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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Samizdata quote of the day – Ofcom’s quest to censor the world This is not good enough, says Ofcom. It wants, it seems, pre-emptive powers to block access to sites operating anywhere in the world, should they be deemed harmful to people in the UK.
This is authoritarian nonsense on any number of levels. For one thing, it moves noticeably towards a Great British Firewall, like that used in China. We should also worry that an unelected agency is spending its time digging around the internet looking for material it would like to stop us seeing. Admittedly, we are told that the issue here is material that’s harmful to children and sites such as suicide forums. But it is a racing certainty that any such powers, if given, will be invoked to go well beyond suicide forums.
Equally, it’s not clear whether Ofcom wants these powers to extend to blocking sites to users across the globe. A recent Ofcom update on a suicide site clearly suggests it sees a UK geoblock as insufficient. This really would bring us into cloud-cuckoo-land. No national regulator, whether it comes from the UK, China or Burkina Faso, has any business censoring the global internet.
– Andrew Tettenborn
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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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Curious: Is the UK firewalled off now at all?
Can you access, for instance, US sites selling weapons like https://palmettostatearmory.com/ ?
(Just trying to get a sense of where you are right now in the walled-off world.)
I’m in the UK and can access the gun site after telling their challenge that I am over 18. But I can’t access the free content on Paramount US, it redirects me to the paid-for content on Paramount UK. But that is Paramount blocking me, not Ofcom.
We don’t need any of this bollocks and that includes Ofcom.
When we had an Empire what we chose to regulate was important on a world stage. Now, not so much.
OFCOM seems to display bureaucratic creep.
Even before Marxism become important to the British establishment (the Marxism pushed by endless academics – including my own half brother – and his friend Ralph Miliband, the father of Ed and David Miliband), the philosophy they, the British establishment (or the British branch of the international establishment) followed was that of Hobbes, Hume and Bentham – it is not a philosophy that stresses rights AGAINST the state (to put the matter mildly), and if it talks about natural law, natural justice, and so on, at all – it redefines the terms, in order to make them without any meaning that would contradict statism.
Censorship in Britain – why not? And as they do not believe in objective truth (the British establishment, or the British branch of the international establishment, are very Modernist in this respect – they do not believe there is any such thing as objective truth, other than state-power and state-propaganda) they are quite capable of waxing lyrical about how Freedom of Speech is safeguarded in Britain – even whilst they crush what little is left of it. They lie without shame – because they do not define “truth” in any other way than “what benefits the state”.
Try to censor the world? Again why not? Threaten American and other companies. And if that fails – push for bans on VPNs and so on.
China can afford to cut itself off from the internet – because China is the number one manufacturing power on Earth (about twice the industrial power of the United States).
Britain is not even number ten in industrial power (although it pretends to be number ten – by presenting tables with certain countries left off, or downplayed) – it can not afford to cut itself off from the internet, because Britain depends so much on service industries.
But the British government (the officials and “experts”) most likely will, eventually, cut Britain off from the internet – using the excuse of child pornography (or whatever) to disguise their real objective of ending all political and cultural dissent. “But that would destroy Britain” – yes, but they do not really care.
At least the brutal tyranny in China is pro Chinese – it wants China to be inhabited by Han Chinese and for these Han Chinese to have have families made up of mothers and fathers and children (which is why it is so worried by the low fertility rate).
The regime in Britain (the officials and “experts”) has nothing but hatred and contempt for the British people – and would like to see the British people come-to-an-end.
And this is not just true of Britain – the international Western establishment generally (including in the United States) has nothing but hatred and contempt for Western peoples – and would like to see them come-to-an-end.
It is tempting to see the British state (and other modern states) as a frothing lunatic out to rip the throats (with its teeth) of everyone it comes across – but it is not really like that.
It is gently spoken, and bureaucratic in its evil – indeed the description “the banality of evil” springs to mind.
“I have nothing against you, I really do not have anything against you. But I have a quota to fill, I am just doing my job – so please stop struggling and let me deal with you, you are only prolonging your agony and making everything worse for everyone”.
If (if) you accept their starting assumptions – this is a reasonable position.
As for the word “harmful” – Ofcom means “contradicts the lies of the British state”, but, please remember, they define “truth” as whatever serves the Progressive cause of the state (they do not believe in objective truth) so even if the British state declared that 1+1=63, they would not regard that as a lie (as they define anything that is in line with state propaganda as truth), and they would define “1+1=2” as dangerous, harmful, “misinformation”.
Remember they (the international establishment, including the branch of it in Britain) do not believe that humans are human BEINGS – they do not believe we have souls (in either the religious or the Aristotelian sense), the pet philosopher of the World Economic Forum, and other such people, are horribly clear on this point.
No *national* regulator? What, you want an international regulator (UN?) to do it?
Let me fix that for you:
If some country wants to regulate what sorts of websites can be run from it’s shores, well, that’s for the citizens of that country to sort out. But you lot don’t get tell me what I’m allowed to publish OR consume.
@ bobby b. – I like PSA, too.
No, UK users are not blocked from accessing sites like PSA and many others offering items for sale in the US,that are unlawful to own in the UK. But I will wager good cash money that the UK authorities monitor such traffic and take note of who visits such sites. And in any event, since being arrested in the UK is often followed by a rubber-stamped seizure and search of the arrestee’s devices, you may be sure that all such traffic will be carefully recorded, even if it has nothing to do with the original arrest, and any such evidence of badthink will be used against the arrestee at any time and for any reason.
As others have observed, it would not be any surprise to me to see, within the next few tears, many European nations as well as the UK instituting China-type firewalls on the Internet. The kind of freedom of information and thought that the Internet provides is just not acceptable to the European weltanschauing, and that includes the UK even though it is notionally no longer part of the EU.
llater,
llamas