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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Now see here all you bloody smoking bastards. They have just about had enough of you and your pathetic, juvenile, surly insolence. Why can’t you seem to get it through your amazingly thick skulls that this sort of thing just is not on?
They have tried to be reasonable. They have tried to be understanding. But, oh no, that wasn’t good enough for you, was it? Well, here’s a news flash for you, chummy: the party is over. Their patience is at an end. The ‘good cop’ routine has not worked, so its time to send in the ‘bad cops’. Yes, that’s right. The gloves are finally coming off:
Pictures of diseased organs and rotting teeth could feature on cigarette packets under new government plans.
Similar pictures appear in Canada, Thailand, Brazil and Singapore – now a public consultation will be held on whether to introduce them in the UK.
“We need to continue with fresh, hard-hitting ideas, providing more information that will help smokers quit,” Health Secretary John Reid said.
And if that does not force you to quit, well, then they are just going to have to break out the Celine Dion records and play them on a loop until you damn well come to your senses.
Don’t make them do it!
I believe I detect some tantalising signs that the Many-Headed Hydra of the British State is, at last, beginning to eat itself:
Institutional racism is a “blot upon the good name of the NHS”, a report on the death of a black patient has said.
An inquiry said the failure to give ethnic minority people proper mental health care was a “festering abscess”.
It follows the death of schizophrenic patient David Bennett in 1998, after he was restrained at a clinic in Norwich.
Retired High Court judge Sir John Blofeld, who lead the inquiry team, said the death of Mr Bennett – known to friends as Rocky – was “tragic and totally unnecessary”.
His team said it believed institutional racism was present throughout NHS mental health services.
This ‘institutional racism’ thingy has turned out to be a very useful multi-purpose weapon. Perhaps they should drop one into Iraq to help quell the insurgents.
In any event, considering the disproportionately high number of people from ethnic minority backgrounds who work in the NHS, I find this accusation very hard to believe. In fact, I will go as far as saying that it is bunkum. Bunkum on stilts. Bunkum with knobs on. About as plausible as an EU anti-corruption drive.
It made more than 20 recommendations including the demand that NHS staff working with the mentally ill are trained in “cultural awareness and sensitivity”.
We have to respect the fact that some people choose to be stark, raving bonkers and that that choice is just as valid as people who happen to be in full control of their mental faculties. All states of mind are the same and doing things like eating spiders and lurking around public parks flashing the old one-eyed trouser snake at little old ladies are merely alternative lifestyle choices that we should celebrate. In fact, these people are not barmy at all, they are just….differently conscious.
But, truly, this is a puzzlement. The NHS is the ‘Jewel in the Crown’ of the public sector and the only thing still holding that wheezing, cankered Leviathan together is the commitment and morale of the staff working within. What better way to dissolve all that goodwill than by subjecting them to the kind of Inquisitional ordeal that ‘cultural awareness training’ entails?
Do these accusers not appreciate or realise that the possible consequences of their campaign might be to cattle-prod this most sacred of sacred cows straight into the merciless metal teeth of the abbatoir? Or perhaps they do realise but they simply do not care? Perhaps the years of unimpaired success have so sharpened the appetites of these professional race warriors that they have become like ravenous wolves, turning on their class confreres and ripping out great gobs of flesh in a feeding frenzy?
Well, either way, I say it is best to let nature take its course.
Medical researchers have condemned the new Human Tissues Bill as an impediment to teaching and research.
But scientists say the changes go too far and will make teaching and medical research extremely difficult.
There is no discrimination between whole organs and a collection of a few cells on a microscope slide, they say.
Cancer charities and the Wellcome Trust are calling on ministers to make changes to the Bill.
Doctors have to obtain written consent if they wish to use any form of human tissue removed from a person living or dead, even if they are checking for the prevalence of a virus in the general population. One can think of the consequences if tests could not have been carried out for AIDS, given the level of stigmatisation that accompanied the virus. There is a quandary since informed consent is surely necessary before the tissues of any individual are extracted, preserved and used for any purpose, even if it is for public health.
However, it is estimated that 3,000,000 samples and 100,000,000 blood samples will require written consent, proving another bureaucratic excess for the NHS. Public health is often used as an argument to override the concerns or refusal of an individual to provide any form of sample. No doubt there is an argument that rational individuals will understand the necessity of acting in concert when faced with an unknown disease or epidemic. However, this is often not the case.
Grappling with the issue of public health and a libertarian society, certain questions have presented themselves: Do individuals who refuse to cooperate with ventures sourced in civil society to track and curb the spread of any disease in a minarchy open themselves to claims of compensation since their actions could be viewed as endangering others? At such times, is the action of ‘opting out’ of a collective venture to track and curb an epidemic by any individual sufficient to trigger claims against that individual on the grounds that their actions placed others in danger?
Perry de Havilland has limited the notion of public health to “communicable diseases”, but even here, it is unclear if such matters require a coercive authority mandated to use the measures necessary to curb any disease. As it stands, the new Human Tissues Law will require written consent before any part of your body is taken and used for another purpose, even if it is in your own interest. Surely an advance on the contemporary thefts by state institutions in the name of ‘research’.
I got a Valentine’s Card once. I cannot remember the exact year but I think it might have been around 1937.
Since then my doormat has been graced with a small mountain of bills, a cascade of unwanted mail-order catalogues and the occasional muddy footprint. But I harbour no grudges and, as the day of luuuurrve and romance fast approaches, let me take this brief opportunity to extend my warmest wishes to all those gaily courting couples of the world. May the aim of cupid’s arrow be straight and true and may it pierce the fluttering heart of paramours everywhere. For what is life but to love, as some philosopher once said. Or should have said.
Forgive the mawkishness but I have been driven to such sentimentalities as a reaction to the rather less enchanting message that is being broadcast from people who, purportedly, are rather more caring than I am:
A hard-hitting advertising campaign to warn young people about the dangers of unsafe sex has been unveiled by the Government.
The campaign, launched in the run-up to Valentine’s Day, features cartoon images of realistic looking Valentine’s cards, with powerful messages about the risks of sexually transmitted infections (STIs).
One features a sunset scene of a couple on the beach with the poem: “Oh Valentine, since you came to me you’re always in my thoughts. I’ll never forget the night we met and you gave me genital warts.”
Another shows a pink teddy bear in obvious pain, with the message: “I love you so much it hurts… when I pee.”
Such a bunch of twinkle-eyed, slushy romantics, are they not?
Health Minister Melanie Johnson said it was “vital” to tackle this boom in sexually transmitted diseases and improve sexual health.
“This campaign is aimed at targeting those most at risk by using thought-provoking imagery and direct language.
“The Sex Lottery campaign is targeted specifically at sexually active 18 to 30-year-olds, and has already achieved significant behaviour change.’
At Christmas it’s the dangers of overeating, overdrinking and faulty electrical goods. In the summer it’s skin cancer, sunstroke and cornea-damage. Now, the season of romance invokes finger-wagging and tut-tutting about STD’s. I think what the Department of Dour Presbyterian School Ma’ams is trying to tell us is that life is a bitch, no good will come of it, pleasure is sin and we will all be jolly well sorry we ever started.
While the theological analogy is tempting, it is probably too deep. The real problem lies in there being far too many many state bureaucrats with far too much time on their hands and way too much of our money burning a hole in their pockets. But I do wonder if these people actually mean what they say? I mean, is all this sanctimonious hectoring just a way of bailing out the huge waves of cash that HM Treasury has flooded them with in recent years? Or do people like Melanie Johnson really see the world only in terms of the demons waiting to pounce with malice aforethought on the unsuspecting life-reveller? Are these apparent neuroses just convenient rubrics or is this, in fact, the true face of our political classes that we are seeing, genital-warts and all?
I would like to think that it is the former but, increasingly, I suspect the latter. I really do think that our entire ruling class is deep in the grip of some paralysing psychosis that has turned them into medieval peasants, muttering incantations and kissing toads to protect themselves from the Dark Faeries That Dwell In The Woods.
Generally speaking, the world is a dangerous and worrisome place for defeated and exhausted people.
So George ‘Hitler’ Bush and his shadowy cabal of extreme right-wing neo-conservative warmongers are, once again, showing their contempt for the peace-loving, democratic will of the international community:
The United States is challenging a strategy by the World Health Organization (WHO) to tackle obesity.
Some scientists accuse President Bush’s administration of planning to water down proposed junk food regulations, in order to protect big business.
No mention of who these ‘scientists’ are, mind. Perhaps they are Indyscientists.
Anyway, I support the WHO. I think it is only reasonable and fair that I should be told what I can and cannot eat by a panel of experts from Libya, Chad, Cuba and North Korea. It’s for my own good!
I learned long ago not to hang my rhetorical hat on anything as unreliable and insubstantial as a scientific report, especially when they are described as ‘surveys’. It always conjures up visions of earnest researchers scurrying about with clipboards asking random people multiple-choice questions about household detergents.
However, that said, it would not surprise me in the least to discover that this does, in fact, have some substance to it:
Millions of Africans believed to have HIV/Aids are free of the disease, according to research published yesterday.
The survey will dismay those who claim the West is ignoring a pandemic so acute it could wipe out the populations of entire African states.
I know exactly who those ‘dismayed’ people are. They are the lobbyists, charity scammers, tranzi office-holders, preachy celebrities and other assorted NGO-fodder who have turned AIDS into an international fund-raising and foreign junkett circus. Joining them will be a host of African kleptocrats who know only too well that ‘AIDS’ is the magic word with which to open the purse-strings of Western treasuries.
Africa still has that ‘dark continent’ quality about it that makes it impenetrably mysterious to gringos in the West. So when we are told by talking heads with august-sounding titles that squinty million zillion trillion people are dying of AIDS in Africa every four minutes, very few of us (if any) have sufficient knowledge of the situation on the ground to raise so much as a batsqueak of doubt. By the same token, it would all look the same if the figure-compilers lumped in deaths from all manner of other maladies and diseases in order to inflate the victim-toll.
I remember so clearly when AIDS became a big public health issue in Britain in the mid-80’s. From out of nowhere came legions of ‘experts’ to assure us that it really was the new ‘Black Death’ and it was poised to wipe out the civilised world. Resistance was futile. Most of us would be dead before breakfast.
It never happened in the West and maybe it is never going to happen in Africa either.
With a rapidity which defies belief, Mr Bezos, of Amazon.com, has delivered to my grasping hand Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s The Myth of National Defense, and a copy of Ludwig von Mises’ Bureaucracy, direct from Amazon’s Seattle headquarters, via standard shipping, in less than a week. Remarkable.
I thought I’d warm myself up for the big one, from Herr Hoppe, with the 1944 classic from Herr Von Mises. And what a true classic it is. I’m only on page 19, of its one hundred and thirty four pages, but already it has staggered me with its guillotine-sharp language, its brutal power, and its Germanic eloquence. Magnificent.
We simply are unworthy of this greatest of the twentieth century’s bearers of the flame of liberty.
One quote has already caught my eye, after a recent David Carr article:
It [modern socialism] is totalitarian in the strict sense of the term. It holds the individual in tight rein from the womb to the tomb. At every instant of his life the ‘comrade’ is bound to obey implicitly the orders issued by the supreme authority. The State is both his guardian and his employer. The State determines his work, his diet, and his pleasures. The State tells him what to think and what to believe in.
→ Continue reading: Gorge yourself stupid
It is now 2004 and may I take this opportunity of wishing all Samizdata readers a happy, healthy and prosperous New Year.
As for me, I have resolved that I will be in the same bad mood this year that I was in last year. It makes perfect sense. My enemies don’t change their ways, so why should I change mine?
It is time to stand up for the “nanny state” – for Jowell and Hodge and, in other areas, Patricia Hewitt and Harriet Harman. And also, in general, for the state’s right and duty to involve itself in questions of diet, health, family budgets and good parenting.
So it turns out that all the leftie carping about ‘big food’ in 2003 wasn’t a joke after all. They really mean it. I predict, before the end of 2004, a ‘burger tax’.
The crucial point which critics of the nanny state fail to mention is that individuals and families don’t stand alone. None of us lives in a neutral social space, unharassed, and free to make wise long-term choices. Whatever the philosophical ideal, in the real world we are bombarded by corporate messages cajoling us and our children to consume and borrow. We are inhabitants of the more, now, spend-it, eat-it society, which – let us not forget – boosts the profits of the multinationals.
We are also inhabitants of ban it, tax it, regulate it society which – let us not forget – boosts the profits of the political classes.
Health-hectoring is now being added to enviromentalism and ‘anti-racism’ as a legitimating ideology of the ruling class. Another self-sustaining justification for their power, wealth and status. Nothing new about that of course, only now they are prepared to put the whole process on public display before nailing it into place.
Alright, I wrote that quotation myself. But anyway, this is what I hate about the Guardian: it’s so damned gloomy (what I hate about the Telegraph of course, is the stair-lift adverts). Can anyone tell me exactly how the Guardian manages to publish this…
Newly revised predictions from the Government’s Actuary Department (GAD) reveal that the life expectancy for men who will be born in 2031 has risen to 81 years, compared with 75.9 years for those born in 2002. For women the figure jumps to 84.9 years, compared with 80.5 years for those born last year.
And now the bad news. The figures are around one and a half years higher than the GAD had assumed as recently as its last report in 2001, and will fuel further fears about the ability of future governments to cope with the profound problems associated with an ageing population.
…on the same day as this…
The full scale of the health timebomb caused by Britain’s descent into lazy lifestyles is to be exposed in a landmark report by the Government’s Chief Medical Officer.
Sir Liam Donaldson will spell out for the first time how two-thirds of Britons are now so inactive – with most people, particularly women, failing to do even the minimum recommended amount of ‘moderate’ exercise – that they are at risk of getting cancer, diabetes and heart disease.
I don’t know which is more shocking and dreadful, the fact that Brits are living longer or the fact that they take no notice of government fitness targets! Did you all get your fitness targets in the post? No? That’s strange, neither did I.
→ Continue reading: “Britons have longer, nicer lives” disaster!
It annoys the hell out of me when I hear the chattering classes in Britain describe this country’s decrepit socialist National Health System as ‘the envy of the world’… and it astounds me when idiots in the USA think it should be emulated over there.
As someone who has all too much first hand contact with the NHS, as well as having been at the tender mercy of other nation’s healthcare systems when I have broken bones, crashed cars, got shot, fallen through a weak floor, head-butted a flying bottle, been bitten by snakes/dogs/rats/, skied into trees, caught exotic unpronounceable tropical diseases and all the other things that happen to folks such as myself who travel to far off places and foolishly venture out of the hotel… and I can assure you that the NHS is at its best nothing special compared to much of the rest of the world and at its worst, it absolutely sucks. I certainly never saw a dirty ward in a hospital in Croatia or Ghana or the USA like those I have seen in Britain’s state run hospitals.
In reality, not only does the NHS provide indifferent care (an appointment I needed once took 11 months to arrange), it does so at vast cost and in reality a large chunk of the burden of healthcare is done privately. In fact, the NHS could not survive without a large healthcare private sector, the size of which Eamonn Butler points out over on the Adam Smith Institute’s own blog.
When my grandfather was gravely injured a few years ago, the treatment he received from the NHS was adequate – but after it became apparent that he was not able to look after himself any more due to brain damage, my family ended up shelling out well over £40,000 ($70,000) per year to keep him in a private nursing home which did not smell of piss. I am not complaining, after all what the hell is money for if not for something like that? However the role played by the non-state sector is a largely unsung one and I wish more people in Britain realised that the fact the state does not provide a healthcare service does not mean one will not be provided. If the state did not take such a whack of tax money to fund the monstrosity that is the NHS, far more people would have healthcare insurance.
Of course that might not end up costing much less than the existing system but the evidence outside Britain suggests it would certainly produce a higher quality system than the one of de facto healthcare rationing in use in the UK now.
The British Medical Association cuts to the chase. No shilly-shallying about. None of these namby-pamby half-measures or pathetic, milquetoast compromises, no, they have decided to go for the kill and demand another full-blown drug war:
Smoking should be completely banned in the UK, according to a top medical journal.
The Lancet said tens of thousands of lives would be saved by making tobacco an illegal substance and possession of cigarettes a crime.
Might as well really. The political climate is right, the enforcement apparatus is all in place and resistance will not be futile because it will be non-existant. In fact, they are probably kicking themselves for not coming out with this sooner.
Dr James said the government had already shown it was willing to pass similar legislation, such as banning the use of hand held mobile phones while driving.
Once again we see that appeasement does not work. Give the bullies an inch and next they want a mile. These people cannot be placated.
Forest director Simon Clark said the Lancet was “the true voice of the rabid anti-smoking zealot”.
He said smokers should not be treated as criminals, adding: “The health fascists are on the march.
Oh no, Simon, they have been on the march for decades. Now they have taken the citadel.
“What next? Will they urge the government to ban fatty foods and dairy products?”
Yes. There is no reason for them not to.
Empathy is the thing in schools history these days. You get the kids to think their way in to what it was really, truly like to be a fourteenth century Bohemian swineherd and feel their pain. Empathising with groups neglected and derided by the “Kings ‘N’ Battles” school of history is particularly favoured.
As part of my personal commitment to this school of thought, I’d like to bring up for public view the sufferings of a marginalised and stigmatised group. Slaveowners. Ever thought about their problems, huh? You probably think a person who can legally demand the unlimited services of another human has everything he wants. But you’d be wrong.
The ancient and modern chroniclers agree. Slaves were frequently lazy, dishonest and obstructive. Lacking initiative and zeal. Endlessly prone to saying, “yes massa, coming massa,” and yet still somehow unwilling to put their hearts, souls and scrubbing arms into bringing out that deep-clean sparkle when scrubbing out the vomitorium.
Here is Seneca, writing in the Rome of the first century AD: “A household of slaves requires dressing and feeding; a crowd of ravenous creatures have to have their bellies filled, clothing has to be bought, thieving hands have to be watched, and the service we get is rendered with resentment and curses.” (From On Tranquillity.)
Seneca knew no other system than slavery. In contrast English observers of the US writing after 1833 could observe the system from outside. I found several quotations in the Penguin Portable Victorian Reader illustrating how shoddy slave-work was. A passionate enemy of slavery, Charles Dickens, wrote “Richmond is a prettily situated town; but like other towns in slave districts (as the planters themselves admit) has an aspect of decay and gloom which to an unaccustomed eye is most distressing.”
Even an opponent of slavery as lukewarm as William Makepeace Thackeray had to admit, writing to a friend in England: “Every person I have talked to here about it deplores it and owns that it is the most costly domestic machinery ever devised. In a house where four servants would do with us …. there must be a dozen blacks here, and the work is not well done.”
→ Continue reading: Life is still tough for the owners of lazy slaves.
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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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