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]
|
I was listening to Frou Frou‘s cover of ‘Holding out for a hero’, I could not but help think of British politics. Here’s part of the song, and the sentiment is what I think many Samizdata readers will feel, especially following of the Tory leadership’s shameful and unprincipled support of identity cards:
Where have all the good men gone
And where are all the gods?
Where’s the street-wise Hercules
To fight the rising odds?
Isn’t there a white knight upon a fiery steed?
Late at night I toss and turn and dream
of what I need
[Chorus]
I need a hero
I’m holding out for a hero ’til the end of the night
He’s gotta be strong
And he’s gotta be fast
And he’s gotta be fresh from the fight
I need a hero
I’m holding out for a hero ’til the morning light
He’s gotta be sure
And it’s gotta be soon
And he’s gotta be larger than life
Although I knew this day was coming, it is profoundly depressing nevertheless. It is now the law that ID cards will be imposed by force in Britain, with the support of the Leaders of the Conservative Party and the Labour Party. They have won and as far as I am concerned, the guttering flame of the culture of liberty in Britain just blew out.
I do not expect a truly repressive state to be implemented for many years yet (hopefully), but the infrastructure of tyranny is now well and truly in place, all of which came to pass with a soundtrack of a faint bleating sound of an indifferent public in the background. You might as well flip a coin to figure out which party will usher it in but a authoritarian panoptic state is coming. If this is what the majority of British people want, then may they get exactly what they deserve, but I am out of here. For those of you who will be happy to see me go, trust me, the feeling is mutual.
I realise most people will just shrug their ovine shoulders and find my worries inexplicable, crazy even, as it is not like Blair and Howard are setting up Gulags, right? No, of course not. Who needs those when there is a camera on every corner and your every purchase and phone call will eventually be logged on a central government database? As far as I concerned, the war is over and my side lost.
I have to try and speed up my business ventures and get out as soon as I can afford to do so. I shall try to be out of Britain and have my primary residence in the USA by 2007 at the latest to avoid being forced to submit to this intolerable imposition… and I shall be taking my wealth generating assets with me. I cannot say I am looking forward to winters in New Hampshire but I do not really see that I have much choice anymore. I do not see the United States as a paragon of civil liberties (to put it mildly), but at least it is a place in which the battle can be fought within the last bastion of the Anglosphere’s culture of liberty.
Damn it.
The ID card bill has been passed…
Government plans for national identity cards were approved by the Commons last night despite more than a quarter of MPs not voting.
Although Conservative and Labour rebels failed to derail the Identity Cards Bill, they provoked a highly embarrassing mass abstention.
Horrible news indeed and Bill Cash had the right idea:
At one stage Bill Cash (C, Stone) brandished a copy of George Orwell’s novel 1984 at the Home Secretary, challenging him to repudiate claims that the measure would effect a “sea change” in the relationship between state and individual.
This is depressing. Especially when I think that I survived communism without ever being fingerprinted…
– Adriana Cronin
This story does not inspire a lot of confidence in the current Coalition effectiveness of dealing with islamists and sundry Baathist dead-enders in Iraq.
Some 22 people have been killed and many more wounded after a rocket attack on a U.S. military base in the northern town of Mosul. A grim day. Now, call me a pajama strategist, but I wonder whether it ought to be possible to make some use of the tremendous technological advantages of America’s modern army in defending soldiers against such attacks on their own military encampments. No, I am not going to make the mistake of supposing that we can create the ‘perfect’ military. I am aware that all organisations, even relatively well-run ones, have their weak spots, and that includes the armed forces of the West. But it does stick in the craw that a group of servicemen having a meal can end up being killed by a bunch of insurgents running around with a few rocket launchers a few thousand yards off.
I have been looking around a few websites for possible enlightenment on what can be done. DefenceTech blog gives some insight into how ordinary servicemen and women are improvising their own techniques, including piecemeal bits of engineering, to make their vehicles and equipment less vulnerable to attack. It goes to show that crushing the insurgents is not just about the fancy stuff like flying an Apache helicopter. Improvisation has its part to play.
As an aside, it makes me wonder how those critics beating up Donald Rumsfeld at the moment would have written about the calibre of F. D. Roosevelt’s defence chiefs 50 years ago, during the Battle of the Ardennes, better known as the Battle of the Bulge. Andrew Sullivan might have been calling for Eishenhower’s head on a stick by now.
On Saturday, there was this, from Helen Szamuely …
The most recent news from Russia, apart from the ongoing saga of Yukos, which is being destroyed by the government partly to punish its Chairman, Khodorkovsky, for trying to break away from it and for giving money to the political opposition and partly to restore control of the production of energy to the state, has been one of a new law presented to the Lower House of the Duma. This will specify that foreigners who can be shown to have criticized Russia, its people and its culture, which, one must assume, includes the political structure, can be refused a visa without further ado.
One has to accept that a country must be able to choose whether to allow certain people to enter its territory. However, Russia until recently has proclaimed its intention to become an open country like other open countries (give or take complete state control of the media and the abolition of elections on regional level and of individual deputies of the Duma). If this law goes through, all pretence will be finally abandoned.
… and then yesterday, this, from Freedom House (thank you Instapundit):
Political rights and civil liberties have become so restricted in Russia that the country has been downgraded to “Not Free,” Freedom House announced in a major survey of global freedom released today.
Mark me down as a foreigner who can be shown to have criticized Russia, by which I mean the bit of Russia (the bit in charge) that did this to the rest of Russia.
Next time I’m at a party and I meet someone who works for a publishing company, I’m going to get him in a headlock and push his face into a cake.
– Some consumer feedback from Harry Hutton – something about British books being made with the wrong sort of paper.
The Sikhs who used violence to prevent free speech in Birmingham yesterday and truly the children of the Politically Correct generation. They see that force, be it of law or of the flying milk bottle, is the accepted way to respond if your feelings are hurt and thus have forced a play that they find offensive to close.
Tolerance for dissenting views would appear to be a thing of the past and obviously the state is not the solution. If it was, it would have responded to this affront by the rioters against the basic right to express yourself by meeting force with force. The correct ‘dialogue’ with the rioters would be to crack a number turbaned heads open in the same manner those people are expressing themselves.
Mohan Singh, from the Guru Nanak Gurdwara in south Birmingham, said: “It’s a very good thing that they (the Rep) have seen common sense on the issue.
And so Mohan Singh demonstrates he opposes a pluralist civil society. Presumably when some people decide they find something he values ‘offensive’ and elect to start throwing bricks to prevent it from happening (for example, say some militant atheists, or more probably militant Muslims, find his religious services offensive to their sensibilities), or perhaps it is decide, as in France, that turbans will not be permitted in school under force of law, Mr. Singh will just shrug his shoulders and accept that being forced not to do things other people dislike is just the way of things. And if he does not accept that, why should he expect anyone else to care about what he wants?
Yes, I am glad a few people in the Conservative party have the backbone to stand against Michael Howard and refuse to back the imposition of mandatory ID cards. Yet the truth is than they are outnumbered both by those in the party’s authoritarian faction and in the others who say they opposed ID cards, such as possible future leader David Davies, but place their political careers above both their principles and what they presumably think would be best for the nation. Still, I suppose we should thank Michael Howard for making it clear to all but the most blinkered that they offer no alternative to Labour in any substantive way over an issue that offers much downside and no clearly explained upside.
If you ever want to see an effective opposition in this country, vote for the one party who can deliver that by destroying the Conservative party once and for all by making it permanently unelectable, thereby showing the true cost of Conservative ‘moderation’ on the EU and civil liberties. Only once the last bitter hope that the Tories might ever form a new government has been removed by 10 to 15% of their vote defecting for the foreseeable future can something better emerge from their ashes. Vote UKIP.
Some people will forever be chasing the chimera of better government. This shields them from the idea that the only option is less government
– Peter Gordon
If you don’t like what the label on your clothes says – the size or the brand name – cut it off.
(From a beauty book or a women’s magazine, I forget which. Sublime wisdom, whatever the source.)
The Guardian issues a rallying cry:
To be anonymous, to go privately, to move residence without telling the authorities is a fundamental liberty which is about to be taken from us. People may not choose to exercise this entitlement to privacy, or see the point of it, but once it’s gone and a vast database is built, eventually to be accessed by every tentacle of the government machine, we will never be able to claw it back. We are about to surrender a right which is precious, rare even in western democracies, and profoundly emblematic of our culture and civilisation. And what for? The government advances arguments of necessity, raising the threats of terrorism, organised crime, benefit fraud and illegal immigration.
We must not imagine that respect for individual liberty is innate to the British establishment. With this bill, the government is attempting to change for ever the relationship between the individual and the state in the state’s favour. Those who treasure liberty must not let it pass.
Hear, hear.
|
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.
|
