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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These simple truisms go a long way to explaining MP & blogger Tom Watson‘s support for passing laws regarding the use of fireworks. On his blog, and on this blog in our comments section, the Honourable Member of Parliament for West Bromwich East calls for more regulation and makes it clear that fireworks will simply be banned if that does not produce the desired effects. And yet when talking about an incident in which a woman was injured by some idiot throwing a firework he himself notes:
Granted the little thug that conducted this assault was breaking existing laws
�and then proceeds to ignore that fact from then on. I do not know Tom Watson personally but I heard him speak in Houses of Parliament and he seems both affable and reasonable for a politician. But as Brian Micklethwait’s article today says regarding the ‘problem’ of obesity, it is only to be expected that a person whose salary depends on passing more laws to, well, always insist on passing more laws.
The United States, for all the many, varied and egregious flaws in that constitutional republic, has at least managed to some degree to place whole sections of civil society off-limits to the law making Tom Watson’s of the world. For example free speech is largely protected against erosion in ways that have not proved to be the case in Britain with the advent of so called ‘hate speech’ laws.
In so many ways it is where the USA has managed to constrain regulatory democracy from intruding wherever vox populi wishes it to, and the resulting politicizations of social interactions that entails, that its vast economic power and admirable civil virtues spring. Similarly it is where the United States has departed from those principles (RICO, civil forfeiture, IRS reversal of burden of proof, etc.) that things have gone very badly wrong.
And therein lays the problem at the heart of modern democratic states: so much of society has been made amenable to literal force (i.e. political action) that it makes little difference in the long run who is in control of the democratic means of coercion, the end result for civil liberties and several ownership (including self-ownership) will be the same. Face it, in Britain there is little to choose between Tory Michael Howard and NuLabour David Blunkett when it comes to which of them has abridged more civil liberties whilst serving as Home Secretary. Likewise, Janet Reno may have presided over the mass murder of a bunch of wackos in Waco, Texas, but is anyone really going to claim John Ashcroft is not continuing the process of shredding the much vaunted Bill of Rights?
The problem is the whole meta-context of seeing as axiomatic that politics is always acceptable just so long as it gets the imprimatur from a plurality of the politically engaged. Until enough people are willing to look to the moral basis of a law and simply refuse to accept the legitimacy of laws just because they are laws, we will always have politicians singing their siren song for your votes to empower not you, but themselves, by offering to solve your every problem with more laws. It is not enough to just not vote for them, you must find innovative ways to not cooperate with them.
Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force.
Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.
-George Washington
The Drug ‘War’ continues to dement US society in new and innovative ways that even a cynic such as myself find hard to credit. This is truly staggering:
Gun-toting police burst into a South Carolina high school, ordering students to lie down in hall ways as they searched for drugs. The commando-style raid has parents questioning the wisdom of police tactics. The raid occurred Wednesday at Stratford High School in Goose Creek, S.C. Surveillance video obtained by CBS Affiliate WCSC in Charleston shows the police waving their guns and searching lockers as students lie flat on their stomachs or sides. The school’s principal defends the dramatic sweep, caught on the school’s surveillance tape. Police came into the school with guns at the ready, ordered all students to lie on the floor and then handcuffed anyone who apparently didn’t comply quickly enough.
I am sorry, but some square headed jerks in blue shirts start waving guns around a bunch of children who are just going about their business at school, and it is reported that parents are “questioning the wisdom of police tactics”? Questioning the wisdom of police tactics? To quote that wit and sage Eddy Murphy, get the fuck outa here. I would be looking for some heads-on-spikes if a child of mine was subjected to that sort of treatment. How this incident has not resulted in angry mobs in the streets throwing rocks is beyond me. What does it take to really piss these people off?
So… attention all parents in Goose Creek: are you starting to have second thoughts about the wisdom of entrusting your children to state ‘care’ yet? Unbelievable.
And now class, today’s important lesson:
The state is not your friend.
Any questions?
via Catallarchy.net
Like some undead creature from a B-movie, the festering Political Compass refuses to lie down and die.
I have not changed my views of this daft test one jot. Hand me another sharpened stake.
I doubt the BBC particularly wants my off-the-cuff attempt to pee in their iCan pool and I really look forward to goading Johnathan Miller into setting up an anti-TV licence campaign on iCan. However with the Cambridge Women in Black we see an example of exactly the sort of campaign the BBC had in mind when it set up its strange vaguely bloggish monstrosity. They state:
Cambridge Women in Black are holding silent vigils to protest against the ‘war on terror’. We are women of all ages and from all walks of life who oppose the use of violence. We are wearing black to show that we mourn all victims of terrorism and war.
In March 2003 the UK and US governments again attacked the people of Iraq, who have already suffered extensively from war and more than a decade of devastating sanctions. Cambridge Women in Black are here to show that we believe that more violence will not bring security and peace. We call on our government to stop creating yet more misery and hatred.
Note that the woes of the Iraqi people are not due to decades of Ba’athist mass murder and repression but are from the war and sanctions… sanctions during which large palaces and grandiose mosques were constructed in Iraq. Still, I do not suppose I should hold that against the ‘Cambridge Women in Black’ because after all, they state they are mourning “all victims of terrorism and war”… and never said anything about the victims of national socialist tyranny.
story via The Daily Ablution
1. noun. A blog (depreciated).
2. noun. A hybrid blog/website, featuring website features such as a conventional on-line company brochure (for example) but also incorporating a blog in a sidebar as a supporting feature on the same page.
(coined in this context (usage 2) by Adriana Cronin)
It is hard to know what to make of this:
Gordon Brown celebrated his return to politics yesterday by firing a shot across the bows both of Brussels and Tony Blair. Perhaps the Chancellor has found the time while on paternity leave to read the 250 pages of the draft European constitution. Mr Brown evidently does not agree with his neighbour in Number 10 that the constitution is a mere “tidying-up exercise”. On the contrary, he is obviously alarmed by the text agreed by the constitutional convention, which extends EU competence into areas of economic policy hitherto jealously guarded by the Treasury.
The only thing I am sure of is that it does not mean exactly what it says. My tentative take on it is not that Brown dislikes a regulated economy/society per se, but rather than he insists on being the one doing the regulating. The guy is hardly a free market capitalist after all and neither is he much of a nationalist. Maybe he feels that as Kinnock already has his snout highly placed in the EU’s trough, there will not be room enough for another ‘big beast’ such as himself and thus he is stuck with maintaining his looting rights via obsolescent old Westminster.
Alternatively, could it is just a ploy to demonstrate that there is a ‘vibrant Euro-sceptic wing in the Labour Party’ and thus forestall natural Labour supporters from feeling they have to vote a revitalised (ha!) Tory Party under Count Drac… Michael Howard, given that Brown is making it clear that “Labour is not entirely in the pocket of Brussels”. Are Labour’s strategists really that clever though? Not sure.
Cynical? Moi?
I must be the last person in the blogosphere to have spotted this. Some guy seems to have been fired by Microsoft for posting a photo of a bunch of Macintosh G5 computers being delivered to some nameless warehouse in Microsoft’s Redmond headquarters.
It seems a tad capricious… unless of course there is more to this than meets the eye. Much as I dislike Microsoft, we have only one side of the story here so I feel no great need to follow the herd in leaping to this bloke’s defence.
For me the interesting thing is the way a personal problem of less than earth shaking import can flash around the world and get the blogosphere clucking… I guess it was a slow week for interesting world events to write about and anyway, who can resist the chance to bash the Evil Micro$oft?
I have mentioned before that I am a great fan of the movie Resident Evil… well the sequel of which I spoke is going to hit the cinemas soon and a tantalising teaser can be found here!
The server upon which we are hosted was a bit dyspetic for about an hour today… but it is feeling much better now after it was burped (rebooted) by our excellent chums at Hosting Matters, who really are the worlds best hosting company!
Although I still maintain that I do not take iCan all too seriously, I have bunged a new ‘campaign journal’ up and also written the same piece up as an iCan ‘article’ called Neither chaos nor regulatory dystopia. iCan is wildly convoluted and a real nightmare to navigate and I could not figure out how to ‘attach’ the article to Anti-Activist Activism.
I did however find out how to attach the article to iCan ‘issues’, such as ‘direct democracy’, where I am sure it will be about as welcome as a turd on a billiard table 
…can also be our enemy too. Just because a person dislikes the regulatory state, that does not mean they see several liberty as first of all virtues.
Here on Samizdata.net, we have written many articles abominating the coercive law enforced process of moral relativism called ‘Political Correctness’. As a result, it is a measure of how bizarre some commenters can become when they starts accusing us of being PC because we do not have a problem with women joining the military, regardless of the fact none of us ever suggested a significant number of women have the physical strength to be front line infantry. It is apparent that the reason we are called ‘PC’ is that we do not think the only reasonable role for a woman in society is that of bearing and raising children.
Now I for one am all in favour of people who wish to have and raise children doing exactly that. Yet when it is suggested that a woman who might like to, say, spend her time flying a combat jet or wandering around lawless Basra as a military policewoman, we start seeing quack-science trotted out about ‘evolutionary biology’ and psychology and words to the effect that ‘real women are just unsuited to such things’ regardless of the mountain of evidence to the contrary… whilst somehow missing the rather obvious fact that actual biological evolution seems to have equipped woman, as well as men, with vastly powerful brains imbued with a capacity for reason and informed choices beyond crude instinctual motivations. Women have absurdly overpowered heads if the totality of their lives is driven by evolved psychological imperatives to immerse themselves in simple tasks such as having sex and keeping the house clean. → Continue reading: The enemy of our enemy…
The European Conference of the Libertarian Alliance and Libertarian International will be in London from Saturday 22nd to Sunday 23rd November 2003.
The speakers include fellow Samizdatista David Carr and serial Samizdata commenter Paul Coulam.
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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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