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.
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“On Friday about a thousand European citizens, representatives of the organisations of civil society and elected representatives at the local, regional, national and European level participated in a human chain around the Rond-point Schuman, right in the heart of Brussels “quartier européen”.
This event was organised by the Union of European Federalists in collaboration with the Intregroup European Constitution within the European Parliament on the occasion of the European Council meeting in Laeken.
There cannot be a strong Europe with weak institutions, and there cannot be strong institutions if their democratic legitimacy is not reinforced, the organisers stated afterwards in a press release.
“If the EU does not manage a qualitative leap of its political system, Europe will be condemned to institutional paralysis – be incapable of governing the Euro, acting on the international scene, efficiently contributing to maintaining world peace, fighting against terrorism and defending Europeans’ security. It will be left to the financial markets and incapable of facing the challenges of globalisation,” the organisers stated.
Among the participants were Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Co-President of the Group of the Greens/EFA in the European Parliament, Virgilio Dastoli, Spokesman for the Permanent Forum for Civil Society, Andrew Duff, MEP (ELDR, UK) and Fernand Herman, President of the U.E.F.-Belgium, Jo Leinen, MEP (PSE, D) and President of the Union of European Federalists, Cecilia Malmström, MEP (ELDR)”
The comrades are taking to the streets! From every slum and factory the oppressed of the earth are pouring forth onto the blood-spattered cobbles of Belgium and putting up the barricades. This is revolution and the air is thick with popular slogans such as:
“If the EU does not manage a qualitative leap of its political system, Europe will be condemned to institutional paralysis”
How cleverly it rolls off the tongue and sears into the heart of every visionary as they storm the steps of the Winter Palace.
Bureaucrats, lobbyists, statisticians and office-holders unite! You have nothing to lose but your weekly column in the departmental newletter
“WHAT TO WE WANT?”
“MORE FOOD SAFETY LAWS”
“WHEN DO WE WANT THEM?”
“NOW!”
The European Union (all please stand up and salute) has ‘declared war’ on junk mail.
Legislation will be enacted within the next 12 months to outlaw unsolicited e-mails, letters and phone-calls which, according to Grand European Panjandrum for Consumer Protection ‘costs EU businesses about 9.6 billion Euros (about 40 pence) per year’.
So there we have it, boys and girls. The New World Order is taking shape before our very eyes: the US is going to war on Bin Laden and the EU is going to war on binned letters.
A big meeting of the 15 EU heads of state in Laeken has ended today in a Billy Wilder-style farce of childish squabbling about who gets which brand, spanking new taxpayer-funded lavish office in Brussels. Just how precursive is this going to prove, I wonder?
The meeting itself was supposed to address the problem boldly identified by Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt that the ‘EU is out of touch with the people’. (No kidding, Guy??!!) Cue, huge conflab in Laeken to discuss ways in which the EU ‘can be made to be more relevent to people’s lives’ (or similar).
Of course, what all this euphemistic twaddle translates into is the bold fact that nobody loves the Eurocrats and the Eurocrats know it. They know it and don’t like it because, like all potentates they require not just our lives but our hearts and minds as well. Without the latter they can never quite feel secure. So they want us to love them, to hang their pictures on our walls, to quote their speeches and fill our bookshelves with their ghosted biographies. That way we need them, they need us, we’re all in this together and we march forward to a happy fEUture
But it won’t happen. Governments, all governments, have been a stick-and-carrot operation but the EU has no carrots and using the stick will bring them down more quickly than us. They can still bully and threaten but what precious little ability our political masters had to inspire loyalty or devotion bit the dust long ago and that kind of thing is impossible to resurrect. They can always try the singles columns
“German technocrat, 53, cuddly and sincere. Hobbies include drafting pointless laws and constructing vast bureaucracies. Seeks willing and compliant polity for mutual dependence leading to full union”
More likely though they will have left Laeken with instructions to their minions to draw up a convoluted brobdignanian set of regulations designed to ‘bring the people closer to the EU’. Expect them to be trumpeted joyously through the usual channels within a month or two – and then promptly forgotten about
The EU is now like some old dowager empress, seized with money and power but repulsive and unloved. How long can they live without it until they die of a collective broken heart?
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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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