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]
Part 5: Trusted includes information on how we will design the new system to ensure that everyone can have confidence that it will protect their data. It includes discussion of technical security measures, data protection standards and how people can exercise greater consent and control when using the digital ID. There is also a chapter on governance and oversight
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There’s an interesting report in today’s Telegraph:
Russian hackers have infiltrated the email accounts of UK government officials and overseas Foreign Office staff in a major national security breach.
In the sophisticated and ongoing attack – nicknamed FortiBleed by researchers – hackers stole login credentials belonging to government staff, granting unauthorised access to sensitive systems and threatening further infiltration across Whitehall departments.
The history of post-war Britain is essentially the educated middle class giddily, gleefully taking a sledgehammer to every single load-bearing pillar in society in the belief that the roof will somehow stay up through the sheer force of our own cleverness.
It's a jarringly disorienting feeling, being told by a set of politicians who did not grow up with youtube, that those of us who did were somehow victims.
The Americans are gaining healthy life years while we are losing them.
Hmm, that is interesting, no? Thus the UK requires more red in tooth and claw capitalism, more neoliberalism, obviously. Sell the NHS for scrap and go private!
And, well, but that’s not quite how American health care works, not for those over 65. That’s Medicare. Which is paid for by the government. But not supplied by the government. Which is a reasonable guide to what the problem is with the NHS. Tax paid health care is fine. It’s government supplied that is not.
At which point we gain our prescription – sell the NHS for scrap and have more neoliberalism. We’ll gain longer and healthier retirements by doing so.
“We have many migrants who make a deeply valuable contribution to our country, including in our healthcare system and hospitality sector and we depend on them to make our country work. We do not want this terrible tragedy to be used to divide people or fuel hostility.”
If a member of your family had been left comatose after a Sudanese migrant attempted to behead them, is this how you’d respond? Can you imagine your own tone being so conciliatory — or your own words tacking so closely to the establishment view on migration?
Apparently, this is how the family of Stephen Ogilvie expressed themselves, after watching his attempted beheading on the streets of Belfast. The Ogilvie family’s statement is eerily similar to those issued by the family members of other victims, in cases which might be termed politically sensitive.
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All we can say for sure is that the British state is secretly working to shape how you think about, and respond to, politically sensitive events. Mass migration isn’t going away and multiculturalism will be upheld, regardless of what voters may think or instinctively want.
As such, these state agencies take a keen interest in what people say online, about subjects like race, immigration and Islam. They view certain positions on those issues as inherently dangerous and extremist — and if William Shawcross is to be believed, its definition of which views constitute “extremism” is very expansive.
Yes, yes, we know, paying tax is the price of partaking in civilisation. But that’s still a price, a cost. We think that people should see, up close and personal, the cost of that civilisation being built on their money. We are therefore against this:
Income tax will be automatically deducted from state pensions for millions of retirees under plans being considered by Labour, The Telegraph understands.
Not because the state pension should, or should not, be taxed. But because this is easy taxation. Some to many will not really even note it. Tax should be painful so that proper consideration be given to how much is being demanded.
Michael Mosbacher, the Telegraph‘s Deputy Comment Editor, is going for the rage-clicks, but he has a point:
There are under 1,000 ponies left on Dartmoor and over 145,000 sheep. Since the 1950s, the moor’s pony population has fallen by close to 90 per cent, whilst ovine numbers have more than trebled. These divergent trajectories have much to do with one simple fact – lamb is a Sunday roast staple and we don’t eat ponies. Easter dining tables groan under legs of lamb, but pony tenderloins are only notable by their absence.
Overgrazing is the environmental sin du jour and the regulators are demanding that something be done. We indeed live on a sheep-sodden island. According to Defra figures, the ovine population of the UK was 30.5 million in June last year. Wales alone is home to over 8.5 million sheep whilst there are only around 5 million in the entire United States.
On Dartmoor, Natural England is calling for a radical reduction in stocking numbers, and that for the first time includes the semi-wild ponies. The problem for the ponies is that they are of very little commercial value and there is an abundant market for lamb. If a farmer is ordered to reduce their livestock numbers – the ponies are actually all owned – they will cull the ponies rather than have fewer of the animals from which they actually draw their living.
Can a man whose legacy will be full-term abortion, censorship, digital surveillance, and the abolition of trial by jury really claim to have rescued Britain from the moral abyss? Can a man who gave us soaring youth unemployment, who shrugged at farm suicides, who thinks nothing of bankrupting schools for disabled children and religious minorities, really boast of returning to Britain a sense of pride?
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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