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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Several bloggers have reported on the story of a deaf lesbian couple who selected a deaf sperm donor to maximize the chance that ‘their’ daughter would be born deaf. And this is what indeed happened, producing perhaps the world’s first designer handicapped baby.
The way I see it, it is no better, and no different, than if these vile despicable sociopathic women had taken a child and jammed a sharp pencil in its ears to make it deaf. They have intentionally caused harm by any rational objective measure, they are merely using genetic predispositions, rather than sharpened pencils, to do it… it is not a random defect because they have loaded the dice to get the result they want and actually went looking for a donor with defective genes.
I hope the child grows up to hate them for what they did and to do harm back to them. In any reasonable society, the action of these ‘parents’ would be an objectively criminal act quite different from the tragedy of random birth defect. These vile creatures belong in jail for their de facto assault on ‘their’ child.
I am strongly in favour of genetic engineering but would regard creating sentient beings intentionally disabled as just as monstrous as what these evil women did by ‘selective’ breeding.
I have had a couple e-mails asking me what I thought about the situation in Venezuela and the fact Hugo Chevez seems to be back in office after the Army deposed him. I assume the reason these two readers asked me what I thought on the subject, which is a bit off my usual polemical stomping grounds, is presumably because I wrote a well received piece on the subject of Hugo Chavez back in December.
Well all I can say is what is it with kids these days? The younger generation just do not take pride in their work. Back when I was a youngster, we all knew that a coup d’etat was not over until you have shot El Presidente dead on the steps of his palace.
British government plans for data sharing mentioned earlier in the Libertarian Alliance press release I posted yesterday are a clear indication of the casually authoritarian attitudes of those who would control every aspect of our lives. What I find so infuriating is that the supporters of this giant leap towards the Panopticon State are so arrogant that they are hardly even trying to hide the scope of what they want.
The Orwellian sounding Performance and Innovations Unit (PIU), who are the cutting edge of the leviathan state’s intrusions into every aspect of private life, have had the gall to announce (emphasis added):
Information is processed without people’s knowledge only where necessary for national security, public safety, statistical analysis, the protection of the economy, the prevention of crime, the protection of health, morals, or the rights and freedoms of others
Can anyone out there please tell me ANYTHING that the state does which cannot with the barest minimum of effort be classified under one of these amazingly broad categories?
In short, any functionary of the state with a computer terminal can examine any aspect of your life they wish. They are not even really trying to hide what they are planning.
Government bodies with names like the ‘Performance and Innovations Unit’, a body finding new ways to intermediate the state into every aspect of private life, have always reminded me of the Terry Gilliam movie Brazil , in which the ‘Information Retrieval Unit’ was the name for the agency who extracted information from people by torture. Perhaps it is time for Harry Tuttle to pay the PIU a visit, spanner in hand.
When the state watches you,
dare to stare back
New revelations that Alec Douglas-Home, the foreign secretary under the conservative government of Edward Heath, had planned to try and find a way to hand Gibraltar over to Spain in 1971 against the wishes of its people have been greeted with ‘shock’ and ‘amazement’ by current members of the Tory party.
Well I can only marvel at the credulity of modern Tories. This is the government that did more to undermine the common law basis of British civil liberty than any other in the 20th century by taking us into the European Economic Community (as it then was) under knowingly false pretenses. If they were happy to do this to all of the UK, is it really so surprising that the harbingers of modern super-statism would think twice about selling out a mere 27,000 people in some remote outpost of the Old Empire?
“Government’s data sharing plan is a dagger to the heart of liberty”, says Free market and civil liberties think tank.
The Labour’s government’s plans to integrate the personal data held on British citizens by various government departments and agencies is a dagger to the heart of liberty, says the Libertarian Alliance, the radical free market and civil liberties think tank and pressure group.
Libertarian Alliance Director, Dr Chris R. Tame, says:
“In the light of the ever-more blatant attack on civil liberties in this country – including the proliferation of camera surveillance systems, the increasing involvement of intelligence agencies in political surveillance and dirty tricks operations, the push for a national ID card and DNA database, the gradual abolition of common law liberties by the removal of jury trials, of the presumption of innocence, of the right of silence and of double jeopardy, and by the adoption of the EU’s despotic corpus juris – this proposal is even more ominous. The government’s claim that data would be processed only ‘where necessary’ is laughable – especially when one sees that their list of ‘necessary’ reasons covers every conceivable excuse for nanny statism, paternalism, censorship, socialism, prudery, puritanism and prohibitionism.
It is ironic that when the state has demonstrated that it is incapable of providing any ‘public service’ adequately, when it cannot defend its citizens from predators of every stripe, that is should be attempting to turn us into supplicants and serfs. The common argument that ‘if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear’ is absurd. In an age when health fascists have declared smoking to be a form of child abuse, it is clear that everyone can be subjected to the prejudices of demented paternalists – whether of the fundamentalist religious nutters, the peddlers of PC pieties, the environmentalists, or the feminist anti-sex cranks. Your life style, your tastes, your sexuality, your political and social views, can be subjected to tomorrow’s moral panic, propaganda scare campaign and witch-hunt and legislated as ‘crimes’ or as ‘politically incorrect’.
The citizens of Britain need to send a message to our would-be masters that we are not numbers, that we will not be pushed, filed, indexed, stamped, briefed, debriefed, or numbered – that our lives are our own.
It is now clear that the ‘social contract’ has been broken by the state. Resistance to the usurpations of the state is both a right and a moral duty. It is the right, the duty, of all to resist and disrupt the state’s data gathering and record-keeping ability, by whatever means are necessary”.
As Jason Pontin points out in his article on Red Herring, there is a bifurcation of inventiveness on the planet. A few places do all the entrepreneurial heavy lifting, the rest look on. It is not just circumstances but also cultural factors which produce innovation.
There is a nice article about blogging by Daniel Sorid on Reuters. At last someone who actually understand why blogs are better than Usenet.
In the print version of The Times T2 supplement today, there was an interesting article by Ann Treneman about attitudes amongst a selection of British Jews living in the heavily Jewish Golders Green area of London. One particular section caught my eye in which Rabbi Pini Dunner remarked about a perceived increase in hostile views towards Israel and jibes about Jews. When asked ‘Like what?’ he replied:
“Like the phrase ‘You people…’ Language we do not expect. Colleagues at work will refer to ‘you people…’ What is that? People think: I am British. I am Jewish. I support the state of Israel. That does not make me ‘you people’. You don’t refer to Conservative supporters as ‘you people’ or black activists as ‘you people.”
Yet he is quite wrong on all counts. I think black people (activists, no less) would be hugely amused to hear they are not referred to as ‘you people’ by some sections of British society. And to hear Conservatives referred to in that manner all you need to do is listen to Prime Minster’s Question Time in Parliament.
Notions of identity are a complex thing in a multi-layered dynamic society like modern Britain. As a friend of mine once said to me, “In Jamaica I feel British and In Britain I feel Jamaican.” For her, feelings of identity bounce off context and her context keeps changing. For Rabbi Dunner, his feelings of ‘dissimulation’ from Britain are, I suspect, more a measure of his own feelings than those of British society around him. All I have to do to become one of ‘you people’ is start loudly espousing libertarian views in Britain or mentioning my Catholic background. My ex-wife once told me she hated it when in London she was referred to as one of ‘you Northerners’ (she came from Newcastle).
The British are a patchwork quilt of a people, not some volk, or Rabbi Dunner would find himself in a very different society indeed, one he would be far more removed from culturally than this one. When we express views that support foreign states or have unusual religions, then we should not be surprised when people notice we are different to them in some ways… but neither should be think it really matters all that much. We are all ‘you people’ to someone. Get over it.
Who cares about Israel playing Godzilla on the Palestinians? Record loss at Lloyd’s? Bury it on page 7. Are the Tamil Tigers coming in from the cold in Sri Lanka? Sorry, you seem to have mistaken me for someone who gives a damn.
England football captain and Spice husband David Beckham has broken a bone!
Oh the humanity! The horror… the horror…
Lloyd’s of London has reported a record loss of £3.1 billion ($4.44 billion) directly related to the 11 September attacks. Similarly Swiss Re reported the largest loss in its 138-year history of 165 million Swiss francs (£69 million/$98.9 million).
This might be interpreted by some as a sign of the vulnerability of global capitalism but in fact it indicates quite the opposite. The fact that the effect of a huge capital loss in the USA can be spread around the world, rather than born entirely by the target of that loss is an impressive demonstration of the ability of modern networked capitalism systems to absorb losses and ‘keep on ticking’.
And just incidentally, it also highlights that it was far more than just the United States which was attacked by the two aircraft which crashed into the WTC.
Is ‘Britain’ still a culture rooted in evolved wisdom and contradictions that stretch back more than a millennium? Do those Anglo-Saxon, Norman, Celtic and Nordic roots still run deep?
Or is Britain in 2002 the product of a transcendent collective moment in 1945, just waiting these years since for the uncluttered minds of New Labour to sweep away the last remitments of the Old Empire and cut the even older entangled thread of yeomanry and gentry, producing the longed for value-neutral tabula rasa of ‘Cool Britannia’? Is this Year Zero, in which all cultural values are equally valid… dancing around the maypole, Guy Fawkes night, religious tolerance and snogging behind the bike shed are not more or less a part of a collective multicultural state-society than burqas, clitoradectomy and enforced arranged marriage?
Well the verdict is in… in excess of one million people lined the 24 mile route of the Queen Mother’s progress to St. George’s chapel to cast their vote on the impromptu referendum on just what ‘Britain’ actually means. Millions understand that a hereditary monarchy that reigns over society without ruling the state is less corrupting than democratically sanctified political patronage. These same millions know what it is to be British and stood up to be counted yesterday. They were not there just to see what was but also to show to each other was still is.
Recently my computer, a Blue-White G3 PowerMac, gave up the ghost after years of stalwart service and this, plus some rather more harmonious distractions, has been responsible for my suspicious absence from the Samizdata.
However I shall soon return to inflicting my views on the blogosphere. The multi-talented Andrew Dodge proved that he is capable not just of invoking evil spirits, scaring horses, authoring anti-statist tracts and smoking vile smelling cigars but also of helping me drop a cool £2,500 on a juicy new Quick Silver G4 PowerMac and setting it up for me. I am still accelerating up the curve of coming to grips with OS X (which is beyond cool) but I expect to be blogging my heart out soon.
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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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