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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Corporate executives used to avoid talking about their war experiences. But today’s educated executives thrill and eventually bore you with their high-altitude conquests. A quarter of them seem either to be just back from one of those instant-glacier expeditions or to be deep in the midst of training for one…You get the impression that every spot on earth over 10,000 feet above sea level is packed with magneta-clad millionaires luxuriating in their thin-air hardships.
– David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise, first published in 2000, page 209.
I normally have to get into my office in London’s docklands financial centre of Canary Wharf at some ungodly hour in the morning, so I rarely get the chance to browse the news headlines on television or radio before rushing off for the Tube. But laid low with a nasty headcold this morning, I watched the BBC Breakfast television show for about 30 minutes. This is what I saw:
Item: The local council in Richmond, west London, is proposing to slap heavy parking taxes on people who own cars that are deemed ecologically incorrect (SUVs, etc). The programme interviewed a few bedraggled locals moaning about this, a retired TV personality who said it was a jolly good idea, and left it at that.
Item: A group of MPs want to ban sale of fireworks to ordinary citizens because loud bangs emitted by such things frighten animals and the elderly. We had a brief “debate” in the studio between a puritanical MP and an elderly lady who said what a shame it would be if fireworks were banned. No clear defence was made of the right for law-abiding people to have their fun. The safety-trumps-liberty issue was taken as a given.
Item: The pop star Madonna, who is trying to adopt a baby boy from the African nation of Malawi, has spoken of her anguish about this bureaucracy involved on the Opra Winfrey TV show in the US. This was deemed to be a news item worthy of the BBC’s attention.
Item: recycling of baby’s diapers.
Item: Litigation continues between ITN, the British television network, and the US authorities, over the death of ITN veteran broadcaster Terry Lloyd in Iraq about three years ago.
Item: BBC business journalist discusses how to avoid back injuries in the workplace. It is taken as given that companies must be forced to spend more money to ensure their staff are comfortable.
Now I think a trend is at work here. Many of the “news” items are pretty minor stuff, compared to the ongoing crackup in the Middle East, etc. They are relatively minor stories, what I would call “consumer journalism” stuff that typically used to be confined to daytime television and the dumber ends of the tabloid press. Maybe the producers figure that viewers are unable to digest anything more substantial at 7 in the morning and maybe they are right (but radio news and current affairs seems to have more gravitas, or at least it used to). However, the choice of subjects also reflect the current liberal/left intelligentsia’s obsession with bossing us around in order to protect the environment; they reflect a distinct strain of neo-puritanism (such as Richmond’s persecution of owners of big cars and bashing of fireworks), and an assumption that the child custody arrangements of a person, even a famous one like Madonna, are any of the State’s business.
Bring on Guy Fawke’s Night, is all I can say.
See if you tell the difference.
This via Reuters:
A 70-year-old British pensioner, trained in martial arts during his military service, dispatched a gang of four would-be muggers in a late-night attack in Germany.
“Looks like he had everything under control,” a police spokesman from the German town of Bielefeld said of the incident last Friday.
The man, a native of Birmingham who now lives in Germany, was challenged by three men, demanding money, while a fourth crept up behind him. Recalling his training, the Briton grabbed the first assailant and threw him over his shoulder.
When a second man tried to kick him, the pensioner grabbed his foot and tipped him to the ground. At this point, the three men, thought to be aged between 18 and 25, fled, carrying their injured accomplice with them.
The pensioner, whose name was not immediately available, suffered light abrasions.
Well, some of our older citizens are not pussies, it seems. I trust and hope that this guy gets a commendation for dealing with these scum in such an exemplary manner.
I have taken some lessons with these guys, and I can strongly recommend them for those in decent physical shape (and that does not mean you have to be a big tough bruiser, either. There is something positively encouraging about watching a petite woman throw off an attack by a 6 foot-tall rugby player type).
Henry Porter, the British journalist, gave a lecture recently, which is reproduced in the Independent newspaper here, which lays out in trenchant terms the sheer magnitude of the Blair government’s assault on civil liberties. None of the broad points will exactly come as a surprise to regular readers of this blog but I link to it because it is a pretty good primer on the issue for those who have not thought much about this issue.
Here are a couple of excerpts:
There will be many reasonable people among you who will argue that the fight against terrorism or some other compelling problem makes the removal of a fragment of liberty the best option available to us. A little bit here, a little bit there doesn’t really matter, particularly when it involves somebody else’s rights. Without thinking very deeply, we say to ourselves “if you’ve done nothing wrong you’ve got nothing to fear from these new laws”. Not true. There is something to fear – because someone else’s liberty is also your liberty. When it’s removed from them, it’s taken from you even though you may not be able to conceive of the circumstances when you might need it. A system of rights must apply to bank managers, illegal immigrant cockle pickers and every type of defendant otherwise it doesn’t count.
I worry that we are not alert to the possibilities of social control. No matter how discreet this surveillance, it increases the spectral presence of the state in the everyday consciousness of each individual. I grant that it is a slow process and that it is nothing like the leaden omnipresence of the Stasi in the GDR. But I think we’re heading for a place from which we will not be able to return: the surveillance society where the state will crowd in on the individual human experience and threaten the unguarded freedoms of privacy, solitude, seclusion and anonymity. We may continue to attest to the feeling of freedom but in reality we will suffer more and more restrictions. Inexorably we are becoming subjects not citizens, units on a database that may be observed and classified by a Government which is taking control in areas where it has never dared in democratic times to trespass before.
I like the way that Porter directly confronts the nonsense ‘argument’ that “only the guilty have anything to fear” line that one hears being trotted out in favour of things like abolition of Habeas Corpus or eroding the presumption of innocence in the Common Law. This is a fine article that deserves to be widely read. At the end, Porter recommends, among other things, a wholesale effort to teach children about how the laws protecting liberty were acquired, and why they were acquired, in the first place. For it is in its attempts to obliterate history, or make us feel deeply ashamed of it, that the real menace of New Labour’s modernisation obsession first revealed itself. It may strike some critics of libertarianism as paradoxical, given that libertarians are usually seen as fans of modern life, that any defence of freedom must be steeped in an understanding and appreciation of history, including the Classics. Perhaps our modern legislators would be far less of a menace if they had bothered to study the speeches of Pericles or Cicero.
If this deal goes ahead, it will be the largest example yet of an Indian firm buying a British one. How the world has turned, 60 years on from the end of the British Empire in India.
Anglo-Dutch steelmaker Corus Group Plc is set to recommend a 4.1 billion pound takeover by India’s Tata Steel Ltd as soon as Friday, sources close to the matter said.
Corus’ board met on Wednesday evening to rubber stamp the deal but is waiting until Tata’s board meets, which is expected on Thursday or Friday, before making an official announcement to its shareholders, the sources said.
It will be interesting to see how those anti-globalisation campaigners, who in the past were the same sort of folk to demand that the rich West gives aid to “Third World” nations like India, respond to Indian business purchases of British and other European firms. That is the trouble with fighting evil capitalists – one minute they are wearing pin-striped suits and speak in posh English accents, the next, something quite different. It must be very annoying.
The Pearce household is getting a paper shredder to cut up all those documents: old bills, etc, that can be used by thieves to steal a person’s identity. It is, as this BBC report shows, a major problem. I do not imagine for a second that identify cards will significantly reduce this problem. In fact they may merely open up a whole new avenue for fraud. So, I am getting a shredder.
This looks like a decent website on where to get these machines.
(Those more fortunately blessed with space can of course just chuck this stuff on the bonfire.)
If reality contradicts your thoughts, that’s delusion. If your thoughts contradict your actions, that’s madness. If reality contradicts your actions, that’s defeat, frustration, self-destruction. And no sane being wants delusion, madness and destruction.
– From the Golden Transcendence, John C. Wright, page 212
An almost-hidden jewel in London’s collection of museums is the Gilbert collection of jewels, furniture and historic art in Somerset House, on the banks of the Thames near the Temple tube station. At the moment, there is a retrospective exhibition of the work of the great Tiffany jewellery business, going back to that firm’s origins in the middle of the 19th Century. In some ways, the rise of the house of Tiffany mirrors America’s own rise as a mighty economy, since the industrial progress of that country created vast fortunes, and naturally, people wanted to show this wealth off. And boy, did they do so. I strongly recommend this collection for anyone who wants to see the jewellers’ art at its greatest.
My only word of caution: if you are thinking of taking someone there for the start of a sophisticated date, be warned. The jewels there may give your other half Big Ideas. Very Expensive Ones. Gulp.
I do not think that George Walden, former Conservative MP and minister, cares much for David Cameron, according to this article that came out a few weeks ago. Excerpt:
The politics of sentiment increasingly dominate public discussion, and sentimentality tinged with cynicism was what Diana was about. The same is true of Cameron’s social politics. The cant of the new elites emerges with numbing shamelessness in his public declarations. Recently the one-time PR man for ruthlessly profitable trash TV made a heartfelt speech in which he said that money wasn’t everything, and that the quality of our culture mattered. In his more mawkish mode it is possible to discern in the Tory leader’s political pitch a faint echo of Diana’s Christ-like affectations. With her, it was a scrupulously choreographed contact with people sick with Aids. With Cameron, it is an ostentatious tolerance of the lower orders: suffer the hoodies and the hoodlums to come unto me.
Brrr… Walden might as well have called Cameron a patronising wanker. He must be glad the practice of duelling has been abolished.
Iain Dale, usually the most civil of commentators, is not impressed much by Walden, however:
Former Tory MP George Walden was one of Britain’s worst ever High Education Ministers. Since leaving Parliament he has earned a living writing pseudo-intellectual drivel about politics and culture. It’s usually unreadable. I attended a discussion evening with him and his wife a couple of years ago, organised by Living Marxism. He was insufferable and spent the whole evening putting down his wife. In the Independent on Sunday diary there is a piece on his book The New Elites in which he slags off David Cameron for “being a posh man pretending to be common”. Utter rubbish. But even if it were true, it’s better than a pub bore pretending to be an intellectual.
Aren’t Conservatives lovely?
Great article by Brendan O’Neill on the attempts – vain, I hope – to silence folk who dare contest the Truth of Global Warming.
Right, it is Friday evening, I have a life, so have a good weekend and try not to think about English football.
Economist Bryan Caplan has posed the question: which law would you like to break? I guess, that being a libertarian kind of guy, he favours giving the finger to those laws that do not protect life and property but instead regulate our behaviour for our own good.
So, it being the start of the weekend, I shamelessly steal Bryan’s idea and pose this question to the Samizdata hordes: which law would you like to break? And also, why?
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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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