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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No doubt it must be global warming that has caused the most severe snowfall on the US capital in ninety years. I eagerly await an IPCC report on this!
I can only wonder if Dave Cameron actually reads the newspapers. The first rumbling of disquiet on his caring/sharing Green Tory-ism started last year and it is not too late to get rid of this half wit and replace him as leader of the Conservative Party with, well, a conservative.
Gah. Sorry, I think I just had a ‘brain displacement’… this is the Tories I am talking about! What was I thinking! The party that never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity! Silly me. Still… is it not enjoyable to watch the unravelling of an overarching global narrative?
Hitler finds out Obama lost Massachusetts… hehehe.
The Royal Society for Public Health no doubt sees itself as a worthy collection of people who are axiomatically on the side of the angels. I mean, who could be against public health?
In truth they are a terrifying and truly totalitarian outfit who operate with a presumption that the state has super-ownership of the physical bodies of everyone in Britain. Now I am of the view that defence against infectious plagues is a legitimate role of the state because it is a collective threat… a plague, like a fire or an invading army, does not respect property lines and so this is the whole reason to have a ‘nightwatchman state’.
But that is not the view of people like the Royal Society for Public Health. No, they take the view that ‘public health’ follows on naturally from state run medical care and gives the state the right to decide pretty much anything that can impact on an person’s health, regardless of that individual’s preferred choices, even if those choices are personal ones that do not place other people at risk.
They have issues a manifesto for nothing less than the nationalisation of your body and the intrusion of the state, on grounds of protecting your health from yourself and others who agree to be around you.
- A minimum price of 50p per unit of alcohol sold
- No junk food advertising in pre-watershed television
- Ban smoking in cars with children
- Chlamydia screening for university and college freshers
- 20 mph limit in built up areas
- A dedicated school nurse for every secondary school
- 25% increase in cycle lanes and cycle racks by 2015
- Compulsory and standardised front-of-pack labelling for all pre-packaged food
- Olympic legacy to include commitment to expand and upgrade school sports facilities and playing fields across the UK
- Introduce presumed consent for organ donation
- Free school meals for all children under 16
- Stop the use of transfats
Of all these statist policies, number 1 is particularly invidious, with our technocratic masters seeking a sumptuary law on alcohol (i,.e. a tax to stop poor people drinking), number 12 seeks to regulate our choice of what we eat.
But by far the worst of all is number 10, this is the one which tells you everything you need to know about these people and the profoundly, unabashedly thugish nature of their world view… the state can help itself to your body parts by default. Post mortem conscription. Frankly I am all for organ donation, but at the moment, I carry a card expressly forbidding my organs to be harvested post mortem as the very notion these people are presumptive owners of any of my mortal remains is simply intolerable.
But then as they demand the right to regulate everything about your physical existence prior to death, I suppose it is no surprise they think nothing of helping themselves to your carcass after you die.
These people are the very worst kind of self-righteous technocratic curtain twitchers, the true spiritual heirs to the folks who in the first half of the twentieth century had people with birth defects sterilised or has troublesome people lobotomised, on ‘scientific grounds’ of course ‘for the public good’. Naturally such Guardian reading caring sharing folks would see drawing such analogues as a grotesque calumny, but in truth they exhibit the same intrusiveness and obsession with controlling the lives of others, it really is the same psychopathology, just repackaged for the 21st century with the current notions of ‘best practice’.
These people must be opposed… but not just politically, they need to be seen socially for what they are and abominated for their desires to regulate the lives of everyone around them. They presume to occupy the moral high ground but they do not and the more people who openly and publicly reject their axiomatic presumption of state controls over the very bodies of people, the sooner we can start to reclaim the culture of people who belong on a psychiatrist’s couch to help them deal with their abhorrent desires to use force against those who wish to live their lives without interference and according to their own judgements, with the positive and negative consequences of that accruing to themselves alone, like real adults.
The people behind this manifesto are detestable and they need to be told that to their faces.
“Can Barack Obama turn things around?” asks Harold Evans in the Telegraph.
The most galling thing for Obama is that his campaign vision of a less polarised America has turned out to be a daydream. The fright-wing of the Republican party has become more virulent than ever. Instead of joining with him in essential reforms, he has been demonised as a Hitler, an enemy of the American Constitution, and the Wingnut “birther movement” screamed that he is not even an American citizen. It is a tribute to Obama’s resilience that he has kept his cool in the face of this hysteria. He remains personally likeable to most Americans (something that could not have been said for the moralising Carter or the abrasive Bush), but the fervour of the movement that elected the first black president has abated.
Oh those mean old wingnuts! Clearly Bush never had to put up with anything like that!
But if the current economic mess in the USA sprang from a Big State Republican’s policies operating with a congress full of his enemies, why even ask the question if an even Bigger State Democrat can ‘turn things around’ by digging the same holes deeper?
As for Obama being “the smartest guy in the room”… really? He took the failed policies of his predecessor and doubled up the bet… is that really the sign of intelligence or original thinking?
And whilst I may have thought Bush was dismal, I do not recall him publicly stamping his feet at all the Hitler analogies being made about him and I also never got the impression he was ‘abrasive’… just habitually wrong. Rather like Obama actually. Only a bit whiter.
Fellow imperialist Norman aggressor Harry de Quetteville does an exquisite take down of Oliver Stone in the Telegraph. It is so delicious that extracting a passage just does not do it justice.
…Oh I just cannot resist…
I pushed a woman under a bus this morning. Nice looking old girl she was, looked like she’d just had her hair done. Maybe she was off somewhere special, but we won’t know now will we, not since I pushed her under the bus.
She hadn’t done anything wrong, apart from being old. But you wouldn’t believe the hoo-ha the whole scene created. Some people next to me looked positively aghast as those big double-decker wheels rolled over her. Then some others jumped on me and held me down until the police arrived.
Read the whole thing. Simply splendid.
Free association is one of the bedrocks of civil society, so when ‘faith based’ schools start complaining about the secular state interfering with who they can and cannot admit, my first response is to urge these folks to inform the state that it is none of their god-damn business.
It is surely a matter for religious group themselves to define their own congregation. In short, if they actually have any deeply held principles, and if they do not, why call themselves ‘faith based’ at all, they should simply refuse to comply with the state’s demands. Just point blank refuse.
To their credit some Catholic adoption agencies shut down last year due to the state demanding they operate in contravention of Catholic principles (by placing children with homosexual couples), but it remains to be seen if any schools will do likewise and shut down rather than comply, or better yet, simply ignore the regulations on who they admit.
But that said, at the same time that these schools should refuse to obey secular direction of their religious based institutions, they must also refuse to take a single penny of state money. Why? Because if they take the taxpayer’s coin… coin which has been extracted from believers and non-believers via the political system… they cannot then complain if that money comes with politically imposed conditions.
In Britain, a woman alone in her own home cannot even brandish a knife to defend herself, let alone actually use one.
The youths approached the kitchen window, before attempting to break into her garden shed, prompting Miss Klass to wave a kitchen knife to scare them away. Miss Klass, 31, who was alone in her house in Potters Bar, Herts, with her two-year-old daughter, Ava, called the police. When they arrived at her house they informed her that she should not have used a knife to scare off the youths because carrying an “offensive weapon” – even in her own home – was illegal.
The lesson here is simple: never call the police. Never. Ever. They would have arrived too late to protect her had it turned violent and in any case Myleene Klass, who acted commendably by making it clear to intruders that she would defend herself and her child, was the only person who actually faced the possibility of arrest when the police did arrive.
If you have to defend yourself, do not call the cops afterwards and if possible leave the scene as soon as you can, no matter how clear it is that you are the aggrieved party. And if worst comes to worse and you get into a violent confrontation in your own home with an intruder, try to make sure your story is the only one the cops will hear (under no circumstances try to detain the scrot for the coppers to collect).
And if the cops do show up, just remember that your statement is not about speaking truth from a position of innocence, it is about not giving the state any pretext to arrest you. Stay nothing about what happened until your lawyer arrives.
Just remember that arresting you for daring to defend yourself is easier than looking for some criminal who attacked you because the police know where you live and getting any arrest shows up as a positive result in their statistics. Ideally just defend yourself and do not call them at all afterwards.
Myleene, you had the right instincts and you have my respect… your only mistake, and it is a big one, is to assume the cops in the UK are on your side and a young mum home alone with her child was legally entitled to defend herself. They ain’t and you are not. You have the moral right to do whatever it takes to defend yourself from intruders, but the police have no interest in such niceties.
The state is not your friend.
An Islamic group called islam4uk, who are a front organisation for the islamo-fascist group al-Muhajiroun, want to march through Wootton Bassett carrying “symbolic coffins” as a protest against the ongoing British participation in the Afghan civil war against the Taliban.
My suggestion is that the good people of Wootton Bassett reply by throwing “symbolic bricks” at the Islamo-fascist protesters, should they actually ever march down that town’s streets. Just symbolic bricks of course, made of sponge cake… or maybe bricks of good English bacon or Danish butter as I am sure the cheerful chaps of al-Muhajiroun will get the joke… not real bricks, because we do not want any Islamo-fascists to get their brains bashed out by our jolly japes… well, not whilst they are in Britain at least.
But what I would really like to see is for Islam4uk carry out a march carrying symbolic coffins through a street in beautiful downtown Bazarak in Panjshir Province in Afghanistan. Just about everyone there is a muslim, so what could possibly go wrong, eh? Go on, guys, give it a try.
If religious leaders get the urge to spout off on religious topics to the religiously inclined, well I suppose that is what they are for. But why oh why does the Church of England think it is appropriate for them to have any corporate opinion at all on purely secular matters like advertising?
Why should a bunch of clerics think they have any business demanding the state regulate the media? Exactly what biblical basis do they have for supporting the imposition of restrictions on what people do on TV? I must have missed the passage in the New Testament where it says “The Lord says tell Caesar to threaten those who sayth things you don’t approve of”.
I have zero tolerance for a state privileged organization who claim to speak from a position of moral superiority advocating force backed restrictions on secular life. The sooner the Church of England is disestablished the better.
I just noticed an interesting set of musing about Professor Shahriar Afshar, wondering fearfully what theorist will do if the Large Hadron Collider fails to find the mysterious Higgs Boson:
The controversial physicist, whose Afshar experiment has already found a loophole in quantum theory, said that unless the scientific community starts contemplating a “plan B”, failure could lead to “chaos and infighting”.
He said failure will undermine more than a hundred years of scientific theory and undermine some of the mainstays of scientific thinking, the Standard Model, a general theory of how particles fit together to create matter. It would also lead to bitter recriminations and infighting among the different scientists and a complete loss of confidence among the general public and taxpayer, he said.
This made me wonder if not finding the Higgs Boson would necessarily be a Bad Thing if it means Big Science is less likely to get the hapless taxpayer on the hook to pay for the latest research toys. But more importantly, also makes me wonder why scrapping a failed theory (if that is how it turns out) and seeking to come up with better ones is grounds for such trepidation. What the good professor sees as “chaos and infighting” sounds like fresh opportunities for intellectual enquiry to me, but then I do not have any tax funded sacred cows in danger of getting defunded. Just sayin’.
Usually differing opinion should be met with reasoned debate… but sometimes they should be met with statements like “if your side ever managed to get that into law, my response would be to urge people to start shooting at anyone who supports that position”. The notion that state action must be used to reduce the population of this planet falls well into that category for me and so when I see an ‘ethicist’ writing about his reaction to this subject, moreover in the context of him having a child, it does make me wonder what sort of thing different people regard as the final line beyond which they stop talking and reach for the rifle or the semtex.
One reader of my blog last week asserted that “the human population could do with a good 25% knocked out.”
He goes on to suggest that we should: “restrict every woman to a single pregnancy, once she has had that then sterilize her, restrict every man to causing a single pregnancy, after that castrate him, stop ALL forms of artificial preganancy (test tube etc.) This way we will reduce the population – and quite quickly.”
Strong stuff! But it is certainly true that for the last couple of centuries population growth has been inextricably linked with the use of fossil fuels.
Now I do not begrudge ‘Ethical Man‘ his response, but rather than replying, in effect, “steady on chaps”, personally my intemperate inclination would be more alone the line of inviting the person suggesting we need mandatory state enforced population reduction to go jump off a bridge and die, for the greater good of course, if he felt so strongly about it… and the sooner the better.
This is no different to the sorts of people who say about Stalin when his policy of mass murder is brought up “yes but at least he industrialised the Soviet Union”… thereby equating the millions who died in the man-made Ukrainian famine and in the the gulags as, in effect, simply fuel burnt in a justifiable bonfire to power the Soviet Union’s engines. I usually ask such people if they would have accepted they and their families would have been a reasonable cost had they lived in some Soviet village at the time and been deemed expendable as a way to crush anti-communist nationalism, and if not, why not?
The problem I have with this whole discussion is that it grants what is a monstrous totalitarian perspective a polite hearing rather than the sort of response it truly deserves. It strikes me to just dignify the proposition “the state should spay women and castrate men” with “wouldn’t it be better if we just find a way to reduce the fuel we burn?” is to in effect tolerate the intolerable. A far better response, and dare I say a more ethical one, would be “your policy will indeed reduce the world’s population because people like me will put a 10mm hole between the eyes of totalitarian scum like you.”
To accept such vile notions such as forced sterilisation as acceptable to advance, even in theory, is not tolerance… it is moral cowardice. It is a bit like giving a polite airing to the chap who wants to argue that we would all be better off if we just gassed a few Jews, and then tutting gently before calming pointing out the error of his ways… as opposed to throwing him out the door (ideally without bothering to open it first). I know which I think is more appropriate.
It is no secret that I think Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, is a twit and indeed possessed of some very destructive and morally inexcusable views (why mess around with fiddly things like moral culpability or moral choice leading to charity when you have state power to simply take and redistribute, eh?).
Well I suppose his latest utterances should come as no surprise then…
Children are being forced to grow up too quickly in a culture which refuses to recognise that human beings are naturally dependent on one another, the Archbishop of Canterbury warned today.
Dr Rowan Williams condemned the pressure on children to become “active little consumers and performers” at the earliest opportunity.
Never mind the fact our culture works hard to infantalise adults and the notion of a profound differentiation between childhood and adulthood is a very modern and rather weird idea. But as he is an unabashed statist leftie. I can see how fostering a sense of dependence would appeal to such a person and it is to be expected he would deprecate the fact many people hold up independence from others as a virtue.
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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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