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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There is a great little article in Slashdot about a well known German hacker group, Chaos Computer Club, publishing the fingerprints of German Secretary of the Interior as part of their protest against state use of biometric ID.
The club published 4,000 copies of their magazine Die Datenschleuder including a plastic foil reproducing the minister’s fingerprint – ready to glue to someone else’s finger to provide a false biometric reading. The CCC has a page on their site detailing how to make such a fake fingerprint
Sweet. I suppose that is a ‘hardware hack’ of sorts!
From NRO ‘The Campaign Spot’:
The tour will begin at McCain field, named for the family in Mississippi. McCain will note in a speech there that a distant ancestor served on George Washington’s staff, and “it seems that my ancestors served in every conflict this country has fought”. One of the themes in that speech will be how government should support parents, and how it should help, not complicate, how parents pass on their values to their children.
Holy. Crap. And this is the Republican candidate. Read that again: “government should support parents, and how it should help, not complicate, how parents pass on their values to their children”. Just de-construct that for a moment. Is that not a phrase that should send cold shivers down the spines of anyone who thinks civil society has been fucked over by the state quite enough for the last fifty or so years, thank you very much?
Clearly the government does not want any old values passed on to the kiddies, so John McCain must see a role for state approved politically vetted family values. And what if someone want to pass on the values of respecting the property of others and so not tolerating proxy theft via third parties (like, say, the state), is Johnny going help out there somehow? How about atheism? Contrary to the popular perceptions, I know a great many God-Free Americans (almost all of whom are self-described hyphenated Republicans). Will the state give them a hand passing that one on to Junior too? How about utter contempt for the political elite and their army of functionaries? John McCain’s kind offer to ‘help‘ is another manifestation of the baseless arrogance of so many members of the political class who think that civil society revolves around the state and is something for them to tinker with.
So John, let me tell you how to “help, not complicate, how parents pass on their values to their children”… mind your own goddamn business. There is nothing complicated about that.
I previously reported on the saga of Mikko Ellilä. Here is the trial (in English) and now the state has spoken its verdict: guilty.
So it has happened: thoughtcrime is now officially a crime in Finland. Stating your opinion, moreover stating your opinions based of government statistics, is illegal. Finns may now only express a politically sanctioned range of opinions subject to supervision by official Gauleiters like Mikko Puumalainen. The fine is small but so what? The message is clear. Dissent will not be tolerated by the Finnish state. It should not matter a damn if you agree with what Mikko Ellilä says, it is outrageous that he is not being allowed to say what he thinks.
The thing I find so nauseating is these sanctimonious pathological control freaks act as those they are not repressive government thugs using force to prevent dissent. The freedom to only state popular opinions is no freedom at all because freedom of speech is the right to say what some other people do not want to hear. It is the right to express opinions that may offend because if you cannot do that, you do not have freedom of speech.
People like Finnish bureaucrat Mikko Puumalainen exist everywhere (see the Ezra Levant case in Canada) and they must be resisted by any means necessary.
The crazy guys from VBS have 14 parts of strange-but-interesting video footage from that open air prison known as North Korea… check it out.
I do not think they are going to be invited back.
“Can you believe this place?” Admiral Driscoll said to me. He sounded like a bit like a kid on Christmas morning. I felt weirdly like a jaded old man who had seen it all even though he is older and more accomplished. I understood then what some American soldiers and Marines mean when they say the top brass lives and works at “echelons above reality”. I’m not blaming the admiral. His job requires him to be isolated from nuts, bolts, and the street most of the time.
– Michael Totten
Michael Totten’s latest from Iraq is up and as usual highly recommended:
The Middle East beyond Israel strikingly lacks anything resembling political correctness. I hear much more severe denunciations of radical Islam there than I do in the U.S., and I don’t mean from Americans. I hear it from Arabs, and from Persians and Kurds. I hear it in Lebanon all the time, and in Iraq too.
Sabah Danou walked with Commander Summers and Admiral Driscoll. He’s an Iraqi who works for the multinational forces as a cultural and political advisor in Baghdad. “Look,” he said to me and gestured toward a local man with a long beard and a short dishdasha that left his ankles exposed. “He’s a Wahhabi,” Danou hissed. “He is linked to Al Qaeda. That’s their uniform, you know, that beard and that high-cut dishdasha. God, what pieces of shit those fuckers are.”
In less dissembling mealy-mouthed times, that would simply be described as saying it the ways he sees it.
I came across a couple articles that puzzled me. Advocates of all beliefs, be they religious, political or philosophical, generally try to argue their position and convince other people their view of the world is the best one. Of course some religions (and pretty much all political systems) are evangelical, whereas some, like Judaism for example, are not. Nevertheless even Jews will argue their corner on why their beliefs are sensible and it is far from unheard of for people to convert to Judaism, something most Jews would probably regard as A Good Thing.
Yet strangely as of late, some Jews and Muslims seem a bit bent out of shape when another religion, the Roman Catholic Church, either lands a high profile convert or prays openly for non-believers to convert.
Being God free myself, I have no dog in this fight but this all strikes me rather like shop owners protesting that some other shop is advertising and therefore ‘stealing’ their customers. Guys, like everything else, religion is a market… why are you shocked that the Boys in Rome engage in marketing?
So there I was, your typical history buff aviation enthusiast, when I overhear a discussion in a cafe that there is a movie out called Horton hears a who.
“Oh fab!” thinks I, fully expecting said movie to feature the coolest Nazi jet fighter ever conceived (and if you know anything about conceptual late war German aviation, that is saying something). Maybe some contra-factual Luftwaffe 1946 scenario? Woo hoo!
…Sadly it is about an elephant.
The police in the UK have admitted that regardless of whether or not an Members of Parliament broke the law regarding expenses (i.e. helping themselves to our money), they see no point in attempting to prosecute any of them as the laws are so arcane, it is almost impossible to know if any have in fact been broken.
I believe it was a Roman senator (Crassus?) who when asked if he would use his power and privilege to prevent himself being punished for some small transgression, he replied “as we make the laws, it behoves us to obey them if we want other to as well”. Clearly this is not the view prevailing in Westminster.
…rather a lot actually.
Michael Totten continued to climb in my estimation after a very good article called The Israel of the Balkans on the interesting parallels between Kosova and Israel.
Strongly recommended.
The rioting in Lhasa seems to be continuing and now it has been reported that some discontent is boiling over elsewhere in Chinese occupied Tibet. Of course if the official death toll says:
only that 10 “innocent civilians” had died, mostly in fires set by rioters, and that 12 police officers had been seriously wounded.
It is safe to say it is probably ten times that, at least on the side of the resistors. It seems that Chinese colonists have also been involved in attacking Tibetans, so this does appear to be far from over. Sadly I cannot see China having any serious trouble remaining in control given the sheer size of their security apparatus.
So, all you activists out there who have made a career out of excoriating Israel, do you have anything to say about this?
Update: I received the following e-mail from a person called Lee Ming:
Why not China defend itself from separatisms? What if parts of Britain want to be separatists? China has rule this since long ago!
Some Chinese claims assert they have ruled Tibet since the 13th century (the Peace Treaty between Tibet and Britain in 1904 is strangely forgotten):
1. Chinese rule was always debatable
2. The historical claim is largely irrelevant. Scotland has been part of the UK since 1707 and it was in a loose de union with England since 1603… yet if a majority in Scotland vote to become independent now, do you think UKGov will send in the riot cops and troops? No. Hell, if a majority in Wessex want to go their own way, I quite like the idea of that too. There is nothing sacred about nation states.
The fact a majority of Tibetans want to be independent of China rather than live under colonial occupation is all the justification needed.
The latest great idea from ‘digital-strategy consultant’ Jim Griffin, who is advising the Recording Industry Association of America on new and innovative ways of rent seeking, is to propose a piracy surcharge on ISPs in the USA.
Of course the advantage of that is if all broadband users have to pay the music industry $5 per month, regardless of whether or not you actually download any music, legal or illegal, why bother promoting music at all? Who needs products when you can just force people to pay you regardless? Is it great that we have governments around the world who are in a position to actually try and do stuff like that?
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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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