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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Just leave your computer turned on! I am pleased to see that all the modern gizmos that make life worth living are having a significant effect on everyone’s ‘carbon footprint’.
I cannot tell you how delighted that makes me. The notion that all the traffic that Samizdata generates adds to the preposterous statistics used to describe anthropogenic global warming gives me such a warm fuzzy glow I am myself no doubt heating up my little part of the globe… however the notion at all the people using their computer to visit the Greenpeace site are doing the same is thigh slappingly funny.
And yes, I leave my computers on 24/7. Take that, Gaia.
…definitely the time to be in the USA, watching fireworks on a lake whilst drinking far too much Yuengling beer.
The most invidious part of ‘health authoritarianism’ is that it takes a very reasonable aspect of a state’s responsibility, that of defending against the truly collective threat of infectious plagues, and debases it to interfere with non-infectious diseases which only pose a risk to people who voluntarily enter private property where certain very obvious conditions pertain.
And so we have the smoking ban on enclosed non-residential private property in Britain being imposed by classifying private property as ‘public places’. Never mind that you do not have to enter that privately owned property if you do not like the smell of it, or that the owners should be able to exclude people they want to exclude (such as smokers or for that matter, non-smokers) or that employees who do not like the working conditions can quit and go work somewhere else.
No, the political class loves the idea of eliminating emergent civil society and extending political control ever deeper into people’s lives (this is usually described as making things “more democratic”), and the idea that private property is actually private is an intolerable obstacle to those whose world view is based on violence backed control of the lives of others.
Many people have a deep seated psychological need to see others controlled, not because they are genuinely threatened by them but because they simply get off on controlling other people. The world is full of curtain twitching busy bodies who feel enlivened by calling down the power of the state on those of whom they disapprove for no other reason that it ’empowers’ them (it used to be ‘queers’ who got reported, now it is different types of nonconformists). No totalitarian system that has ever come to power has been able to sustain itself for long without appealing to this all too common psychologically defective demographic, relying on denouncement and informers to perpetuate a political order.
And the only way to resist is to, well, resist. Find ways not to obey the rules. Subvert the meaning of statutes. Do not accept the ‘rightness’ of the prevailing bigotries. Speak out against the orthodoxies of though that underpin the control freaks. Call them what they are. Just find ways to be awkward, find ways not to cooperate, and confront those who assume they on on the moral higher ground and pour contempt on their world view. Just do not meekly cooperate.
Sean Gabb is in blistering and delightfully acerbic form in an article titled Two Wasted Hours in Doughty Street. I had a similar experience surrounded by Tories at an otherwise interesting Adam Smith Institute event once, so Sean, I feel for you old chum.
The article reminded me of an old and not particularly distinguished movie with the line: “A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”
The attempted London bombings were, we will be told, a consequence of US/UK actions Iraq or Palestine or Afghanistan or something or other about George Dubya Bush or Halliburton or Global Capitalism or Social Injustice. You may be certain that all these bullshit excuses will be trotted out by the disingenuous left who crave the accusations or the deeply provincial Americocentric faction of libertarianism who pretend bad people will leave you alone if only you stay in your mountain bunker in the Ozarks, do not ever send soldiers abroad and refuse to trade or interact with the rest of the world.
However I wonder what these people will make of the possibility that the attacks could well have been about Britain daring to grant an honour to Salman Rushdie. Yet again I am delighted that Rushdie was so honoured, thus subjecting so many of western civilisations’ enemies, domestic and foreign, to the harsh light in which their true natures are revealed.
Of course I have no doubt this will all be used to bring in yet more regulation of our lives, reducing even more of our already grotesquely abridged civil liberties whilst leaving us not even slightly safer.
I received an e-mail asking why, as many of the Samizdatistas live in London, we have not commented on the attempted mass murder by followers of Islam (also known as “the Religion of Peace”).
Well, firstly we Londoners are fairly used to people setting off bombs in this city ever since Irish terrorists started doing that in the 1800’s. The current crop of homicidal nutters trying to kill civilians happen to be less discriminating that some in the past (though please do not forget the none too discriminating Irish pub-bombers of days gone by), but in the end it is nothing we have not seen before.
And whilst I am delighted this was attempt to kill people was thwarted, it is not something that will actually have the slightest impact on my life or the lives of most Londoners. We will continue to act today much as we did yesterday. Frankly I am more worried about the pervasive threat posed to my civil liberties by Gordon Brown than the more or less random threat to my life posed by Al Qaeda.
So not much more to say about it other than… oh, that sucks…now I am off to dinner at a nice Thai restaurant tonight with my inamorata.
Update: looks like we were very lucky it was not a suicide bomber this time… thanks to some brisk and highly commendable work by a member of the Plod (who yanked some wires rather than wait for the bomb squad) this was a close call rather than a catastrophe. Our tax money well spent for once it would appear!
…a new career for Brown… Melanie Brown.
“You mean Gordon Brown, the new Prime Minister, don’t you?” you say.
Hell no, what could be interesting about that? I mean Melanie Brown.
The fact we have a new Prime Minister makes bugger all difference. In fact it is hardly worth reporting. Gordon Brown says he wants to govern for ‘change’. Well the catastrophic abridgement of the civil liberties of all Britons during the Blair Years was certainly a ‘change’. And no doubt we will indeed get more ‘change’ under El Gordo, all of it for the worse… so that is hardly newsworthy at all. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
No, the most interesting news worth reporting is all about Melanie Brown.
A singer called Brown. Vastly more interesting that some kleptocratic power crazed political hack called Brown
MP Quentin Davies has defected from the Tory Party and joined Labour.
Yawn.
Given that there is now such little substantive difference between the total regulation centrists of the ‘Conservative’ Party and and the total regulation centrists of the Labour Party, what possible difference could this defection make? It is now such an easy move politically, psychologically and philosophically (though using that word in an article about some political hack verges on hilarious), that I would not be surprised to see MP’s regularly ‘crossing the aisles’ according to the dismal ebb and flow of political fortunes in Westminster.
In fact, why not just merge the two parties and call them the Tory Labour Party? That way people on the dismal left and dismal right who think political power exists for the purposes of control for control’s sake, will have an openly unified ideology free home for their votes rather than the current fiction of a two party system.
Of course if you want to have an actual conservative party to vote for in Britain, you have UKIP, whilst genuine philosophically motivated lefties can vote LibDem.
Although the Blair government has needed little encouragement from the European Union to destroy our civil liberties and impose ever more layers of political control over our lives, it seems he has decided to try and lock a few more controls at the more remote European level.
And will a future Cameron government undo what Blair has wrought? Do not make me laugh. As Dave Cameron even attempted to back out of his pre-leadership promise to take the token action of removing the ‘Conservatives’ from the integrationist EPP grouping in the European ‘parliament’ (and the Conservatives MEPs are still in a de facto coalition with the EPP), clearly he lacks the inclination to do anything of actual substance.
Clearly the only way to undo what Blair has wrought in Brussels is to just start ripping up treaties or better yet get out of the EU altogether… and that is not going to happen under any foreseeable UK government. Nothing short of a social earthquake that radically shifts the political landscape is going to make much difference and that ain’t going to happen under any likely government I can foresee.
I for one was delighted when I heard Salman Rushdie was going to be knighted… which might sound odd given that I regard the puffed up popinjay as a caricature of the very worst traits of the ‘meejah’ class, truly an example of how the empty vessel makes the most noise (though I cannot fault his taste in crumpet).
But the fact UKGov did something that was so obviously going to put one in the eye of the Islamists is a good think in and of itself regardless. Like the Mohammed cartoons incident and its aftermath, the reaction across the Muslim world to this serves as a very useful reminder that the ‘moderate Islam’ is a myth (for a superb account of this ‘from the inside’, I recommend Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and that not only helps in the battle against intolerant Islam directly, it helps in the culture war closer to home against Islam’s host of useful idiots in the western world.
The Libertarian Alliance has published a new pamphlet by Samizdatista Paul Marks called A Critique of a Critique: An Examination of Kevin Carson’s Contract Feudalism.
He is in splendid and splenic form, I am pleased to say.
…Abolish it. That is what the latest Libertarian Alliance press release demands and I find it hard not to agree.
In this era of channel fragmentation, cable, satellite and the rise of the internet as a method of distribution, what on earth is the point of the BBC? If I want to see what the other side is thinking I can watch Al Jezeera or read the Independent.
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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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