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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A new nationwide police agency, the Serious and Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) has been created in Britain.
The creation of a new “British FBI” to combat organised crime, with informants being offered reduced sentences to snitch on their gangland bosses, was given unanimous support in the Commons today – despite a controversial raft of new powers.
The home secretary, David Blunkett, told MPs he was in favour of allowing intercept material – bugged phone calls and emails – to be used as evidence, pending a review which would report back in June.
And he would also, for the first time, force professionals such as lawyers and solicitors to cooperate with police enquiries into organised crime, even if it meant betraying client confidentiality.
And thus people will simply stop asking for legal opinions just in case their shyster runs off to the police in order to cover their rear ends and thereby ensuring a steadily increasing climate of fear, distrust and uncertainty. The Blair-Blunkett government are nothing less that populist authoritarians.
Barbara Amiel is someone I frequently find disagreements with but when she is right, boy, is she right. Whilst I am usually rather prone to point the finger of blame at the state as the font of all evils when things go wrong, Amiel makes the reasonable point that even with the best intelligence in the world, the prevailing zeitgeist in the United State (and elsewhere) on and before September 10th 2001 meant that there was very little support for anything which could really have stopped Al Qaeda’s infamous arrival onto the world’s front pages.
The question is not whether Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush actually knew about the murderous intentions of radical Islam or whether they took what they knew seriously, but what the public mood would have let them do about it before 9/11.
Not much, I wager. What administration could, before 9/11, have sent in American boys to fight a regime in Afghanistan because it was implementing the ideas of an old man with a long white beard, sitting crossed-legged in the mountains talking about Satan America? Had I been in Congress before 9/11, knowing everything that was knowable about the Islamists, I still doubt if I would have voted to send troops to the Hindu Kush to topple the Taliban. Eardrums would have exploded all over Capital Hill from outcries of racism and imperialism if there had been serious efforts, pre-9/11, to round up suspected Muslim militants in the United States and tighten security on Muslims entering the country. As it is, the post-9/11 sensitivity to racial profiling makes travel hazardous for white grannies who dislike body-searches.
All too true. Read the whole article.
Gerhard Schröder is calling companies who outsource ‘unpatriotic‘, after Ludwig Georg Braun, the president of the federation of chambers of industry and commerce, advised German businesses to seek opportunities elsewhere.
So, Gerhard Schröder, the man who has presided over yet another interventionist government whose policies have made Germany progressively more and more uncompetitive over the years, brazenly refuses to accept his personal responsibility for imposing the very policies which are driving businesses to seek to invest elsewhere.
But then I suppose as the prerequisite for any professional politician is to be able to look an entire nation in the eye and tell them black is white and up is down, and then ask to be applauded for saying that… and what is more, more often than not, that is exactly what happens.
Whatever. Reality always has its way with vainglorious politicians in the long run because people, and their capital, will eventually go where their interests are best served.
And that place will not be Gerhard Schröder’s Germany.
One of the reasons for slightly less output on this august blog is that two of the editors and the inimitable Gabriel Syme were off meeting other sinister Illuminati in Prague for a fine Czech beer or six.
No prize for guessing where the Illuminati meet in Prague Prague, like Bratislava, is known for its splendours…
Hot… steamed in fact One of the upsides of the dire weather was that many of the usually crowded tourist attractions were almost deserted.
We meet one of the leading central European bloggers, Tomas Kohl (on the right)…
Tomas sinks some fine Czech Pilsner with Adriana and Gabriel Syme → Continue reading: Samizdata.net on the river Vltava
To say that legislation can bring about an end to child labor is akin to saying that someone’s fever could be cured by dousing his thermometer in ice.
– Thomas E. Woods, Jr.
Well, no surprise there… China fears everything it cannot control, and thus it is stomping on China’s blogosphere.
The site Blogbus.com was closed on 11 March “until further notice” for allowing a letter to be posted that was critical of the government. It was the turn of Blogcn.com to be shut down on 14 March.
We tried to see if we could get banned in China and it did not take that long to get us shut off from Chinese readers a while back (I have not checked recently to see if we are still a China no-no).
The linked Vigilant.tv article at the top of this entry even helpfully provides a link to his wonderful Invisiblog system to allow Chinese bloggers to deftly avoid the best efforts of the Chinese state’s attempts to silence them.
Yet in the long run it will avail them naught. As the Chinese state increasingly liberalises its economy in order to provide more wealth that it can tax, which of course means assuming less state control over that most entrepreneurial of people, the Chinese, that very process will eventually cause alternative power centres to appear as a direct consequence of creating more wealth without directing where that wealth is created.
Mentioned en passant in another alarming article in which David Blunkett threatens yet further abridgements of civil liberties under the guise of ‘fighting terrorism’, it is noted he and the European Commission advocated the idea of…
Joining forces with the Commission, Mr Blunkett backed proposals for a fingerprint data base of all EU citizens and tougher measures to tackle terrorist funding.
Oh wonderful.
recoup (v.) recouped, recouping, recoups
v. tr.
To receive an equivalent for; make up for: recoup a loss.
To return as an equivalent for; reimburse.
Law. To deduct or withhold (part of something due) for an equitable reason.
v. intr.
To regain a former favorable position.
So when we are told that a committee of the Irish parliament will tell the Irish government that it should…
…use taxes or development levies to recoup some of the windfall profits made by property speculators when their land is rezoned.
… we are being told the Irish government should receive an equivalent for; make up for: recoup a loss.
Now how exactly does a property owner profiting from a change in the manner in which the Irish state abridges their property rights (i.e. land use zoning), thereby cause the Irish state a loss that needs to be recouped?
It should be clear that what we have here is an example of our old friend ‘meta-context’ at work again. Underpinning the suggested tax increase is the unspoken axiom that the economy exists for the purpose of allowing the state to acquire resources and any profits derived from the economy which benefit someone else other than the state are in fact a ‘loss’ for the state. That is to say, this is just a slight variation on the bizarre economic fallacy that someone else getting richer perforce makes someone else poorer. The self-evident concept of wealth creation simply does not register.
I wonder how many people sitting in that Oireachtas committee set to tell the Irish leader to increase those taxes would find the notion that the only reason the state ‘allows’ people to engage in economic activity for their own benefit at all is so that the state can tax them? My guess is that it would not be a commonly held overt belief but if you were to actually strap a number of mainstream Irish journalists and TDs to chairs and question them, teasing out the unspoken underlying assumptions within which they see the world, that is indeed what you would discover to be the case.
Yesterday I marvelled at the notion that David Blunkett had the gall to suggest that victims of miscarriages of justice should be charged for ‘room and board’. That this has not featured on the front page of every newspaper in Britain is also shocking to me. It seems to me that when there has been a miscarriage of justice, the state should bend over backwards to make amends as fulsomely as possible and make lavish restitution for damages done both directly and indirectly for the life it has unjustly disrupted. If justice is administered ‘in the name of the people’ then surely amongst the endless litany of grotesque uses of the public purse that consume billions and billions of pounds, this would be a rare legitimate public charge that few would dispute.
However what is even more baffling to me that the Tory Party is not queuing up in the Commons to denounce Blunkett in the most extreme language allowed in Parliament. Why are they not trying to use this latest affront to common decency and natural justice and using it to paint the Labour Party as the party which tramples over civil liberties? They should be relentlessly calling for Blunkett’s head over this and what do I hear? The sound of silence. Anyone who harbours delusions that the party of Michael Howard will be their champion for civil liberties against the ever more authoritarian Labour government really needs to see them for what they really are.
Regardless of whether or not the government manages to get this measure accepted or not, the mere fact Blunkett can even suggest such a thing without sparking clamourous calls for his removal from office is both a damning indictment of the moral and political vacuity of Britain’s political parties and a chilling measure of state of Britain’s culture. I sincerely hope to be proved wrong and see a ground swell of anger emerging in the press and polity in the next few days but I am not holding my breath. It would be interesting to hear the views of some of Britain’s blogging Members of Parliament on this issue.
Given my extremely low expectations, it takes a lot for a British government to actually amaze me.
Well they have managed to do exactly that. The people who rule us are not misguided, they are actually evil.
It takes a lot to amaze me, but Blunkett has done just that.
WHAT do you give someone who’s been proved innocent after spending the best part of their life behind bars, wrongfully convicted of a crime they didn’t commit?
An apology, maybe? Counselling? Champagne? Compensation? Well, if you’re David Blunkett, the Labour Home Secretary, the choice is simple: you give them a big, fat bill for the cost of board and lodgings for the time they spent freeloading at Her Majesty’s Pleasure in British prisons.
On Tuesday, Blunkett will fight in the Royal Courts of Justice in London for the right to charge victims of miscarriages of justice more than £3000 for every year they spent in jail while wrongly convicted. The logic is that the innocent man shouldn’t have been in prison eating free porridge and sleeping for nothing under regulation grey blankets.
This is insane. The state locks someone up unjustly and then demands payment for room and board? This is the true face of the people who have power over us. It is actually evil.
If this astonishing development does not cause the mother of all political storms both in Westminster and society at large, then Britain as a society has clearly become so inured to authoritarianism and arrogance by its rulers that we must be past the point of no return. Blunkett must go. Now!
Sometimes when I feel the need to see the world through very strange eyes indeed, I wander over to the Pravda website for a bit of paleo-collectivism using language little different from Soviet days. I am rarely disappointed.
There is a splendid example of entertaining pretzel logic in slightly fractured English called West against Russia. The article discusses that the fact many articles appear in the western media which are critical, unflattering and disparaging regarding modern Russia and particularly Vladimir Putin. The author of the article, Mikhail Chernov makes it clear that the western reports are not just reportage but are a campaign and ‘Russian experts’ know why this is happening:
The main task of the new media campaign is making Vladimir Putin (who will probably be elected for the second term) not legitimate in the minds of Western audience. Meanwhile, some Russian experts believe that toughening the position of the West did not result from Russian political events and certain economic interests in Russia. The EU and the USA increased their criticism of Russia because of the crisis of the “Western” model of social order and simultaneously express their rejecting Russian social order model in this way.
So western criticism actually has nothing much to do with Russia, it is just a facet of the crisis of our social order, hence…
Many Russian experts believe that moving Western politics into anti-Russian direction is inevitable. Director of Pamir-Ural research group Alexander Sobyanin said that there is no special plan to undermine Russia. Western elites do not think bad about Russia and are not going to bring Russia down.
Quite so, there is not much interest in ‘bring Russia down’ anywhere other than Chechnya. In truth, western elites (whatever that means) do not really tend to think overmuch about Russia at all. But the fact Russia is seen as a far of basket case by most western elites is not the thrust of the article at all. Quite the contrary in fact.
According to Mr. Sobyanin, sharp increase of anti-Russian propaganda resulted from the crisis of the Western society elites. “The elites of only three countries were in the mainstream of the global economic and social development in the last century – Russia, the USA and Great Britain. The world entered the stage of changing dimensions – it has to abandon outdate absolute “financial criteria” and elaborate the new paradigm of development. Implementing changes will be accompanied by wars and social conflicts. Anglo-Saxon elites are not ready for this yet”, said Alexander Sobyanin. He believes that there is a chance that Russia can elaborate new, alternative algorithm for global development (in last century it was socialism), and for this reason the West perceives Russia as the dangerous ideological competitor.
Well I did tell you that I go to Pravda because I enjoy reading things that are surreal. This appears to say the thing that is wrong with the Anglo-Saxon model is that it looks at the ecomony in economic terms! And so what is this ‘new paradigm of development’? It is not spelled out so let me guess: economics must be managed politically for fairness and efficiency in order to avoid ‘wasteful competition’? I am just speculating here but who feels brave enough to disagree and tell me this is not at the root of this ‘new paradigm of development’ being hinted at? The notion that Russia is a source of a viable economic algorithm likely to challenge ‘Anglo-Saxon’ capitalism is quixotic to put it politely… laughable to be a bit more blunt.
As Russian civil society exists only precariously, the Russian social model is simply that of subordinating ‘social’ interactions to politically regulated interactions strongly influenced from the top. In short, the Russian social model is ‘people being told what to do’. The socialist ‘ownership’ based method of doing that has simply been replaced with the more effective fascist style ‘control’ based method. Which is to say, rather that nationalising everything, the Russian state simply regulates things and imposes controls on what people can do with what they nominally own.
This is of course also the approach of regulatory statists even in Britain, the USA and elsewhere in the west, but unlike those places, Russia has the ‘advantage’ of a civil society with no significant intermediate organisations between it and the state, moreover it is a society conditioned to a top down approach by centuries of Tsarist autocracy followed by Communist totalitarianism. The article then goes on to talk about how in the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ way, it is competition which defines our civilisation:
Western model” implies having certain “agreement” accepted by the society. One of the backbones of this agreement is competition between individuals. Russian tradition does not recognize competition as positive factor because competition awakes low instincts in people and does not improve the quality of products, but, on the contrary, worsens their quality.
Which no doubt explains the huge flood of high quality Russian products sweeping the world. That pesky toleration of individualism will be the undoing of us poor Anglo-Saxons. In reality, that there are any successful businesses at all in Russia is testament to the ingenuity of individual Russians and their ability to operate in spite of the ‘Russian model’.
Quite apart from the fact this utter tosh claims to be ‘reasoned analysis’, the fact that the people who think of themselves as Russia’s elites still think in such delusional terms shows the extent to which things have not yet recovered intellectually from that nation’s poisonous past. Who needs The Onion when you have Pravda? Sorry, but there is only one kind of Russian model that has any interest for the rest of the world.
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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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