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 comedian Alexei Sayle once said very wisely that he objected to the use of the word “workshop” in any connection other than light engineering. I now feel similarly about the phrase “limited edition”, which should, I believe, be confined to publishing. Sadly, this phrase is now applied to cars, clothes, portable telephones, in fact to any manufactured product where they have to decide beforehand how many they’re going to make in each little burst of manufacturing. In other words to all manufactured products.
The latest manifestation I have observed of limited edition feaver is: limited edition potato crisps. That’s right, Walkers Crisps have just produced a six-pack “limited edition” bag, containing two Heinz Tomato Ketchup flavoured crisp packets, two Branston Pickle flavoured crisp packets, and two Marmite flavoured.
In my opinion the Marmite crisps are very nice (as are the crisps flavoured with Marmite’s deadly rival, Bovril, which have long been available), the Tomato Ketchup crisps are okay, and the Branston Pickle crisps are disgusting.
Talk of limited editions raises the question: are there potato crisp collectors? If so, do they collect their crisp packets unopened, or do they merely preserve the wrappings? If they do collect the crisps unopened how do they ensure that the crisps do not get broken inside the packet, even as the packet remains unopened, and if the crisps are preserved in mint condition, how can the crisp collector tell?
It was with questions like these in mind that I consulted the
Walkers SHOWCASE website mentioned on all the crisp packets.
At this point my posting takes a sudden lurch away from harmless frivolity and towards seriousness, because this is what I found:
Welcome to Walkers SHOWCASE!
Walkers has invited every school in England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and Eire to post their students’ best work on the Walkers SHOWCASE online gallery. What better way to show off the children’s talents – not only across the school, but to children’s friends and relatives – and to everyone with an interest in education around the world?
If you have been chosen as your school’s SHOWCASE Co-ordinator, your first step is to register your school. This takes just a few moments – but one part of it is your agreement to keep to the SHOWCASE Charter. You can review the Charter before proceeding with registration by clicking on the SHOWCASE safety button on the left. As soon as you have registered you can start uploading exhibits – everything from collages created in Reception to interactive games devised in a sixth form project.
Have fun!
I hate this. These people take no pride in their product. I expected – well, I was looking for – testimonials from satisfied crisp eaters, discussions of the relative merits of Marmite and Bovril crisps, intricate analysis of just why it is that the Branston Pickle crisps are so horrible, news of other Walkers products. Instead we observe what is now called a Public-Private Partnership, and of the most vomit-inducing kind. If I was a teacher and they made me the school’s SHOWCASE Co-ordinator, I’d feel like a whore.
I realise that as a good little libertarian, I ought to be willing to defend everything that capitalism does however tasteless (including whores, of course), but when it comes to capitalists stalking the wastes of the public sector in search of captive juvenile audiences for junk food adverts, I’m sorry, I just can’t do it. I wouldn’t want a law against it, but surely no self-respecting school would do this.
Perhaps I should overcome my dislike of such things. I don’t know, I really don’t. I would especially welcome comments on this.
Occasional Samizdata.net guest writer Alice Bachini has been bitten by the blogging bug and has her own splendid blog called A Libertarian Parent In The Countryside.
It may well have the longest blog address I have seen (libertarian_parent_in_the_countryside.blogspot.com)!
Check it out. 
People across Europe are digging bomb shelters in their back gardens and staring skyward fearfully for the first signs of the mighty Namibian airforce.
No, not really… Afro-socialist bigot President Sam Nujoma of Namibia has added all the nations imposing the flimsy and ineffective sanctions against his good buddy Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe to the list of his usual targets for incoherent invective (i.e. homosexuals, capitalists, white people).
“I just want to make it categorically clear that if the EU does not lift the sanctions against Zimbabwe, the whole African Union will also impose economic sanctions against Europe. Either there is peace or war and we don’t want a war. Change your attitudes. If you don’t change, we are going to get you.”
I am quaking in my boots. 
This piece by Janet Daley in today’s Telegraph is of interest, and these paragraphs are the heart of it:
… there must be a lesson here for those who hold – and would like to proselytise – currently unfashionable opinions. How exactly has this happened? How is it that this stance, which has been travestied and traduced by the entire Left-liberal media behemoth, has still managed to win through to the hearts and minds of so many fashionable anti-establishment people?
And perhaps even more beguilingly, why are so many acerbic comedians and social satirists happy to stand up in public for a cause that has been largely associated with politicians who have never knowingly told a joke? …
Of one thing I think we can be fairly sure. Harry Enfield, Bob Geldof, Vic Reeves et al were not won over by Teresa Gorman’s ‘street cred’ or Norman Tebbit’s hairstyle. Neither the cut of Norman Lamont’s suits nor John Redwood’s demotic vocabulary made them think: “Hey, these guys are my sort of people. I like the look of them. What’s this they’re saying about the European single currency being a bad idea for Britain? I think I’ll join up.”
No, I believe not. They must have been – wait for it – persuaded by the arguments. Imagine that. They must have heard people who look and sound nothing at all like them, saying things that struck them as basically sound. …
I’ve been flogging away with ideas for the best part of my adult life so far, so you might expect me to greet JD’s piece with unmitigated reverence. However, one of the ideas I’ve been flogging away at is that persuading members of the Conservative Party to support something is not the kiss of life, rather is it the kiss of death. This is not an idea of the kind JD is talking about; it’s a propaganda idea, a focus group idea, an idea about how to win arguments by unfair means as well as by fair ones. It’s an idea about “positioning”, “associating”, about atmospherics rather than just about principles. (At the risk of getting too technical, much of the idea of being principled is itself an idea about atmospherics.) → Continue reading: “Opposition to Brussels is becoming fashionable” – Thoughts on The Divide
Libertarians differ about many things and one such area is whether so-called ‘natural rights’ exist or whether, to borrow the phrase of 18th century utilitarian thinker Jeremy Bentham, they are so much “nonsense on stilts”. Just to be clear from the start, I think natural rights, where they spring from an understanding of human beings as creatures possessed of free will, who need freedom from coercion to thrive, make some sense. However, given the difficulties involved, natural rights for me must be strictly and narrowly applied otherwise the idea rapidly disintegrates.
Over the past 100 years or so, the natural rights doctrine has been progressively (sic) hijacked by collectivists of various stripes who have turned what is essentially a set of prohibitions against the initiation of force against persons and property into a series of claims, which require the use of extensive coercion for such ‘rights’ to be realised. As an example of how this use of ‘rights’ degrades an originally-useful concept, step forward the assemblage of clowns, brutes and hangers-on at the current Earth Summit in South Africa.
It ought to be obvious, but sadly is not, that providing something like the ‘right’ to healthcare begs the question of whether some person or persons have a corresponding duty to become doctors, nurses or hospital staff; does a ‘right’ to AIDS drugs mean people should be forced to become scientists and forced to invent such drugs and then supply them free of charge? Of course, put like that, the entire modern rights-talk collapses. But the contradictions of such talk are rarely remarked on. Sadly, questioning such ‘rights’ has become almost a taboo subject among the chattering classes.
Adriana wishes she were dreaming and so do a number of British Plane Spotters. Let’s face it. The Greek government are a bunch of whackos and their very presence in the EU should be more than enough to convince any sane person to get far clear of it.
I expect the economic consequence to them to be absolutely disastrous. Would you recommend Greece for a holiday if you have to leave your palm pilot, your laptop, your phone and god knows what else behind? Would you even consent to a business meeting in that backward country? Not I, for damn sure.
I have been reading my morning dose of news when I came across ZDNet reporting that a new law against gambling was passed in Greece. Law Number 3037, enacted at the end of July, explicitly forbids electronic games with ‘electronic mechanisms and software’ from public and private places, and people have already been fined tens of thousands of euros for playing or owning games.
It also transpires that the true meaning of the wording of the law means that anybody carrying an electronic game – even if it is just on a mobile phone – could face a hefty fine or lengthy jail sentence! According to the Greek newspaper Kathimerini,
“The police will be responsible for catching offenders, who will face fines of 5,000 to 75,000 euros (US$4,967 to US$74,506) and imprisonment of one to 12 months. The blanket ban was decided in February after the government admitted it was incapable of distinguishing innocuous video games from illegal gambling machines.”
One online report said that even watching a film on DVD – many of which contain promotional games linked to the movie – had resulted in an arrest and a 10,000-euro (US$9,934) fine.
Internet cafes are allowed to continue to operate, providing all gaming is prohibited: if a client is found to be running any sort of game, including online chess, the café owner will be fined and the place closed. The law applies equally to visitors from abroad:
“If you know these things are banned, you should not bring them in”
said the commercial attaché at the Greek Embassy in London – who declined to give her name.
Now, so many words spring to mind – most of them not suitable for a ‘family’ blog. I will restrain myself and focus my disbelief and fury on one point – the government imposes a blanket ban on games (electronic in this case presumably because it has already banned the other kind) because it is incapable of distinguishing innocuous video games from illegal gambling machines! Not only have governments been preventing people from all sort of activities, now they can’t even be bothered to find out what exactly it is they don’t want us to do! Somebody wake me up, please, I must be having a nightmare…
Carla Howell’s recent debate with Michael Widmer, former Press Secretary for Governor Michael Dukakis and high tax proponent (and oh yeah, currently President of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, wink,wink, nudge, nudge) is now online. You’ll find the RealMedia link there.
Carla also reports the Massachusetts Teachers Union has done a bit of Orwellian thinking. They renamed their ” Tax Equity Alliance of Massachusetts — Education Fund” or TEAM to the media attracting false advertising name of “Massachusetts Budget & Policy Center” just to attack the ballot proposition.
When I was a kid teachers were teachers: not just another bunch of porkers at the trough.
Over on Airstrip One they’re getting themselves in something of a lather over the prospect of British involvement in any attack on Iraq. Hadrian Wise is forthright:
“There are many reasons for opposing British participation in an American attack on Iraq, but there is only one good one: that it is not in our interests.”
Really? I have what I consider to be jolly sound reasons for taking quite the opposite view.
Anyone who has not been in hibernation for the last 20 years must surely by now have noticed that Britain as a sovereign nation is being subjected to a remorseless process of extinction by degrees and I think it uncontroversial to suggest that, if Britain is subsumed into the Holy Belgian Empire, then any further discussion of British national interests will have been made entirely redundant by virtue of there no longer being a country called Britain. Are we agreed? Good. Let’s move on.
Given the above-mentioned scenario, one would have thought that the most screamingly urgent national interest would be to avoid it all costs and I suggest that a good way of avoiding it would be by steadfastly maintaining our strategic alliance with the USA whose own national interests are, as has been widely noted, growing increasingly inverse to the more nebulous concerns of the Europeans. This is an opportunity that British patriots could not, dare not miss.
As Our Glorious Leader maintains his pledge to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the Americans, he alienates not only about two-thirds of his own political party but, far more importantly, drives an ever-deeper wedge between Britain and Brussels; a wedge that can only prove to be vital to our national survival. Does Blair have the political capital to throw us into the war against Iraq and get Britain into the Euro? I think not. The choice confronting us, therefore, is a) the extinction of Britain or b) the extinction of Saddam Hussein. Ooh, that’s a tough one!
Now before anybody embarks upon a lambast of my apparent callousness, I do realise that waging war on Saddam will, in all likelihood, lead to loss of both British troops and Iraqi civilians. I want to assure all that I am not indifferent to this but we’re talking about stark national interests here and, in that context, such sentimentalities do not get a look in. They never have and they never will.
So, as far as I am concerned, Tony Blair is doing the right thing and I cannot tell you how strange it feels to type those words. This is because I, along with many others, always believed that he saw his own destiny as future President of Europe. But I now suspect this may have changed. I think that the hand of history that Blair feels on his shoulder has shoved him rudely onto a different track; a track that I, as a patriotic Englishman, find most agreeable and one that I could scarcely have conceived of on September 10th 2001.
It looks like Tony Blair has decided which of Jim Bennett’s two horses to ride and has selected the Anglospherian one..
It certainly does look like the ducks are lining up in a row really fast now.
He whose desires have been throttled,
who is independent of root,
whose pasture is emptiness –
signless and free –
his path is as unknowable
as that of birds across the heavens
– Dhammapada
This passage, to me, is about a free cosmopolitan, freed from imposed ties, much of his life seemingly empty but in fact intellectualised and indeed virtualized, his actions seemingly random to those who look on from outside but, like the birds, actually quite purposeful
The British news media are harumphing about Tony Blair being publicly upbraided by a pair of African autocrats, overshadowing the British Prime Minister’s ‘passionate’ calls for African development and increased ‘aid’ to Africa by the West.
But therein lies part of the problem. The media seems shocked that a bunch of brutal tyrants are actually sounding like, well, tyrants… ungrateful tyrants at that.
Yet the very existence of thugs like Mugabe is underwritten by Britain (to media applause) to the tune of a billion pounds a year, stolen from UK taxpayers by the British state and given to African countries, or more accurately the ruling elites of African countries. This sort of behaviour is tantamount to Britain circa 1938 offering to give British tax money to common Germans (to be disbursed by the Nazi state or pro-Nazi NGOs) and thereby relieving the German National Socialist Workers Party’s leaders of the political consequences of their own economic policies, in effect subsidising the induced cost of fascist economics.
Tony Blair and the host of other national and NGO Tranzi cheerleaders are nothing less than the logistic support system for tyranny in the ‘Third World’.
So when you read of calls for an ‘answer’ to Mugabe, please realise that the even the most sound replies to the rhetoric on offer still skirts around the real truth. The only reply to the likes of Robert Mugabe is to meet violence with violence. If just 10 percent of that aid budget was spent sending arms to Robert Mugabe’s political enemies, including the white farmers of Zimbabwe, Mugabe and his supporters would be doing the only thing they can do by way of suitable recompense to the soil of Zimbabwe’s ruined farmlands.
Of course for this to happen would require an understanding by Blair et al of their indictable role in Africa’s ruin. The effects of the legacy of British and European colonialism pales in comparison to the here-and-now effects of Western statist support for homegrown African statism.
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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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