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]
|
Sometimes the views of Britain one reads in the American press suggest to me that the authors must have visited Britain in some parallel universe rather than the one I live in.
Every now and again however, I read an article that suggests not just that there are indeed commentators in the USA who understand Britain just fine, but that some of them understand the truth about Britain a great deal better than many British journalists and the majority of Britain’s dismal political class.
The sad truth is that British journalists who are not sounding shrill and alarmed clearly have not grasped the magnitude of what is about to happen to the British people’s remaining ability to live under accountable governance and accessible law. As a result, the only voices in Britain which seem to be aware of the rapidly approaching blackhole that the United States of Europe represents are the perpetually shrill and alarmist tabloid newspapers like the resolutely low-brow Sun newspaper.
Thus it is this tabloid rag that Washington Times journalist Paul Craig Roberts quotes extensively:
Next month, Mr. Blair intends to give his approval to a new European Union constitution, which would create a United States of Europe and turn Parliament into the equivalent of a local council.
Trevor Kavanagh, political editor of the Sun, Britain’s largest newspaper, says Mr. Blair’s decision signs away 1,000 years of British sovereignty and hands “control of our economic, defense, foreign and immigration policies to Brussels. The EU will also gain authority over our justice, transport, health and commerce systems and dictate the strength of union power.”
Mr. Blair has ruled out a referendum or vote on his decision to terminate the existence of Britain as a country. He says the issue is too complicated for voters to understand.
Think about that for a moment. Do you think it is too difficult for people to understand the difference between being an independent country and a province in a European empire? Do you think voters can’t understand the difference between electing a government that is accountable to them and being ruled from afar?
[…]
Britain’s unique legal system, with its habeas corpus and double jeopardy protections, would cease to exist. Native Britons could be imprisoned for voicing opposition to their cities being overrun by Third World immigrants. But Mr. Blair thinks these changes are too difficult for British voters to evaluate.
[…]
Britons can be arrested for self-defense. Imagine having to decide whether to submit to rape, robbery or assault or face arrest for responding with excessive force. Force capable of driving off an attacker is likely to be “excessive,” especially if accomplished with use of a weapon.
[…]
Habeas corpus and protection against double jeopardy mean little when criminal sanctions apply to self-defense and to children playing with toy guns. It might be that, practically speaking, the British have already lost the protection of their law. In choosing Mr. Blair, perhaps the British people showed an indifference to continued national sovereignty.
Read the whole article. I am indifferent to the fading vaingloriousness of states. However I am far from indifferent to a process that will lock in the ever increasing growth of state by making its power centres even more remote than they already are, thereby making them immune to even the weak checks and balances of locally sourced law and democracy.
Many have fought the advent of the European super-state in Britain, but it has just been one issue amongst many. Only now and oh so very belatedly have a few newspapers and media commentators picked up the horn and sounded it. Suddenly it is dawning on them that the battle has now reached the very last ditch almost unnoticed, whilst the mass of people sleepwalk towards the end of a thousand years of evolving political culture. Lose this one and there will be no more political means left for opposition. No doubt the perpetual growth of mass surveillance and the impending introduction of ID cards at this time is just a coincidence. Sure.
Welcome to a dying nation.
As I have had a couple lengthy e-mails asking me to explain my hostility to PoliticalCompass.org, I thought I would do so in a new post.
My big problem with PoliticalCompass.org is that it makes inherently statist and left/right valued assumptions to which there is no appropriate answer unless you share those assumptions, making the test fine if all the world fitted neatly into the left/right, socialist (US=liberal)/conservative continua… but the world just ain’t that simple.
Although they claim to provide a more sophisticated representation of political views than the crudity of left and right, they in fact strip away some of the true issues that differentiate statists and anti-statists. At best they differentiate one form of statist from another, separating social democrats from communists from conservatives. If you think you can usefully differentiate an agorist or anarcho-capitalist libertarian from a minarchist libertarian from a Kritarchist libertarian using the political compass tests, you are sadly mistaken.
I would argue that as the very meaning of their ‘libertarian’ axis is badly flawed, if they tell you your political coordinates are x,y, as they have no real understanding of what one of the four axes represents, the test and thus the coordinates on the ‘compass’ it generates, are highly suspect, to put it mildly.
There is no such thing as voluntary collectivism when applied to an entire society, which means ‘collectivist’ libertarianism does not accept several liberty and thus is not libertarian at all: if you live collectively on a kibbutz, one day you may decide it was all a big mistake and just say “screw this crap” as you walk out the door. If the other people in the kibbutz use force to stop you leaving, it is they who are the criminals… try doing that in a collectivist society (which in reality means a collectivist state) and you will find that the door to a non-collective existence is in fact a prison cell or a chimney. → Continue reading: More musings on the Political Compass
Michael Totten has stepped in that steaming pile on the information superhighway known as PoliticalCompass.org and thereby concluded he is ‘one of us’… well… sort of.
Now as Michael is a thoughtful sort of leftie, it would pain me not at all if he holds onto that thought and bounces it around for a while. Maybe he will conclude that rational libertarianism may indeed be a better intellectual home for him than either the statist left or statist right.
However he will not find the answers to that question by taking the preposterous test offered by PoliticalCompass.org
Salam Pax posted a big update yesterday, with photographs taken during a trip from Baghdad to Basra via Najaf.
So, those of you who thought he was not ‘for real’… has this changed your mind? Whilst it is difficult to be sure, I have always suspected the ‘Baghdad Blogger’ was exactly what he said he was.
As our regular readers will have noticed, we were blown off our server by the bandwidth spike caused by the response to Gabriel Syme’s article on Wednesday. 
We have just moved to Hosting Matters, and thus hopefully such traumatic ‘black out’ events will be a thing of the past from now on!
 Glenn Reynolds has blown up more servers that Al Qaeda!
I don’t know if I’m more impressed by these people’s tenacity in defending their position even as it circles the drain, or horrified that they’re willing to grab up weapons like these in order to avoid having to admit they were wrong.
– Brian Tiemann commenting over on Cold Fury regarding comments on Gabriel Syme’s recent post.
The hunt for the fugitive Texas Democrat legislators has intensified with a set of playing cards being issued to troops in Iraq in case any of them turn up there.
[Alan K. Henderson rocks]
Although details are still sketchy, it seems that Algerian government forces have rescued some of the European tourists taken by Islamic terrorists of the ‘Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat’, who are part of the Al Qaeda network. Some reports indicate that both Austrian and German special forces (perhaps GSG 9?) were involved in the operation assisting the Algerians.
This is very good news indeed!
The Al Qaeda terrorists who attacked western civilian workers in Saudi Arabia are nothing more than a timely reminder that the overthrow of Ba’athist Iraq was not the end of the matter which blasted into the public consciousness on September 11th 2001. Saddam Hussein and Islamic terrorism were related subjects but were never the same. I was starting to detect a “Game over, now it’s Miller Time” attitude in some newspapers and blogs after the triumph in Iraq, but I think this shows that if there is ever a time for complacency, it sure as hell is not now.
It will be interesting to see what happens if this atrocity leads to a mass movement of Westerners out of the accurséd Kingdom. If the risks posed by terrorism means the Saudis become unable to induce western technicians and specialists from working there at any price, I suspect the impact on the Arabian economy will be quite dramatic. No doubt within a couple years infrastructure and certain essential functions will decay beyond the point where the regime’s spin doctors cannot hide the truth that Saudi Arabia is not an internally viable nation-state in any modern sense.
And if the Saudi Wahhabist regime’s ability to use petrodollar funded patronage to buy off the disparate elements of its indolent society grinds to a halt, what happens then?
Would a monstrous and tyrannical fundamentalist regime take over? And would that regime be a breeding ground for Islamic terrorism? Well considering that the current regime already is a monstrous and tyrannical fundamentalist regime, and it is from Saudi Arabia that most of the September 11th terrorist hailed, so frigging what if it collapses?
The House of Saud is built on sand, so let it go down the toilet of history and let’s see what comes in its place. After all, if we like the look of what comes next even less than the current tyranny, it is not like the 3rd Infantry Division has to travel all the way from the United States to do something about it… and that self-evident fact alone should concentrate the minds of those who would be the new rulers in Riyadh.
The US will not be in the region forever but at the moment the peoples of the Middle East are very aware that they are living in the shadow being cast by that 900 foot tall gorilla currently standing astride Iraq… for a short while at least, that might not be such a bad thing just so long as the gorilla knows when it is time to go home.
In what is perhaps one of the greatest examples of political farce I have seen in quite a while, 53 Texas legislators from the Democratic party have fled the state capitol to avoid a vote that could cost their party seven congressional seats.
So let me get this right… it is okay to be a member of an elected assembly of lawmakers that passes laws compelling people to do this or that, but if you don’t like the laws being passed because it interferes with your party political agenda, well, screw democracy, just quite literally run away and prevent there being a quorum.
Okay, that works for me. Anything which bring into disrepute the elected bodies at the very heart of the system is just fine by me… I can think of few ways to de-legitimize the public face of democratically sanctified force which robs and regulates its ‘citizens’ that by having them act like petulant school children taking their ball home because they don’t like the other team’s rules. No quorum means no voting and no voting means no new laws on anything, at least for a while. Excellent.
It is pretty funny that they call themselves Democrats though, eh?
[Thanks to Shannon for the link]
It appears that Los Angeles is well and truly in the tarpits:
Los Angeles is getting pummeled by economic woes beyond its control. Like so many Western cities, vital services are provided by the county. And L.A. County is $800 million in the red.
[…]
The sheriff’s department, which provides support for the city’s police, has cut 900 deputies and closed two jails. Baca says any more cutbacks will jeopardize public safety.
[…]
And so the county’s only option is to cut back services — vital services the city depends on.
[…]
“I’d cut back on something else instead of lifeguards. Someone who would save your life, I wouldn’t cut back on that,” said 15-year-old Michael Harter, playing with his brother in the surf.
But the truth is, most of these things are not “vital services the city depends on”. Lifeguards? Sorry but no one is forced to go swimming, so if lifeguards are so damn important then allow companies to provide the service on a fee paying basis. Health? Do it all privately. Education? The state has no business whatsoever involved with the education in the first place, particularly in this era of cheap internet access and in a country with probably the most efficient and inexpensive phone system in the world.
Security is a legitimate concern, so the solution to the problems faced by the sheriff’s department should be clear… cut back on everything else, scrap irrational drug prohibitions (less jails will be needed) and remove all the ludicrous restrictions on ownership of the means of self-defence (less police will be needed).
The thrust of the linked article is that ‘Los Angeles is in crisis’.
Bullshit.
It is the city government of Los Angeles and the people who think that theft based appropriation is the only way to satisfy their needs (which usually means wants) who are in crisis, and far from being ‘beyond its control’, this is a crisis of their own making.
Good.
If you have not checked out the Dissident Frogman‘s groovy new multi-lingual blog, then now is the time to rectify that oversight. However be careful not to push the red button.
Dissident Frogman is one of the best pro-liberty sites on the internet and is a reminder than there is more to France than Weasels. Just remember not to push the red button.
The Frogman is still working on the site so updates are a bit patchy at the moment; however it is worth checking it out now just to marvel at the sheer technical virtuosity of his graphic design talents. Note the ‘Busted Beards Al-Qaeda Fragboard’ in the sidebar…
…it adds a whole new meaning to the term ‘hit counter’
BUT DON’T PRESS ANY RED BUTTONS!
Don’t say we didn’t warn you.
|
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.
|
