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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Whilst reading one of my favourite blogs, Daily Pundit, I came across a story Bill Quick was commenting on which a 17 year old boy in the United States denounced his father to Police for growing a few marijuana plants.
And just how is this different from Nazi and Communist regimes that encouraged children to denounce their parents to the authorities for doing things they disapproved of? The moral corruption at the heart of the ‘war against drugs’ gives perfect lie to the ‘family values’ cant of political establishments across the so called ‘free world’. Nauseating. I hope the little shit ends up out on the street and reaps the true consequences of his treachery.
The recent brouhaha over the ‘Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein €uro’ ad by anti-€uro activists, showing British comedian Rik Mayhall as Hitler, does make one wonder if the same people were protesting in front of shows by Mel Brooks when he used Hitler (in three movies, no less) as a source of humour.
The following advert, which features the well known red triangle trade mark of that bastion of macho virtues, Bass Breweries Ltd. would presumably have had the likes of pro-euro ‘comedian’ Eddy Izard howling about ‘homophobia’ in much the same way he has protested against the use of the Hitler image on grounds of ‘taste’ by his political enemies (never mind he himself has done a well know ‘Hitler skit’).
By comparison I was first shown this Bass Breweries advert by a floridly homosexual libertarian with whom I am acquainted… and he thought it was hilarious. Is there something about being a statist that makes a person not just morally comfortable with using the threat of violence to reorder free social interactions on a massive scale but also intrinsically humourless?
In the United States, property forfeiture laws effectively make the ‘protection’ of their vaunted constitution meaningless against seizure of pretty much anything, as various arms of the state can help themselves to property without the owner having ever been convicted of a crime and often without even being charged with one.
Alas this tyrannous state of affairs can now be found in Britain as well, at least when it comes to HM Customs and Excise. The fact that just on the opinion of a customs inspector that you have too much alcohol or tobacco for personal use, the presumption of innocence can be swept away, reversed in fact, and your property stolen by the state without you ever being convicted of smuggling. Without so much as setting foot in a court of law, if the representative of the state says you are a criminal smuggler, then you must prove otherwise on the spot or not only will he take the goods you are trying to bring into the country but he will also appropriate the vehicle in which you are transporting them, i.e. your car or van. You are guilty unless you can prove otherwise.
There are many things to admire in the USA that Britain should seek to emulate… however its legal system that allows convictionless theft by the state just on the say-so of state functionaries is not one of those things.
Security is the one area minarchist libertarians like me are willing to countenance at least some role for the state… but yet again private security measures, whilst not infallible given that no work of mere man is foolproof, prove no less effective than those heavy handed defenders of order on governments payroll.
Egyptian Hesham Mohamed Hadayet shot two people dead at the El Al desk in LAX yesterday before being shot dead by a private security man. The airport had armed US soldiers wandering around and yet on July 4th, the EL AL desk was defended by private security. 
Is it any wonder the Israeli airline takes responsibility for its own security whenever possible rather than leave it up to the local buffoons to protect them?
That is in effect what President of the Convention on the Future of Europe, Giscard d’Estaing said last Tuesday when discussing the implications of another refusal of the Irish voters to sanction the enlargement of the EU:
“I do not want to go into the details. I am not a foreign minister and that is not my role. However, the question is: If there is a goal, you cannot ignore it. Enlargement is necessary. Then we have to take initiatives to make the legal basis for enlargement,” Mr Giscard said in Denmark.
The advocates of corporate statism are determined to have their way and piffle about ‘democracy’ is only used when it suits them. If Ireland vote ‘No’ again, regardless of Romano Prodi’s claim ‘there is no Plan B’, it is clear that the mere wishes of the Irish people will not be allowed to stand in the way of Europe’s ‘Manifest Destiny’. 
This is in essence what the ‘Visigrad Four’ (Slovakia, Hungary, Poland and Czech Republic) are telling the EU as they loudly protest at the prospect of not having their inefficient antiquated agricultural sectors subsidised by other sectors of the greater European economy when (if) they join the John Maynard Keynes Fan Club European Union in 2004.
Quite why anyone thinks farmer are entitled to protected status compared to, say, construction or pharmaceuticals or software or little plastic widget manufacture always seems to avoid coherent discussion, but I assume the logic is that if they are going to join the Swine Society, then they must be given a full place at the trough.
Actually if the poor fools are indeed successful at getting into the EU I hope they get their way, thus vastly increasing the strain on the monstrous Common Agricultural Policy and bringing the day of financial implosion of the entire EU a giant step closer.
Of course the preposterous Prince Charles could not care less if working people have to pay inflated prices for their food. No doubt next he will demand the EU and State put an end to the ‘obsession’ of common working people with cheap holidays and cheap motor transport… oh… I forgot, they already did that by taxing the hell out of petrol (75 percent of the cost in the UK) and propping up inefficient airlines with anti-competitive practices.
In order to get to their respective Valhallas, Comedians are supposed to die on stage like Tommy Cooper, Mountaineers on the north face of K2, Racers behind the wheel at Le Mans, Warriors in battle and Rock Stars are supposed to die in a hotel room with a stripper.
Hoka Hey John, you were one of the great ones and nothing if not dependable.
I went back to my mother
I said “I’m crazy ma, help me.”
She said, “I know how it feels son,
cos it runs in the family.”
The Labour’s government’s Extradition Bill is a legal obscenity and a dire threat to the liberty of everyone, says the Libertarian Alliance, the radical free market and civil liberties think tank and pressure group.
Libertarian Alliance spokesman Dr. Sean Gabb and Libertarian Alliance Director Dr. Chris R. Tame, say:
“This bill formally applies the EU wide arrest warrant proposals to the UK. What it means, simply and crudely, is that British citizens can be carted off to other European countries on the say so of a foreign judge without the slightest benefit of any legal due process in this country. Moreover, they could be arrested for an array of so-called offences that are not – and never should be – crimes in this country.
In addition to such vague nonsense as “environmental crime” and “computer related” crime the Bill explicitly
allows for the extradition of UK citizens for PC-thought-crimes of “racism and xenophobia”. It is clear that the EU, and this government, is using this phrase in an obscene attempt to smear critics of the EU as “racist” and any advocacy of the virtues of hard-won British liberties as “xenophobia”. Other “crimes” for which British citizens could be deported to Europe include advocating “holocaust denial”, selling Nazi memorabilia and advocating a wide range of unpopular (and sometimes silly, offensive or nasty) opinions – and, of course, plane-spotting. The legal system of Britain, whilst far from perfect, seems a paradise in comparison to the politically corrupt and ruthlessly illiberal Code Napoleon systems of Europe – where you are deemed guilty until proven innocent and can be incarcerated without trial for absurd periods of time.”
Drs. Gabb and Tame conclude:
“If the British government succeeds in passing this tyrannical and obscene legislation it is clear that the social contract has been abrogated in an unprecedented act of treason by our own government. Nothing less than mass civil disobedience and physical resistance by any means necessary is justified by this attempt to allow the abduction and incarceration of British citizens by foreign powers.”
…that make many of them so damn credulous? As we have mentioned in many previous articles on Samizdata, just because a person is deeply distrustful about modern states (as we are here on this blog), that should not make us regularly fall prey to the sort of garbage being peddled as ‘fact’ by pretty much anyone with an anti-US/anti-UK axe to grind.
We constantly warn about the growing Panopticon surveillance state rapidly developing in Britain and marvel at how Americans tolerate the state not just ignoring their own precious constitution on a massive scale with its forfeiture laws and victim disarmament laws, plus its egregious ‘citizenship’ laws… yet just because we do not regard the US and British states as ‘the good guys’ that does not make us fall prey to apologists for mass murderers like Saddam Hussain and Slobodan Milosevic on the theory that as the states in which we live are demonstrably anti-liberty in so many ways, then if those states says terrible things about Hussain or Milosevic then those guys, and their apologists/revisionists, must therefore be okay. Q.E.D…
And so when I read the ‘those poor old Serbian cetnics may have been a bit naughty but they were not really so terrible compared to the Bosnians and Americans’ remarks over on Strike the root, I can only sympathize with the hapless Jews who have had to endure this sort of ‘big lie’ crap that transcends ‘mere fact’ for generations. If only people had just trusted Slobodan it would have worked out okay eh? Yeah, right. The notion that Milosevic seriously wanted to just break Bosnia Herzegovina into cantons ‘to ‘protect the Serbs’, after they had violently ethnically cleansed the parts of Croatia they had occupied, is hilarious.
Sorry guys, but the atrocities in Bosnia were not publicity stunts by the Bosnian government. The depopulated villages are proof enough of that, as were the eye witnesses to horror after horror. Most of the murder happened well and truly off-camera and away from the media spotlight in Sarajevo. To blame the Americans for how bad things got in Bosnia, whose foreign policy in the Balkans was largely incoherent for the first three years of the war, is rather like blaming America for how nasty things got in Poland for the Jews after 1942.
Why otherwise rational commentators buy into these ludicrous revisionist conspiracy theories and sundry ‘black helicopter’ shite, making common cause with mass murdering tyrants in countries whose names they can barely spell, is just one of the great marvels of our time.
Ah, no… sorry, wrong century. Cast your mind back to the 20th Century: many times we heard Nazi propaganda describing how Jewish bankers (who being bankers were presumably capitalists unlikely to prosper under communism) and Bolsheviks (who, being Bolsheviks, were presumably communists unlikely to be well disposed towards bankers) were nefariously working together against the interests of the German Volk.
Well, according to the utterly enthralling and dependably surreal Justin Raymondo, those rascally Jews are at it again in the 21st Century, this time allying themselves with radical Islam for reasons which rather elude me, against the interests of the United States… i.e. the people who sell Israel a large chunk of the weapons they use to do various things Justin disapproves of (like survive).
Go figure. 
At last, someone who understand the full range of libertarian thought on war… well, kinda 
Although I am not an uncritical fan of Lew Rockwell‘s flavour of libertarianism, he has written an excellent article about that most inconsistent of the many conservative intellectual inconsistencies… conscription.
His article about acceptable face of state slavery is on the Lew Rockwell.com site.
It is interesting that some of the same people who claim the United States is the ‘freest country in the world’ seem to have no problem with supporting so many American ways of denying the very concept of self-ownership and replacing it with state ‘social’ ownership rather than ‘several’ property… and even extending to a person’s actual body.
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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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