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 EU parliament has indicated its warm support for a new draft Directive which will regulate conversations between EU citizens.
The new Directive, which is the brainchild of French MEP, Bertrand Maginot will provide a legislative framework to ensure democratic oversight of all conversations which take place within the EU.
“This law is both overdue and necessary” said Monsieur Maginot. “At present there are absolutely no controls over the things people say to each other. This is dangerous and unacceptable”
British Commissioner, Sir Crispin D’oilly-Gitte also gave his full-hearted support to the new legislation.
“We must protect our citizens from being exposed to inaccurate or dishonest things”, he said. “This law is an important step forward to a safer and more democratic Europe”
Dismissing the concerns of civil liberties groups, he added:
“These people are just wreckers. This law will increase freedom in Europe. Everyone will be able to converse with confidence; safe in the knowledge that they are not being exposed to wrong ideas and bad information”
The new law will require any EU citizen wishing to have a conversation with another EU citizen, to first send a draft text of their proposed conversation to a Conversation Monitoring Officer (CMO) who will be appointed at national level. The CMO will check the text for honesty, accuracy and consistency with democratic European values.
Provided the text meets the required standards, the applicant will be given permission to hold their conversation with such other person or persons as are identified in the initial application.
“It is a simple safeguard”, said Monsieur Maginot.
Whilst the new Directive is not expected to be opposed, there is some concern at the dispute about exactly how the new regulatory regime will be funded. Swedish Social Democrat MEP, Helena Hankart has proposed that the CMO service be free to all applicants and funded out of general national taxation. However, Greek Commissioner Taxis Mitopisis is campaigning strongly for all applicants to pay a fee which will be charged according the applicant’s income.
“We have several committee meetings planned and I have no doubt we will achieve harmony on this issue”, said Ms.Hankart.
The new Directive is expected to be in force by January 1st 2003.
Inside Europe: Iberian Notes on 11:00 CET, March. 22, 2002 (no link to individual articles) does a pretty good job of comprehensively trashing the Spanish claims on Gibraltar and pointing out the weird logic involved.
Margaret Thatcher‘s remarks are hardly surprising to anyone who has read what she has said over the years but it was a surprise to me as an outsider looking in to read the negative response from so many British Conservatives.
For years Perry has been telling me that they are ‘The Stupid Party’ and are not committed to resisting EU envelopment and super-statism. I see now that he is quite correct. [Ed: like I said about the Libertarian Party in the USA, there are some good people in the Tory Party, but they are not the ones running it]
It seems that the only argument between the much of the Tory party and their political enemies in Britain is the rate at which British is to be enveloped by Euro-statism. The British Army was once said to be ‘Lions lead by Donkeys’. It would seem the Tory Party are ‘Donkeys once lead by a Lioness’. As the contrast between the more dynamic economy of the USA and Euro-sclerosis grows harder to miss by even the most willfully blind, how can the party which actually started the privatising ball rolling that shattered the seemingly unstoppable advance of ‘democratic’ socialism in the 1980’s have come to being in step with histories obvious losers? The Stupid Party indeed.
You are the perfect example of a man too lazy to fail
– Kristine Blauser Scalzi
Let’s hear it for successful indolence! Yeah! 
I mean he is begging for it… and so in order to indulge his rather interesting masochistic habits, he is walking down the virtual beach and kicking sand over all the big 250 lb guys on the beach. He wants to get bitch slapped by the liberals (by which he means American socialists), challenged to fisticuffs by the conservatives (by which he means American Republicans) and shot by the libertarians (by which he means us, I guess).
Well I don’t feel qualified to respond for the first two groups but for the last… well sorry John, I am not offended. In fact, I thought it was hilarious and not far off the mark.
But seeing as how I know John will be heartbroken if I don’t reply more ‘in character’… asking for the reason why libertarians don’t get elected is rather like asking why so few Jews are pork butchers. I am sure there probably are a few Jewish pork butchers (probably Russian ‘Jews’ living in Israel or Highland Park, New Jersey, who no doubt have a fine Slavic sense of irony) just as there are a few ‘Libertarians’ who get elected to put their hands on the levers of state oppression in order to manipulate society with the state’s proxy violence…
…perhaps you see my point. Or not.
Oh, and John, I would hazard a guess that the reason I blog a lot more than you is I probably have a lot more money. I made it via an obscure and very complex arbitrage deal that involved hiring other people’s kids to blow strangers for crack. Damn I love capitalism.
But the fact remains… John’s article is funny and contains a fair element of truth about ‘liberals’ (socialists), conservatives and libertarians.
P.S. Stay the hell off my property!
For much of today, we have been having e-mail problems (i.e. the domain hosting server is down), so if you e-mailed any of the usual addresses, we probably did not get it.
As a temporary measure, please send all e-mails to samizdata at cloister.dircon.co.uk until you get the all clear.
Oh happy happy joy joy, we love our domain server!
My friend Kristine Löwe, a Norwegian now living in London, is deep into that post-university battle to get started in Real Life, and I want to give her all the help I can. She’s just had a piece about European drugs policies published in the electronic version of the Guardian.
“Not very exciting stuff” she says modestly in her e-mail to her friends and contacts, and a ringing cry for total legalisation her piece definitely is not. The story is of a shift from treating heavy drug users as criminals to treating them as medical patients, and I don’t know which idea depresses me more. Nevertheless, this is a useful way to learn the latest about the official drugs policy mindset this side of the Atlantic, and next to Kristine’s piece you’ll find further links to other interesting drug-related stories from the Guardian’s electronic archives.
Thieves tried to grab a diamond necklace from U.S. entertainer Liza Minnelli while she was honeymooning with her new husband David Gest. The Oscar-winning star was the victim of an attempted robbery when the car in which she was a passenger stopped at traffic lights in Holland Park, west London.
That should boost the British tourist trade – not!
When economist and law professor, Marco Biagi began advising the Italian government on reforms to Italy’s ossified Labour Laws, the Italian left sprang into immediate action. Using the rationale of marxist production theory and by the rigourous employment of dialectic method, they planned to confound Biagi by convincing him of the systemic contradictions of free-market ideology.
But that didn’t work so they just shot him.
“Investigators said flatly Wednesday that they had no doubt Biagi was slain over his controversial efforts to help Silvio Berlusconi’s center-right government rewrite Italian labor law in a way that would make it easier to fire workers. The unions, and the left in general, vehemently oppose any challenge to the current labor law, which effectively guarantees many workers lifetime job security.”
We have seen this in Europe before. In the late 60’s and early 70’s a number of marxist terror gangs starting springing up as the cracks in the heads of their own ‘intellectuals’ began to show. But, they were assuaged as Europe embraced the ‘Third Way’ and thus cocooned them from the chill wind of Reagan/Thatcher capitalism.
Only now, the cracks are starting to appear in the ‘Third Way’ as well and they know it. Having nothing else to offer, the die-hard disciples must resort to terror and murder. What else can they do when they have invested so much of their lives in a bankrupt philosophy that fewer and fewer people wish to buy or even browse? Like their apprentices in the anti-globo movement, they seethe within the spiritual prison cells of their own incoherent minds.
“An intelligence report to Parliament last week had warned of the risk of terror attacks in response to the conservative government’s policies.”
The article makes it clear that we are not dealing with Islamic radicals here but, in a sense, we might as well be. The same flat-earth mentality is at work; an identical impotent rage in the face of better people and better ideas. Wahabbism and marxism are merely two sides of the same psychotic coin and it is entirely predictable that they are undertaking a congruence of method.
The poor Mr.Biagi deserves better then to be a chilling portent of things to come. Tragically, though, that is exactly what he might be.
There is an interesting article about a meeting of libertarian science fiction writers over on Hollywood Investigator. The splits between libertarian thought (and libertarian ‘thought’) are made very clear by the views on parade at this dinner.
This is the first time I have noticed one of the 2001 pattern two pound coins (£2 = US $3). I think the tails side is far nicer than the messy modern art confusion of the previous pattern, which looked like a circuit board that had been stamped on by an elephant.
 
Please applaud Dan Gillmor for spelling out that security and privacy are not incompatible in his article Don’t Deny Privacy for Security’s Sake in Computerworld. He mourns the fact that despite their supposed libertarian principles, Silicon Valley companies and their competitors around the world are racing to help the snoops. An example of technology that promotes both security and privacy is encryption and if we want a safe economy in the Digital Age, strong cryptography – with its positive and negative uses – isn’t an option but a requirement. His challenge is to the IT industry:
IT should be considering what happens when businesses are forced to put holes into everyday systems so that law enforcement can easily find wrongdoers or potential criminals. If government has a back door to every communication or collects vast amounts of data in central locations, the potential for a privacy debacle is enormous.
Please read and rejoice that someone has stood up to the post-September 11th tendency to compromise liberty in the supposed interest of security. 
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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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