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]
The Dutch have launched wide-ranging crackdowns on the buy-to-let sector, but renters are paying the price
“Landlords have no friends in politics anymore,” Tjeerd Sijtema, one of Rotterdam’s 15,000 civil servants, tells me.
Last year, city officials made Dutch history when they became the Netherlands’ first lawmakers to introduce a ban on landlords buying properties to let.
Red-rimmed signs warding off landlords were erected in 16 of Rotterdam’s 71 neighbourhoods – where around a third of its housing stock resides.
Smug-looking faces shaped like houses stare down at residents who cycle past it in quick succession. Above read the loaded words: “We are working on a healthy housing market here.”
“Working on”, as in “destroying”:
But one glaring consequence of the ban is the downward pressure it is having on rental housing supply, which props up those who cannot immediately afford to buy a house – typically younger residents, migrants and fresh divorcees.
The ban also pushed up rents for tenants in regulated neighbourhoods by around 4pc last year, damaging housing affordability for renters which the Erasmus School of Economics said “undermin[ed] some of the intentions of the law.”
Even students are feeling the negative impacts. In a quaint coffee shop at the heart of leafy Kralingen-Oost, a popular area amongst undergraduates, one student told me it’s much harder to live in larger groups now. “I’m only living with one other person this year,” she told me.
And, naturally,
Meanwhile the waiting list for social housing in Rotterdam – which makes up a staggering 55pc of the city’s overall housing supply – is now five years’ long.
Ban tobacco in the UK, and you will simply divert uncountable millions in untaxed moneys into the pockets of criminals, while cigarette smoking will barely decline at all – in fact, I’d take a small wager that the smuggled product will be cheaper after the ban than the legal product was before. It’s such a monumentally stupid idea, I can’t imagine for a minute that the government won’t eagerly embrace it.
More than 35 years ago, I recall when an old friend of mine (who died all too young in 2006), Chris R Tame, had been appointed the director of an outfit called FOREST. That acronym stood for Freedom Organisation for the Right to Enjoy Smoking Tobacco. The group was backed by sundry folk, including as far as I know, tobacco firms. It made no secret of it. Chris, much to the annoyance of various pressure groups such as ASH (Action on Smoking and Health), was a keep-fit guy, who went jogging (I joined him in runs around Regent’s Park), lifted weights, did not smoke, and drank in moderation.
Chris’s argument was that your life was yours, not the nation’s or the State’s. With so-called “passive smoking” and the “pollution” side of it, he argued that the risk was slight, but where possible, the issue was for owners of private property to decide. A person was not, on this reasoning, forced to work in a pub or restaurant, etc, and people were not forced to go to such places. In a vigorous economy, with lots of consumer choice, there would be non-smoking premises and those who disliked or feared tobacco smoke could patronise places they preferred. It was the sort of messy solution that a market would provide, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach. (See a commentary here from the CATO think tank in the US.)
Over the past 30 years, Chris’s argument has lost ground. On a personal level, as someone who doesn’t smoke or like the smell of it, that’s fine by me. But I realise that this is short-sighted to value a loss of others’ liberties. It is nevertheless striking that, when considering how things were 30 or 40 years ago, we have gone from tolerance of smoking (look at old movies and TV shows) to almost total suppression. I still see a few people smoking a ciggie outside an office here in London, but that’s rare. In fact, I am more likely to smell weed than tobacco these days in London, or for that matter, New York.
Today, UK prime minister Rishi Sunak, at the annual Conservative Party conference, outlined a few policies and measures. I was struck by how he wants to adopt a New Zealand-style measure to progressively raise the age at which people can buy cigarettes, up to the point where it is illegal in all but name.
I recall many years ago how ASH and others denied to Chris Tame’s face that they wanted to ban cigarettes. Oh no, they said, that’s just propaganda. Well, it turns out that the end-point for all their campaigns was indeed to ban cigarettes completely. They wanted it all along but lacked the cojones to say so honestly.
Thanks to the cult ideology of Net Zero some governments, including our own, have started trying to destroy the entire basis of human brilliance and ingenuity in a way that has no parallel other than in totalitarian states.
If electric cars represented an overall improvement on internal combustion engine (ICE) cars by being collectively better to drive, cheaper to buy and run, at least as easy to ‘refuel’, had longer (or even equivalent) ranges, used less energy, lasted longer, had better resale value, were less environmentally damaging through being easier to make, using less metals and were easier to recycle, they’d sell themselves. Those are all minimum standards the Government could have set, but hasn’t.
Switzerland is a great country. In most respects Machiavelli’s description of the Swiss as “armatissimi e liberissimi”, “most armed and most free”, still applies. But…
It says,
Mandatory shooting
Mandatory program
Compulsory shooting training applies to all soldiers equipped with an assault rifle and must be completed every year until the end of military obligations.
It must be carried out by August 31 with a recognized shooting club. You can check the dates and times in official publications or on the internet.
Further information can be found at: http://www.be.ch/militaire
Switzerland has mandatory military service (German: Militärdienst; French: service militaire; Italian: servizio militare) in the Swiss Army for all able-bodied male citizens, who are conscripted when they reach the age of majority,[1] though women may volunteer for any position.[2] Conscripts make up the majority of the manpower in the Swiss Armed Forces.[3]
On September 22, 2013, a referendum that aimed to abolish conscription was held in Switzerland.[4] However, the referendum failed with over 73% of the electorate voting against it, showing strong support for conscription of men in Switzerland.
Much as I admire the Swiss, I cannot make myself believe that constitutes being liberissimi.
We regard it as deeply inappropriate and dangerous that the UK Parliament would attempt to control who is allowed to speak on our platform or try to earn a living from doing so. Singling out an individual and demanding his ban is even more disturbing given the absence of any connection between the allegations and his content on Rumble. We don’t agree with the behavior of many Rumble creators, but we refuse to penalize them for actions that have nothing to do with our platform.
Although it may be politically and socially easier for Rumble to join a cancel culture mob, doing so would be a violation of our company’s values and mission. We emphatically reject the UK Parliament’s demands.
But this is not all that the Energy Bill 2023 does, and here we come to a fresher development in the relationship between law and the state. Importantly, Brownsword has recently been suggesting that we are rapidly advancing into the next iteration of law – Law 3.0 – in which law becomes essentially self-executing through technology and, indeed, the very exercise of subjecting human conduct to rules becomes subsumed by technological management. Here, the creation of rules itself will become seen as archaic, with technology providing us with better – more efficient, more rational, more effective – forms of justice than those available to the flawed system of law which we currently respect. The end result (the apotheosis of Law 3.0, as it were), will be the merging of technology with law, such that the requirement for rules to exist will disappear and human conduct will be more or less entirely managed by technology.
London’s transport network has been cracking down on unhealthy food advertising on the tube, but according to The Times this now includes the dairy favourite.
The founder of Cheese Geek, Edward Hancock, said the ban was “crazy” and said he couldn’t understand why fizzy drink ads were allowed on the network but not artisan cheeses.
Hancock said cheese “has been shown in numerous recent studies to be beneficial for health.”
TfL banned high fat advertising in 2019. It was intended to capture fast food but appears to have widened in scope to high-end cheddar.
TfL said the cheese ads – which were to be part of a campaign run by Workspace, the office provider and consultancy – could not go on the network because TfL uses “the Food Standards Agency’s model to define foods that are high in fat, sugar and salt.”
I think Sadiq Khan got to the bit in Leviathan about “Power to keep them all in awe” and thought, “I like the sound of that”.
“Banks have been put on the front line of defense against financial crime. That makes sense because they have the personal data and handle the money, but it takes a lot of work to check out clients’ sources of income and business relationships. To speed up the process and limit costs, banks have turned to third-party data firms and automated systems. The bureaucracy has been industrialized. It could be throwing up too many false positives, but it almost certainly is making it hard for individuals who get wrongly classified as risky to overturn those results. Once you’re in a database that is replicated and resold many times over, it can be an endless task to get yourself scrubbed from it. Politicians have made the most noise and got the regulator’s attention, but it seems likely to be others suffering bureaucratic nightmares. The FCA’s own data shows one in 10 British Muslims don’t have access to banking, compared with 2% of all UK adults. Regulators should look not only at banks’ policies for applying the rules, but also examine their systems for performing the job.”
– Paul J Davies, columnist at Bloomberg ($). He makes excellent points about how banks, using tech services to keep on top of potential money launderers, have allowed their systems to run amok. The analogy here is the “no fly lists” that countries have for people suspected of terrorism, etc. If you get on these lists, and haven’t done anything wrong (such as if your name comes up as a “false positive”) it is a hellish job to get off them.
Prior to this, in November 2018, academics at Queen Mary University of London were due to publish a study in the Lancet that found schemes like ULEZ make no difference to children’s health. It took the LEZ (Low Emission Zone), the precursor policy to ULEZ, introduced in 2008, which levied fines on lorries, buses and coaches, and examined its impact on over 2,000 children. ‘Despite… improvements in air quality, there was no evidence of improvements in the proportion of children with small lungs or asthma symptoms over this period’, it concluded. Unhappy with these findings, the mayor’s office wrote to the lead author, Professor Chris Griffiths, and asked him to change the conclusion. ‘It reads like LEZ or similar have no impact at all’, deputy mayor Rodrigues complained. Griffiths refused to budge. ‘It’s difficult to alter the sentence you refer to as it’s what we set out to look for but didn’t find’, he replied. The study was published unaltered the next day, but the deputy mayor’s intent was clear – to rewrite science to meet City Hall’s agenda.
Here are three articles I saw over the last couple of days, one about Canada, one about the UK, and one about Ireland.
Jordan Peterson writing in the Telegraph:
As a professional, practicing clinical psychologist, I never thought I would fall foul of Canada’s increasingly censorial state. Yet, like so many others – including teachers, nurses, and other professionals – that is precisely what has happened. In my case, a court has upheld an order from the College of Psychologists of Ontario that I undergo social media training or lose my licence to practice a profession I have served for most of my adult life.
Their reason? Because of a handful of tweets on my social media, apparently. Yes: I am at risk of losing my licence to practice as a mental health professional because of the complaints of a tiny number of people about the utterly unproven “harm” done by my political opinions.
Bill Goodwin writing in Computer Weekly:
Plans by the government in the Online Safety Bill to require tech companies to scan encrypted messages will damage the UK’s reputation for data security, the UK’s professional body for IT has warned.
BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, which has 70,000 members, said that government proposals in the new laws to compromise end-to-end encryption are not possible without creating systemic security risks and in effect bugging millions of phone users.
John McGuirk writing in Gript.ie:
Yesterday morning my colleague Ben Scallan attended the Electoral Commission’s announcement of the new constituency boundaries for the next Irish general election. While most of the focus of the event was on who would be voting where, Ben asked a question of more general relevance to the commission: It has been granted significant powers to regulate so-called “misinformation” in Irish election campaigns. If this was a power it needs, we reasoned, then surely it would have examples of the kind of misinformation that it intended to regulate in future elections. Ben asked for such an example, and here is what happened:
The Irish government's new anti-misinformation force, the Electoral Commission, says it has "very extensive powers" to "require the correction or removal of information we believe to be incorrect" – all in an effort to "enhance democracy." Question by @Ben_Scallan#griptpic.twitter.com/nMlixyGM2q
That the commission does not have examples of the kind of misinformation it intends to correct is hardly shocking if, like me, you are a cynic. It’s quite hard to genuinely shock us cynics.
And yet Mrs. Justice Marie Baker, the Chairperson of the Commission, did indeed manage to shock me at 3.15 in the clip above when she said “we’re also going to have to learn how to deal with the balance between the right to freedom of expression on the one hand, and on the other hand, the right of persons not to be misinformed”.
This is shocking firstly because Mrs. Justice Baker is a judge of the Supreme Court, and should know that while the right to freedom of expression is in the Irish constitution, the right not to be misinformed appears nowhere. Even granting some allowances for the fact that she was speaking off the cuff, it’s objectively remarkable to see a Supreme Court Judge essentially making up a law, and a right, that nobody has ever voted on – and more than that, assuming for herself the right to enforce on everyone else a right or a law that she’s just invented herself.
To do that is one thing – to do it while speaking of “defending democracy”, when democracy is about having the people choose their own laws, is quite another.
“The right of persons not to be misinformed” is a truly Orwellian inversion of the meaning of “right”. It describes the withdrawal of a right as the granting of one.
I would like to think that the absence of any news stories about threats to freedom in Australia, New Zealand or the United States in today’s little collection was because there were none to report. I would also like the figure and eyesight of a twenty year-old and a billion pounds.
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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