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]
That’s the heading. The sub-heading gives us a bit more detail:
Lawmakers and activists see encouraging signs that Trump officials could cut budgets by leaving federal money unspent.
Well, I may have changed things a bit there. See which version you prefer by comparing what I put with the original version.
I can’t fault paragraph one of the actual story:
Lawmakers and activists are preparing for the possibility that President Donald Trump’s administration, in its zeal to slash the federal budget, will take the rare step of deliberately not spending all the money Congress gives it — a move sure to trigger legal and political battles.
I had already been thinking to myself that Trump might do this. I didn’t think he would start making such noises quite so soon after signing the bill.
Next: actually not spending the money. But, never make that old “we demand action not words” mistake. Demand words, and then actions in accordance with those words, which is a hell of a lot more difficult if there have been no words to start with. If words didn’t count for anything, why the hell would we here bother with them, day after day?
This is a recent Spiked tweet. And that’s all it says, so no need to follow that link, unless to you want to chase up other Spikednesses. As well you might.
Zuckerberg must also be contemplating a second oddity. There was no privacy outcry when Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign took advantage of the same Graph API to exfiltrate information of tens of millions of Facebook users without each voter’s knowledge and consent.
– Declan McCullagh, writing: Obama harvested data from Facebook and bragged about it. Why are we only freaking out about this now?
In Britain, the EU is often thought about as a single entity — and one that in the end will do whatever Germany says. But Angela Merkel is struggling to exert control over her own government, let alone the continent. Juncker and Barnier see an EU that does not take its orders from member states, but draws (or claims to draw) its own democratic legitimacy from the European Parliament. The EU member states have an interest in a good deal with Britain. But the European Commission — the apparatus in Brussels — has an interest in Britain being seen to be worse off after leaving the EU. The Commission would also receive 80 per cent of the tariff revenue from UK exports to the EU, making ‘no deal’ more appealing to Brussels than to member states.
Mises sees ideologies – sets of ideas – as guiding people’s actions such that they extend or curtail the growth of the division of labour. But people can participate in an extended division of labour while still holding to an ideology of violence which must run counter to, and undermine, peaceful cooperation. Many who joined this extended order by moving into urban areas remained strangers to the ideas which made wider specialisation and exchange possible:
“One cannot make a social philosophy one’s own as easily as a new costume. It must be earned – earned with the effort of thought.”
Hence in history there appear periods in which the division of labour is extended and others in which it regresses: “More menacing than the barbarians storming the walls from without are the seeming citizens within – those who are citizens in gesture, but not in thought.” – Hayek too excoriates those “non-domesticated barbarians in our midst” who “refuse to accept” the “acquired discipline” of a world-wide division of labour while “they still claim all its benefits”.
When Corbynites say how their leader’s apparent chumminess with Hezbollah and Hamas or the IRA only arose because to make peace one must talk to those one does not like, I have long been in the habit of asking, “So why did he never meet with the equivalents on the side the left wingers don’t like? When did he arrange to meet with ‘price tag’ Israeli terrorists, or with Loyalist paramilitaries in Northern Ireland? Why did he never have similar dialogue with fascists and racists?”
Some time towards the end of last year, my niece Roz emailed me to the effect that she was in London, and would I care to meet up with her for some coffee? I was intrigued. Because of our differing political views, Roz and I have had a polite but somewhat distant relationship. She is into feminism and environmentalism. I am into, well …: see all my other postings here. What was going on? Why this meet-up? I knew some unusual game was afoot. But what?
We duly met up, and after some further polite chit-chat, what was afoot was revealed. Roz had written a crime novel, called The Devil’s Dice. This book, she said, was in the process of being published, by a real publisher of the sort that you have heard of. I like crime novels, and I like detective dramas on television. And I know how hard it can be to write anything even as long as a longish blog posting (such as this one is (you have been warned)), let alone a book. So, I was impressed.
Although she didn’t spell this out, it was clear that Roz was then at the stage of communicating with everyone she could think of who might be able to help her sell this book. Which also impressed me. Good for her. And good for her also, and good for me, that she was content to include me in this process. Later, an advance copy of the book arrived at my home, in a bright gold bubble-wrapped package, together with some chocolate dice, in a little bag made of bright red netting.
I read the book, and found it thoroughly absorbing and entertaining. She writes really well.
A quote from the book? Try the dedication:
To my parents.
Thank you for your support and encouragement, and advice on how to kill people.
Roz’s mum, my older sister, was a National Health Service doctor, and her husband was a psychiatric social worker. Short of having parents who were directly involved in the criminal justice machine, like detectives or coroners or forensic pathologists or suchlike, a crime writer couldn’t ask for a better start.
An unnamed West Yorkshire police officer has managed to attempt to pervert the course of justice by getting himself summonsed for driving an untaxed vehicle, when he accidentally put his own details on a form instead of those of the alleged miscreant, reports the Daily Mail.
Members of West Yorkshire Police’s Roads Policing Unit (RPU) took to Twitter to mock another member of their team who appears to have put his own name on a form rather than the real offender.
I’m pretty sure that a humourless American prosecutor would seize on this as obstruction of justice by wrongly reporting yourself as the ‘perp’, and to be fair, it does seem to have all the necessary elements of causing wasteful employment of police time in UK law.
Our wonderful mini plea-bargain system of fixed penalty notices in the UK allows you to buy off a prosecution, or go to Court and challenge the basis of the ticket and risk conviction.
Whilst the UK may seem more and more like East Germany as time goes by, witness recent police action on free speech, it is heartening that the police are managing to boost their summons rates in a way that cuts out the unfortunate middleman, like the Armenian Orthodox Priest in Soviet Russia who, having a conspiracy beaten out of him by Stalin’s NKVD, managed to name as his co-conspirators every member of his congregation that he had buried in the past 3 years, thus enabling his tormentors to fill their quota with ‘real’ people. At least for now, this is a laughing matter. Should Comrade Yezhov‘s admirers take power, it might not be so nice.
If we are handing out punishments to obvious non-Nazis for doing stuff that reminds people of Nazis I don’t see why that Seig-Heiling pug should get away scot-free.
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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