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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Samizdata.net regular e-mail addresses working again!

· Administrative

It seems that our regular samizdata.net e-mail (as found in the sidebar) is now operational again and can be used once more.

Alas we seem to have lost some of the e-mails that were sent to us over the last week (i.e. since late last Friday) unless they were sent to our emergency address.

August 22nd, 2002 | Comments are closed

Pointing out the obvious to the oblivious

· Opinions on liberty

In Wednesday’s Daily Telegraph, Janet Daley wrote an article called The Tories have room for liberals of both persuasions.

Now I really have no quarrel with the thrust of her contention:

The cruellest and saddest irony of all is that the self-styled new model army, with its social liberalism ticket, need have no dispute with the old faith. Social liberalism and Thatcherite economic liberalism are consistent with one another.

Nothing is more likely to give people the confidence and the wherewithal to live their lives as they choose than personal prosperity and the freedom that it brings. Respect for personal liberty sits neatly alongside the promotion of economic self-determination. Together, they could make a coherent, radical and very modern party programme.

Well as our confreres in the United States so lyrically say: no shit, Sherlock.

What I find so saddening is that perhaps Daley has indeed set the level and tenor of this article to what is appropriate for the current state of sophistication and received wisdom of the typical Daily Telegraphy reader, i.e. acting as if ‘all the elements of truth and measure’ were to be found within the essentially bipolar world of parochial Westminster party politics. But frankly what Ms. Daley is saying is nothing more that what libertarians in Britain have been saying for a great many years. When she says:

Respect for personal liberty sits neatly alongside the promotion of economic self-determination.

This phrase practically defines the libertarian meme and yet you will search the article in vain for the word ‘libertarian’.

August 22nd, 2002 | Comments are closed

Billie Saletan slated

· Economics, Business & Globalization

William Saletan continues to live up to my expectations, which I assure you is not a compliment, with a bizarre article in Slate that contends that if a law is passed in the USA to make the level at which capital losses can be written-off against income tax more generous, that would be, wait for it, “suburban socialism”.

Fascinating. So lowering someone’s tax burden is socialism. Let’s run by that again…the state gets less of a businessman’s money, which is to say, more of the ‘means of production’ currently in private hands remain in private hands… and that constitutes socialism?

Of course I do not expect someone like Saletan to have actually read and understood any serious books on political economy, but I would expect someone who opines on economic and political issues to have read some ‘Idiots Guide to Political & Economic Systems’ so that he has at least the vaguest inkling as to what the hell socialism actually means.

The plan in question is not the state socialistically redistributing wealth by taking it (via tax) from someone and giving it to someone else. No, they are just talking about reducing the amount of theft (i.e tax) the state appropriates for certain people who have run up losses: the loss making taxpayer is not getting other people’s money, he is simply being allowed to keep more of his own money by off-setting losses. Duh.

August 21st, 2002 | Comments are closed

Samizdata e-mail horrors continue

· Administrative

Just a reminder that our e-mail is still buggered up, and has been so since last Friday. Please use our emergency e-mail rather than the one in ther side bar to contact us.

August 21st, 2002 | Comments are closed

Anglosphere attitudes

· Anglosphere

Steve Sailer has written a very good article called How tolerant are the British? that takes a good look at Anglosphere attitudes without the rather self-congratulatory tones of many in the blogosphere.

In a rather different article a while back, I came to some similar conclusions and pointed out the agreeabe implications of the high incidence of miscegenation in Britain.

August 21st, 2002 | Comments are closed

Another classic article from Transterrestrial Musings!

· Opinions on liberty

Rand Simberg of Transterrestrial Musings is in exceptional form! Read Administration split on European invasion, Washington, April 3, 1944 (Routers).

Fissures are starting to appear in the formerly united front within the Roosevelt administration on the upcoming decision of whether, where and how to invade Europe. Some influential voices within both the Democrat and Republican parties are starting to question the wisdom of toppling Adolf Hitler’s regime, and potentially destabilizing much of the region.

“It’s one thing to liberate France and northwestern Europe, and teach the Germans a lesson, but invading a sovereign country and overthrowing its democratically-elected ruler would require a great deal more justification,” said one well-connected former State Department official. “The President just hasn’t made the case to the American people.”

This is his best article since his much lauded Media casualties mount (which was for my money far and away the best blog article of 2001).

Run, do not walk, to Transterrestrial Musings.

August 21st, 2002 | Comments are closed

On this day in 1940

· Military affairs

August 20th 1940, and the fate of western civilisation hung in the balance. As the Battle of Britain was still being fought out between the Luftwaffe and RAF to determine if Nazi Germany would be the uncontested master of western Europe, Winston Churchill gave one of his most stirring of many memorable speeches in the House of Commons:

Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few

August 20th, 2002 | Comments are closed

All hail PGP!

· Privacy & Panopticon

Given the previous post on the subject of state surveillance, it is good to hear that The Register is reporting that PGP encryption is back in the hands of an independent company.

August 20th, 2002 | Comments are closed

Europe: the total surveillance super-state

· European Union · Privacy & Panopticon

Although I have never been a huge fan of Statewatch, a civil liberties advocacy group whose membership contains a high proportion of socialists (which I have always thought analogous to a temperance society whose membership contains a high proportion of brewers), the latest Statewatch press release is well worth reading.

They clearly lay out how the European Union is about to take a giant leap towards the sort of total surveillance super-state that the Soviet Union could only dream of implementing. As Tony Bunyan, Statewatch editor, comments in the press release:

EU governments claimed that changes to the 1997 EC Directive on privacy in telecommunications to allow for data retention and access by the law enforcement agencies would not be binding on Members States – each national parliament would have to decide. Now we know that all along they were intending to make it binding, “compulsory”, across Europe.

The right to privacy in our communications – e-mails, phone-calls, faxes and mobile phones – was a hard-won right which has now been taken away. Under the guise of fighting “terrorism” everyone’s communications are to be placed under surveillance.

Gone too under the draft Framework Decision are basic rights of data protection, proper rules of procedure, scrutiny by supervisory bodies and judicial review

The Panopticon super-state ‘of the future’ is now very much upon us.


When the state watches you,
dare to stare back

fuck_the_eu.jpg

August 20th, 2002 | Comments are closed

Progressive Democrats: no friends of liberty at all

· Irish affairs

As Paul Staines mentioned below, the Irish Young Progressive Democrats explicitly state they are not libertarians and just a glance at their agenda reveals that they are not friends of liberty by any stretch of the imagination. This party is just another bunch of statists pushing the conventional theft based ‘welfare’ politics of old, claiming responsibility for:

· Introduction of a minimum wage

This is tantamount to saying it is better for you to not have a job at all than to have one at wages that offend someone else.

· Huge increase in overseas aid

In other words ‘we have been taking money from you by force and give it to people overseas that you did not choose to give it to via one of the vast number of voluntary international charities’.

· Taxi cab liberalisation

Oh right them… I guess at least someone in the YPDs might have read a book review about a book at about some unpronounceable Austrian free market economist

· Increased social benefits especially pensions

i.e. theft by the state

· Increased funding for education

More theft by the state to fund an activity in which the state has no legitimate role whatsoever

I look forward to being invited to Paul Staine’s next garden party with food cooked over a barbecue lit with both his Tory Party and Progressive Democrat Party membership cards.

August 20th, 2002 | Comments are closed

Samizdata.net e-mail woes continue

· Administrative

Just a reminder that our e-mail is still knackered, and has been so since last Friday. Please use our emergency e-mail rather than the one in ther side bar to contact us.

August 20th, 2002 | Comments are closed

Would you trust this man alone with an ailing elderly political party?

· UK affairs

In case anyone who has been observing the Tory Party in Britain has not noticed, they have not been doing very well for rather a long time now. In spite of years of Tony Blair’s less that glorious ‘precedency’, the Conservatives are still trailing a very distant second place in England and are more of less nonexistent in Scotland, riven everywhere by factions fighting over control of the carcass of the Party and quite bereft of any distinctly identifiable ‘Tory’ ideology. In fact there is not even any sign of an intellectual or political ‘wave of the future’ starting to build up… not even a ‘ripple of the future’ really.

Now we are being told by Norman Tebbit, the Dr. Harold Shipman of British politics, that what the Tory Party really needs is a purge of any ‘libertarians’ (i.e. anyone who likes non-white sportsmen or dislikes the state telling them what to do with their genitals or actually has anything resembling a new idea).

Of course Tebbit has quite a lot of experience masterminding Tory party purges. He shut down the Federation of Conservative Students in 1987, thereby guaranteeing the Conservative Party would become an ideology-free zone from then onwards.

Funny how the party has been in decline ever since it eradicated its most radical and highly motivated roots. They don’t call it ‘The Stupid Party’ for nothing.

August 19th, 2002 | Comments are closed
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