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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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.
Reports that Malaysian leader Mahathir Mohamad is going to resign next year might seem like good news, given that the man remained in power by corrupting the judiciary, stuffing ballot boxes and even assassination when required. But the fact he will not leave office hanging from a lamp post or with his back against a wall next to his kleptocratic cronies is a measure of his success in tyrannising the subjects over which he still rules. He will just be allowed to step down in his own time leaving the jails filled with his political opponents.
One can only hope that his successor, who will no doubt be the finest successor money can buy, will be pressured into acknowledging the true the ‘Mahathir Legacy’ in a suitable manner in order to preserve his own skin from Mahathir’s Malaysian victims. The fact such people as the unbane Mahathir, the feral Mugabe and their ilk are treated as honoured guests at Commonwealth function in Britain, wined and dinned at the expense of the hapless British taxpayer is bad enough but to see him actually get away with it and ‘live happily ever after’ would be intolerable.
Of course it threatens the man who pointed out that the security services protecting the Queen and government ministers are using insecure radio systems to communicate.
Making the equipment that can pick up those channels illegal in the UK will do nothing to prevent the IRA or any middle eastern terrorists who want to attack British targets from acquiring them overseas or just building it themselves (it is not exactly rocket science).
Solution? Buy encrypted communications systems and stop broadcasting in the clear. Duh.
Although I am personally a ‘Hakeyian Popperoid’, unlike Adriana and Brian I am not particularly ill disposed to Objectivism per se, seeing the minarchist libertarianism of its advocates as clearly fellow travellers. Of course I realise some capital ‘O’ Objectivists reject the term ‘libertarian’ as applying to them but if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and has feathers, I tend to call it a duck… the Libertarian Alliance has many objectivist members who are not uncomfortable with being associated with the term.
My view is that we live in such a ‘target rich’ world replete with statist, socialists, fascists, racists and various other toxic ‘-ists’, thus attacking people who are largely in sympathy with the cause of liberty because we don’t like the way they got to that conclusion is not particularly productive.
That said, Samizdata will continue to publish critiques of Objectivism, if that is what is on its contributors minds… and we will also publish Objectivist perspectives. Rand is not the enemy.
Mad cow disease (vCJD), foot-and-mouth, MMR, salmonella in eggs… the list goes on and on. The reality of life is that no one has a monopoly on insight, intelligence and information. Yet the state would have us believe that in their case when they say something, is somehow of a higher order compared to any other institution or individual. After all, it that was not the case, how could the fact the state backs its views with the threat of violence be justified?
Yet time and time again we are told in patronising tones that the state’s experts know best, to the extent the state is prepared to after our body chemistry regardless of our individual wishes. We are told for years “Of course British Beef is safe to eat. Our scientists tell us there is nothing to worry about and reports to the contrary are just scare-mongering”… only to discover it can in fact kill us in the most ghastly manner by boring holes in our brains .
Likewise, the combined measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine is still foisted on people by Britain’s national Health Service in spite of worries about potentially horrendous side effects. Fortunately, the culture of deference to authority has been breaking down for quite some time as the state finds itself dis-intermediated from the flow of information to people. As yet more information casting doubt upon the safety of MMR comes to light, those who decided to shun the state’s advice and err on the side of safety for their children are shown the wisdom of their ways.
Yet the important issue here is not ‘if it better to fluoridate water’ or ‘should I eat more folic acid’ or ‘should I immunise my children with single jabs or the three-in-one’ or ‘should I wear a seat belt’?’… but ‘Why do I tolerate the state and the experts on its payroll overriding my views on issues which relate directly to my body?’
The fact is fluoride probably does make for better teeth, folic acid for better health, MMR is usually safe and seat belts often save lives. But why on earth entrust these decisions to such a demonstrably fallible institution like the state? We all make mistakes, but the price of individual error is largely confined to the individual making the error or at least to his immediate family or associates… the price for the state making an error however is far wider and much harder to mitigate. When the advice the state gives us proves to be flawed, that can be disastrous, but they it actually makes its views on health as a force backed mandatory law, that should be regarded as intolerable.
In the case of MMR, single vaccines are privately available off the NHS, yet due to the fact people have their money appropriated to fund the NHS regardless of their wishes, the state reduces their ability to actually make meaningful choices independently. In much the same way, you make correctly deduce your children would be better educated either at home or at a private school, yet because the state takes your money and pours it into funding state schools anyway, it greatly reduces the real choice of less wealthy parents to actually opt out.
We are told we have all manner of free choices in the wonderful ‘representative’ democracy in which we live (pick any western country), yet as long as the state appropriates such a large chunk of the money we earn and depend upon to actualise our wishes, the reality is that for many, choice is an illusion as they struggle to manage what remains of their unapproapriated several property.
Related articles
It is a matter of private choice, not a matter of ‘public’ health, Tuesday, June 18, 2002
Libertarian ‘Public Health’?, Tuesday, June 18, 2002
The totalitarian mindset, Sunday, June 16, 2002
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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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