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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Anyone who recalls reading my report on the ‘Liberty and Livelihood March’ that took place in London (although ‘took over London’ is more accurate) in September may have been as struck as I was by the militant tone of the participants. They were very angry people.
Of course, such belligerent postures often turn out to be more an expression of bravura rather than a forewarning of intentions but if this report in the Telegraph is anything to go by, then maybe they did really mean it:
“Militant hunt supporters are threatening to sabotage essential services, including electricity pylons, gas supplies and food deliveries, in reaction to the Government’s decision to introduce a Bill that would ban foxhunting.”
Home-grown insurrection about to begin?
“The Real CA were hopping mad, really furious, and the talk was very serious indeed. They are talking about highly criminal acts, but they feel they have been driven to it.”
I can corroborate that the people on that march were, indeed, hopping, jumping and skipping mad but is the ‘Real CA’ real? One can never entirely discount the possibility that this is a Security Service operation designed to smoke possible insurrectionists out of the woodwork and neutralise them before they start actually embarking upon any campaigns of damage or disruption.
Certainly, if the Security Services were not aware of the ‘Real CA’ they most assuredly are now and, if the insurrectionists are good to their word, what is HMG going to do about it?
You did something because it had always been done, and the explanation was “but we’ve always done it this way.” A million dead people can’t have been wrong, can they?
– Terry Pratchett
Daryl Cobranchi blots out “The Kingdom” (i.e. Saudi Arabia) from the story he’s quoting from and says: Guess where this is? The quote he copies and pastes says all the usual things about how private sector education in these parts works better and costs less than the government’s efforts. I guessed India, through having already done a piece about Indian education for my new education blog.
I was also going to hide this posting away in the same place, but then I thought Saudi Arabia? That’s definitely Samizdata territory. That’s of a lot more than merely educational interest. So here I am here with it, and here’s the paragraph that follows the ones that Daryl recycled, from Arab News:
Essentially I am not an enthusiast for the privatization of the education system on a wider scale. However, the experience makes us appreciate the private sector’s quality and apparent superiority. The quality of government schools s not because of a shortage of funds. At the same time, it is the sheer size of the government bureaucracy and machinery that weighs it down and renders it ineffective.
Abdul Rahman Al-Rashid‘s use of the word “essentially” reminds me of how Kingsley (novelist father of novelist Martin) Amis used to say that “essentially” is another word for “not”. The grammar doesn’t quite work out with the above quote, but that aside, if this man is not an enthusiast for the privatization of education, it makes you wonder what a Saudi Arabian who is an enthusiast for the privatization of education would be like.
It’s been a hard few years for a lot of friends of mine. Up until I left Pittsburgh in 1989 I was usually out at nights with the local Deadhead crowd. My room mate of many years was in Sandoz, one of the top local bands of the time. They were at the core of the Pittsburgh Deadhead scene. As a local folk-rocker I’d always been on the fringes of it. Year in and year out, the audiences which supported local writers like myself were largely part of that scene.
It was saddening when I heard Gerry Garcia had passed away and the Dead would no longer tour. Their concerts were just undoubtedly the craziest, most fun, warmest and friendliest I can imagine ever to exist in this life. You simply had to experience the all day parking lot party followed by four hours of continuous music by the Dead. No warm up band: they played for the love of the music. No searches for hidden tape recorders: they reserved the center section for the TapeHeads. There was always a forest of microphones there. Every Dead concert that ever was can be had on a bootleg tape. The Dead even encourage fans to trade show tapes on the Internet. Just don’t trade their studio work… that’s all they ask.
It is with great pleasure I read they are touring again albeit with out Gerry because he’s, well, dead, not just Dead… You known what I mean.
I suggest you read the article. The changes since 1995 when they last toured should give you an indication of exactly how fast Liberty is being undermined in America. People go to Dead concerts to get high, dance naked, groove on the music, be nice to each other, party until dawn and in plain words have an incredibly good time. Times so good you savour them for the rest of your life.
A State that blocks innocent pleasure is hardly worth fighting for except the enemy we face is far, far worse and stands against absolutely everything about a Dead concert or a Rainbow Gathering.
If you want to know “Why We Fight”, join their tour and let yourself go. Saving this life style is something worth fighting for.
  
1990/91 Pittsburgh Dead Scene
Photos: D.Amon
Good news! Samizdata.net is still accessible in China, at least as of this morning! A few months back we did get a couple e-mails from Chinese readers, so it is good to know that the Great (Internet) Wall of China has some holes in it, no thanks to collaborators Cisco and Oracle (may the great EMP from the sky strike them down).
- Communist China: GDP per capita (2001) $4,300 per year
- Capitalist Taiwan: GDP per capita (2001) $17,200 per year
- You are four times better off under capitalism
So here are a few things you are not supposed to see in China. Now stop messing around on the Internet and go out and conspire with someone to overthrow the state, willya!
Or even if their isn’t, either we have free will, or we do not and are just deterministic biochemical meat puppets dancing to some unfathomable script… God playing with himself. If the latter is true, then what the hell, nothing, and I do mean nothing actually matters. Morality? Truth? Life? Death? Meaningless.
Even if you do not believe in God, the same questions are relevant. I would argue that we do indeed have free will (for an excellent discussion by an atheist on that, see sections of David Deutsch‘s remarkable Fabric of Reality). And if we have free will, the very notion of submitting to the slings and arrows of life when an arrow-proof shield can be fashioned with our own hands is surely unreasonable… and to forcibly require that a person do nothing when the means to build that shield exist is not just unreasonable but monstrous.
In the print edition of New Scientist, Tom Shakespeare, the co-author of Genetic Politics: From eugenics to genome advocates outlawing parents from using ‘sperm selection technology’ which can allow the sex of a child to be chosen. He sees this as a precursor to parents eventually selecting desired traits for unborn children:
On balance, then, I believe that sperm sorting will in the long run do more harm than good. And this seems doubly true of sex selection via pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. Even if there is no “gene for” intelligence, sporting prowess or artistic talent, few scientists doubt that gene-chip technologies will one day provide considerable information about genetic variations. Letting parents choose embryos on the basis of sex now, for no good medical reason, will make it harder in the future to say no when they ask to choose embryos on the basis of other traits.
This thinking is actually quite close to that used by socialists who argue that ‘private’ education should not be allowed because it should not be up to mere parents to decide what is best for ‘their’ children. Not only can private individuals not be trusted to make such decisions (it should be left to ‘experts’), it is also unfair to others if those children are better educated. Similarly, if physically more capable disease resistant children can be ‘created’ by parents, this is somehow seen as ‘bad’ for everyone else. → Continue reading: If there is a God…
I think we may have finally found a justification for burqas. 
Sunday 1st December starting 2:30pm from the place de la Bastille, a hundred French Libertarians intend to march on the Ministry of Finance at the quai de Bercy (about 2kms). I intend to join them and will be making a collection for the costs of the demo (hand-bills, megaphone, banners, hire-cars, etc.).
Last year 60 were expected and over 200 sympathisers turned up, after the Paris daily “Le Figaro” had carried a mention of the march on the front page the day before. The event is part of the world-wide walk for capitalism. I’m unaware of any plans for a march in London on that day, perhaps organisers could post details to Samizdata.
Want to buy a robot mini-dragon to watch out for fires and intruders? Got lots of money? Then what you need is a Banryu.
It looks like something from Appleseed or Ghost in the Shell. Very cool indeed.
There is a new film called 28 Days Later, which to summarize extremely briefly, involves Britain in the very near future laid waste by a bio-engineered plague released by animal ‘rights’ activists. This plague, called The Rage, turns people into feral zombie-like killers.
Although the film has gained some rather good reviews, why bother shelling out your hard earned and heavily taxed money to see zombies up on the big screen?
Britain is already full of zombies tramping somnambulantly under the CCTV cameras, past the voting booths in which they can meaninglessly vote for ‘worst choice one’ or ‘worst choice two’ and only moving at all due to the sensory stimuli provided by the carcinogenic stench of greasy fast food dispensaries and the flickering light cast by sub-moronic Pavlovian response inducing game shows.
So why bother going to see a film about them when all you have to do to see zombies is look out your well barred and burglar alarmed window?
I am not usually this bleak-of-view, but to see the protections of both habeas corpus and double jeopardy doomed by a currently unassailable government… and yet to then see this greeted not with rioting on the streets but for the most part with a collective ovine shrug, does rather lead anyone who values liberty to dark sentiments.
When words lose their meaning, people will lose their liberty
– Confucius
For example the term ‘liberal’… once meant (& to some, prefaced by ‘classical’, it still does) a supporter of individual liberties against both force backed custom (paleo-conservativism) and force backed allegedly rational planning (socialism). It is now generally used as a euphemism for ‘democratic socialism’.
I don’t know who Johnathan Galt is but his name has a certain resonance round these here parts for reasons which don’t need a great deal of explanation.
I do know that he has a website that contains a number of video clips which most certainly look and sound authentic. (You will need some sort of reliable media-playing software to view).
Of particular interest is the footage of a man called Abu Hamza who preaches at the Finsbury Park Mosque situated but a few miles from where I live. According to Mr.Hamza, ‘kuffirs’ (er, that’s us, gentle readers) are fair game for robbery, enslavement and murder. Charming.
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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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