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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Vicki woods writes in the Telegraph that Greek justice makes a mockery of the law.
Now the trouble with cases like this is that just as one is firing up to get outraged… along comes the thought, yeah but he might be guilty.
So he might. Or he might not. But the Greek justice system does not seem to be in any hurry to find out in the case of Andrew Symeou. He has spent a year behind bars without trial. Oddly enough the Greek authorities did manage to energise themselves sufficiently to issue a European Arrest Warrant. That got snappy action all right! A stirring display of how the nations of Europe can act together to leapfrog pettifogging national legal procedures! After this strong start, however, the Greeks did not quite manage to maintain the spirit of pan-European efficiency when they twice denied Mr Symeou bail on the grounds that he was not a Greek national.
And to think that a little over a 100 years ago, passports were almost unknown until an international assembly of governments decided to impose them. There’s just no stopping a bad idea whose time has come. Not without a guillotine, anyway.
– Commenter ‘tehag‘
The United States operates what it refers to as the Visa Waiver Program. This allows citizens of other rich countries to make short visits to the US without the hassle of obtaining a visa in advance. This follows what is pretty much standard practice: citizens of most rich countries can visit most other rich countries without obtaining a visa. In recent times the US has also required visitors to register their passport numbers with a US government website prior to coming to the US, presumably so that potential visitors can be checked against a list of prohibited visitors. This is more than most other rich countries require (although my native Australia has a very similar system) but is a very minor inconvenience.
Up until now, this whole process has been free of charge to the traveler. However, as of September 8, the US will start charging a $14 fee for people who wish to use the visa waiver program.
It is not actually terribly uncommon for governments to extort charge money from tourists in ways like this, but it is once again relatively unusual for such fees to be charged when citizens of one rich country visit another rich country. (Fees are more common when citizens of rich countries visit poor countries or vice versa). As a frequent traveler, however, I find such fees loathsome. Having a moneygrubbing government steal money from you is not a good first impression of a country. Such policies do of course influence where I choose to travel to, and whether I will return to a country for multiple visits.
What does boggle the mind about the new US policy is its justification. The fee has been introduced under something called the Travel Promotion Act of 2009, which was passed with overwhelming support in both houses of Congress. Apparently, the money is to be used to set up something called the Corporation for Travel Promotion, which will apparently “promote America to overseas tourists”, and thus halt the decline in tourism to the US.
Got that? A tax is to be imposed on tourists, the proceeds of which will be used to set up a new bureaucracy to promote US tourism to foreigners, who will then come in greater numbers.
Brilliant.
I was about to stick this up as a(n) SQotD, but I see that there already is one. Never mind, here it is anyway:
Belief in magic and faith in spells runs strong in political Washington. The New Republic’s print edition describes the reaction of the Administration on “April 14, 2009 as Barack Obama’s standing in the polls was beginning to slip”. Obama was looking for a phrase to bring back the love, “something that would evoke comparisons to Theodore Roosevelt’s Square Deal, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.”
Obama had hit on the phrase the New Foundation. He tried it out with Presidential historians at a private dinner in the White House. Doris Kearns Goodwin nixed it. She said it sounded “like a woman’s girdle”. Goodwin was right. But it underscores the complete vacuity of a public policy built on wordsmithing. The administration was trying on words like a courtier at Versailles might try on a hat or a dress thinking it would make a difference.
Not that there is anything wrong with hats or dresses or deckchairs. The only thing wrong is imagining that rearranging these articles on the deck of the Titanic will keep it afloat. There’s something crazy about that, something pathetically crazy.
That’s Richard Fernandez reflecting on the declining esteem in which President Obama is now held, abroad and at home.
Two thoughts. First, I’d have put a comma where it says “hats or dresses or deckchairs”, to make it “hats or dresses, or deckchairs”. There is a slight change of gear there, which, I would say, needs a bit of punctuational acknowledgement.
But second, more seriously, is Obama’s present nosedive in esteem, well described by Fernandez, irreversible? Having just watched our own former Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, damn near levelling out from what looked like a nosedive towards total catastrophe for himself and for his party, and achieving a very decent, under the circumstances, crash landing that nearly saved both. Brown only lost by an extraordinarily narrow margin, given how things had looked only a few months earlier, and his main opponent, from having looked a winner by a mile, had to make do with leading a mere coalition. Seemingly doomed politicians – inevitable losers, to use the word that Fernandez also uses – can make comebacks. Can Obama? Can this Titanic yet be kept afloat?
One thing that might improve matters for President Obama is that just now (or so it looks to me from over here) even the one party media who got Obama elected are now criticising him, a bit, partly for real, but partly in order that their next burst of slavish support for him will look honest instead of slavish.
On the other hand, if what happened here with Gordon Brown is anything to go by, Obama’s saviours will not be his media cheerleaders, or for that matter his own speechwriters, but his leading opponents, who will somehow contrive to look as clueless as he now looks.
In most every election, 80% of blacks vote Democratic – the perceived party of free stuff – rather than for the party that ended slavery.
– Rachel Marsden
The Audit Commission became a politicised, bloated parody of itself. After thirteen years of Labour rule, and marinated in the arrogance of the mission, they decided to employ lobbyists to combat the Pickles Terror.
If you are part of the problem, you are part of the dissolution.
Over at Instapundit (and at various other places), Glenn Reynolds has recently spent a lot of time discussing the question of whether Higher Education (and particularly Higher Education in the US) is essentially yet another debt fueled bubble in the process of popping. His reader Peter Galamga recently said the following, implicitely condemning quite a few fields of study and the academic departments associated with them
I think the days of spending the equivalent of a mortgage on one of the many two-word degrees (the second word is usually “Studies”) are coming to a close.
Although the second word might often be “Studies”, I think “usually” is too strong. In particular, one should also be extremely suspicious of courses and fields where the second word is “Science”. These are very seldom worthwhile, and are even less often actually science. “Biology” is good. “Plant Science” is bad. “Statistics” is good. “Political Science”, less so. “Meteorology” and possibly even “Climatology” is likely good. “Climate Science”, I will leave to you.
That said, I think things are much more likely to be okay of the second word is “sciences”. In particular, I can think of one or two truly formidable “Natural Sciences” programs. Does anyone else have any thoughts on this?
Some people may remember Natalie Solent writing a post on Samizdata about statist developments in Kenya (a post inspired by a BBC report – of all things).
Predictably a from-central-casting leftist commenter turned up – accusing Natalie Solent (and even nice, gentle, fluffy me) of lies, ignorance…
Well Glenn Beck has actually read the new Kenyan Constitution, passed last week (even I could think of better things to do than read the small print of the new Kenyan Constitution – for example pluck out some of my nose hairs, so if Glenn wants to use his failing eyes to read the thing for the rest us…) and he read out sections of it on Monday, live on his show.
There is a list of “positive” rights (i.e. nice things the government must do for you) – wild promises of health, education, and so on. The idea that these can be afforded even in a developed economy (in the long term) is problematic – as for in an economy like Kenya, the idea is absurd.
Also (as even the Economist magazine admitted – although, of course, it supported the new Constitution) large areas of what are presently privately owned land can now be taken by the government.
Lastly – we have an interesting definition of “freedom of speech” (the very thing that Natalie was pointing to) . “Hate speech” is excluded from “free speech” protection – and hate speech is defined as an attack on a group, or an individual (which just about covers everything one might use a right to free speech to do). I am sure that Frank Lloyd (President Barack Obama’s “Diversity” Commissar at the Federal Communications Commission) would love to introduce such a Constitution in the United States (no naughty Fox News, or talk radio or internet to upset him any more), Kenya may even replace the Venezuela of President Chevez as his favourite country.
Although there are no explicit use of words like “Marxism”, the style in which the Kenyan Constitution is written (and a lot of the content – see above) is very much like the old Soviet Constitution – not a nasty, negative, set of limitations on government power like the United States Constitution.
Almost needless to say Comrade Barack Obama spent a lot of money making sure the new Kenyan Constitution was passed – although Glenn Beck did not mention that point. Although Glenn did mention that this sort of Constitution was the “Dream” of Barack Obama’s Marxist pro Soviet father (not to be confused with his Marxist mother or socialist maternal grandparents, or his Marxist childhood mentor Frank Marshall Davis, or his fellow Marxists in New York whilst a post grad, or the Marxists he worked with for his whole adult life in Chicago, or his Marxist Liberation Theology Minister for twenty years Rev. J. Wright or…), as made clear (if one reads carefully) in Barack Obama’s own first book “Dreams…”
A friend of mine has looked into the Kenyan constitution – I hope I do not have to read it (i.e. I am forced to when some moron, or paid hack, comes along and say it is a wonderful example of truly limited government), from the sound of even this bit it seems like the Constitutional document equivalent of a snuff film.
His initial comments were:
I’ll stick to other countries’ coffee now, the rights enumerated are amazing, even goods and services. Why didn’t Marx think of simply enumerating legal rights to plenty? Were the massacres encouraged as a reason for the new Constitution? Clause 10 is bad enough; 34 (4); 43; 66, 73 etc.
How do I enforce my rights (were I Kenyan) under 43 (1) (c): By not paying in a restaurant? Everyone is obliged to uphold the Constitution 3 (1). OK, start saving up for the Famine relief now…
No wonder the Economist magazine supported it (no I am not saying they are Marxists – they are just whores who always try and get into bed with the powerful) and Comrade Barack spent American tax money to make sure it passed.
The vile ContactPoint database, which held details about every child in England and was accessible to hundreds of thousands of professionals has been switched off.
I have to say that in pulling the plug the government has confounded my gloomy predictions that no matter who won the election civil liberty and privacy would be equally poorly served.
Good comment to a BBC article on the subject here:
I work with large data sets professionally (I am a data architect working with large companies). ContactPoint was always going to fail, either disastrously through its own failings, or through an eventually inevitable political decision. The experience of data management within public and private organisations is that almost any data set like this will eventually end up on a laptop or a memory stick which then gets lost, and that users need to be carefully trained and monitored to ensure appropriate use. That was never going to happen here, with 300,000 users in a number of organisations, roles and lines of business, spread across the country.
Dr Robert Daniels-Dwyer, Oxford
However Simon from Doncaster feels differently:
David Cameron, in my view, will be directly responsible for any child who is abused in whatever form as a result of scrapping this system. How long before another Victoria Climbie? Well, with the cut backs to child social care, expect more and more and no doubt it will be local authorities who take the blame. This government is a disgrace.
Where did you say you worked again, Simon?
 Tiraspol, Transnistria. August 2010.
Amusingly, these two billboards are in front of adjacent buildings. Both, alas, are some distance from the brandy distillery that appears on the Transnistrian five rouble banknote.
The British government want to sign up to the Schengen Agreement… but they want the police state parts of it without the free movement of people parts of it
– Guy Herbert
One Catherine Bennet has yet another article in the Guardian about that jam experiment. Hers is called Since when was giving people a choice a good idea?
It is not merely the chorus from anguished parents (and patients), that they cannot exercise choice where there is no spare capacity, that might give a rational education secretary pause, but a growing body of research indicating that too much choice is overwhelming. Gove will know of the much cited experiment with jam, by the US academic Sheena Iyengar, which found consumers were more than six times more likely to buy a pot if they had to choose from six varieties, rather than 24. If uncertainty about preserves is a problem one can probably live with, or possibly enjoy, a similar helplessness in the face of big, irreversible decisions is, to judge by a new study, State of Confusion by Professor Harriet Bradley of Bristol University, something that should worry a government that advertises choice as an unmitigated good.
Mr Eugenides says,
So, just to recap: a woman who used to live with a lord in a 365-room mansion, now in a household with a combined income of some quarter of a million pounds a year, has read a PR puff commissioned and paid for to advertise a price comparison website, and uses this as evidence that we should all just take what we’re given by the state and shut up.
Ironically, price comparison websites are themselves a market mechanism for making choice easier.
I say, to Catherine Bennett and the next fifteen journalists to go into an ecstasy of servility when pondering this little demonstration that some people find shopping boring, shut up about the jam already. It’s jam. The process of choosing it has no deeper meaning. Unless one is a connoisseur of jam, in which case one probably finds choosing between 24 varieties a pleasing experience, as people usually do when shopping for something that interests them.
Look at it this way, Ms Bennett. You have twice to my knowledge chosen a man as mate and helpmeet. Was making that choice from all the prospective partners you could have had ever stressful? There is some literature – like about half of it – to suggest that some people find it so. Some people regret their choice. The evidence suggests that you have at least once. Can we assume that if by any sad chance you find yourself seeking a man again you are willing to let a civil servant choose for you?
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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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