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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Human beings are a strange lot. Despite being blessed (theoretically at least) with the powers of critical analysis they are nonetheless wont to form an unquestioning consensus around an idea that makes little sense and produces consistently awful outcomes. In fact, the awfulness of the outcomes seems to be directly proportionate to the dogmatic insistence that there cannot possibly be any other way of doing things.
I can think of no clearer example of this than compulsory education: a bad idea which is (by and large) badly implemented by the state in the form of day-prisons which act as a factory for producing unacceptably large numbers of witless, traumatised, ignorant, semi-literate teenagers and not an insignificant number of violent, anti-social thugs.
Nor is this a secret shame. Indeed, it is the subject of much national hand-wringing about ‘what to do’. And yet, if I dare to suggest that the whole idea of incarcerating children for at least 10 years and then indoctrinating them with the things that politicians think they should know about is both counterproductive and immoral and bound to produce very little except awful outcomes, the reaction I get is rather similar to the one I imagine I would get if I were to demand that all pregnant women be injected with rabies.
Still, the best way to deal with a ‘truth-that-dare-not-speak-its-name’ is to speak it; often and boldly. That is why we need press releases like this one from the Libertarian Alliance:
“State schooling is an instrument of ruling class control. It is a means by which ideologies of obedience are imposed on the young.
State schools have always encouraged intellectual passivity and trust in the authorities. In the past generation, they have begun also to celebrate illiteracy, innumeracy and a general ignorance of the world. Add to this endemic bullying and temptations to unwise experimenting with sex and recreational drugs, and we have in state schooling a comprehensive absence of what used to be meant by education.
Rising truancy levels are to be welcomed. They show that increasing numbers of the young are withdrawing from the process of mass brainwashing. The young may not yet be expressing positive discontent with the corporatist police state New Labour and the Conservatives have made for us. But they are beginning to vote with their feet.
While the Libertarian Alliance does not encourage breaches of the criminal law, even if the law happens to be pointless or malevolent, we do look forward to a time when state schooling will be as dead an institution as the workhouse and the debtor’s prison.”
And when that day comes, human beings (being a somewhat strange lot) will be disinclined to recall or even believe in a time when there was a consensus around state education.
This just in from the US Defense Department:
WASHINGTON, August 2, 2006 – The National Guard has exceeded its troop requirement along the southwestern U.S. border by almost 200 servicemembers and is assisting U.S. Border Patrol activities there, a senior Defense Department official said here today.
We were obligated, by Aug. 1, to have 6,000 National Guardsmen deployed to the four-state southwest border region. And, in fact, as of close of business yesterday, we had 6,199 soldiers, Paul McHale, assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense, said in an interview.
Now if they had not met the stated goal, that would naturally have been newsworthy…
A woman who had (what I certainly think was) a humorous sign on her gate saying “Our dogs are fed on Jehovah’s Witnesses” was forced to take it down by British police because it is “distressing, offensive and inappropriate”. Yet seeing as Muslim extremists can walk down the street holding signs threatening to decapitate people, all with a police escort, it is clearly time to stop co-operating with the police and being so damn polite to them. Instead urge them not to allow themselves to be used to repress people’s right to express themselves and force them to fill out as much paperwork as possible. Got a lawyer? Call him. Just do not meekly co-operate.
We need to establish that there is no right not to be offended that trumps the reasonable right to self-expression. In fact I would argue that police escorted Muslims have already established that. If Muslims extremists can threaten people with death unless they express themselves in accordance with the restrictions Muslim activists want imposed on them, then we clearly do indeed have the right to make jokes about feeding Jehovah’s Witnesses to our dogs.
So stop making the job of the police easy when they try to impose such restrictions. If they want to stop you expressing themselves, do not threaten them but do not feel any great need to be unduly polite, make them arrest you and take the matter to court, every single time. I often go out wearing a tee-shirt saying “My Imam went to Mecca and all he got me was this lousy Tee-shirt”. Offensive? I do not think so but if anyone disagrees, I will not take it off and will force any policeman who takes issue with it to arrest me if he wants to stop me walking around wearing it.
Take a look at this… Jenna Jameson in a really strange bit of video weirdness. This is not the sort of thing you should ‘over-think’ in the comment section.
The Spectator is, and has been for many years, the leading conservative magazine in the United Kingdom. By ‘conservative’ I do not mean that it always supports the Conservative party (it has often had articles that have attacked the certain aspects of the Conservative party), but that the magazine opposes the socialist-social democratic forces that have dominated the United Kingdom for many decades (and it must be remembered that the basic cultural institutions of the United Kingdom remained under socialist-social democratic control even when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister).
However, it has long been a open secret in conservative and libertarian circles that The Spectator is often somewhat half hearted in its opposition to the “left” (for want of a better word). So one has to be careful about buying it. Under a poor editor, or even on a bad week in the time of a good editor, it may be little better than the BBC.
Last week I bought a copy of The Spectator. I wanted a change from the death-to-Israel, death-to-America line of all the television and radio stations and much of the print media in Britain (not that they have guts to just say ‘death-to-the-Jews’ of course – outlets like the BBC on the Daily Mail claim not to be anti Jewish in the slightest, it is just a matter of opposing the bad things that Israel does and opposing the backing of the United States gives to Israel).
The editor of The Spectator (Matthew d’Acona) may be a friend of the unprincipled David Cameron (present leader of the Conservative party), but he (like, to be fair, many of the people around Mr Cameron) is known to be pro-America and pro-Israel.
Also on the front cover of The Spectator it was advertised that Norman Tebbit had written an article. Tebbit was Chairman of the Conservative party when Margaret Thatcher was leader. He was always an independent man willing to argue with Mrs T. if need be, but always a loyal and honourable and was badly wounded by an IRA bomb (the same bomb left his wife paralysed and many other people dead) which led to his semi withdrawal from politics, thus leaving Margaret Thatcher exposed to the plots of her enemies. The Tebbit article was good (a polite demolition of Mr Cameron’s line of policy – too polite for my taste, but that is the way Norman Tebbit writes).
And there were other good articles in the magazine, however two very bad articles were present.
The first was by the ex Labour ‘minister for Europe’ (i.e. minister for the EU) Denis MacShane… → Continue reading: Two bad articles in The Spectator
For all the arguments between the Chicago and Austrian schools of economics, the fact remains that Milton Friedman is one of the good guys. Milton Friedman has struggled for freedom all his life and has brought the basic ideas of private property rights and free markets to more people (via, for example, his weekly article in Newsweek magazine and in his best selling books such as ‘Capitalism and Freedom’ and ‘Free to Choose’) than any other person alive.
Like millions of other people I express my good wishes to Dr Friedman, to Rose Friedman and to their children and whole family.
The picture on top of this New York Times story about Iran’s reaction to the conflict in Lebanon demonstrates the problem.
It also distracts from the story itself, which is pretty interesting in the way it describes how many hopes, and fears, the Iranian regime has invested in Hezbollah.
Its fears are about the military damage that Hezbollah is sustaining under the weight of Israel’s attack. That is something that is totally speculative, as we don’t have any way to assess it. However given the weight of fire that northern Israel is under at the moment, it is quite possible that Hezbollah is being weakened quite considerably by the sheer volume of munitions that it is expending.
I am not a military person at all, but I cannot help but wonder what the military situation might be like if Hezbollah used its rocket artillery strictly against military targets.
Be that as it may, Iran feels that it is benefiting from the increased prestige that Hezbollah is getting from Arab populations, which normally would be denied it for sectarian differences. It is a moot point how well that prestige will last when the fighting stops and Hezbollah has to account for its actions to the rest of the Lebanese community, which is by no means pleased with what Hezbollah has done.
But I still can not get over that image from the streets of Tehran.
Pinewood Studios, the place where the latest 007 movie is being made, has been damaged so badly by fire that it may have to be demolished. Very sad. The place has been used to make James Bond and other films for many years. I wonder whether the ghost of Fleming was appalled at the choice of actor and sent down a thunderbolt?
For a whimsical look at Bond’s place in post-British film and publishing and this country’s history, this whimsical book by Simon Winder is great and rather informative about the Cold War era phase of British history, despite the odd error of detail.
Kevin Connors mentioned this blog story about the fascinating new small jet from Honda to me a few days ago and I remembered it when I ran across this today:
Honda announced today it will begin taking orders for a new, small jet aircraft later this year.
The HondaJet, unveiled last year, will enter the “very light jet” market in the United States, the company said.
It sounds like quite a nice piece of kit:
The sleek jet has an an all-glass flight deck. An over-the-wing engine design maximizes space in the fuselage for passengers and luggage, the company said. The configuration is also said to reduce drag at high speed to improve fuel efficiency.
The prototype jet, which seats up to seven, has completed more than 240 hours of flight testing, flying to 43,000 feet and hitting 412 knots.
I am much afraid I will not be running out to buy one myself, but I will certainly have my camera ready to click on it at first sight!
Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic expects to start flying in 2008.
Designer Philippe Starck, former soap star Victoria Principal and ‘Superman Returns’ director Bryan Singer have booked their flights for tourist trips in outer space, an official from the company selling the galactic voyage said Monday.
Virgin Galactic, a Virgin Group company, has sold some 200 tickets to passengers for suborbital flights, starting in 2008, said Will Whitehorn, the company’s president.
It has collected 8.5 million pounds (US$15.6 million, euro12.4 million) in deposits for the flights that cost 109,000 pounds (US$200,000, euro158,000).
Despite the seemingly hard scheduled time here, I have heard Virgin Galactic officials state emphatically they will not fly until Burt Rutan says SpaceShipTwo is ready nor will they put pressure on him to rush the job. Branson is in this for the long haul, and that means he has to ‘Bring ’em Back Alive’.
The official report on the SpaceX Falcon-1 launch termination at Kwajalein in the Pacific has been released and as it turns out, the problem was not human error after all. it was subsurface corrosion, possibly due to the tropical ocean climate and galvanic action, of a single nut on a fuel pump.
You can read more about it here.
Elon Musk’s next launch is now scheduled for November.
Angloslavia was originally a term coined by Ken MacLeod in his science fictions series about The Fall Revolution. If you have not picked these four books up, you should do so, now! The term is utilised here as a playful reference to the current flow of immigration from East Central Europe into the United Kingdom. This flow has serious consequences due to the interplay between immigration and public services. East European workers naturally respond to the market incentives provided by New Labour’s decision to open up Britain’s employment market. This improving migration is combined with an inflexible public sector which is not geared towards dealing with such a large increase in local populations. This inflexibility is due to the incompetence of New Labour’s administration, since they appear to have undermined, indeed destroyed, the Northcote-Trevelyan ethos of the mid-Victorian civil service, that ensured Britain’s civil service was more competent than most for a while.
A massive rise in immigration next year could trigger a devastating crisis in Britain’s schools, housing and welfare services, according to a secret Government report leaked to The Mail on Sunday.
The document reveals that every Government department has been ordered to draw up multi-million-pound emergency plans after being told public services face catastrophe as a result of the hundreds of thousands of Eastern Europeans pouring into Britain.
The government faces disaster if the courts, applying European law, conclude that all East European immigrants are eligible for the same benefits as United Kingdom subjects. A large influx will either force up taxes to pay for the extra services and benefits required, rewrite the rules to ensure that public services remain remain viable through radical reform, or do nothing.
One of her [Home Office Minister Joan Ryan] biggest fears is that the courts may force the Government to scrap its restrictions on East European immigrants applying for council houses or benefits. At present, they receive some benefits only if they register for work – which one in three don’t do – and earn full benefit rights after they have worked for a year.
Ms Ryan says: “The legal basis for this is precarious and there is a strong risk of a successful challenge. This is a concern.”
Benefits will provide an additional incentive for immigration from Eastern Europe. The pressures that this will place on the welfare state may provide a force for accelerated reform, since the free market will provide services cheaply and more efficiently, if given free rein.
So far, the addition of cheap flights to Eastern Europe, the added mix of Slavic tongues to polyglot London and the chance to taste more beers from exotic climes, has proved an exciting experience. Let us give the same chance to Sofia and Bucharest.
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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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