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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I have oft-times been accused (particularly by Perry and Brian) of being negative or pessimistic. Well, all I can say is, that you don’t know the meaning of those words until you have read the latest litany of damnable woe from John Derbyshire:
“The four horsemen of the Apocalypse are saddled up and ready to ride”
Go and read the whole thing. And then kill yourself. But, if you are one of those people who have ever accused me of pessimism, then will you kindly offer up a grovelling apology before you go.
Ah yes, we must all be thankful for those liberty-loving dudes over in Brussels for saving us from the predations of the British State, according to Antoine.
Well, he’s partly right; the British State is predatory but to look to the EU or the Human Rights Act for salvation is to jump out of the British frying pan and into the European fire. If Antoine cared to trawl through the archives of this blog alone, he would find himself confronted with ample evidence of the lunacy and petty tyranny that has been imposed on us since joining this wretched Reich. This is a trivial, but sadly typical, example
There is no paradox here except that perhaps the British State could afford to be marginally less predatory if it wasn’t for the £1.8 million per day that they must collect from the British taxpayer in order to contribute to the Euro-coffers (and thereafter distributed to Hamas among others). Now that is a f*cking paradox! Besides, we all know that it is only a matter of time before all taxes get harmonised across the EU and nothing ever, ever, ever gets harmonised downwards.
I cannot wait for Antoine’s next mind-boggling invocation: support Chinese Maoists because at least they put an end to foot-binding?
It is a rare treat when you get to see the seeds of destruction actually being germinated so please take note of this latest pronouncement of Romano Prodi
“According to the Financial Times, Mr Prodi and other EU commissioners have discussed the possibility of having direct elections in order to give the future president a massive democratic mandate. However, they have concluded that it is almost impossible to run a meaningful election campaign all across the EU.”
So Mr.Prodi thinks that future EU Presidents should be appointed by horse-trading and deal-broking (in smoke-free rooms, of course). No, that is not what he actually says but that is what he means.
For all the high-minded ideals and blather about human rights and democracy from the apparatchicks of Brussels, there is no consensus in Europe, no demos in Europe, there is no ‘Europe’ and if there is one eternal truism of politics that is beyond argument it is that no system of government can rule without the consent of the majority of the governed. A government of and by a ruling elite will always fall. Always.
Imagine walking into a branch of a fast-food restaurant with a view to buying yourself a quadruple cheeseburger and fries, only to be told by the smiling counter-assistant; “Sorry, sir, we can’t serve you that food because you’re already too fat. Have a nice diet”.
When you protest at this public humiliation you will be told (through a rictus smile) that they are only acting on their legal advice.
This is the scenario that could be coming to a town near you if a certain Mr. Caeser Barber gets his way. Mr.Barber, a resident of New York City, has launched a legal action against several world-famous fast-food restaurant chains who, he claims, have conspired to turn him into a hog-beast.
“He claims the fast food restaurants, where Barber says he used to eat four or five times a week even after suffering a heart attack, did not properly disclose the ingredients of their food and the risks of eating too much.
It is too much to hope that that is a mis-print? Even after suffering a heart-attack this human vacuum-cleaner continued shovelling cheeseburgers and fried chicken down his neck. As somebody who is engaged in a lifelong jihad against flab, I am only too aware that my waistline is entirely my own responsibility but that sort of makes me a marginal minority in an age when one’s woes are expected be laid at someone else’s doorstep.
I could wax angrily about the rank silliness and raging absurdity of this victim-culture but I’d only be treading over well-worn carpet. Besides, Mr.Barber is highly likely to win regardless of my posturings.
Those of us who are familiar with the Holy Scripture of Post-Modernism (Neurosis, Chapter 1, verse 12 – “He that provideth for me shall face a mighty reckoning for his sin”) know only too well how this will play out. Mr.Barber will sit in the Courtroom (in a reinforced chair and with some sort of drip in his arm for theatrical effect – it generally works) and blub about his ruined life. His pudgy hand will wipe away a tear as he recounts how his childhood dreams of competing in the Olympic Decathalon have been cruelly dashed by Colonel Sanders and his monstrous regiment of corporate calorie-peddlers. Mr.Barber will blub, the Judge will blub, the lawyers will blub, the jury will blub and the press reporters will blub. Everyone will have a good old blub about blubber and the good citizens of New York will do their humane duty and compensate this poor man and punish the wicked purveyors of tasty nosh who have actually profited from his misery.
And once the inevitable verdict has been delivered, the flood-gates (or should that be ‘the food-gates’) will be open for everyone who has ever popped a button off their shirt or moved up from dress size 14 to dress size 16. The money may even make it worthwhile. Hey, if you can’t be beautiful, you may as well be rich. I swear that I see a new form of prohibition on the horizon, together with a War on French Fries.
A British solicitor has been sentenced to six months in prison under the money laundering provision in the Drug Trafficking Act 1994
Not that he was actually laundering money, mind you. He ‘failed to report suspicions of money laundering’ i.e. he did not go behind his clients back to snitch him out to the authorities and he has now paid the price.
He has paid the price for not sufficiently appreciating that he has been conscripted by the government and that his first and last loyalty belongs to them. I fear he is not the last ‘draft-dodger’ to feel the wrath of the State.
‘When the Proceeds of Crime Bill goes through (it should recive its Royal Assent this week), money laundering will apply to the proceeds of any crime. The implications for the profession will be widespread.’
The Proceeds of Crime Bill will extend the current obligation to report suspicions of money laundering to cover all and any unlawful activity. And it will not be a question of what the professional adviser did know but what they should have know.
The professional classes are going to have their lives made hell and, whilst this is an undoubted injustice to the many who work hard and serve their clients interests as best as they can, there is also a raging irony and a fable here.
The professional classes have always anxiously sought the help of the State in order to establish the restrictive practices and barriers to entry upon which much of their wealth and influence has been built. The same State has now turned on them with a rapacious fury.
This should serve as an object lesson to everyone that the Leviathan may have strong arms in which to cradle you but it also has big, sharp teeth to eat you all up. And the beast cannot help its nature.
Batten down the hatches, stock up on vital supplies, head for the hills and stay there – IT’S COMING!!!! According to the British press we’re all doomed, DOOMED by a huge lump of rock hurtling at us from outer space at unstoppable speeds and due to impact at just about the same time as the British Conservative Party is finally showing signs of a revival.
Meanwhile, Antoine Clarke thinks that the very existence of the thing could constitute an Islamic Heresy (presumably not if lands on Tel Aviv though).
Now I know that none of us are likely to be losing any sleep tonight but, nonetheless, isn’t this recent bout of angst about apocolyptic death from the skies a bit, well, medieval?
“Rejoice, brothers, it’s heading for Brussels”
Gibbering Dark Ages peasants pointed at manifestations in the sky and took them for portents of impending doom. Were they merely prescient? Or are us humans prey to pre-programmed primordial collective fears regardless of our technological advances?
When I was a young articled clerk with firm of London solicitors, I was involved, at some length in what turned out to be fruitless legal action against a notorious slum landlord called Nicholas Hoogstraten. Fruitless, because every time I went to Court to enforce against him, he simply disappeared behind a kaleidoscope of dummy front companies and aliases. He was as elusive as the morning mist.
Still, what I learned about him from the file notes left an indelible impression on me that was stirred again today when I heard that Hoogstraten has been convicted of manslaughter and now faces the possibility of a life sentence. In 1999 he ordered two of his henchmen to attack a former business associate who was threatening to sue him. They killed him. The jury accepted Hoogstraten’s plea that he never ordered the man’s death, he merely wanted them to rough him up and frighten him. The two hit-men were convicted of murder.
Hoogstraten is the nearest thing to a Bond villain that I have ever actually encountered. He could have sprung, fully-formed, from the fevered mind of a Hollywood script-writer; arrogant, sneering, dapper, ruggedly handsome, enormously rich, wickedly cunning and mind-bogglingly ruthless. He built his property empire on the back of intimidation, violence and outright theft. Every plausible account I have read of him paints a picture of a swaggering ego that was not just prepared to use violence to get what he wanted but actually enjoyed using the violence. The fear he engendered seemed to actually turn him on.
Whilst undoubtedly possessed of high intelligence and great business acumen he was flawed by an arching contempt for his fellow men and almost insatiable desire to hold power over them. A man of such single-minded malevolence that he appears to have scarred all who ever came into contact with him.
And, now, it’s all over.
But why is this a Libertarian view? Because there is apparently no end of people, mostly (but not exclusively) on the left who are convinced that we Libertarians admire and wish to emulate characters like Hoogstraten. That when we call for an end to state intervention and regulation it is because we want the Hoogstratens of the world unshackled and free to wreak whatever havoc they choose; that when we speak of free markets, what we really mean is freedom for Hoogstraten and his ilk to use their wealth and power to stomp on anyone who gets in their way. For socialists of all stripes, Hoogstraten is capitalism made flesh.
Wrong. Dead wrong.
Libertarianism is not, and never has been, about money or its pursuit. Money is incidental. It is about empowering ordinary people to take control of their own lives and arrange them in ways that best suit them. It is about the sanctity of contract, the endless possibilities of voluntary arrangement and real wealth to be found in reputation, decency, civility and honour. All these things are a anathema to men like Hoogstraten.
It is also well worth pointing out that Hoogstraten built his empire and wreaked his worst havoc at a time when there was far greater state intervention in the property market than we have now and where the laws and regulations protecting tenants in rented property were far more draconian. Yet none of this stopped Hoogstraten or even slowed him down. He simply possessed the insatiable will to drive under, over and through them.
Ultimately, there is no surefire way to stop the Hoogstratens of this world. They are like a malevolent force that nature throws up at us every now and then. But a far surer method of cutting them down to size is to build a strong civil society where people actually care about what happens to their neighbours and have a stake in their neighbourhoods and where toxic bullies like Hoogstraten are kept in check or run out of town on the end of a pitchfork.
…Bono 
And not for nothing either, as he has taken it upon himself to act as a tool for the Holy Belgian Empire and give the Irish people a sound telling-off for voting ‘No’ to the Nice Treaty.
“For god sake, if we miss this chance, what are we then?”
Well, obviously, a bunch of unilateralist simplisme Irish cowboys, that’s what.
“When I participate in meetings with politicians in Europe then they always bring this up…”
‘Louis, Sven, Dirk, come quickly, it’s a famous rock star. At last, we can enjoin a profound discussion on the socio-political consequences of Eastward expansion of the existing regulatory framework’.
“They cannot understand that Ireland did what it did with the Nice-treaty. I noted that a lot of politicians became very angry. I think that a ‘No’ will put Ireland in a selfish light…”
Did you hear that, you scruffy lot in Dublin? If you keep exercising your constitutional right to choose, then the Brussels politicians are going to get very, very, very angry with you. I mean, really angry. They’re going to hold an Angry Conference and share their anger. Then they are going to pass at least a few thousand more regulations in pure anger. And then strike primitive, aggressive postures and denounce you, angrily. So just watch your step.
Bono? Is that a proper name? It can’t be his real name, surely? Perhaps it stands for something. Somebody once told me that it is Gaelic for ‘dickhead’.
It was only a matter of time, I suppose, before the slumbering beast of the real British left emerged from its stupor and began to tramp around the country laying waste to all before it. And by the word ‘left’ I do not refer to the new, touchy-feely, big tent left but the old, proper, card-carrying, high octane, full-fat, extra-strength bona fide followers of Lenin.
They’ve been pricked and cut too much to stay dormant; Blair in bed with Big Business, Blair in bed with ‘right-wing’ European politicians and (probably the deepest cut of all) Blair in bed with George W. Bush!!.
They’ve had enough. They’re mad as hell and they just won’t take it anymore. So they have organised a grand gathering of their clan today in London to formally announce that Blair and ‘New’ Labour is a dragon to be slain.
The ‘old’ left has never gone away, of course. Nor have they abandoned their dream of turning Britain into North Korea. But they have been very quiet for the last few years because the Blairites captured the high ground of the Labour Party and made it electable again by being business-friendly (after a fashion). Out of fear of a return to Tory government, they kept still their waspish tongues.
But, either they no longer fear a Conservative revival or they are so desperate they no longer care. Either way this legion of marxist trade union leaders and Labour party activists want a fight. Methinks they are going to get one.
I have always believed that the political classes have one project and one project only: maintaining power. All other considerations are dispensible; smoke and mirrors for the voters come election time.
The political class that we are lumbered with in Britain wish to tighten their grip somewhat by removing the obstacle of an 800 year-old Common Law right known as Double Jeopardy i.e. a person cannot be tried twice for the same crime.
This was not a defence mechanism fabricated on some altruistic frolic. It was seen as essential if a citizen was to maintain their liberty against an all-powerful state which had the resources to pursue them at will if so desired. It was a mechanism which maintained the rule of law not the rule of whim.
Home Secretary David Blunkett has announced plans to ‘modernise’ our legal system by abolishing this hard-won right. He wants to make it easier for the State to pursue serious criminals who are seen to ‘get away with it’. It sounds like a noble impulse but the truth is far darker. Of course, the government has been at pains to stress that it will only abolished in so far as it relates to very serious matters e.g. murder but I’m afraid that we’ve heard this one before. Once the principle is established it is only a matter of time before mission creep drives it forward to cover all and any offences (including, possibly, EU-mandated offences such as ‘xenophobia’ or the deliberately vague ‘computer-related crime’).
The ability to prosecute by instalments will manifest itself as a tool of control in politically-sensitive cases with any risk of the ‘wrong’ result. The State will simply be able to drag a defendant back into Court time after time until it gets the result it wants. Sooner or later, with its ability to write a blank cheque, the State will win and everybody will know it.
There are few more pointed weapons of political control than this. There mere threat of it is enough to silence or cow difficult or even unpopular people into quiessence. With the endless threat of constant prosecution hanging over their heads, normal life becomes all but impossible. Keep quiet and do as you are told or your life will simply become unbearable.
Like my now defunct hard-drive, our collective memories are no longer accessible. If they were, the polity would rise up in revolt at the merest hint of the government arrogating this kind of power unto itself, but by the time iron rule has replaced rule of law, nobody will be able to remember a time when it was any different.
At about the same time as Samizdata went through its metamorphosis, my old computer motherboard began its jarring death-rattle and, shortly thereafter, expired both graciously and soundlessly.
It was time to break open that stash I keep under the floorboards and upgrade, upgrade, upgrade. Now, thanks to the assistance of a quite remarkably useful Russian systems builder called Yuri, I am surfing the net on the equivalent of a twelve-cylinder roadbeast. I have every bit and byte and bob and meg and gig and ram and rom known to humanity. I am a souped-up, hyper-driven and power-processed blogger. I have Weapons of Mass Digitization and I intend to use them in a Holy Jihad against Idiocy.
Yes, thanks to Yuri and the new, improved Samizdata I am ready to roll like mountain thunder over the arid plains of mediocrity and mendacity.
And a little addition to my ‘Glorious Ironies File’: Yuri was once a soldier in the Red Army, stationed in East Germany and trained to kill Yankee Imperialists and bring down Capitalism. Now, he is running his own successful business in London and helping me to spread the seed of Capitalism all over the Net. Splendid!
It was a old con trick in London’s East End. A street urchin would ‘hobble’ somebody’s parked car (usually by crawling under and pulling the connectors from the starter motor) and while the stricken owner was wondering how they were going to get home that night, up would pop said urchin, now as Good Samaritan, who would offer to get them going again…in return for a modest fee.
Those motorists were the lucky ones. The rest of us have been forced to hand over sums that are far from modest to urchins that we actually elect and as a result of an almost identical modus operandi.
Since HM government has dedicated much of the last 50 years to sucking every last drop of blood from our veins and is now shocked, SHOCKED to discover that the simple desire to save for one’s retirement is complex and forbidding. Of course it is. Since every successive Finance Act introduces new mechanisms for wealth-grabbing, financial service providers have had to twist and contort like Rumanian gymnasts in order to keep shirts on their customers backs. Just as an anti-body bombarded by viruses develops an ever-more impressive arsenal of chemical defences in order to stay one-step ahead.
The result is a business of pensions and savings that is so brain-gougingly complicated that many professional accountants and bankers admit that they no longer understand it.
So now the grift. HM government comes to the rescue on it’s White…sorry, Diverse Charger to save us poor peons from drowning in a sea of pure gobbledegook. Hooray for the government!!
Tom Burroughes has a dream for the government, I have a message: F*ck off and leave us alone. We’ll build our wealth quite nicely without you.
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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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