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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I think I may have stumbled upon (or possibly even coined) a counter-cultural smear word for deployment by the good guys against the bad.
I was having lunch with a business associate today and, at some point, conversation turned to discussion of a mutual acquaintance. While groping for the right words to describe this persons character, the word “liberophobe” just seemed to pop out of my mouth.
Liberophobia – an irrational fear of freedom.
I do not not know whether this word popped out of my brain prior to popping out of mouth or whether is was lying subliminally in wait as a result of my having heard the word elsewhere. In any event, I am far more concerned about spreading this meme than I am about claiming any moral rights to the term.
‘Liberophobic’. I like it and I recommend that it be put to good use by whoever feels so inclined.
Blogger and friend Russell E. Whitaker links to and quotes from an article citing the increasingly intrusive, impertinent and downright rude questions which compilers of the U.S. national census deem is fit to ask citizens of Jefferson’s Republic once every ten years.
It is scarcely better in Britain, as far as I can tell. Oh well, I do recall with amusement reading somewhere that in response to questions about matters of religious belief, a number of folk now give their answer as ‘Jedi’. Even funnier, it is now a recognised category. I wonder if I ought to go through my collection of science fiction novels and come up with a new category or two.
The often intemperate Jesse Walker lists 10 reasons to throw Bush out of the White House. I tend to agree with the majority of his complaints, but his last one really points up the dilemma posed to libertarians by the US major parties.
The Democrats have nominated a senator who—just sticking to the points listed above—voted for the war in Iraq, the Patriot Act, McCain-Feingold, and the TSA; who endorses the assault on “indecency”; who thinks the government should be spending even more than it is now. I didn’t have room in my top ten for the terrible No Child Left Behind Act, which further centralized control of the country’s public schools—but for the record, Kerry voted for that one too. It’s far from clear that he’d be any less protectionist than Bush is, and he’s also got problems that Bush doesn’t have, like his support for stricter gun controls. True, Kerry doesn’t owe anything to the religious right, and you can’t blame him for the torture at Abu Ghraib. Other than that, he’s not much of an improvement.
Yet I find myself hoping the guy wins. Not because I’m sure he’ll be better than the current executive, but because the incumbent so richly deserves to be punished at the polls. Making me root for a sanctimonious statist blowhard like Kerry isn’t the worst thing Bush has done to the country. But it’s the offense that I take most personally.
They are not artefacts, they are not animals, they are not a tourist attraction, they are people. They do not belong where animals do, they belong in settlements, villages, towns and cities like you and me.
– Sydney Tshepiso Pilane
This is an account of my wildly fluctuating sympathies as I gradually found out more about a legal case launched by the Bushmen of Botswana.
I first saw the story on Ceefax. It’s disappeared from there, so I can not quote, but I got the impression that the Bushmen had been evicted from the Kalahari game reserve and that the (possibly dishonest) reason the Bostwana government had given for evicting them was that it could not afford to provide services. Riiight. I powered up for Welfare Rant #2 on the way that welfare systems start by offering their clients services and end by making the ‘services’ compulsory and demanding that people live their lives in such a way as to allow the government to fulfil its side of the forced exchange with minimum inconvenience.
Then I thought, not so fast, Natalie. → Continue reading: Kalahari Bushmen, New Age Travellers and the paradoxes of state welfare.
The War on Terror, like any war, provides the opportunity for certain technologies to be developed at an accelerated pace. The problem is that we seem to depend on the rather glib assertion that without freedom there is no prosperity. This is fine so long as government is concerned with prosperity. But how long do people have to wait in societies where an élite puts the power to rule ahead of prosperity? As George Orwell put it in Hommage to Catalonia: “We don’t grasp it’s [totalitarianism’s] full implications, because in our mystical way we feel that a régime founded on slavery must collapse. But it is worth comparing the duration of the slave empires of antiquity with that of any modern state. Civilisations founded on slavery have lasted for such periods as four thousand years.”
With this thought in mind, from Tech Central Station:
Chemical detectors may provide, by the way, the greatest advance in counter-insurgent capabilities. Biochips will make it possible for self-directed UAVS to seek out explosives, including those used in small arms, and chemical and biological agents. They will also enable the identification and tracking of thousands or even millions of individuals in a monitored area based on their “smell.”
→ Continue reading: Building walls
A mugger jumps out and threatens a well-dressed man with a knife, and shouts:
“Hand over your money!”
“You can’t do this,” says the outraged man. “I’m a local councillor!”
“In that case,” replies the mugger, “hand over my money!”
(via the Adam Smith Institute)
Over at the Social Affairs Unit, there is an interesting digital publication called Butler’s Dilemma: Lord Butler’s Inquiry and the Re-Assessment of Intelligence on Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction, by Professor Anthony Glees and Dr Philip Davies.
Although the Butler Report comes out tomorrow, this interesting analysis actually explains the issues at hand. The first section is called The Whitewash Blues…
Not that I need to preach to the converted here, but I love the internet. How else could I read every daily edition of my hometown newspaper back in the US if not for the web? I like keeping up on who is engaged and who got married, who got arrested and which baseball coach got sent to prison for selling crack cocaine – it is local gossip news through a global channel, and I can never resist tuning in.
It is also interesting to note the range of opinions that co-exist in my largely conservative hometown. It is a wonderful place to grow up, and a wonderful place to grow old, full of lovely people, but I was somewhat surprised to read an editorial in Monday’s edition which stated that taxpayers have to be willing to foot the bill for public schools’ physical education classes. What surprised me was not that such an unquestioning, statist line could be uttered in the kind of place that was built on a can-do attitude and pride in one’s own ability to do for oneself; what surprised me was how the editorial writer did not even bother to craft an argument in favour of his or her opinion.
So I wrote my first ever letter to the editor. I do not think it will be published, and I would hate to have totally wasted the one minute it took me to read the article and the five minutes it took me to dash off a response, so I reproduce it here.
According to Monday’s Gazette editorial on gym classes in public
education, “Schools cannot turn their backs on students’ health, and the state and taxpayers have to be willing to foot the bill.” This is nonsense, at least if you accept the fact that it is up to individuals to decide to be fit or to be unfit. In the case of children, it is parents – not school systems – who must bear that responsibility. It is a scary state of affairs indeed when the notion that parents ought to be the ones taking responsibility for the food their children consume and the activities in which their children participate strikes so many as strange and unthinkable. “But it’s the schools’ job to teach that!” comes the cry. No, actually, it is not.
The incontestable fact of the matter is that our ability to do things for ourselves – including the ability to think, in some cases – is diminished when the government does those things for us. (Anyone who doubts this should look to those countries where Communism was not so long ago the order of the day, where people who lived under those brutal régimes quite literally struggle to make basic choices for themselves after years of having the government make almost all of life’s decisions for them.) This also diminishes us as human beings. The question we must really answer is whether we give priority to a population that may overeat and under-exercise and that consequently does not live as long as it may, or to taking away citizens’ autonomy “for the common good”. Such collectivist thinking ignores individual rights and responsibilities, and in doing so encourages moral and intellectual passivity. It is also, not coincidentally, the kind of sentiment with which any proud Communist would agree.
As for the question of Medicare and Medicaid, not everyone swallows the statist line that citizens must submit to having our finances looted by the government in order to pay for such services.
On the same note, it is a regrettably radical concept in this day and age, but I do not believe – as the Gazette editorial stated – that I or any other citizen must be willing to foot the bill for any other parent’s child’s physical education. Our schools have their work cut out for them as it is when it comes to guiding children in academic disciplines. There is no reason to pin the blame on them if Johnny and Susie do not realize that physical activity is a good thing. Of course the fact is that Johnny and Susie and any person with a functioning brain knows this; it is – and must be – up to them to decide whether or not to act on this knowledge. If Johnny and Susie’s parents wish to be let off the hook for parenting their children in this area, they need only look to editorials like the one in Monday’s Gazette to feel absolved of any such responsibility.
What I did not mention in my letter is that I experienced in two local school districts, as a child and teenager, downright lousy phys ed programs. In high school, it was so bad that your phys ed grade was based solely on whether or not you bothered to bring a change of clothes for the class. The teacher, who also served as athletic director and head basketball coach of the high school, would give you 50 per cent credit just for showing up. Calling that “physical education” was nothing short of a joke, especially as most of us used the period to do the homework we’d neglected to do for the next period’s class.
Is this really the reason why some kids are overweight? Hardly. But if I have learned one thing from growing up in an area with very little in the way of fee-paying schools, it is that the parents of kids who attend state (public) schools will always complain about all the things the schools are not teaching their kids that they are entirely capable of teaching their children themselves, be it how not to get pregnant, how not to catch a sexually transmitted disease, or how not to grow obese. It is time someone started making parents feel as crummy as they should for this attitude, so get guilt-tripping today.
Red Herring has an article about Supernova panel moderated by Doc Searls that discusses Fighting networked wars.
John Robb, author: Warfare is changing to an attack on critical points in infrastructures to create damage far beyond the cost of an attack. Al Qaeda sees the West as a system that it must attack on a distributed basis to make the most of its limited resources.
How do you fight these folks? Looking at the size of these networks, what is characteristic of al Qaeda and affiliated organizations looks like a crime network combined with traditional terror. They have mastered terrorist best practices and that has allowed him to unplug the organization from nation-states, which subverts the nation-state system itself. Al Queda is in a new zone. They have no restrictions on behavior.
A distributed problem has to have a distributed response.
Exactly, and that is one of the central arguments of White Rose, if you address a distributed threat such as terrorism by tightening and establishing centrally imposed and managed security, you will produce a sense of false security and ‘crowd out’ the only distributed security – the individual and in the society.
At last. George W. Bush starts telling it like it is, instead of issuing defensive justifications that only reinforce the petty slights and slanders that give rise to them.
We removed a declared enemy of America who had the capability of producing weapons of mass murder and could have passed that capability to terrorists bent on acquiring them. In the world after September 11th, that was a risk we could not afford to take.
This is exactly what some of us have been saying for a long time. Finding WMDs was never the point. We knew Saddam had the capability, otherwise he could not have done this. We knew he could not be trusted on WMDs because he kept doing this. We knew he sensed no moral obligation to stay on his own ground because he did this. And we knew Bin Laden had declared war on the West, and we knew Saddam was sympathetic to that cause because… well,
Bin Laden: Any chance you could help out with this next big attack on the States I was thinking about, Mr Saddam?
Saddam: Certainly not! What you are suggesting is immoral! Live and let live, that’s my philosophy!
As if.
So I had a choice to make: either take the word of a madman or defend America. Given that choice I will defend America.
The only reason the game of Hunt-the-WMDs got so much publicity was that America used it in their attempt to appease the United Nations; Saddam’s non-compliance with weapons inspections was supposed to be the legitimate (ie UN-friendly) reason for launching war, therefore, finding WMDs after the event would have “justified” the invasion with hard evidence.
Bad idea. The UN is evil too. It issues terrorism-encouraging statements that inspire people to blow up public-transport users. The UN would not have approved war on Iraq if Saddam had invited the UN and Bin Laden round together for chicken a-la-king, raspberry pavlova and an after-dinner game of launch-the-nuke. It would have suggested waiting a bit longer in case the decimation of California was a mistake rather than a precedent.
No more Mr Nice Guy, please, Mr Bush. The UN is not our friend.
Today, watching television often means fighting, violence, and foul language – and that’s just deciding who gets to hold the remote control.
– Donna Gephart
Silicon.com reports on Japanese authorities decision that tracking is best way to protect kids.
The rights and wrongs of RFID-chipping human beings have been debated since the tracking tags reached the technological mainstream. Now, school authorities in the Japanese city of Osaka have decided the benefits outweigh the disadvantages and will now be chipping children in one primary school.
The tags will be read by readers installed in school gates and other key locations to track the kids’ movements.
Apparently, Denmark’s Legoland introduced a similar scheme last month to stop young children going astray.
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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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