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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Here are a couple of recent stories, both recently linked to by Instapundit, that I think deserve to be put next to each other.
First, here is a quote I found while rootling about in the McCain/Feingold story, which Dale Amon has already posted about here. Here is the bit that interested me:
These laws are decidedly NOT aimed at online press, commentary or blogs, and the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 was carefully drafted to exclude them. The FEC has now been asked to initiate a rulemaking to work out how to deal with different kinds of Internet political expenditures, and there will be plenty of opportunity for public commentary.
This denial is, of course, the result of the exact opposite having been alleged. I read it because one Winfield Myers of the Democracy Project quotes it, and notes that the quotee, a hot shot lawyer, makes very little of his past legal relationship with McCain. Bloggers prefer it when they know where people are coming from.
And the second quote, is from a review of a book called Go Directly to Jail: The Criminalization of Almost Everything.
McNab was a seafood importer who shipped undersized lobsters and lobster tails in opaque plastic bags instead of paper bags. These were trivial violations of a Honduran regulation – equivalent to a civil infraction, or at most, a misdemeanor. However, using creative lawyering, a government prosecutor used this misdemeanor offense as the basis for the violation of the Lacey Act, which is a felony. The prosecutor then used the Lacey Act charge as a basis to stack on smuggling and money laundering counts. You got that?
McNab was guilty of smuggling since he shipped lobster tails in bags that you can see through, instead of shipping them through bags that would frustrate visual inspection. He was guilty of money laundering since he paid a crew on his ship to “smuggle the tails.” Although it turned out that the Honduran regulation was improperly enacted and thus unenforceable, the government did not relent. A honest businessman lost his property and his freedom: McNab is serving 8-years in prison.
Okay, so what do the tribulations of a seafood importer have to do with the right of bloggers to blog what they damn well please? Well, what interests me is the political process involved in both matters. How the hell do the laws and the processes that got poor Mr McNab nabbed get put in place in the first place? The phrase “not aimed at” is the point of this posting. → Continue reading: “Not aimed at who?”: how distributed governmental stupidity McNabs the innocent
A week ago I hosted a meeting at my home, and took photos, a couple of which are, I now think on looking through them again, rather good.
This one, of Samizdatista Philip Chaston, shows him in full put-that-bloody-camera-away mode:
But I carried on snapping, and also got this rather nice pic, of the speaker that night, Patrick Crozier (left as we look) and of occasional Samizdata commenter on behalf of the Total Libertarian Correctness tendency, Paul Coulam (right – as always):
This photograph is my response to this, which, alas, was then getting into its evil stride.
Although, I recently, in a moment of disgusted introspection, found myself understanding where the mania to ban smoking comes from. A friend had asked, yet again, if I minded him smoking in my home. In truth I do mind, but tolerate it from friends. (Non-friends who smoke in my home disgust me.) So the answer is usually, as it was last Friday, okay go ahead. After all, if they want to smoke, I can either cross them off my friend list, or put up with it and stop moaning. Easy.
Well, no. What I would like would be some magic procedure which would stop them smoking, so that they could remain on my friend list without any reservations or difficulties or embarrassments or resentments.
The thing about laws is that they have little impact on criminals, but they can change the habits of the law abiding. So, if you want some of your friends to behave differently, the law can magically achieve what you alone cannot. I cannot make my smoking friends stop smoking. But the law can!
To which my answer, to myself, is: Get thee behind me Satan. I will not support legal coercion merely because it will solve a tricky little problem in my personal life. But to which, alas, the answer of many others is: We want our friends to stop smoking, but we cannot merely say that, and pass the law. So instead we must dress our tastes up in the language of care and concern, and jabber on about health hazards, and best of all about passive smoking.
The simple truth is that lots of non-smokers simply do not like it when smokers smoke in their vicinity, or worse, in their homes and workplaces. They do not like it. They want it stopped. Health, for many people is, if you will pardon the metaphor, a mere smokescreen. Personally, I do not give a damn what my friends are doing to their health. That really is their business and not mine at all. The smell of smoking in my flat, for several days afterwards, that is what I wish would go away.
No doubt there is some kind of spray on stuff that would help me, but you know how it is. That is just one more stupid thing to have to worry about. How much easier would it be if the law could just put a stop to it! (No! Satan! Go away I say.)
The serious point is: if I were to get my smoking ban, what would be next?
Digital photography perhaps? Such a ban would surely attract widespread support.
A regular theme remarked upon here and elsewhere has been the big growth in people working – if that is the right verb – in Britain’s public sector. On the most cautious estimates, about half a million new jobs have been added to the public payroll since the present Labour government came to power in 1997. This article in the current issue of the Spectator puts that figure, after revisions, even higher, to more than 800,000. Jeysus.
It goes without saying that the article concludes that much of this increase is designed to build a powerful constuency in favour of voting Labour and embracing Big Government. No kidding.
The article goes on to say that the process is likely to end once big tax rises are necessary to foot the bill, provoking an explosion of anger similar to that at the trade union public sector mayhem in the 1970s. I hope a more pleasant resolution is at hand. If the Tories are half-smart, they will figure out a way to outflank Labour and put some radical, attractive options on the table. Some juicy tax cuts might be a good start.
On that happy note, I am off to enjoy the rest of Friday evening.
There has been a great deal of discussion today about the McCann-Feingold attack on the First Amendment. These lowlives are behind the most dangerous attack on American civil liberties in my life time and probably even that of our oldest readers.
They are gutting the First Amendment.
I have gone to Senator McCain’s comment page and left the following polemic:
Dear Sirs:
Should you attempt to overthrow the First Amendment on the internet, I will disobey.
I will not answer the court.
I refuse to pay fines.
I will organize civil disobedience against your Communist style election rules.
I will never, ever, submit to this attempt to destroy American liberty.
With utter enmity and ill will,
Dale Amon.
Live Free or Die.
I hope y’all will come visit me when they send the Marines to Belfast to haul my ass off to a Federal prison for the crime of Lese Majeste and inciting Civil Disobedience.
Actually, I hope to see a lot of you there with me. Massive in your face disobedience is the only real answer to this all out attack on our Constitution and Bill of Rights.
It does not matter what your politics are: Left, Right, Center or Libertarian. We have to hang together and fight these bastards.
PS: It is never too early to begin the campaign to unseat them.
I have long believed that Robert Mugabe, ruler of the hapless Zimbabwe, will die before he ever admits to having made a mistake. Yet the Telegraph now offers this report, about how Mugabe has admitted to making a mistake!
President Robert Mugabe confessed yesterday that millions of acres of prime land seized from Zimbabwe’s white farmers are now lying empty and idle.
Confessed.
After years spent trumpeting the “success” of the land grab, Mr Mugabe, 81, admitted that most of the farms transferred to black owners have never been used.
Admitted.
But what did Mugabe actually say?
… in his home province yesterday, Mr Mugabe chided the new landowners for growing crops on less than half of their land.
“President Mugabe expressed disappointment with the land use, saying only 44 per cent of the land distributed is being fully utilised,” state television reported. “He warned the farmers that the government will not hesitate to redistribute land that is not being utilised.”
In other words, Mugabe admitted no wrongdoing at all. He made the right decision. It was the people who were charged with implementing the decision who did wrong, by failing to grow as much food as they should have.
Plenty of other people are saying that Mugabe made a mistake with this larcenous policy:
Critics said Mr Mugabe’s admission exposed the land grab’s “failure”.
“It has been a phenomenal and absolute failure on every level,” said Tendai Biti, secretary for economic affairs of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change. “It has failed both in terms of production of crops and in terms of the occupation of the land.”
And what is more, they seem to have supplied the Telegraph with a reason for the failure of the new farmers to farm successfully:
The new farmers are unable to raise bank loans because their properties are formally owned by the government and they have no individual title deeds. Without loans, they cannot buy seed, fertiliser or farming equipment and the regime has broken a pledge to supply them with tools.
Some farmers have resorted to using horse-drawn ploughs. Many have given up trying to produce anything at all.
So Mr Mugabe has made yet another mistake, this time in mishandling the arrangements for the new farmers with whom he has replaced the previous ones he stole from. But has he admitted it? No. Has he shifted the blame onto the hapless farmers? Yes. I would not want to be in their shoes now.
Par for the course. Mugabe is infallible. Reality is unworthy of him and has let him down.
But more importantly, this is a revolution that is starting to devour its own, to implode. Those “new farmers” are, or were, enthusiastic Mugabe supporters, were they not?. Now they are being blamed for the failure of a Mugabe policy. With luck, this means that this vile regime is now starting seriously to weaken itself, rather than merely to weaken its enemies.
If that is right, it might help to explain this:
Zimbabwe will hold parliamentary elections on March 31 and, for the first time in 10 years, Mr Mugabe is no longer holding out the offer of white-owned land as a vote-winner. Instead, his speeches are dominated by attacks on Tony Blair, who he claims is plotting to recolonise Zimbabwe.
I daresay many of his listeners are thinking: that sounds good. When is the Great White Blair due?
As I have said before, Robert Mugabe is now the leading spreader of the idea that Africa should be reconquered by white people.
Samizdata has been a bit quiet for the last few months, by its early standards. Partly, this has been because a lot of us have become busier, doing our various versions of real life. But partly, I suspect, it is because the big story out there during the last few months, the onward march of democracy in the Middle East, first in the form of the Iraq election, and then in the form of the demands for more democracy stirred up by the example of the Iraq election, has been somewhat of an embarrassment to us Samizdatistas. While Instapundit and his many linkees have exulted, only the occasional grudging posting here, to the effect that democracy is a step in roughly the right direction, has broken our silence on this subject.
The Samizdata view of democracy, most eloquently expressed by Perry de Havilland, is that democracy is one thing, and freedom is quite another. Freedom is freedom. And democracy means the mob doing whatever the hell it likes, which may be freedom but which is just as likely to be tyranny.
Few now talk this way. Nowadays, the tendency is to regard freedom and democracy as so closely related to one another as to amount to a new noun and a single thing: freedomandemocracy.
Freedomandemocracy has been the great ideological winner of the twentieth century. At the beginning of the century, conservatives and old-school liberals were still to be heard denouncing freedomandemocracy as mob rule, Perry de Havilland style. Then, other isms arose, full of the certainty that their preferred revolutionary and/or national (mix to taste) elite knew best and that freedomandemocracy was doomed, by its incoherence, moral mediocrity, lack of national team spirit, and general shabbiness, feebleness and decadence. But as the twentieth century rolled onwards, freedomandemocracy proved surprisingly resilient, and it was the isms that proved shabby and decadent, and morally far worse than mediocre. And freedomandemocracy now marches onwards into the new century, ready to chalk up yet more triumphs, leaving the old isms behind …
… to face new isms, in the Middle East. So now, freedomandemocracy, under the canny leadership of President George W. Bush, is busy threatening to knock over more dominoes.
Why does democracy work so well? And why do people insist on lumping it together with freedom?
In this posting, I will try to expand on ideas which I have already touched upon in a previous posting here. I am not, in this posting – together with any on freedomandemoracy that may follow (I promise nothing), aiming at most people, because most people do not need to be sold on democracy, or on why it feels so much like freedom. This posting is aimed at people who, like me, have embraced libertarian political axioms, to the point where we have become so acutely aware of the differences between freedom and democracy that we prefer to speak of freedom versus democracy. We need to know why and how democracy is proving to be such a formidable enemy of our ideas, and in what way it is also a formidable ally. Because my point here is: those most people have a point, in fact lots of points. Freedom and democracy do overlap in lots of ways, which I will now try to start itemising.
The first and greatest argument in favour of the connection between freedom and democracy is that democracy is preferable to civil war, and that civil war is extremely bad for freedom. → Continue reading: Freedomandemocracy: on how democracy is better than civil war and on why the next election must not be cancelled
For some reason, the decision by Bill Gates to become an honorary British knight makes me sad. Has the founder of Microsoft finally, and completely, sold out to the “establishment”? Has his bruising encounter with the looters, whoops, I meant U.S. Justice Dept and EU Commission made him yearn for a respectable, quieter life?
Somehow, I cannot see Steve Jobs wanting a gong.
Irony, or hypocrisy? You decide.
In one of those events that barely even raises an eyebrow anymore, one of the leaders of the “Million Mom March” in favor of (even more) gun control, was arrested on firearms violations.
A Springfield woman who began lobbying against gun violence after her son was shot to death in 2002 was arrested last week when police allegedly found an illegal gun and drugs in her home.
First, lets be clear – she wasn’t lobbying against gun violence, she was lobbying against gun ownership. The Million Mom March was all about driving guns out of everyone’s hands, regardless of criminality.
So just what was she busted for? Having a gun with a scratched-off serial number, and not having firearms owner ID card (required by Illinois). Two classic gun-grabber laws, here being applied to someone who admits that she had the gun in question.
In other words, she admits violating the laws in question. One wonders if she will plead guilty and volunteer for jail time, as her beliefs would seem to require. Well, one wonders only if one is terminally naive – she is fighting the case, apparently unwilling to live with the consequences of the restrictions she wants to impose on others.
In an article titled The Fall and Fall of Blogging Debate in Britain, fellow Samizdatista Jackie Danicki puts the boot in (though in a quite measured way) regarding ‘expert’ views on the nature of blogging and how it relates to journalism. She attended a high profile event at the London School of Economics called The Fall and Fall of Journalism and was clearly deeply unimpressed with what she heard. Read the whole thing.
If anything is evident it should be that, while nations might abide by formal rules on which they have agreed, they will never submit to the direction which international economic planning involves – that while they may agree on the rules of the game, they will never agree on the order of preference in which the rank of their own needs and the rate at which they are allowed to advance is fixed by majority vote. Even if, at first, the peoples should, under some illusion about the meaning of such proposals, agree to transfer such powers to an international authority, they would soon find out that what they have delegated is not merely a technical task, but the most comprehensive power over their very lives.
Hayek ‘The Road to Serfdom’ (Routledge edition: Page 236)
The gods of Samizdata decree that linking to The Times of London is discouraged. But I am going to at least quote from it. Twice.
First, here is William Rees-Mogg on the EU Constitution, but stating a general rule:
So long as our Government takes us for fools, we have every reason to take them for liars.
Meanwhile, my former neighbour Mr George Thomas, on the letters page, demonstrates an application of the rule:
Tony Blair claims that “there is no greater civil liberty than to live free from terrorist attack”.
He is wrong. If the 20th century teaches us anything it is that the greatest threat to civil liberty comes from governments that have been allowed to exercise excessive power over their own people. The greatest civil liberty is to live securely protected from government intrusion. We have seen that, while terrorists can threaten the lives of hundreds and maybe thousands, governments can oppress and maltreat entire peoples and can do this for decades.
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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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