A cascade of power blackouts have hit the north eastern USA and parts of Canada, causing widespread chaos. It was also reported that due to the power cuts, the United Nations building in New York City has been closed.
So, not entirely bad news then.
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August 14th, 2003 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
 …that can be found over on www.bureaucrash.com  Which reminds me of my favourite picture of Che Guevara, that achingly cool totalitarian pop icon… 
As you sow, so shall you reap August 11th, 2003 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
The latest flash adventure by our most splendid Dissident Frogman shows the correct application for the wonders of modern technology in Iraq. Ignore the warning and…press the Red Button in the main column of the blog. Pure genius.  August 8th, 2003 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
This article on White Rose is rather interesting and really rather heartening…
I have long feared incremental statism more than revolutionary statism, because revolutions are easy to notice and thus easy to shoot at and, more importantly, get support from other people when you do. Incremental diminution of liberty however falls within the ‘boiling frog’ syndrome. By the time people notice, it is too late. Now I really do not care what the Catholic Church has to say about gays or whatever… that is matter for practicing Catholics, not a well and truly lapsed one like me. But I am rather interested in anything which could well cause a major collision between civil society and the state. You see, what I see here is that sooner or later, the Irish state is going to find itself confronted by a Catholic Priest who loudly proclaims in unambiguous language what the state defines as ‘hate speech’ by strongly depreciating homosexual relationships… and the state will be faced with in effect prosecuting someone for being a Catholic and following ex cathedra Catholic doctrines to the letter. And then all of a sudden, when it becomes clear that the state has decided it will give itself a force-backed say in what gets said from the pulpits of Catholic Churches, millions of people who are voluntary members of a civil non-state social organization called The Roman Catholic Church are going to have to look long and hard at how they see the state. I could not ask for better grounds on which to draw up an army for that particular fight. I think rather a lot of them will come to the conclusion that…The state is not your friend. More and faster please. August 6th, 2003 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
Someone has recently set up a syndicated account for Samizdata.net over on LiveJournal… if XML feeds are something you are interested in, check it out! August 4th, 2003 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
If anyone doubted that the libertarian ‘vibe’ is seen by many as powerful and attractive, then the fact so many people who represent its antithesis keep trying to hijack the term to mean ‘someone opposed to liberty’ should make it clear that the word ‘libertarian’ is hot, hot, hot (i.e. much as the term ‘liberal’ within the Anglosphere was hijacked when it was hot and which has now come to mean ‘illiberal’, which is to say, socialist). I have argued before that Libertarian Socialism is an oxymoron… well the same applies to Libertarian National Socialism. But then given that National Socialism and Socialism are just tactical variants within the same old statist collectivist class of political philosophy, it is hardly surprising the arguments as to why one is absurd to call itself libertarian applies equally well to the other. The only real difference is that the Nazi variety of socialist collectivists just have better tailors and a worse press. The use of the term by overt Nazis is really no more bizarre than its use by Noam Chomsky, that socialist apologist for Pol Pot and several other of the world’s collectivist mass murderers. August 4th, 2003 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
People like David Attenborough or almost anyone connected with Population Connection (a group which used to be rather more directly called ‘Zero Population Growth’), are technocrats at heart. Problems are identified, analyzed by experts and their solutions to those problems are imposed via political interaction. It is simply ‘rule by expert’ and there is quite literally no limit to the areas of life which is beyond the overarching gaze of the men and woman with letters after their names. When such people are given access to political power, no limits to what they can make you do or not do. The experts are, after all, the best and thus know best, and if people will not be swayed by their words spoken from the position of superior knowledge, then they must be forced to comply via the political system. They are the new would-be aristocracy in the literal Greek sense of the word. In today’s Times of London (we do not link directly to The Times), David Attenborough, speaking for the Optimum Population Trust, demanded that the British state work to halve Britain’s population by establishing a ‘population policy’.
Indira Gandhi and Deng Xiaoping shared such views and enacted policies based on the realization that gentle prods will not stop people having children. Their views were based on crude pragmatism married with an honest understanding of the efficacy of coercive violence. People like David Attenborough however take a rather more lyrical utopian view of nature and ‘sustainable economics’ (which in fact has nothing whatsoever to do with economics) and thus are rather more grandiose in their objectives. They seek to limit people’s right to have children or to travel the world or engage in ‘wasteful’ or ‘harmful’ economic activity generally that is not approved of by…well, them, of course. They wish to restore balance and harmony. This sort of idealized view of nature and man’s place in it (or lack thereof) was something that would have gained approving nods not just from idyllic ruralist 18th and 19th century poets but also Heinrich Himmler. For these people there are no ‘market’ solutions caused by the social interaction of free people, because that would allow the possibility that free people may simply ignore the ‘wise words’ of The Best. In a political system, rather than a social system, there are only a few people who must be convinced and manipulated, and thus it through coercive collectivist politics that the new technocratic aristocracy seek to apply their ‘wisdom’. At least the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement are not trying to use the violence of state to make people comply. The same cannot be said of Sir David Attenborough and his collectivist ilk. August 3rd, 2003 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
Over wide areas of the urban first world, the Panopticon State is already very much a reality. Folks like us, the contributors to Samizdata.net, White Rose and the grizzled veterans over at Privacy International cry out warning pretty much daily alerting people not so much about the simple fact of surveillance per se but rather surveillance plus data-pooling. Yet it is important to draw people attention to the basic facts and encourage them to notice the evidence right in front of their eyes, peering down at them like menacing mechanical crows perched on metal branches jutting from walls everywhere, that we are increasing under surveillance by the state directly… 
…and by companies whose surveillance footage states are increasingly reserving themselves the right to gain access to on demand… 
But the people who would like our every move recorded and subject to analysis are not fools. They would rather you did not actually notice what is before your very eyes and so we are seeing the second age of CCTV: more aesthetically pleasing and less intrusive cameras, rather than the stark utilitarian carrion crows which currently predominate…  …rounder, blending in with the background…  …looking more like the lighting fixtures than the all-seeing-eye. The second age of security cameras is at hand…still quite literally staring you in the face, but increasingly hiding in plain sight, counting on a mixture of clever design and the fact that familiarity breeds contempt. But Big Brother is still watching, only with a little more style and taste now. That just makes it more dangerous.  (Cross-posted from White Rose) August 2nd, 2003 | 43 comments - (Comments are closed)
Over wide areas of the urban first world, the Panopticon State is already very much a reality. Folks like us, the contributors to White Rose, Samizdata.net and the grizzled veterans over at Privacy International cry out warning pretty much daily alerting people not so much about the simple fact of surveillance per se but rather surveillance plus data-pooling. Yet it is important to draw people attention to the basic facts and encourage them to notice the evidence right in front of their eyes, peering down at them like menacing mechanical crows perched on metal branches jutting from walls everywhere, that we are increasing under surveillance by the state directly…
…and by companies whose surveillance footage states are increasingly reserving themselves the right to gain access to on demand…
But the people who would like our every move recorded and subject to analysis are not fools. They would rather you did not actually notice what is before your very eyes and so we are seeing the second age of CCTV: more aesthetically pleasing and less intrusive cameras, rather than the stark utilitarian carrion crows which currently predominate… …rounder, blending in with the background… …looking more like the lighting fixtures than the all-seeing-eye. The second age of security cameras is at hand…still quite literally staring you in the face, but increasingly hiding in plain sight, counting on a mixture of clever design and the fact that familiarity breeds contempt. But Big Brother is still watching, only with a little more style and taste now. That just makes it more dangerous.  August 2nd, 2003 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
Adriana sez: “Statism is enough to drive a girl to drink”.
Granny sez: “Don’t you have some flavour other that ‘samizdata.net flavour’?” But what do you think the captions be? August 2nd, 2003 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
…the state does, in the person of Mr. Justice Sumner, that is who owns your body.
Given that so many in the ‘free world’ are subject to compulsory educational conscription, how many people are in fact ‘sovereign’ over their own minds? And in an era in which the state can force you to put certain chemicals in your body regardless of your wishes, are you sovereign over your own body? If you are a child, clearly not… and even if you are an adult, clearly not.
But her views obviously count for nothing. If you do not truly own the insides of your body, then what are you? “The elder girl had asked not to be given the MMR jab”. Is she a slave? A serf? A chattel? I have fulminated before on that particular issue when confronted with people arguing for mandated mass medication… the issue is not one of health but rather ‘who owns your body’. What the judges and doctors who would use the violence of state to force other people to change the chemistry of their own bodies show us is not that they care, but rather their totalitarian mindset. Can it really surprise us that the state does not respect individual property rights or the right of self-defense if it does not even respect the right of individuals to judge what chemicals should or should not be put in your own body? This is not a minor issue because it goes to the very heart of whether your perception of freedom is an illusion or not. July 30th, 2003 | 66 comments - (Comments are closed)
Bill Thompson wrote a rather histrionic article over on the BBC1 site about the recent incident in which a former US Marine went off on a, ehem, ill advised magical mystery tour with a 12 year old English girl. The bit I just loved in Thompson’s article was:
…that is like saying if the child had being dragged into a car and kidnapped:
Make our communities safe for children…ban roads and sidewalks I say! Ban them all! So if ‘The Internet’ kidnapped this girl, then why is Toby Studabaker the one on trial for it and not this wicked fellah called The Internet? Ok, Thompson says that this girl got into trouble (or at least everyone else feels she got into trouble, she never did seem to show much sign of thinking so herself from what I read), and she did this because she had access to a computer, which her parent have provided and thoughtfully equipped with a modem, over a phone line which they pay for, but somehow we must not blame inadequate supervision by the parents. Goodness no! I mean, if we did that, next thing you know people might be saying it was a bad idea for parents to leave their loaded shotguns around their teenager’s room. Instead we must impose sweeping bans on who can use chatrooms! And why is that, pray tell, Bill? Ah… I understand… you write for the BBC of course! Never suggest a sensible private solution at the family level if an excuse can be found for some wonderful collective state intervention! Silly me. For one blinding and foolish moment I actually thought parents might be responsible for their children’s welfare! 1 = Link via our favourite statist technogeeks at iSociety 2 = The M25 is London’s orbital motorway (freeway) July 22nd, 2003 | 38 comments - (Comments are closed)
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