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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Efforts continue to use powers of eminent domain (UK = compulsory purchase) to take US Supreme Court Judge David Souter’s home away from him in order to use the land for a hotel and tourist attraction called the Lost Liberty Hotel.
However New Hampshire State Representative Neal Kurk, in spite of being behind worthy measures to prohibit in his state the sort of abuses of eminent domain that the US Supreme Court okayed with their monstrous Kelo judgement, is nevertheless opposed to the plan to use eminent domain against Souter.
“Most people here see this as an act of revenge and an improper attack on the judicial system,” Kurk said. “You don’t go after a judge personally because you disagree with his judgments.”
Why not? If Souter was part of the system underwriting a grotesque abridgement of liberty, who not grotesquely abridge his liberty? I suppose being a politician himself, the notion of using laws against the people responsible for them might be a little too close to home for Kurk even if he is sponsoring a measure to prevent such abuses in New Hampshire. Yet why should people whose liberty is abridged and rights to property threatened not want to punish the guilty parties with the tools they themselves have no problem seeing used against others? I am a great believer in revenge.
Do unto others as they do unto you.
Only a complete ass would make the cost of ID cards, rather than principle behind them, the main thrust of their opposition to such an imposition. And it would appear that Tory Blair David Cameron is exactly such as ass.
So presumably Cameron, who does nothing not somehow calculated to help return the Tories to power, thinks that such a stance will play well with people who actually care about civil liberties? Well if that really is his objective, does he really think that the NO2ID crew and the LibDems (the two main anti-ID card groups) are really just worried about another small tax? In short, is he really that stupid? And if he is trying to curry favour with ‘Middle England’, is this not the group we are told do not really care one way or the other on the issue?
All he needs to do to get the serious civil libertarians to cheer him to the rafters is stand up and say “regardless of what it costs, we oppose them because they are wrong and any government that tries to impose them is not just wrong, it is wicked. And if they are imposed, we will scrap them the moment we take power, again regardless of what was spent to impose them.”
There is of course no chance whatsoever he will ever say that because clearly the idea of that ID cards are all about civil liberties does not really resonate with a Blairite like Cameron… but of course I would love to be proven wrong.
Jacques Chirac has suddenly come out with a statement (French version here) that not only is France prepared to use nuclear weapons “against any state which launched a terrorist attack against it”, their nuclear forces had been “configured for such an event”.
As clearly this is a direct threat to nuke Iran, I can only wonder what the hell is going on here? Makes me wonder what exactly do they know in the Quai d’Orsay that they are not sharing with the rest of us.
The headline of the print Daily Telegraph today trumpeted ‘Mini-brothels get go-ahead to operate on your doorstep’. I immediately took a peek at my doorstep but alas nothing to report yet.
To recycle a well known quote: prostitution combines free enterprise with sex. Which one are you against?
There is an article by Simon Heffer with the simple title of Doing nothing in Iran is not an option which seems to be stating the obvious to me. Given the leadership of Iran are self-declared apocalypse enthusiasts, I for one do not regard just waiting until Tel Aviv gets nuked as acceptable and I rather suspect the Israelis heartily concur. The shit is going to hit the fan soon, that much is certain and no amount of risible European diplomacy will change that.
As for something that could be done more or less immediately, it was gratifying to see Mark Steyn has come around to my view on how to apply pressure in ways that might really destabilise this regime… do to the Iranians security services exactly what they are doing to British troops in Southern Iraq: fight a proxy war with them, only do it openly and without apology.
Fact is, Britain is already at war with Iranian backed forced in Iraq and has been for months. So the government just needs to take this to its logical conclusion and escalate the war so that the Iranian state finds itself at war with British backed Iranian insurgent forces in Iran. It is not like there is any shortage of Iranians who want to be rid of their theocratic nutters. Sounds like a nice convergence of interests to me.
To see a term like “Blairite Tyranny” bandied about on a blog like this by people who think things like civil liberties actually matter, is to be expected.
However to see those words in print at all in the mainstream media is quite remarkable! More of the same please.
It would be fair to say that telling the truth often makes you no friends, and thus the need to protect ‘whistleblowers’ from being penalised for telling what they know is an issue that should be close to the heart of any who value truth above all else. It is often only people on the inside who can reveal the dirty deeds and malfeasance that would otherwise never come to light. Therefore when I read of a person losing their position because not only did they tell the truth, they refused to allow the truth to be forgotten, it just makes me sick as a parrot.
This was the text of what I submitted for inclusion as an ‘icon of Britain’ via the Department of Culture, Media & Sport website mentioned by Guy Herbert yesterday:
The CCTV camera is the perfect icon for Britain today, summing up the nature of the changing relationship between civil society and political state. They are an innovation in which Britain leads the world both technologically and in usage and are the visible manifestation of so many things which happen out of sight. It is almost impossible to avoid their gaze for an entire day and sitting like steel crows on their perches above us, truly they are emblematic of modern Britain.
The thing is, I am not taking the piss, this really is modern Britain…
I look forward to Blair apologists spinning this unsurprising revelation.
Town hall bureaucrats are to be given sweeping new powers to investigate homes for identity card evasion and to impose heavy fines on occupants found without one. The revelation, in an obscure Whitehall consultation paper, calls into serious doubt the Government’s repeated promises that planned ID cards, already hugely controversial, will be voluntary and that no one will be forced to carry one.
But we should trust the government because… well, just because.
At least the Telegraph is putting out bloggy articles like this one in opposition. I wonder, is the rest of the Fourth Estate going to sleep through this?
The loathsome Philip Gould, a man who is like something out of Orwell’s 1984, has written a letter to the Guardian pointing out what Tory Blair David Cameron has made obvious over the last few days: New Labour’s ideology of regulatory statism and the incremental replacement of several rights based civil society with democratic omni-political interactions has completely won the argument amongst the professional political classes. David Cameron’s announcements of ‘belief’ in the purest form of socialism in Britain (the National Health Service) and his effortless assumption that it is the role of politicians and the state to tell companies what choices of food they may offer to customers to select from are not ‘clever politics’ but rather the total whimpering surrender to the ideology of Blairism. As Philip Gould points out, his side has won and won utterly. The entire meta-context within which political debate goes on has been conceded by the Tories, dooming them to always fight on ground of their ‘enemies’ choosing.
I have never been more certain that my conviction is correct that liberty, individuality and several rights can only be fought for outside the democratic political process. Although being in office matters to people like Philip Gould, to the rest of us the truth is we might as well be living in a one party state.
New Labour has indeed won in Westminster, regardless of who wins the next election, but of course as Gould cannot imagine anything beyond politics, there is still a civil society out there that needs to be defended against people like him and you cannot do that by voting for different sections of the political monoculture. I hope his article will be read by many of the remaining Conservative activists who are still quixotically clinging to the absurdity that a Cameron victory would change anything. To fight Tony Blairism first we have to destroy Tory Blairism. If you care anything for liberty and opposing the growth of a panoptic pooled database regulatory state, the worst thing you can do is vote for a Blairite like David Cameron and his intellectually defeated political party.
The article by one of our contributors yesterday about Russian on-line music business allofmp3.com raises all manner of fascinating issue that I think should be pondered.
It has been argued by some of the commentariat that “whether you approve of the morality of the western music business or not, the goods belong to them and the artists” and thus as “one of the driving principles of this site [Samizdata.net] is respect for property rights, not glorifying those who steal, whether it be the state or someone else”, presumably we should be more critical of this. These are reasonable positions to take and certainly I would not want anyone to think Samizdata has anything less than complete enthusiasm for private property rights. However I also think with regard to this (which is to say the sale of music on-line in a manner which is against the wishes of the businesses who own/created the music) the view that property rights are being violated is not correct.
In fact I would say that notion is exactly the wrong way around. Like it or not, music is now a commodity that is traded by weight in an international market and therefore the creator has only residual rights to how that commodity is subsequently resold. The model allofmp3 uses does indeed pay something to the creators of the music and refusing to acknowledge that things have changed and that recorded music is no long a physical good is pointless.
It may not be the business model originally envisaged by the music creators but that is the only viable one that remains to them. The market price for their product is now about 12¢ a track and if that (or their cut of that) is not enough for the music’s creators, well I guess they should stop producing music and go find something else more profitable to do, just as if the price of diamonds falls too low, De Beers should feel free to stop digging them up in Namibia. What they (and De Beers) should not feel free to do is demand governments force the price of music (or diamonds) up by insisting they can only be sold a certain way via approved technologies at higher prices. One of the driving principles behind Samizdata.net is trying to develop theories about the world that reflect reality. I am willing to hear other theories but it seems to me that the market has spoken (loudly) and using the state to prop up a business model that technology has made nonsensical is not really serving the cause of liberty.
Another issue raised by the commentariat is that companies like allofmp3.com are all involved with the ‘Russian Mafia’. As no evidence has been offered, clearly that is baseless supposition. However it does raise some other interesting issues: I would say even if it was true that allofmp3 is paying ‘protection’ to the Russian Mafia and/or using their political influence to shield their business model, the Russian Mafia fulfils certain roles that in other countries are filled by governments and lobbyists to much the same effect, thus I am not sure it makes a company like allofmp3 any different to a company (say Sony) using the force of the state to enforce its business model.
There is really not that much difference and if you do not believe me, I suggest you try telling the state you no longer wish to follow their regulations and wish to make your own arrangements for ‘protection’ and therefore intend to withhold a portion of your taxes… and then see what happens to you.
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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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