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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See how eager people are to demand that they have a right to your money? Polish farmers are upset because they are not going to get to steal tax money from the rest of Europe the moment they join the European Union. They will have to wait until 2013 to join the undead legions of European subsidy vampires.
Poland�s agriculture minister Jaroslav Kalinowske has declared “It is about ensuring guarantees for an equal partnership for Polish garniture. If we don�t all play under the same rules then our farmers will vote against European Union membership,” reports the Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten.
Yes! It would be wonderful if that happened and Poland did not sign away its future. Of course if the farmers do indeed scupper Polish EU membership, they will be doing so for all the wrong reasons but as anyone who has lived through a war will tell you, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Whilst nothing the EU does ever surprises me, it often amazes me that even in the USA the farmers can rob the rest of the country not only in terms of subsidies but in terms of artificially inflated prices. How can the ‘left’ who claim to have the interests of the common people at heart accept that food should be made more expensive by government action? For rich and bourgeoise people, the cost of food as a proportion of their wealth is utterly trivial. Yet for the poor, that is obviously not the case and so various forms of state assistance becomes important to avoid going short of food. In a democratic nation or super-nation, this naturally produces a dependent class who will always vote for the people who provide that state assistance, even though in reality those self same people are actually the ones responsible for the food being so expensive in the first place. The vampire bites and produces a mindless legion of bloodsucking followers.
About this funny vampire picture: I think I might have gone out with this guy a few years ago. I find this on Communist Vampires website that Perry mentioned in earlier posting.
I will be a bit provincial today. It has been a few days of mixed news in my corner of Europe. Very good news is that filthy war criminal Rade Vrga has been arrested in Hungary, which is splendid.
Not so good news is that the idiots governing Croatia have folded under pressure from the farmers political faction and given up trying to abandon the ridiculous policy of agricultural support that takes tax money from everyone and gives it to farmers because they are, well, farmers. Are farmers the only cyclical business that they should need special treatment? Yet an idiotic coalition of HSS and other economically ignorant not-so-reformed socialists think it is perfectly alright to act like vampires on the rest of the economy.
Even worse news is that yet another agreement was signed that is crawling Croatia closer to that ‘haven of fluorescent idiocy’ called the European Union.
And even worse news than that is that a certain Samizdata editor has yet another picture of me for the blog. I am going to have to wear a burqa next time I see that boy!
French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin has demanded an end to free(ish) trade in favour of a global system of ‘managed trade’ called mastered globalization. In a typical stream of anti-life economics and adulation of force based resource allocation, Jospin states that he, and people like him, should have a say in what Americans or British or Japanese or Nigerian or Lebanese or Croatian people can trade with each other across borders and under what conditions. When he says “mastered globalization”, no prize for guessing who he has in mind to be the ‘master’.
Jospin is a man who is responsible more than any other political figure in the EU (and that is saying something) for people like me being fined and harassed by EU states for trying to do business within the EU because I am an outsider, just another Slavic white nigger girl. Naturally he takes much the same view of Africans and Asians who try to do business in the EU.
He called for donor countries at the Economic and Social Council in Paris to commit to “reduce poverty by 50 per cent until 2015”. He could of course do this at a stroke by resigning from office along with all the other lying Socialists, Social Democrats (socialists), Democrats (socialists), Liberals (socialists) and Christian Democrats (socialists) across Europe who prevent so much of the world from making a living due to their trade barriers that discriminate against us. If that happened, I guarantee poverty would be reduced by 50 percent by 2015.
So this is me and my famous skidding car that I was in when I had my mishap on an icy road in Austria.
The Milosevic trial in the Hague is having trouble due to the fact most of the Kosovo war crimes evidence was gathered by western intelligence operatives, rather than independent investigators. However even if that part of the charges against him collapses, he will not be able to stonewall his way out of the charges relating to Croatia and Bosnia.
Nevertheless, I must say that I have never thought the Hague trials were either legitimate or, more importantly, sensible. To paraphrase Talleyrand, they are worse than a crime, they are a mistake.
For Serbia to recover from the monstrous era that the entire former Yugoslavia is emerging from, it needs to go through a process similar to the de-nazification Germany went through after World War Two. It must face its own history and that is not achieved by putting The Demon on trial in the Netherlands. He did not act alone and whole sections of Serbian society must face up to that fact.
The place Slobodan Milosevic should have gone on trial for mass murder and other war crimes was in Serbia because then, and only then, can Serbian society itself drive a stake through the heart of its own darkness. There are a lot of good people in Serbia who are quite capable of doing just that.
Of course this could have been achieved another way too: like Mussolini, Slobodan Milosevic, his vile hellish wife, most of his adult family and about fifty senior ministers, police chiefs and generals could have been strung up on meat hooks as a lesson to future generations. That would have worked too. It might not be pretty but it would have been justice.
News that elegant Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi has appointed the leader of the ‘post-fascist’ National Alliance party Gianfranco Fini as his representative to the Convention on the future of Europe has me grinning from ear to ear.
This is not because I am really any fan of the numbskull statism favoured by Gianfranco Fini but rather because it will make the superstatist collectivists that will have to deal with him apoplectic. As several articles on Samizdata have pointed out, the essential difference between fascist and socialist economics is that fascists believe that what matters is control rather than ownership of the means of production. Fini is a classic advocate of that approach, wanting to regulate economic matters in order to further ‘Italian national objectives’. Of course this approach is in no way different in methodology to that practiced by most social democratic regimes with their ‘national industrial champions’ and acronymed French conglomerates.
And of course that is exactly why a man with overtly fascist links like Fini is hated so much by the ‘social democrats’ across Europe. I am sure if he wore a black shirt and called prime minister Berlusconi ‘Duce’ they would actually not mind so much, but that is not the case. They do not want to be seen standing next to him because people might start to realise that there really is no difference between any of them.
Or should I say higher tax future. Head of the European Central Bank, Dutchman Wim Duisenberg has said that the new Euro currency will lead to tax harmonisation in the long run. Of course I don’t think anyone thinks that means taxes will move down to the lowest common denominator given the French and German remarks about ‘unfair tax competition’. No, we are talking about the whole EU moving up to the confiscatory levels of the highest.
This is of course a 100% political, rather than economic, matter. Taxes are the amount of money confiscated by the state and that is decided by political, not economic, processes. Yet still people maintain the fiction that the European Central Bank is not a politically motivated entity. What economic factors are going to drive taxes to the same levels because the EU now has a common currency?
Now correct me if I am wrong but I thought the entire USA used the US Dollar. Tell me, are the total taxes in New Mexico, Carolina and New York all ‘harmonised’? No, I didn’t think so.
I have been fuming about this for a while. A few days ago, Wolfgang Petritsch, the euro-gauleiter in Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH), announced he thinks Croatia needs to structure its democratic system on multi-ethnic lines. In short, he wants ethnic groups to be encouraged to see themselves as politically different rather than as members of a common civil society. He has of course be informally invited to take his views, write them on sheets of stiff paper, roll them up tightly and stick them somewhere warm and dark. We have already lived through the aftermath of the Yugoslav experiment in tribal collectivism. I for one have no desire to do that sort of thing again, thank you very much.
Unlike hapless BiH, Petritsch would do well to remember that his views do not have a large NATO army to impose them in Croatia. Someone once asked me why I was so glad that NATO does not ‘guarantee’ Croatian security in the same manner as in BiH. Simple. What was the point of the war if we are going to trade taking orders from Belgrade for taking orders from Brussels via some petty Austrian politician like Petritsch? Security of the sort on offer from Petritsch and his Euro-collectivist kind is the security of the cage.
Seeing as how Perry has posted pictures of me on Samizdata, it seems only reasonable that I should post one of him… so here is he and his lawyer. I have not met David Carr so perhaps the lawyer is him. I will leave you to figure out which of them is which.
 Perry and his lawyer
I could of course be referring to the fact, as David Carr wrote that socialism far from being dead has just re-branded itself, and is stalking the night looking for victims. And certainly that is true. However the news is not all bad. The political culture in Croatia still has a woeful hangover from the communist era, but things have nevertheless has taken a turn for the better lately. The Mayor of Zagreb, Milan Bandic was involved in a minor auto accident and just drove off. As a result, his political career is in tatters and public opinion scandalised so much that he has been forced from office. However just a few short years ago he could have done so with impunity. That is real progress.
But I wasn’t really thinking about that sort of thing at all. In my usual self-centred way I was thinking about something much more important: after being laid low with the flu (or whatever it was) I am actually up and walking around at last, still coughing like I have the plague but at least I am moving again like the undead risen from a coffin. Ok, I know that I do not live in Transylvania, but I am probably a hell of a lot closer to it that most of the Samizdata’s readers (about 350 km/220 miles away).
And so off I go to the market this morning to stock up my depleted shelves (I had someone else shopping for me but he never gets the right things). There is still about half a metre of snow on the ground and so I am wrapped up like a yeti, but it is so nice to be outside. After filling up my car, I drive back and start unloading the car… and who should saunter through the open front door but Little Monster, my missing cat. I am amazed. I thought he must be run over by car or frozen under half metre of snow one week ago.
Far from it. He is fluffy and smells slightly of perfume. Someone had even tied a strange looking ribbon on his little collar. I should have just thrown him out and told him to go back to who ever has been looking after him the last week.
Well, at least I finished unloading my shopping from the car before I fed him. That showed him who is the boss.
I have flu and the world hates me, even the rascal Dawson does not like me any more. My dog is at my mother’s house and my cat took one look at me as I started to fall ill a few days ago and sodded off. It seems he has decided not to come back so I have stopped looking out of the window for him. Bastard. Typical guy. There is about half a metre of snow on the ground and my heating only works when it feels like it, so here I am, blogging to the world with my laptop under the duvet with me. Only my ‘editor’ in London calls me so I am starting to wonder if there is anyone left alive and unfrozen in all of Croatia… except for the idiot who lives next door. Why do some people feel the need to rev their cars for 20 minutes before driving off? If the damn thing starts, drive it!!!
I was going to write about our idiot mayor in Zagreb (naughty boy), cretin provincial journalists in the USA who see the world through the narrow prism of their own country and why if I had met a certain much commented on ‘libertarian anti war’ Internet writer in 1991 here in what used to be Yugoslavia, I would have put a 9mm bullet between his eyes.
However I have realised that all these things pale into insignificance compared to my own personal misery at the moment.
Irritable? Me? Nah.
When I am so wound up after a party or a night on the town that I cannot sleep even when I am tired, sometimes I get on the Internet and see what is new. Now that I have discovered blogging, I have another cure for insomnia… but the trick is to make sure that what I write is not a cure for other people’s insomnia. I would rather my writing gives people sleepless nights that sends them to sleep.
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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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