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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The bete noir of much of the left, Ariel Sharon, appears to be ‘doing a Nixon’. Just as only Nixon could go to China without a collapse of domestic support, perhaps Sharon can make peace with the PLO, secure Israel’s pre-1967 borders and compromise on the settlements.
He is being branded a traitor by Jewish settlers, a war criminal by pro-Palestinians and a pariah by the usual suspects. So he must be doing something good. He clearly has a difficult task in balancing Israel’s security against peaceful compromise, but with the new strategic reality in the Middle-East, his task might be easier.
Paul Staines
It appears that Los Angeles is well and truly in the tarpits:
Los Angeles is getting pummeled by economic woes beyond its control. Like so many Western cities, vital services are provided by the county. And L.A. County is $800 million in the red.
[…]
The sheriff’s department, which provides support for the city’s police, has cut 900 deputies and closed two jails. Baca says any more cutbacks will jeopardize public safety.
[…]
And so the county’s only option is to cut back services — vital services the city depends on.
[…]
“I’d cut back on something else instead of lifeguards. Someone who would save your life, I wouldn’t cut back on that,” said 15-year-old Michael Harter, playing with his brother in the surf.
But the truth is, most of these things are not “vital services the city depends on”. Lifeguards? Sorry but no one is forced to go swimming, so if lifeguards are so damn important then allow companies to provide the service on a fee paying basis. Health? Do it all privately. Education? The state has no business whatsoever involved with the education in the first place, particularly in this era of cheap internet access and in a country with probably the most efficient and inexpensive phone system in the world.
Security is a legitimate concern, so the solution to the problems faced by the sheriff’s department should be clear… cut back on everything else, scrap irrational drug prohibitions (less jails will be needed) and remove all the ludicrous restrictions on ownership of the means of self-defence (less police will be needed).
The thrust of the linked article is that ‘Los Angeles is in crisis’.
Bullshit.
It is the city government of Los Angeles and the people who think that theft based appropriation is the only way to satisfy their needs (which usually means wants) who are in crisis, and far from being ‘beyond its control’, this is a crisis of their own making.
Good.
If you have not checked out the Dissident Frogman‘s groovy new multi-lingual blog, then now is the time to rectify that oversight. However be careful not to push the red button.
Dissident Frogman is one of the best pro-liberty sites on the internet and is a reminder than there is more to France than Weasels. Just remember not to push the red button.
The Frogman is still working on the site so updates are a bit patchy at the moment; however it is worth checking it out now just to marvel at the sheer technical virtuosity of his graphic design talents. Note the ‘Busted Beards Al-Qaeda Fragboard’ in the sidebar…
…it adds a whole new meaning to the term ‘hit counter’
BUT DON’T PRESS ANY RED BUTTONS!
Don’t say we didn’t warn you.
The good news is that British Conservative Party appear, at long last, to have developed a will to challenge the Labour government. The bad news is that they are doing it by moving to the left:
A Tory government would scrap university tuition fees in a wide-ranging overhaul of higher education unveiled last night as part of Iain Duncan Smith’s campaign to offer voters “a fair deal”.
Parents whose children expect to go to university after 2005, the likely date of the next general election, would no longer have to worry about finding £9,000 to pay for an average three-year course if the Tories won.
Not only are the Tories moving to the left, they are actually positioning themselves to the left of New Labour. It was Blair’s first government which scrapped the taxpayer-subsidisation of higher education, hence the introduction of ‘Tuition Fees’ which simply means that those who wish to attend University have to pay to do so.
The Tories are promising to place this burden back onto the exhausted taxpayer.
The Government will find itself arguing for charging students more, while the Tories will be proposing a return to free university education.
Only in a country such as this, where there is barely any concept of the link between government spending and taxation, can subsidised education be described as ‘free’. As if the act of the Treasury raiding your bank account in order to pay for your University course is much fairer than relying on you to raid your own bank account.
But, bizarre as it is, that is the way things are seen over here and I suppose I cannot blame the Tories for wanting to pander to the bottomless British appetite for more government and ever-higher taxes. After all, their job is to get elected.
Speaking for myself, I can’t be bothered to vote. There is nothing to vote for.
Health fascism? Islamofascism? Same thing?
[My thanks to Marc Brands for posting this to the Libertarian Alliance Forum]
I have always regarded blogging as a labour of love. At the very least it is means for people with something to say to the world to get these things off of their chest. But, let’s be honest, recognition out in the wider world is sweet and makes the effort all the more worthwhile.
So Natalie Solent can justly feel as pleased as punch that she can count the venerable Mark Steyn among her fans:
As to sites I like, a lot of them are the obvious ones, like National Review, but if I had to single out a non-big-media site, I’d put in a word for Natalie Solent, who writes from somewhere in England and has a way of looking at subjects from odd angles with interesting historical allusions.
Muchos kudos to our Natalie.
[My thanks to Steve Martinovich of Enter Stage Right for heads-up]
Quite an old story (end of April) but interesting. Write a protest on your own property: get warned off by the police.
A German man who staged a political protest by writing “The Government is crap” on his own car, has been told to remove it or face jail.
Police failed to see the funny side of 33-year-old Stefan Lukoschek’s protest at the policies of Gerhard Schroeder.
Officers said they had received complaints from several people about protest on his yellow VW. The words were stenciled on the rear and side windows.
Lukoschek said: “I put it on there because my father who worked all his life, has seen his pension reduced to nothing by the current government.”
“Police failed to see the funny side”. Well obviously that’s because:
- It wasn’t a joke.
- They’re German.
So the German police warn a guy off who writes anti-government statements on his own property (so he must presumably have been breaking some law), the French now have laws against booing the national anthem or insulting the flag (no, really)… and apparently also against insulting the president, and the EU is concocting assorted speech-crime laws to cure “online xenophobia”. What a fine state of affairs.
Robert Hinkley
That’s what the voice of this Iranian engineer sounds like to me. He’s spitting out lyrics in his Diary of a Steppenwolf:
I am tired of all the bullshit I spent the last 20 YEARS with.
I am tired of this regime.
I am tired of the stupid mullahs who belong to thousands of years ago.
I am tired of Ali Khamenei the one handed and his regime.
I am tired of all these bearded bastards.
I am tired of this country I live in.
I can’t stand it anymore. It’s over.
What else is going to happen?
You wake up and find all your favorite web pages banned.
What else is remaining for me?
You directed all my social activities into my home.
That was all that is remaining for me.
2 rooms, a TV set and a PC.
I was just READING it! Can you understand that?
I was just READING!
I’m talking to YOU! Yes you!
You stupid religious old man!
You mullah! You dumb fanatic!
You dogmatic bastard who grow beard as an Is-fuck-lamic show off!
You who limit me! You who restrict me!
You who think you are dumb enough to decide for me!
You! Ali Khamenei with all your shitty regime!
YOUR time is over too. One of these days you’ll be as fucked as Saddam Hussein!
You’re dying! You hear me?
These are your last efforts to stay on the surface!
You are going to sink, one of these days.
So ban as much web pages as you can!
Your time is over, mullah!
You’ll be gone,
but the hatred will remain in my heart, and my children’s hearts for centuries
Incandescent passion like this can only smoulder for so long before it bursts into searing flames. I think the House of the Mullahs will soon be burned to the ground.
A message to all the control-freaks of the world: the instinctive human struggle for life, freedom and dignity can be temporarily subdued but it can never, ever be conquered.
It is interesting to note that the pseudonymous Baghdad blogger Salam Pax is considering supporting the secular Iraqi Communists in the aftermath of Ba’athist Socialism:
[May Day], workers of the world unite. The Iraqi Communist Party and the Iraqi Communist Workers Party are covering a lot of walls with red posters. I have not heard that Nadia Abdul Majeed of the Communist Workers Party is in Baghdad. I am still offering to volunteer if they do some cosmetic changes to their name. They have their hearts in the right place, unlike most other parties who have their hearts near their wallets.
Now as he is a member of a minority by virtue of his private and personal lifestyle choices, I am amazed he finds the slightest intellectual or emotional pull towards any system which takes a collectivist view of the world. To be a collectivist is to have a vision of society which argues that not only should ‘society’ have the right to decided what you (and I do mean YOU as an individual) and a willing other person can do together peacefully, be it exchanging good, money, ideas or bodily fluids, but that ‘society’ also has the right to use violence (i.e. law) to compel you to act as the state wishes. This should logically be a hard sell to any group which by its’ very nature will always be in the minority and hense always politically vulnerable.
Islamic collectivists will not tolerate things like homosexuality or charging interest on a loan, even between willing participants, and will use The State to enforce their views… Communist collectivists will not tolerate exchanging goods or even your own labour privately, even between willing participants, and will use The State to enforce their views. But the core principle underpinning all collectivism is that agreements between consenting adults, be it in the market place or the bedroom, are not something that can be allowed without the ‘political community’ accepting it: in other words, regardless of endless claims to the contrary there is no such thing to a collectivist as civil society, just The State, which is to say, everything is political and politics is about the use of FORCE.
Nothing is private and personal under a collectivist system because everything is subject to politics. It is not a survival trait to be a quirky eccentric or outsider in a collectivist system. Under a non-collectivist system you are free to form communes, pray to Allah (or not), have sex with anyone who is willing. But under collectivism, interaction means politics and politics means laws and laws mean force… and as laws are not optional, you cannot just opt-out and pursue an alternative lifestyle.
If the Iraqi Communists, unlike the Iraqi Party of God, will not persecute someone for being gay, that is not because they think such matters are a private issues… there are no private issues under collectivism… it just means they will allow you to do this or that, not that they think you have the right to do as you please. Remember that before you start sticking up pro-collectivist posters in Baghdad, Good Mister Pax.
I would not presume to tell Salam Pax who to vote for but I have no hesitation telling him what to vote for: What you need after Ba’athism is not just a different government but less government.
Tony Blair is heroic, Churchillian, principled and upstanding.
I’ve been reading a lot of that kind of thing of late and at every incidence I am caught between doubling up in ironic laughter and throwing open the window to shout obscenities into the street.
I have no way of knowing for sure if this report is accurate. Certainly it’s appearance in the Guardian/Observer means a source-warning is essential. However, if it turns out that they are telling the truth, then the ‘heroic, Churchillian’ Mr.Blair is about to usher in the last stages of the Great Betrayal:
Tony Blair is to give Cabinet Ministers the green light to campaign to join the euro even though the majority of the key ‘five tests’ will not be met.
In the clearest signal yet that he wants to pave the way for Britain to join the single currency, Whitehall sources said that he will allow Cabinet members a ‘freer reign’ to push the arguments on the issue. When the results of the tests are announced in the next three weeks, Blair wants to make it clear that Britain has taken an ‘enormous step’ towards joining, and will argue that the British economy is now closer to that of other European countries, essential to the euro working.
The man who helped liberate Iraq from tyrrany could be about to sell Britain down the river to Euro-serfdom.
Next time you run into a bunch of eco-loonies howling from the rooftops about the number of innocent Iraqi children killed by Anglo-American sanctions or the number of Africans whose lives are blighted by the alleged predations of globalisation, you might want to take some comfort from the realisation that what is really going on here is a massive exercise in guilt-displacement.
Green campaigns, you see, are not just a laughable manifestation of Western illiberal neurosis. They actually kill real people in the real world. There is no better illustration of this than their the long-standing (and shameful) war against DDT, an extremely useful chemical spray that has a proven track record in stopping the spread of malaria but which the greenies regard as a ‘toxin’ that must be eradicated in order to ‘improve’ the environment.
Using their customary formula of junk-science, scare-mongering, moral blackmail and religious fervour, the enviro-mentalists have managed to persuade Western governments to lean on the governments of developing countries to prohibit the use of this life-saving bit of technology.
This is neo-imperialism of the worst kind. Western greenies seem to regard the Third World as a sort of benevolent plantation where they can administer their muddle-headed, quasi-mystical, do-goodery to the poor, benighted fuzzy-wuzzys.
The results have been disastrous but the good news is that the ‘noble savages’ have had just about enough of this crap:
Kenya’s leading research center has come out in favor of using DDT to stem the toll of malaria in the country, reigniting a bitter debate between those who want to protect the environment and those who favor saving African children.
With the announcement, Kenya is poised to join a handful of other African countries, which are disregarding donor-nation admonitions that the chemical is an environmental disaster.
Proof (as if any more were actually needed) that one can afford to play along with these self-indulgent parlour games and humour the participants until such times as actual lives are on the line as a result. The Kenyans have rudely (and justly) reminded the world that they are critically vulnerable to the consequences of fashionable clap-trap in a way that over-stuffed and ridiculously coddled Western metropolitan elites are not.
“DDT is not the only weapon against malaria, but given its success in other parts of Africa, it would be of great benefit for malaria control in Kenya,” Richard Tren, director of Africa Fighting Malaria, in Johannesburg said yesterday. “Not using DDT, in effect, condemns Africans to die.”
Dr. Davy Koech, director of KMRI, said DDT is one of the most effective pesticides against the anopheles mosquito, which transmits malaria. He said malaria in Kenya has reached epidemic proportions.
Every person engaged in this campaign of prohibition should hang their heads in shame and ignominy.
Cheap and effective, DDT was once considered a modern miracle for dealing with malaria and insect pests in agriculture. It was used during World War II, when entire cities were sprayed to control lice and typhus. DDT was used to eradicate malaria in the United States, but it was also used by the ton for agriculture, where it killed birds. DDT was named the culprit and vilified by Rachel Carson in her 1962 book “Silent Spring,” leading to its ban in the United States in 1972.
I wonder if that book has even been objectively scrutinised?
Zambia recently decided to reintroduce the chemical for malaria control, and Uganda announced that it would begin using DDT again.
“In Europe, they used DDT to kill anopheles mosquitos that cause malaria,” Ugandan Health Minister Jim Muhewezi told the Monitor newspaper in Kampala. “Why can’t we use DDT to kill the enemy in our own camp?”
Because, Mr.Muhewezei, some Westerners regard ideology as being more important than life itself.
I sincerely hope that this outbreak of common sense continues to spread. I also hope that this episode goes some way to persuade sensible people in the Third World that their lives will not improve until they dismiss the idiotic ravings of Western socialist cranks and start to embrace the enlightenment of technology, capitalism, progress and property rights.
And, if there is any justice in this world, Western enviro-mentalists will all be rounded up and prosecuted for crimes against humanity.
[My thanks to Chris Cooper for flagging up this issue on the Libertarian Alliance Forum]
Because I grew up in the 1970’s I still associate Trade Unions with the rank-and-file of the British urban proletariat; the lantern-jawed, barrel-chested, horney-handed, hobnail-booted sons of industrial toil. These were the rough, tough, no-nonsense men who hewed the coal, forged the steel and rivetted iron plates down in the boiler-room of the British economy.
In those days ‘male grooming’ meant a smell of honest sweat and a smear of brickdust and anyone who was stupid enough to go into a working class pub and prissily complain about the smokey atmosphere was more likely than not to experience ‘Death by Shipbuilder’.
Alright, I know that’s a cartoon but at least it was corroborated to a small degree in real world of shop floors, lathes and jackhammers. But the coal fields are silent now, the shipyards have all gone and the smokestack industries are billowing clouds of vapour over Taiwan not Teesside and so the Trades Union Congress (TUC) needs new rubrics to campaign on. Out has gone the fiery old rhetoric of revolution, strikes and class war and in has come the priggish, condescending ideology of health fascism:
Pubs, clubs and restaurants could increase their takings by banning smoking, says the TUC.
The TUC is pushing for the ban, because it believes passive smoking presents a health risk to waiters, waitresses and bar staff.
Very useful this ‘passive smoking’ hoax. What would organisations like the TUC do without it?
Rory O’Neill, editor of the TUC-backed Hazards magazine which published Saturday’s report, said: “Big Tobacco (the lobby) has spent big money to prevent UK workplaces going smoke-free.
Ah yes, the hobgoblin of ‘Big Tobacco’, yet another shadowy capitalist conspiracy determined to preserve our right to choose. They’re a ‘lobby’, don’t you know. All ‘lobbies’ are malevolent and driven by greed, as opposed to organisations like the TUC which is motivated solely by altruism and love for their fellow humans.
Let us hear the voice of the ‘lobby’:
But Simon Clark, director of smokers’ rights group Forest, said: “Neither the consumer nor the hospitality industry wants a complete ban on smoking and there is absolutely no need for it.
“If the overwhelming majority of people wanted smoke-free pubs and restaurants it would happen, believe me, because people vote with their feet.
Is this Apostate of Hell trying to tell us that if that people wanted a smoke-free environment then any entrepreneur who opened a non-smoking restaurant would clean up? Just further proof that the concept of a free market is a standing affront to people with agendas to advance and empires to build.
My, how the TUC has apparently changed its tune. In the good old days they denounced ‘profits’ and told the workers that they had nothing to lose except their chains. Now they seem to want to enourage profits while telling the workers to lift that barge, tote that bail, have a little smoke and land in jail.
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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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