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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I am not a great fan of Max Hastings but he does have a rather good article in the Guardian that makes points which should be obvious to everyone except state apparatchiks. He decries educational utilitarianism and Labour’s lack of realism about the dominance of western culture and the relevance of British history in view of that undeniable dominance.
However I think he rather misses the point that this attitude has been a significant element for quite some time under governments of both parties. Perhaps what makes this government more alarming is their taste for depreciating any sense of cultural identity for English people and, most importantly, failing to provide any historical context for the modern world. To have a broad grasp of history is to have an understanding of the present and future possibilities and it would appear that is not seen as helpful for the broad masses of people who the state would rather see concentrate on mere technical skills.
I wonder if there are some in Whitehall who really do think that ideally as few British people as possible should know there was not always a socialist ‘National Health Service’? If people do not know of a past without something they are perhaps less likely to imagine a future without it either. Perhaps none would really see things in quite such totalitarian terms yet it is not hard to see the attraction of such a view if you do not want people even discussing things which might reduce your power and influence by questioning certain axioms.
It is often my experience that the very notion that most regulatory planning is a quite modern imposition strikes a lot of people as bizarre. They think that without politically driven planning, everything would be chaos, and that must always have been true, right? Yet before the Town and Country Planning Act 1947, which was the single most destructive abridgement of British liberty ever, people owned property with several rights that are unimaginable today. Civilization would not end if such conditions prevailed again tomorrow (far from it) yet the meta-contextual reality is that in 2005, most people quite literally cannot imagine a world without planning regulations and that makes it rather hard to have a discussion about the issue if you take a radical perspective (i.e. the mainstream perspective of about one hundred years ago).
Perhaps just as Orwell wrote about ‘newspeak’ and posited a totalitarian state which wanted to abridge the language to make even conceiving of dissent impossible, there may be some amongst the political class who like the idea of most people receiving nothing more than technical training as the less people know of radically different world views that are never the less relevant to western culture, the less likely they are to imagine society functioning just fine without a great many of the state institutions taken for granted today. What would happen if people start imagining a world which works just fine without much of the regulatory statism that the state wants you to accept as inevitable and natural?
Creating a non-statist meta-context in which such things can even be discussed is something I have often banged on about. By this I mean establishing frames of reference within which one develops and expresses opinions that are broader than those generally found in the mainstream media or academia today. This matters because the meta-context within which most discussions and analysis take place tends to define the basic range of views that are likely to emerge: for example, if the only method for effecting changes people can imagine involves force backed democratic political processes, their views will tend to develop with that underpinning assumption in mind.
I would be curious to know if people like education minister Charles Clarke really think about that sort of thing. I am quite willing to believe that rather than an sinister overarching world view designed to make us all technically trained drones monitored with panoptic surveillance and ubiquitous state enforced database monitoring, we are just seeing the results of dreary political hacks looking for ways to eliminate things they are too limited to see a use for themselves. Stupidity rather than malevolence is generally a more reliable explanation of wickedness than conspiracy theories… and yet when you take the broader view of this apparent dislike of non-technical education within the context of widespread abridgement of civil liberties by both main political parties, well, it makes you wonder.
Do not count on it but there is a much belated push on in Westminster to undermine the ID cards legislation that, if successful, would in effect make them voluntary. The Tories and LibDems peers (the later of which have at least been consistent in their opposition to ID cards) are at least going through the motion of blocking this monstrous intrusion by the state but I will believe it when I see it.
So… will David Cameron make the immediate scrapping of ID cards and abolition of the national register a manifesto pledge? If not then clearly it is still very much the party of Michael ‘a touch of the night’ Howard. Even if the move to prevent back-door compulsion succeeds, as long as the infrastructure of surveillance and branding us like cattle remains in place, Britain will remain nothing more than a Police State being held in abeyance.
I have written a couple of times before about the very useful cultural confrontation with intolerant Muslims that occurred when Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten published some less than flattering cartoons featuring the Prophet Mohammed.
Well in case you are curious what those cartoons actually looked like, here they are (sorry, but I do not have a larger version and the original link no longer works):
If Salman Rushdie wrote the ‘Satanic Verses’ and incurred the ire of the moonbat faction of Islam, I guess the Jyllands Posten publication must be the ‘Satanic Cartoons’.
Here is a link that shows the cartoons more clearly so you can see what all the fuss is about.
There is a good article about the Iranian blogosphere in the Times by Ben Macintyre. I think Iran’s bloggers deserve as much credit and support as possible as they are very much on the front line of resisting Islamo-facism and blogs there are truly the heirs to the Soviet era dissident Samizdats.
Update: Alan Moore has a few things to say on the subject as well.
If you support the Tories because you dislike the Labour Party’s socialist and kleptocratic underpinnings, might I suggest that you are supporting exactly the same policies just with a slightly posher accent.
And a case in point comes from Oliver Letwin, who like most politicians is rarely overburdened with a need to take a consistent position on almost any issue. He tells is that the Tories should be in the redistribution of wealth business. The only bit I find shocking is that he finally openly admits what has been obvious for rather a long time. The idea the Tories will undo anything substantive to repair the damage of the Blair years is delusional and I certainly hope Letwin keeps flapping his lips to make that clear to as many notional Tories as possible.
So as there is clearly nothing to choose ideologically between Labour and Tory, at least those who are addicted to the preposterous notion that they are empowering themselves by voting should stick to voting Labour on the basis the guys and gals from Transport House are at least more honest about the philosophical underpinnings of their theft. Moreover, as ideology is now no real basis for deciding how to vote and choosing who will be the real Big Brother is about as important as voting for who gets the boot on an episode Big Brother, people should shun the Tories because they are just so damn unappealing from a purely aesthetic perspective. The Labour party may lose the next election but it is hard to see how or why the Tory party could ever actually win it, if you get my meaning.
Or if you are one of those quixotic folks who actually think your vote really does matter, you could always vote UKIP on the basis it is without doubt in the long run the best way to destroy the wealth redistributing Tory party imaginable. And the notion of one day putting the likes of Oliver Letwin out of a job is something I really do find appealing.
Are you uncomfortable enough? Good. Welcome to my world.
– Adriana Cronin-Lukas, on dealing with day to day annoyances of Eastern Europe’s post communist legacy
The best possible antidote to ignorant and irrational Indonesian Muslim clerics forcibly imposing Sharia and claiming the tsunami was punishment for women not wearing veils would be for people to respond to their violence in kind and simply run the bastards out of town.
The religious police have not always had it their own way. In one incident on the island of Sabang, attempts to humiliate a bareheaded girl backfired when angry villagers turned on them. By the time the civil police arrived to rescue the enforcers they were surrounded by an angry mob flicking lighted cigarettes at them.
This is an encouraging start but they need to get rather more serious than flicking a few cigarettes at them.
As I sit in the Coffee&Co café in Bratislava (a town I am rather fond of visiting) taking advantage of its offer of free wireless broadband (ah, no more OWLS for me)…
…I am yet again struck by what changes are being wrought by the internet, and what amazing possibilities it opens up.
Although I studied Russian many years ago when the Cold War was steering me in certain directions, that knowledge has long since been flushed by my brain. Yet the other night just before I left London for Slovakia, I was exchanging e-mails with a chap in Moscow, translating (or more accurately transliterating) my Latin script English into Cyrillic Russian via a free on-line system and similarly translating his replies into English.
The results were rather crude and took a bit of smarts to interpret but we were able to conclude our business most satisfactorily. It really did bring home to me that even though we are only at the very start of the communications revolution (and revolution it is), the ways the internet will change everything are incalculable. The social, scientific, economic and political implications are so far reaching that I am sure the world twenty years from now will be hard to recognise.
Perhaps that is just stating the obvious but for me at least it is the very fact I am now so blasé about all the things the internet makes possible for me that makes it is useful to sometimes stand back and marvel at what an astonishing thing it is. Of course just as we take electric light as a given and only appreciate it when the power goes out, I might be unusually appreciative because at the moment I do not have my usual 24/7 broadband access and there is nothing like withdrawal to make you value getting a ‘fix’.
This sounds like a fairly explosive sort of party!
Mark Thatcher was involved in a failed but very commendable private sector attempt to oust an African tyrant, no doubt motivated by personal gain (an entirely reasonable motivation) and as a result, Prince Albert has decided that Mr. Thatcher is not a suitable person to have his residence in Monaco. Somehow this is part of a new ‘ethical’ approach to running the Principality.
So let me get this straight… trying (but failing) to overthrow some petty ruler who treats his country as a personal possession make you un-ethical? So does that mean being supportive of the government of Equatorial Guinea would make a person… ethical?
One might almost think that Prince Albert just does not like the idea of people overthrowing any ruler of a pissant country. I wonder why that might be?
I am travelling in Slovakia and the Czech Republic at the moment and internet access is rather hard to find. This all too brief internet lifeline is a welcome fix to help alleviate my OWLS (On-line Withdrawal Lamentation Syndrome). Horror is a foreign keyboard.
But at least the locals in the deepest rural Moravia are helping me get over the internet withdrawal shakes by stuffing me full of splendid pastries, for which this part of the world is rightly famed.
Interesting glimpses of the recent communist past abound but are becoming less visible by the year.
Remember a time before the internet? Hard to believe, I know! My hosts used this to listen to broadcasts from the West.
I am with the original samizdat people from whom I took so much inspiration and the reason I came up with the name for this blog.
Tony Blair showed just how courageous he is… he chose to face up to an internal battle based on one idea – the European Union – rather than just doing his job as just Britain’s prime minister.
– Jacques Chirac
Pity Samizdata.net does not have a catagory for articles called “Treason & Betrayal”.
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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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