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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It’s good to see an ancient stereotype confirmed, this time the one about British judges being less than completely alert and on the ball on all occasions.
One of the men convicted of plotting to snatch £200 million worth of diamonds from the Millennium Dome has lodged grounds of appeal alleging that the judge at his Old Bailey trial fell asleep more than once during the hearing.
Lawyers for Raymond Betson are trying to trace two witnesses who were present at the trial and may be able to give evidence about when Judge Michael Coombe dozed off.
Betson’s claim – part of his challenge to his conviction of conspiracy to rob – was disclosed in the Court of Appeal today when his case was delayed for at least seven weeks.
Betson’s counsel, Edmund Romilly, said: “Statements from two people present at the trial show that the judge fell asleep on a number of occasions. We have been making efforts to contact these people, so far without success.”
All of which confirms that old Peter Cook sketch from Beyond The Fringe about how, when you get old and doddery and useless, you had to stop doing mining, but that this didn’t apply at all if you did judging.
I don’t know what else this proves. Probably that most court cases, even about dramatic events such as this attempted Dome robbery – which was like something in a Peter Sellers movie – are stupefyingly boring.
There’s a long article in today’s New York Times about Diebold, the voting machine company, and their struggle to prevent internal emails about security weaknesses in their software getting around on the Internet. They’re arguing intellectual property. Their opponents argue “fair use”. First three paragraphs:
Forbidden files are circulating on the Internet and threats of lawsuits are in the air. Music trading? No, it is the growing controversy over one company’s electronic voting systems, and the issues being raised, some legal scholars say, are as fundamental as the sanctity of elections and the right to free speech.
Diebold Election Systems, which makes voting machines, is waging legal war against grass-roots advocates, including dozens of college students, who are posting on the Internet copies of the company’s internal communications about its electronic voting machines.
The students say that, by trying to spread the word about problems with the company’s software, they are performing a valuable form of electronic civil disobedience, one that has broad implications for American society. They also contend that they are protected by fair use exceptions in copyright law.
Hurry if you want to read all of it. NYT stuff seems to go behind a payment wall quite soon. They take their property seriously too, I guess. (By the way, is this NYT policy recent, or is it just me having only recently noticed it?)
Okay, hands up all those people who did not see this coming:
France faces a year of turbulent and possibly explosive politics after a tactical alliance was formed at the weekend between two parties of a resurgent far left.
Mainstream parties will go into three important polls next year, with a spluttering economy, rising unemployment, a continuing menace from the far-right and an extreme left which is united and powerful for the first time in 30 years.
In an opinion poll published yesterday, after two leading Trotskyist parties agreed to fight regional and European elections together next spring, 31 per cent of French people said that they would “consider” voting for the far left.
One of the parties, the Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire (LCR), has doubled its membership in the past 18 months, as young French people, seduced by the anti-globalisation movement and cynical about conventional politics, flocked to the extremes.
France is going down. It may well be too late to prevent this national self-immolation and were it not for their force du frappe that would be that. A tragic historical footnote but no more.
But will anyone be able to rest easy in the knowledge that a substantial nuclear arsenal has fallen into the hands of Les Moonbats? I just hope that someone, somewhere in the Anglosphere defence establishment is drawing up a contingency plan to deal with this. After all, we know for sure that they exist and the task of locating them should not prove too difficult.
What does the government have to say about “human rights”: the collective term for its concerns about civil liberties and the rights of the individual. The answer can be found in three departments: the Human Rights Department in the Lord Chancellor’s Officeand the Human Rights Policy Department at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. The administrative distinction between these two departments lies in their location: the former is dedicated to the implementation in law of the European Charter on Human Rights and the latter is focused upon human rights as a strand within British foreign policy.
The latest Audit Committee Report on the implementation of the Human Rights Act for managers within local government is a good place to start examining how the law has become a byword for bureaucratisation and regulation. It also has a useful list of further governmental links. Although the traditional freedoms are all recognised in checklists and tickboxes, they are surrounded by a disciplinary atmosphere that has the potential to prohibit any actions considered offensive. Instead of applying common sense and guidance, this Report promotes a stifling conformity in the form of a “human rights culture” in order to avoid liabilities for not applying the law correctly.
By viewing human rights as a possible liability, institutions and the individuals who work within them will come to see civil liberties as a liability and a hindrance to their primary objective. Thus, the Human Rights Act will have the opposite effect to that intended: engendering a culture of compliance that observes the letter, not the spirit of the law, and bringing the actual purpose of the act, increasing the rights of individuals, into contempt.
This posting now is rather non-topical, in that the clutch of words it refers back to was emitted three weeks ago in a news story about how our Prime Minister is going to stop us all getting so fat. I paid attention to this anti-fat initiative because I was interviewed on the radio about it, and one particular little phrase associated with this story has since stuck in my mind. I still have some print-outs of the relevant media coverage. Here’s how the Observer reported it:
In a letter to Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell, a copy of which has been leaked to The Observer, Blair spells out what he sees as the Government’s failure to promote exercise: ‘Government policy has not delivered the outcomes we want in this area,’ he writes. ‘We have started to make progress on the school sport agenda, but also need to more effectively tackle activity levels in the adult population.’
Referring to the Government’s long-term target of getting 70 per cent of people physically active by 2020, the letter, written in July, states: ‘We need an ambitious delivery strategy, using the Olympic bid as a catalyst, to develop more innovative and interventionist policies across the public, private and voluntary sectors in both health and sport if that target is to be achieved.’
Setting aside the nightmare vision of the Olympic Games being held in Britain and coinciding with a government propaganda barrage tell us all to do physical jerks, the phrase that interested me here was Tony Blair’s reference to the government not having “delivered the outcomes” that he wanted. → Continue reading: The menace of “delivering outcomes”
Here’s our first week’s archives. As da boss said back then, “Post away and remember… let’s NOT be safe out there!”
The server upon which we are hosted was a bit dyspetic for about an hour today… but it is feeling much better now after it was burped (rebooted) by our excellent chums at Hosting Matters, who really are the worlds best hosting company!
Although I still maintain that I do not take iCan all too seriously, I have bunged a new ‘campaign journal’ up and also written the same piece up as an iCan ‘article’ called Neither chaos nor regulatory dystopia. iCan is wildly convoluted and a real nightmare to navigate and I could not figure out how to ‘attach’ the article to Anti-Activist Activism.
I did however find out how to attach the article to iCan ‘issues’, such as ‘direct democracy’, where I am sure it will be about as welcome as a turd on a billiard table 
For reasons I cannot even begin to adequately explain, the gatherings of the increasingly angry and militant pro-hunt movement conjours up ‘spaghetti western’ images in my head; the brooding silence, the tumbleweed, the flinty, menacing stares and the ‘man’s-gotta-do-what-a-man’s-gotta-do’ atmosphere of grim resolve.
Yes, somewhere out in merciless, sun-baked badlands, guns are being greased and cheroots are being lit. The Hunting Clan is fixin’ for a showdown:
Thousands of people have gathered around England and Wales to protest against moves to outlaw hunting with dogs.
Organisers said 37,000 protesters at 11 rallies on Saturday and one on Friday, to mark the first day of the new hunting season, signed a pledge to ignore any ban.
Alright, it is actually the middle of the verdant English countryside, but you get the gist.
Having failed in their appeals to reason, common sense and principle, the hunters are still threatened with a government prohibition that will eradicate a centuries-old tradition and the way of rural life that has grown up around it. They are being ‘run out of town’ for no better reason than that they are perceived as an easy target for a government that wants to score cultural ‘brownie points’ with the metropolitan elite.
So the hunters have decided that they are not going to be such an easy target after all. I do not see what else they can do. It is fight or die and they have chosen the former:*
The Declaration is an opportunity for those who support the freedom to hunt to demonstrate to the public, press, Peers, parliamentarians and the Government that we will never accept unjust law. Critically, it aims to convey in an unambiguous way that enough people are committed to either refusing to accept any law that comes into effect (if it does) that any such law would be unenforceable and so fail.
While the language is temperate, the intention is unambiguous: they intend a campaign of civil disobedience. It is an open and explicit challenge to the authority of the British government. What started as protest has become insurrection.
It is still not clear whether the government will press ahead with the abolition of hunting in England and Wales (the ban has already passed into law in Scotland). But, if they do, and these people are good to their pledge, then they are quite capable of making life very difficult indeed for the authorities. In effect, a low-level civil war will be waged in the English countryside.
Regardless of whether or not that scenario comes to pass, I get the feeling that the hunters have started something that will have consequences in the future. The Labour government’s sustained attacks on rural England have led to an awful lot of people getting angry, getting political and getting organised and of such activism are revolutionary movements born. I have no idea how long it will take or what it will become but I do strongly suspect that the countryside movement will metastasise into something much broader and wider than the issue of fox-hunting.
[*The link is to the homepage of the Hunting Declaration where sympathisers can download a copy of the Declaration to sign and send in with or without a donation to the cause.]
So Dianne Abbott’s decision to send her son to a private school is indefensible.
Says who? Says Ms Abbott:
On BBC2’s This Week, Miss Abbott, a member of the Socialist Campaign Group of MPs, said: “I’ve said very little about this because anything you say just sounds self-serving and hypocritical. You can’t defend the indefensible.
Since Ms Abbot appears to be lost for words, allow me to assist. Here are a few things Diane Abbott could say:
- “I have realised that education is too important to be left to the state.”
- “Perhaps everyone should have as much choice as I do.”
- “If I am not prepared to condemn my child to the state system, why should anyone else?”
- “The pursuit of equality for all means everyone gets crap.”
But Ms Abbot has not said any of those things. And she never will.
I have recently read Andrew Roberts biography of Lord Halifax the pre-World War II British Foreign Secretary.
Mr Roberts’ book Halifax: The Holy Fox is considered the classic defence of Halifax from charges that he was simply the ‘yes man’ of the Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and a pathetic ‘appeaser’ of Adolf Hitler (or in secret sympathy with the National Socialists).
However, as I read the book I was gripped with a violent dislike of Halifax.
Partly this was because Halifax was an example of a type of politician I dislike – politicians who claim to be Conservatives but who demand ever more statism ( yes I know there are a great many Conservatives like this). Indeed Halifax was so misguided that he even advocated more welfare schemes and subsidies even in the aftermath of World War I – when Britain was virtually bankrupt.
But there was more than this involved.
Halifax represented muddle in foreign policy – and my own my mind has a tendency to muddle in this area (hence the violence of dislike of him, it is a dislike for an element in my own mental make up).
There were two main polices to choose from in relation to Nazi Germany in the 1930’s. Either one could say that Britain would be best off staying out of European conflicts and just build up Britain’s own defences against the possibility that Germany might, at some future time, attack. Or Britain could decide that Nazi Germany was such a threat that war was inevitable – in which case a policy of preparing for offensive war should have been followed (building up offensive forces, developing aggressive alliances, looking for an excuse for war at a favourable time – such as when Germany reoccupied the Rhineland in 1936, when the German military was so unready for war that the troops were sent in without bullets and with orders to retreat if any British or French military forces attacked them, – and so on).
Instead British policy was utterly muddled – neither staying out of European affairs nor following a policy of preparing to destroy Nazi Germany. → Continue reading: Halifax: The Holy Fool
Increasingly, in my discussions about public policy matters, I find myself advancing the apparently novel notion that:
You tend to get more of what you reward, and less of what you punish.
When discussing my views with devotees of various social welfare schemes, this idea is met with reactions ranging from blank incomprehension to spitting rage at my cold-heartedness. Yet, to me, it seems the most self-evident common sense.
Most social welfare schemes reward certain behaviors, and almost invariably result in an increase in those behaviors.
Two examples (more can doubtless be supplied by the commentariat):
- One of the centerpieces of the expansion of the welfare state was payments to single mothers, often on a piecework basis (the more babies, the more bucks). Lo and behold, an enormous increase in single motherhood ensued.
- Wisconsin recently adopted a new health insurance scheme for the uninsured working poor. As a result, many employers have dropped their insurance benefits, reasoning that their employees can get coverage from the state, so why should they pay for it? Effectively, the new scheme removes the competitive disadvantage of employers who did not offer insurance, thus rewarding such employers and increasing their number.
Yet proponents of these social welfare schemes never cease to be amazed that their schemes do not seem to be alleviating the “problem” they are supposed to address, and indeed the problem often grows worse! Leading to a demand for more of the subsidies that feed the problem, of course.
On the flip side, I recently saw how the punishment meted out by the regulatory state gives predictable results. The regulatory state, of course, punishes economic activity by adding to its cost and by adding the risk of enforcement action.
The repair and service department at the Subaru dealership in downtown Madison is incredibly decrepit and run down, even though Subarus sell like hotcakes in Madison and the place is always busy. I mentioned this to the manager, and he told me that they had not done any work on the place in many years, even though it cost them business and made it hard to keep good workers. Reason was, any renovation would trigger a raft of regulations that would require environmental testing, remediation, handicap access, sound reduction, etc. ad nauseum, which would cost more than the dealership is worth.
Taxation, of course, is another punishment meted out by the state, again with predictable results. It is not unusual to hear young people say that one of the reasons they don’t get married is because, under the US tax code, their tax burden will go up if they do. Examples, I am sure, can be multiplied ad infinitum.
The odd thing is, through the regulatory and welfare states, we seem to be subsidizing the behaviors that we don’t want, and punishing the behaviors we do want. The increase in (subsidized) irresponsibility, and the decrease in (penalized) productivity, may be unintended, but are hardly unforeseeable, and indeed are inevitable.
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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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