and playing ‘paratrooper’ by swinging as high as they can before letting go. You can’t stop them from going bang-bang at passing cars – transmogrified by imagination into Russian or Nazi or Jap or Iraqi tanks, depending on the generation.
If you were to succeed, you would destroy them as thoroughly as if you’d taken them in a backroom and buggered their wee bottoms. Worse, actually. One can recover from mere physical abuse… rape of the soul is forever.
I used to draw all sorts of battle scenes when I was 14. Lots of aircraft diving and strafing, even an imaginary Nazi Spaceship after reading Robert Heinlein’s “Rocketship Galileo”. I’m sure these morons would have loved me.
At one point we had a long running series of water gun ‘assassinations’ in the halls of Coraopolis Senior High School. One group of us were the “Nazi’s” and another were “Codename Jericho” and “Operation Bluelight” from the TV series of the time. This included secret coded messages being passed around and sometimes captured and passed on to me as the senior Herr codebreaker. I’d just gotten my first book on Codes and Ciphers through the Scholastic Book Service. Since both ‘sides’ were working from the same book, it was fairly easy to crack them!
We finally caught a ‘double agent’ and surrounded him in the basketball court bleachers during some ceremony in which a Pennsylvania State official presented our school a State flag. When it ended, our target tried to run for it, but we surrounded him. The ‘we’ being all of us zombies who’d already been watergunned over the last few weeks. The rules were that those already ‘dead’ weren’t allowed to take out anyone else.
Our designated assassin then emptied the watergun on him.
These politically correct fruitcakes in New Jersey would simply have adored us. They would probably have sent me and the others in for Indoctrination and Re-education.
The improbably named UK Home Office Minister Paul Goggins, with the even more improbable title of Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Correctional Services, has defended the lack of strict definitions in a proposed new Internet grooming law. This is designed to prevent the entrapment of young children by older sexual predators. However, the proposed law, as it is currently drafted, could theoretically see a 15-year old boy-and-girl couple, who have mutually consenting sex together, being prosecuted, and sent to jail for five years alongside a 45-year old man who has sex with a 13-year old girl.
On the BBC Today program this morning, Mr Goggins said that the government could find no way of wording their new legislation to include the older predators, but to exclude the under-age couples. However, he said this would be alright, because the Crown Prosecution Service would receive the correct legal guidance on when to and when not to prosecute, to avoid imprisoning sexually adventurous youngsters. Which of course begs the question, why aren’t they clever enough to frame this splendid new legal guidance in the new law?
It also begs the question of how many Samizdata readers would be criminalized if this new law were to be retro-actively applied to them, and only kept out of jail via the masterly whim of any future Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Correctional Services? As our socialist lords and masters wrap us in ever more legislation, to criminalize us, in order to control us better, their excuses and deceptions for this cacophony of intrusive legislation grow ever flimsier. I’m confident they’ll soon make it illegal to walk on the cracks in the pavement, in a loud shirt. But don’t worry, I’m sure Mr Goggins will be kind enough not to bang us away for this heinous misdemeanour, unless of course we do something else much more serious to annoy him, such as calling him a very rude name. Mr Goggins, you are an idiotarian.
Our government is determined that we shall be numbered and identity carded no matter how long it takes or how much opposition has to be ground down, and if they can’t do it by persuading adults, they’ll do it by habituating (and I can think of ruder words than that) children.
Every child in England is to be given a credit card-style ID number in reforms aimed at preventing a repeat of the murder of Victoria Climbie, the Government has announced.
The long-awaited Green Paper on children’s services also included a proposal to create a Children’s Commissioner for England, whose job it will be to speak up for under-18s and ensure their views are “fed into” Government policy.
It set out a large number of changes to the structure of children’s services, which will see education, health and social care combined and dispensed from neighbourhood schools.
Tony Blair said the proposals were a “significant step” towards ensuring there was no repeat of the Climbie case.
One thing is very certain about this new ID numbered world which they are determined to create. It will still contain outbursts of evil like Victoria Climbie’s murder. ID numbers won’t stop that. → Continue reading: ID numbers and Hidden Europe
There is probably a drop-dead serious point to be made here about the gradual ‘feminisation’ of boys but, for now at least, I am content just to publicly guffaw at this latest forlorn attempt to make the world a safer place:
Children in Melbourne have been banned from dressing up as Batman, Superman and the Incredible Hulk because schools say the action hero costumes encourage aggressive behaviour.
At least 10 childcare centres have declared themselves “superhero-free zones”, claiming that youngsters who don capes and masks are more likely to end up wrestling, punching and karate-kicking unsuspecting classmates.
Lex Luther take note: all their childcare centres are belong to you!
The head of one childcare centre, Madeleine Kellaway, told the Sun Herald newspaper: “There is a lot of violence involved, where you get wham-bam aggressive behaviour.”
Perhaps the kids just don’t like her very much.
She said banning the superhero costumes had encouraged more creative play.
‘Okay children, today we’re all going to dress up as Outreach Co-ordinators and play a game of who can get most money from the government in order to implement a policy framework for achieving diversity in local authority management structure. Hooray!’
There are times when I compare 2003 with the Orwellian world of 1984. In one respect at least, the fictional Airstrip One was far better than present day Britain: kids could have more fun!
Consider this report, that children are being harrassed by intolerant adults into staying locked indoors. Of course we live in an age where most children are treated at best as designer lap dogs or fashion accessories and at worst like punchbags or sex toys. So that actually letting children run around parks, fall in streams, get muddy and avoid obesity and truancy by burning off their excess energy in creative or harmless pursuits are not an option. The streets where I grew up have too many cars parked in them to play football, never mind the traffic.
The contrast with the Orwellian child utopia of Airstrip One is amazing: kids can run around as they wish, there is no shortage of activities for them to enjoy, from attending public executions, to outings in the countryside. But the real fun is in the “spies”. Children are actively encouraged to look through keyholes, snoop into the affairs of adults and they can earn plaudits for exposing corrupt and treasonable behaviour. So when that nasty Mrs B. at the corner of A***** Rd and M****** Rd would should at my friends and I for kicking a football outside her house, we could pick up the phone and denounce her to the Party as an agent of Emmanuel Goldstein!
I wonder if there are any equivalent means for children today to get even with bossy and intolerant adults? They could try this phone number: 0800 11 11 (Airstrip One only).
It is a little known fact but Britain is a world-leader in the manufacture and distribution of paranoia. We even export it.
For most of the time our public officials are hard at work busily churning out the stuff for both the domestic and foreign markets. But, what happens when one health-panic runs headlong into another? Well, the whole machine just grinds to an embarrassing halt:
A council has forbidden pupils to apply sunscreen in school – in case other children suffer an allergic reaction.
Cancer Research UK, which launched the Sun Smart campaign to warn of the dangers of the sun, said it was “amazed” by the policy.
Manchester City Council says it is following health and safety guidelines.
Pity the poor child, stuck out on a limb, while two different nannies squawk at them with two entirely conflicting demands. Maybe the nannies could solve the problem (and do everyone a real favour) by just dropping dead from worry.
Children are always a bit of a knotty problem for libertarians (yes, I am still using that word until a better one comes along). I have almost lost count of the number of arguments I have engaged in concerning their rights or absence thereof and I have still not reached any (or very many) satisfactory conclusions.
So it is with the question of physical punishment. Every instinct I possess and every principle to which I subscribe tells me that hitting children (albeit a moderate smack to the posterior) is wrong. You can camouflage it in as many codes of discipline or doctrines of necessity as you wish but the bald fact remains that it is an assault. If assaulting somebody is wrong (and I should hope that most sane people will agree that it is) then surely it remains wrong notwithstanding that it is administered by someone who otherwise loves and cares for you and is intended to provide some sort of memorable object lesson. If I strike out at my wife, co-worker, best friend or next-door neighbour I run the risk of prosecution and a lawsuit. But not so if I strike my child.
I find it extremely difficult to justify this distinction. In fact, if anything, a child should have an even stronger presumption of physical integrity because they are incapable of mounting anything like a plausible self-defence.
So, while my mind is not closed on the issue, that is where I currently stand and that is what I currently think. But, however starkly I may oppose the physical punishment of children, I am even more stridently opposed to the idea of appointing the state as guardian:
Spanking children can lead to more severe abuse, two parliamentary committees said Monday, and urged the government to pass a law barring parents from hitting their children.
The government has already outlawed corporal punishment in day care centers and schools. But parents and guardians are still permitted to use spanking as “reasonable chastisement,” putting Britain out of step with several European countries where all physical punishment of children is illegal.
Heavens to Betsy! We’re ‘out of step’. Quick, somebody crank up that metronome.
Actually this is not a fresh hell. There is a dedicated coterie of toweringly self-righteous do-gooders who have been campaigning for years for a ban on all physical punishment to be enforced by the state and every couple of years or so they manage to force their agenda on to the front pages. I am implacably opposed to them. Quite aside from the fact that these people are so obnoxiously condescending, there is no way I want to hand an excuse to the ‘Social Working Classes’ to drive the thin end of what is sure to prove a very fat wedge in between children and their parents. It will provide further justification for them to go trampling all over people’s private lives and accelerate the process of family nationalisation and resulting social disintegration. A few red rumps are by far the lesser of those two evils.
Fortunately, I can cast aside my customary pessimism because there appears to be no chance whatsoever of this law getting onto the Statute Books. At least not yet. I allowed myself a cheer of relief upon hearing a government minister on the radio news this morning give it the unequivocal thumbs-down. I don’t believe there has been any great examination of ethics involved; more likely their minds are concentrated by the fact that (for a change) the overwhelming majority of public opinion is against any state intervention in this area. I think HMG might be tempted if they knew they weren’t going to face such stiff public opposition.
And I am with the British public on this one. Well, sort of. I do think that assaulting a child is wrong regardless of the intentions behind it but I am equally sure that legislation is a cure that will prove worse than the disease. Parents should raise their children, not the state and I hope sufficient numbers of parents share my sentiments. That is far from a perfect solution but maybe it is the least worst solution and, in any event, it is the best I can do.
Just before our server shut down (which was actually a ‘false flag’ attack by Mossad and the CIA acting under direct orders from the Bush Nazi regime in collaboration with a secret cabal of oil bankers working in cahoots with their Zionist paymasters) one of our readers, Simon Austin sent me this reminiscence of childhood in ages now gone by:
According to today’s regulators and bureaucrats, those of us who were kids in the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s probably shouldn’t have survived, because…
Our baby cots were covered with brightly coloured lead-based paint which was promptly chewed and licked.
We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, or latches on doors or cabinets and it was fine to play with pans.
When we rode our bikes, we wore no helmets, just flip flops and fluorescent’ clackers’ on our wheels.
As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags. Riding in the passenger seat was a treat.
We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle – tasted the same.
We ate dripping sandwiches, bread and butter pudding and drank Fizzy pop with sugar in it, but we were never overweight because we were always outside playing.
We shared one drink with four friends, from one bottle or can and no one actually died from this.
We would spend hours building go-carts out of scraps and then went top speed down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into stinging nettles a few times, we learned to solve the problem.
We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back before it got dark. No one was able to reach us all day and no one minded.
We did not have Playstations or X-Boxes, no video games at all. No 99 channels on TV, no videotape movies, no surround sound, no mobile phones, no personal computers, no Internet chat rooms. We had friends. We went outside and found them.
We played elastics and street rounders, and sometimes that ball really hurt.
We fell out of trees, got cut and broke bones and teeth, and there were no lawsuits. They were accidents. We learnt not to do the same thing again.
We had fights, punched each other hard and got black and blue – we learned to get over it.
We walked to friend’s homes.
We made up games with sticks and tennis balls and ate live stuff, and although we were told it would happen, we did not have very many eyes out, nor did the live stuff live inside us forever.
We rode bikes in packs of 7 and wore our coats by only the hood.
Our actions were our own. Consequences were expected.
The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke a law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law. Imagine that!
This generation has produced some of the best risk-takers and problem solvers and inventors, ever. The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas. We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all.
And you’re one of them. Congratulations!
Pass this on to others who have had the luck to grow up as real kids, before lawyers and government regulated our lives, for our own good.
→ Continue reading: Childhood’s End
I think my relationship with the BBC is finally settling into something quite satisfactory. Having been through the stages of disillusion, mistrust, contempt and loathing I now find that I have reached the point where I now regard the BBC as reasonably reliable reverse indicator.
For example, whenever the BBC presents an event as a spontaneous outburst of public feeling, I immediately turn my mind to the possibility that it is anything but.
A case to consider is this series of nationwide anti-war protests by schoolchildren:
Hundreds of children are among crowds protesting at Westminster.
School children have been played a big part in many demonstrations across the UK while others have staged their own protests at their schools.
Sixth-former Sam Beste, from Fortismere School in north London, has organised many protests against the war.
He is staging a demonstration with dozens of others in Muswell Hilll before heading for Westminster.
In Carlisle, the police were called to a school after hundreds of pupils staged an anti-war demonstration.
There were two separate demonstrations in Belfast with more than 1,000 students and schoolchildren mounting a sit-down protest, blocking the road outside Queen’s University.
In Nottinghamshire, more than 100 pupils walked out of lessons at West Bridgford School to stage a demonstration on a nearby playing field.
In Manchester, about 200 school children joined a big demonstration.
The article makes no specific claims but first impressions would lead one to believe that these pre-pubescent protests are just breaking out everywhere like typhoid. Who knows, maybe they are. I certainly cannot prove anything but, for me, this wave of teenybopper discontent bears all the hallmarks of orchestration. And, if that is so, who are the conductors?
Far be it from me to point the dirty end of the stick at their teachers and lecturers, but it would not be an entirely unreasonable inquiry to make. Just don’t expect anyone at the BBC to make it.
Recommend that they avoid such ridiculous non-advice as this lot of BBC rubbish (thanks Natalie Solent) which I fisked today over here, and tell them this:
The war in Iraq will happen in Iraq, not in Bromley, Guildford or Kansas City. If it’s anything like the last gulf war, it will kill far few people than Saddam has since the last gulf war. But it might kill fewer people. And anyway, the world already contains some disgusting countries where people are killed by their own governments for no reason, which is why the war in Iraq is happening: to reduce their number, and improve things.
You might not want to talk about many of the actual specific evil things Saddam has done, in case they are upset by such details. Children don’t always want to see pictures of innocent mothers and babies gassed to death by their own government in their home villages, for instance. But you could say that Saddam is a vicious thug who has murdered many, many human beings, and the world will be better off once he’s out of power.
If they are having nightmares about terrorist attacks, you can explain how incredibly unlikely it is that one of these will affect them personally or anyone they know, and that you personally do not waste time worrying about it. Tell them terrorist attacks will be reduced once the governments that fund terrorists have been changed to better ones, which is why the Iraq war is happening.
And of course, find out whether they have been subjected to irrational antiwar nonsense from teachers or anyone else they know. My view, since watching a TV documentary about how British children ‘felt’ about 9/11, is that something very unpleasant in the current political climate is actively encouraging kids to feel personally bad and anxious about world events in coercive, irrational ways. For most children- still trying to learn how to read, play football, write stories and get on with their friends- people they never met being killed thousands of miles away should be no more upsetting than people they never met being killed in WWII.
But it’s easy to induce hysteria. “Oh dear, how awful! Isn’t it shocking, little Jimmy! Those people could bomb our home next! Now, how do you feel…?” Well, if the people you rely on for help tell you fairly clearly that you should worry, then you worry. A lot of antiwar propaganda consists of scaremongering, and our children are unfortunately very vulnerable to it. This BBC advice doesn’t address that: it’s part of the problem. Parents: protect your kids from antiwar propaganda: talk to them rationally about the war.
…or how to ensure your kids are more technologically literate than you.
One of the best ways to motivate someone is to present the person with a challenge. For children, forbidding something works equally well, if not better. So when I came across this product in one of those little catalogues that come with Sunday newspapers, I immediately realised its potential to do an amazing service in further advancing the technological awareness of the young generation.
Achieve total control over TV time
Worried about the hours your children spend watching TV or playing computer games? This remarkable new British invention hands back control to parents. Using the electronic Parent Key, you program the child’s daily viewing allowances into Screenblock – say, 7-8 am and 5-7 pm. As the TV mains cable is routed via the locked compartment, Screenblock controls the power supply, turning it on and off at the times requested. But here’s the best bit! It also comes with two electronic cards which act like a football ref’s cards. Wave the yellow one at Screenblock and today’s allowance is reduced by 15 mins – and red means the TV stays off until tomorrow. The all-important Parent Key also overrides all settings when the kids are in bed and it’s time for grown-up viewing.
So far, so good. But if parents led by the desire to curb their children’s TV-viewing habits succumb to the advertising and purchase such devices en masse, pretty soon many a technologically gifted whizkid will be popular, spots or no spots. Not only ways to disable the screenblock will be devised, but kids will be ‘instructed’ in how to do that themselves without their modifications being detected. Part of the solution will have to be the inability of parents to notice the ‘adjustment’. Aren’t you just grateful to the screenblock inventors for broadening your children’s technological horizons?
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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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