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]
|
I think one of the biggest mistakes made by Classical Liberals in Britain was to allow (and, indeed, encourage) the government to start funding education in the 19th Century. He who pays the piper calls the tune and it was only a matter of time before the government took over education and began to run it as the state monopoly we are still lumbered with today.
As with all these monolithic government services they are indifferent to the needs of their customers, exisitng primarily as fiefdoms of a professional education establishment. Well-to-do families can afford to escape the system but not so modest income and poor families whose children are left victimised by the shambolic sausage factories through which they are processed.
To date, there has been insufficient challenge to this state monopoly but that could all be about to change. Last night I had the pleasure of meeting James Stansfield at the October ‘Putney Debate’ hosted by Tim Evans. James works with the famous James Tooley, a former socialist who has seen the light and now campaigns for a free market in education. Together they have established the EG West Centre at the University of Newcastle; an academic research body dedicated to spreading radical ideas about the provision of education by means other than the state.
The man after whom the project is named, EG West, was a British-born academic who did most of his work in Canada in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Swimming completely against the tide of the received wisdom of that era, this man who concluded, from his meticulously documented research, that state education was a disaster. Unsurprisingly, he was pilloried by the rest of academia and the education establishment as some kind of dangerous madman before being proved absolutely correct.
→ Continue reading: A single candle is lit
I suppose it is only to be expected that Iain Duncan Smith would round off the Conservative Conference in Bournemouth with a triumphal assertion that the ‘the Tories are back’. The poor man could hardly do otherwise having presided over a week of fractious in-fighting, broody soul-searching and insurrectionary plots to topple him as leader. He just had to try to end things on an upbeat note and stamp his authority.
But is he right? Like Perry, I think that the answer is ‘no’ and, furthermore, I feel that the situation is unlikely to be improved by any well-spun policy initiatives. The problem for the Conservatives was, in fact, highlighted this last week by their Chairman, Theresa May when she exhorted the assembled party faithful to work to shed their ‘nasty image’. Therein lies the crux of the problem: nobody likes the Conservative because they are popularly seen as being ‘nasty’ and ‘uncaring’, i.e. it is believed that, once in power, they will cut taxes, curtail generous welfare handouts, privatise healthcare and education and stop creating sinecure jobs in the public sector for the competence-challenged.
Now there’s a sublime irony here because, in the event that the Tories ever did ascend the throne again, they are highly unlikely to do any of those things. For sure, about half of the party consists of people who would very much like to do those things but the other half consists of people who would rather stick their genitals in a food blender and press the ‘On’ button before they rocked any boats whatosever, and it’s the latter half that usually wins (as well as being the half that toppled Mrs.T). → Continue reading: Conservatives up the creek
The Illuminatus post below puts me in mind of a little anecdote that was doing the rounds in the legal profession a few years ago. It concerned the case of a homeless vagrant who had been arrested for being drunk and disorderly in a public place. A trivial matter and quite unremarkable but for the sentence handed down by the Magistrate:
“I am going to discharge you on the condition that, for the next six months, you do not touch a drop of alcohol. And when I say ‘not a drop’, I mean not a drop; not even a glass of sherry after dinner.”
It may not be true but I like to think it is.
Since they are vehicles by which ideas are spread, it stands to reason that definitions are important. Very important. There is nothing controversial in this view but I often feel that it is a principle more honoured in the breach than in the observance.
So I was delighted to read this article by Michael of 2 Blowhards wherein he demonstrates the flagrant absurdity of American left-wingers being referred to (and declaring themselves to be) ‘liberal’.
This is a point that we at the Samizdata have made previously and with good reason because American ‘liberals’ are not liberal at all, they are socialists. It sticks heavily in my craw to have to refer to these people as ‘liberals’ when the policies they favour and the ideas to which they subscribe (state interventions and pre-planned outcomes) are diametrically the opposite from anything even resembling classical liberal theory.
This is not just word-play, it is important. As Michael points out:
“One of the tricky things about “liberal” is that it’s just such a damned attractive word. It’s nice to think of yourself as being a liberal person. “I don’t care if my neighbor’s gay” equals “Thus I’m a liberal.” Sure, why not?”
This rings true. The word ‘liberal’ being associated with the qualities of being decent, humane and fair, provides a perfect cover for advancing an agenda which turns out to be largely indecent, horribly unfair and often inhumane.
American socialists are guilty of Definition-rustling. They have stolen a term that belongs to us and used it as camouflage behind which they have surrepticiously advanced their forward lines. I think it is time that we venture forth to take back that which belongs to us. Michael agrees:
“I also find it helpful to refuse to let the American left get away with calling itself liberal. I insist on referring to them as leftists, and to their views as leftism. Why let that crowd of sentimentalists, thought-police and socialists maintain exclusive ownership of a word as beautiful as “liberal”?
Why indeed, Michael. Far better to strip them naked and force them out into the open where the whole world can laugh at their grotesqueness.
Making dire predictions about the organisational abilities of the European Union is a fairly safe bet I reckon, but even I have been taken aback by the speed with which this prediction (from early April):
“So, cue another round of horse-trading, bickering and monumental waste as each part of the Galileo project is apportioned out according to who makes the most noise. The French will build the electrics, the Italians will build the housing, the Belgians will make the navigation system, the Germans will make the rocket boosters, the Spanish will make the launch platform, the Austrians will make the sandwiches and Sweden will provide the environmental protestors.”
has become this reality:
“Germany and Italy are fighting it out within the European Space Agency for the right to provide the main production base for the satellite system, to which EU governments gave the green light in March.
Their dispute has prevented the ESA from beginning work on the project and risks setting back its projected completion date of 2008.”
I submit that I am entitled to enjoy a brief frisson of self-congratulation.
[My thanks to Philip Chaston for the second link]
Imagine you want to set up a business. Let’s say it’s a software consultancy. And let’s also assume that you require some capital funding to get you started. You decide to approach a variety of sources from wealthy private investors to banks to venture capitalists and in order to impress them you draw up a Business Plan.
Only, there is no Business Plan because you are forbidden from charging your customers. Yes, that’s right, you are obliged to give away your valuable time and expertise for free. Which means you are not a business, you are a charity. No business, no Business Plan.
Insane? Bizarre? Economically illiterate? Intellectually retarded? Yes, yes, yes and yes.
And that probably explains why it has been adopted by the British Conservative Party as their big, bold, brand new idea for the National Health Service:
“During the health debate, Dr Fox will say that hospitals would be able to raise cash however they wanted and from whoever they wanted.
They will, however, be barred from charging patients for treatment”.
I am so resigned to this kind of stupidity that I can no longer bring myself to be outraged about it.
How marvelous that state hospitals will be able to go to anyone for their investment; only wihtout being able to offer a return, no investor will touch them and they will be forced to go back, cap-in-hand, to HM Government (and that means us) and we’re right back where we started. In other words, the Conservatives are opting for ‘no-change’.
Despite endless tampering, tinkering, revamps, updates, initiatives, policy changes, shifts in emphasis, new approaches, fresh ideas, radical thinking, more funding, down-to-earth measures, sensible guidelines, new directions, even more funding and more wishful thinking than you can point a stick at, Britain’s unworkable Soviet-model health care system still won’t work.
But coming to terms with that is a pain barrier that nobody is willing to cross.
Do ‘snuff’ movies actually exist or are they merely an urban legend? I use the term ‘snuff’ movie in its traditionally accepted sense i.e. an act of murder which is committed to film or videotape and then replayed in order to provide some warped sexual gratification for the viewer.
I have been prompted to raise this question by a showing of the film “8mm” on British terrestrial television this evening. According to the makes of the film, snuff movies do exist but you have to go to considerable trouble (and expense) to obtain them.
I have never seen a snuff movie but even if I had been shown such a movie how could I know for sure that the ‘grisly murder’ I was witnessing was not, in fact, a very convincing simulation? After all, realistic and gory murders are simulated in mainstream movies all the time so the expertise clearly exists.
Another thing that occurs to me is the problem of marketing such a thing. How (and to whom) do the producers sell their snuff videos when they can hardly be advertised even in the most questionable publications? Furthermore, I am not aware of any criminal convictions (in the UK at any rate) in respect of the making or distribution of snuff movies.
On the other hand, contract killing certainly does exist and if one can pay to have someone murdered surely one can pay a bit extra to have the execution filmed. In the “8mm” film, the snuff movie is made to order at the behest of an extremely wealthy magnate. If they do exist, then perhaps that’s how it works.
I am no nearer to an answer but I am not sure I want to be. I never want to see a snuff movie and I’d like to think they they are, indeed, nothing more than exotic urban fairytales. But sometimes, the world can be a very ugly place.
This is an article from the Guardian:
“The Angel of Death is stalking the streets and leafy suburbs of Maryland in the form of an unknown and, thus far, unseen sniper who has seemingly murdered up to six people in cold blood and for no apparent motive.
The fear of sudden death hangs like a shroud over the entire State under which its hapless and anxious citizens scurry from cover to cover lest they be the sniper’s next victim. This is the real America; rheumy-eyed, mistrustful and dangerous. A place where any passing stranger could be a stone-cold killer and where a violent and bloody death waits just around the next turning for it’s vulnerable and haunted citizens.
While the police search frantically to find the elusive marksman before he claims his next victim, maybe they should pause to consider whether they will ever really bring the guilty party to justice. For, regardless of who’s finger is actually pulling the trigger, the real culprit here is America itself.
Despite the increasingly horrific death toll, this is a nation which still clings rabidly to the absurd and outdated notion of allowing private citizens to own firearms. The simple fact that guns kill people is so banal in its obvious truth that it should not need restating anywhere; except that is, among the Republicans and their gun-lobby puppet-masters who will baulk at the merest suggestion of sensible regulation lest it blow a big hole in their profits. In the meantime, we Europeans can only scratch our bemused and wiser heads and wonder how many more painful lessons will have to be endured before America’s red-necked boys get their toys taken away from them.
But the gun-toting culture is only partially to blame because, in order to be truly lethal, it has to be combined with a reckless, inhuman cowboy capitalism with its injunction to the devil to take the hindmost and let the weak and frail die where they fall. In the land where the Dollar is King, the citizens are merely dispensable serfs providing nothing more than an opportunity cost to be measured on the bottom line against a cardboard cut-out target and a magazine full of dum-dum rounds. In America, breakfast is cheap but so is life.
For us on the safe side of the Atlantic, we can but give thanks for a more progressive political leadership that recognises these squalid dangers and defends us against their encroachment. Not so the average American who is left to twist in the pitiless wind while their elected officials busy themselves with the more lucrative task of propping up their nations corporate interests. When democracy can be trumped by chicanery, as in the Florida elections re-count, good faith lies bleeding. When you witness your own government flaunt the will of the international community, as expressed by Kyoto and the International Criminal Court, is it any wonder your dashed hopes and routed expectations may express themselves as murderous fury? If you hold democratic institutions up to contempt it is but a short step to holding life itself in contempt.
Pray that the Maryland police find this trigger-man quickly and let their be no more tragic victims. But pray also that the bereaved seek true justice by demanding that the murders of their loved ones be added to ever-growing list of crimes that must be laid at the door of George W. Bush”
Alright, I lied. This article did not appear in the Guardian. But it probably will at some point. Who knows, maybe I’ll send it in as copy.
They’ve never caught a rabbit, but they’re eagerly sniffing around for some children to harvest.
According to these Tranzi bloodsuckers, HM Government has not been sufficiently zealous in nationalising children in order to better protect them from their venal, barbaric and untrustworthy parents.
“Every one of the very large number of child deaths caused by violence and neglect in the UK starts with a smack, according to Lady Walmsley.”
‘Very large number’!!??? How many is that exactly? 43,598? 2 million? Half a billion? Don’t they realise that every one of the very large number of very bad laws starts with a completely fabricated statistic? Don’t smack me on the bottom, Lady Walmsley, just kiss my arse.
The real reason HM Government won’t enact these stupid laws is because they know that there is widespread public opposition to them; thus proving that it is not the world which is going mad, just the people who think they run it. And the people who think they run it have an agenda which necessitates the eradication of the family as an impediment to the building of New Global Man.
I’m not as angry as I should be about this because I actually think that the UN is lighting its own way to dusty death. I am reminded of that story of a meek little housewife who turned into a rage-beast and lifted up a truck to save her trapped child. It is probably nothing more than an urban legend but even if it is, it serves a useful function for it is an expression of the universal folk-knowledge about the lengths a parent will go to to protect to their children.
The UN will now have made itself that little bit less popular in Britain and, as their agenda creeps forward, the mask of purported benevolence will begin to slip, the sinister purpose will be seen for what it is and little folk the world over will turn on them like Viking beserkers.
As for me, I have a little disposable capital that I might just invest in the double-headed axe business. After all, the UN, they ain’t no friends of mine.
Then you clearly have not been exposed to the Daily Mirror.
They call it an editorial. I call it a vomit-inducing hagiography, the final paragraph of which has the capacity to keep you awake at nights like the trauma of a mugging:
“It was a magnificent speech from a man who is rapidly becoming the greatest figure in world politics, second only, perhaps, to Nelson Mandela.”
Anyone care to hazard a guess as to who is number 3 on their list? Personally, I shudder to think.
I think I might have a civil claim against the BBC. I was watching the news from the Labour Party Conference this afternoon whilst eating a sandwich and nearly choked when the BBC Political Correspondent Andrew Marr concocted this radiant gem:
“The important thing for the world right now is the continued dialogue between Washington and Blackpool”
My apologies to non-UK readers because you really do have to be British to fully appreciate just how pant-wettingly hilarious that statement is.
There was special guest appearance today at the Labour Party Annual Conference in Blackpool in the shape of former US President Bill Clinton.
At least we were spared Hilary. Bill’s sidekick and trusty companion for the day was film-actor Kevin Spacey who managed to muscle his way into every photo-op like Zelig.
Clinton was on top form, pressing flesh and distributing his effortless charm. One could have been forgiven for forgetting which of the two men was the movie-star. And, boy, were the BBC impressed. The commentators could barely contain their hormonal surges as Clinton glided through the throng. I’ve heard of politicians making love to the camera before but never have I seen the cameras making love to a politician.
He made a speech to the Conference. A long speech. The text of it may be available somewhere out there in cyberspace but if I was you I wouldn’t waste valuable time hunting it down because a) it was dull and b) it’s of limited significance. However, perchance you are interested, here is the gist:
“Mah friends, I am so pleased to be here with you today because we all share a common vision; one of peace, one of hope, one of children. Children, children, children, children. That’s what we’re about: children. And that’s what the Third Way is all about; it’s about you, me, us all joining together to strive for a better world for children. Children anywhere, children everywhere. Not like those knuckle-dragging right-wing loons who don’t care about children. In fact, they eat children. We must not be like them. But we must also help them. We must help them to find a better way; the Third Way. So stay focussed and strong because I know that if we all work together and believe in ourselves we can make socialism work. Oh yeah, and Saddam is a real bad guy and he has to go. Thankyou. I love you lots.”
He got a standing ovation
|
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.
|
