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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Privacy advocates are appalled by the ongoing plan to equip all U.S. passports with RFID chips that can be read surreptitiously from a distance Business Week reports. Computer security expert Bruce Schneier says:
We do need passports with more data. But they chose a chip that can be queried remotely and surreptitiously. I can’t think of any reason why the government would do that, other than that they want surreptitious access. And if airport and border security guards can read everyone’s passports on the sly, so could anyone with a radio-chip reader, from terrorists to identity thieves.
Stop! Have you not raped the planet enough? Is it not time that you lifted your greedy foot from the head of the oppressed?
Put down that cup of steaming, hot coffee right now. Toss that doughnut away. Rip off your cotton T-shirt and consign it to the rubbish tip.
There. Doesn’t that feel so much better? And would you not like to feel this good all the time? Wouldn’t you just love to luxuriate in the warm, satisfying glow of self-righteousness? Tell me that would not like to tuck yourself up in your cosy bed at night and sleep the sleep of the just?
Well, now you can do all of those things. Yes, those guilty days and sleepless nights are at an end for you too can reach out for the ‘Rough Guide to Ethical Shopping’:
Along with the usual demons such as Nike and Gap, which are routinely accused of using sweatshops to keep production costs low, are other alleged villains. The fashion label French Connection is accused of having a “feeble” code on ensuring its clothes are not produced in sweatshops, while the Arcadia boss Philip Green, who owns Top Shop and BhS, has refused to join the UK’s Ethical Trading Initiative.
Ah yes, the UK’s Ethical Trading Initiative. Otherwise known as a ‘shakedown’ → Continue reading: Shopping for the Insufferably Sanctimonious
… Gunpowder treason and plot!
I shall be going out tonight to give that Catholic boy Guy Fawkes a rousing send off on this most politically incorrect of nights.
The liberal-leaning USA Today describes The Guardian today as a “left-leaning British newspaper”, showing a rather more sophisticated understanding of British political culture than the self-styled most intelligent newspaper in the UK can demonstrate of the world.
We now know that Clark County, the target for a Guardian operation to get out the vote for the Democrats, was the only county in Ohio to switch from a Democrat majority to a Republican one. The idea that Holland Park socialists living in £5 million homes could communicate with the concerns of a district of Ohio where $100,000 is considered a lot of money to spend on housing is bizarre.
In fact it is the exact reverse of the old Tory caricature: grandees looking down their noses at the ‘Great Unwashed’ and telling them what to do, for their own good of course. The true sign of just how ridiculous the Guardianistas are, they have no idea how arrogant and stupid they sound in the real world.
Every conservative and libertarian criticism of President Bush is at least partly justified. He has not vetoed any spending proposal from Congress. He has presided over a terrible budgetary situation (to the point where I almost oppose the tax cuts on the grounds that the budget deficit has to be contained first). He did introduce steel tariffs (which did not win him Pennsylvania or Michigan). The policy in Iraq worries me (since the spectacular successes of liberating Bagdad and later capturing Saddam Hussein) by looking all too similar to the political fudges of Vietnam in the late 1960s. I like the idea of the US spending money on Iraqi state education and a national health service no more than I would like it in Camden. I still think North Korea was and remains a bigger threat to the West than Iraq. The Patriot Act is at the very best a temporary necessary evil. And I am not so sure about “at the very best” or it being “temporary” and “necessary”.
But the tribal test of elections is simple. All the bad guys, the Guardian readers, the little-Hitler bureaucrats, anti-smokers, the Socialists, idiot British Conservatives like Alan Duncan, the Palestinian 9/11 cheerleaders, the terrorists, the UN crooks, virtually the entire Left worldwide. They are the ones reaching for Kleenex, anti-depressant pills and shaking their fists at God.
All the people I know that are cheering are the good guys. I have even made this Guardian article my home page on IE, so that every morning for the next few weeks, I am reminded that We win and They lose sometimes.
Just to cast a slightly different view in to the frenzy of commentaries here about the election in the USA…
Sorry but I cannot see how the election of George Bush, a big government right-statist, shows that the the so-called ‘right’ differs that much from the McGovern/Mondale/Kerry view in reality. Fetishizing the differences between the two, which is particularly strange when viewed from overseas, does not change the fact the underpinning meta-contexts are pretty similar when you add it all up. Sure, the Republicans will probably not do something idiotic like try to emulate Britain’s nightmarish socialist healthcare system whereas that is exactly what many in the Democratic party want… but how many government departments is Bush going to simply wind up in order to roll back the state? The argument between the two parties is how much to turn the ratchet of the state’s encroachment into civil society, not whether or not to actually turn the ratchet around to face the other way.
Economic and technological reality will eventually break the regulatory statism of both left and right: party politicos will follow, not lead that process, but please, just keep in mind the only real good thing about Dubya winning is that we get to give all manner of sanctamonius lefties an aneurism, and whilst taunting the collectivist left because the collectivist right won is indeed great fun, it is little more that a minor blood sport that will soon loose its appeal as Leviathan gets more corpulent by the day as both left and right shovel more severed bits of civil society into its maw… the defeat of the ghastly Kerry by the ever so slightly less ghastly Bush was hardly the victory of the forces of light over darkness.
What makes dictators dictators is not that they don’t believe in the power of the majority but that they don’t believe in the rights of the individual.
– Adriana Cronin
This observation by Big Trunk at Powerline certainly took the shine off of my morning:
When the electorate rejected George McGovern in 1972 and Walter Mondale in 1984, it did so on each occasion by a margin of roughly 20 percent. The McGovern/Mondale/Kerry view of the United States has made enormous inroads in the past twenty years. It is less than three percent short of a majority and the trendline seems to be moving in its favor. Shouldn’t we be asking what we need to do to roll it back before it crosses over to majority status?
Simson Garfinkel of MIT Enterprise Technology explains:
RFID technology is already broadly deployed within the United States. Between the “proximity cards” that are used to unlock many office doors and the automobile “immobilizer chips” that are built into many modern car keys, roughly 40 million Americans carry some form of RFID device in their pocket every day. I have two: last year MIT started putting RFID proximity chips into the school’s identity cards, and there is a Phillips immobilizer chip inside the black case of my Honda Pilot car keys.
He comes to an interesting conclusion:
The problem of voluntary, industry-approved privacy standards is that they’re voluntary—companies don’t need to comply with them. And the very real danger facing the RFID industry is that a suspicious public will push for regulation of this technology. Although the industry has successfully killed legislation proposed earlier this year in California and Massachusetts, high-handed actions on the part of RFID-advocates will likely empower consumer activists and their legislative allies to pass some truly stifling legislation.
Indeed.
Iraq The Model has translated comments of Iraqi’s about the US election that were posted to the BBCArabic site. You can read them all
here
The election victory of George Bush is a hugely significant event in its own right but at least part of the reason why it gets so much coverage here is due to the near-absence of anything good happening in the UK. It has been this way for years.
Hence, I am doubly-delighted to note that a small proportion of the British electorate has done something right for a change:
People in the North East have voted “no” in a referendum on whether to set up a new regional assembly.
The total number of people voting against the plans was 696,519 (78%), while 197,310 (22%) voted in favour.
That is not just a ‘no’, it is a big, fat, resounding ‘no’.
The ‘new regional assembly’ that HMG was attempting to foist on the public was supposed to be the first of many similar boondoggles designed (allegedly) to facilitate ‘local decision making’.
Dressed up in the fuzzy, fashionable, eminantly spinnable language of ‘decentralisation’, these assemblies actually represent nothing more than yet another grossly expensive tier of government, complete with an army of paper-shufflers, ticket-punchers, regulators, office-holders, rubber stampers and form-fillers. Not to mention the heavy battalions of outreach co-ordinators, inclusivity counsellors, gender advisers, diversity directors, real nappy officers and sundry other busybodies and parasites.
In short, the whole thing is simply an ‘Enemy Class’ job-creation scheme and I like to think that (at long last) some sections of the British electorate were able to see the truth of this. Perhaps, just maybe, some of the long-suffering British cash cows have decided that they have donated more than enough blood to these Vampires-Who-Walk-By-Day.
HMG has promised that, in the event the referendum was lost, they would drop the whole idea. I am not at all confident they will abide by that pledge. The career ambitions of their supporters will not be so easily thwarted.
But, for now at least, I am prepared to bask in the moment and declare myself temporarily content.
I am happy and relieved by the result of the US election. I thank those who campaigned, volunteered or just plain voted to keep the right man at the helm.
All the same, I take literally the statement that democracy is the least worst form of government.
Many here argue that we do not need any government at all. It is not going away any time soon, though. Most anarchists and minarchists will concede that modern liberal democracy is fertile ground compared to the despotic wasteland that makes up most of history, even if it is not yet a garden of libertarian delights.
I figured out as a child that the least wonderful aspect of a modern liberal democracy is that it lets the majority decide: the tyranny of the majority is to be feared. Votes are a mechanism to deal with the fact that some administrative variables affecting many people (speed limits, for instance, or surrenders) must be set at a predictable value for a recognisable group, or bad stuff happens.
I also figured out as a child that the good soul of a liberal democracy, the thing that has made us the most fortunate human beings in history, is the idea that every individual matters. None of us can be made to stop mattering because we look wrong or do wrong. That’s why every individual has certain rights that cannot be…
…OK, OK, I had better stop myself before I re-hash the Declaration of Independence in much inferior prose. You know all this. You can probably cite references. Please do!
It is a pity it ever has to come to voting. Votes by definition make some people sad. Yet we go on and on about majorities and mandates and elections and other things to do with the regrettable majoritarian aspects of our system. We talk much less about how the only reason that counting people matters is that people count. And, as we on this blog know, it is a constant struggle to defend individual rights against the majority.
I just wondered, is the reason that we so exalt the rule of the majority over the more fundamental principle of equality before the law simply because we picked the wrong ruddy name for our system of government? Everybody knows that we don’t mean by democracy what the Greeks meant by it. We don’t have ostracism. We don’t have slavery. These prohibitions are not mere differences of custom but integral to the system. The difference between our ‘democracy’ and theirs is precisely that we believe in inalienable rights and equality under the law. So whose bleedin’ stupid idea was it to call our system the Greek word for “people-rule?” It was sure to give folk the wrong idea. If we had just called it isonomy instead we would all be a lot better off.
The No2ID campaign has established an e-petition aimed at 10 Downing Street demanding the end to plans for imposing mandatory ID cards and pervasive state databases recording a vast range of what you do in your life.
The No2ID campaigners have taken the line of principled objection, given that the government seem to have decided that there is no longer any room for public debate and refuses to engage with serious – and growing – civil liberty and privacy concerns with the scheme. The Home Office have not met once with civil liberties organisations yet say their concerns have been addressed whilst at the same time avoiding public meetings but at the same time having private briefing with technology partners for introducing the schemes.
Take a stand and make your voice heard while you still can at www.no2id-petition.net. Time is fast running out.
The state is not your friend.
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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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