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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In some countries an interest in ideas, and history, even quite recent history, can get you arbitrarily arrested. It can happen even if you are an academic whose research is being paid for by the government of the country.
On Tuesday they [the police] read me a statement confirming it was an illegal document which shouldn’t be used for research purposes. To this day no one has ever clarified that point. They released me. I was shaking violently, I fell against the wall, then on the floor and I just cried.
What sort of place has ‘illegal documents’? And how would you get one? In this case the document obtained by the masters student in question was published by the US government, and simply downloaded from an official website.
– China? Russia?
In the country concerned, the term ‘illegal document’ does not actually appear in any legislation. It is not, in theory, illegal merely to possess any document there – except for some unusually broad and harsh laws about indecent images. What sort of place is it that the police make up the law as they go along, and threaten academics for having the intention to read about the subject they are studying?
– Saudi Arabia? Egypt? → Continue reading: Freedom of speech? How about freedom to read?
Under the title ‘Physicists raise questions on EMR capabilities’ Janes, (a subscription only publisher) reports:
Two US physicists have claimed that the European Mid-course Radar (EMR), due to be installed in the Czech Republic in a planned expansion of the US ballistic missile defence system, is substantially underpowered, and will form part of “a defence system that is unable to provide any discrimination services against missiles launched from Iran to the eastern half of the continental United States”. George Lewis, associate director of the Peace Studies Program at Cornell University, and Theodore Postol, professor of science, technology, and national security policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, are both opponents of US missile defence plans.
Anyone who has followed military space systems should be quite familiar with the consistently negative and consistently incorrect claims of Dr. Postel. If one were to believe his writings in Scientific American and other publications in the 1980’s we should never have tried to build anti-missile systems because they are impossible.
One must wonder if Dr Postel is sullying the good name of Physics in defense of his political preference for a global OK Corral gunfight, a world seemingly frozen in a timeless instant before the first gunfighter makes a false move. With only two gunfighters that standoff might well last a very long time and thankfully did. With more players the chance of a miscalculation ending in a free for all grows exponentially.
Thankfully, the good doctor was wrong in his eighties predictions about what would be possible now, so we are rapidly moving away from his MAD dream world.
The first decades of the age of nuclear weapons were an historical anomaly, Our newly operational systems will mature rapidly over the next two decades and in so doing will re-instate the natural balance between offense and defense.
In Third Way Britain both the bureaucrats and the nosey neighbours get to spy on you sunbathing nude in your garden.
– A line from a gloriously rude review of an absurd book by our soon-to-be former Prime Minister.
The Labour Party has suffered a crushing defeat in a by-election for one of its supposedly safe seats. The odds now must be rising that Gordon Brown will be challenged for leadership of the party. Having been given the job in a coronation last year rather than face a democratic election, his credibility is in shreds. Quite who would want to step up to challenge him is another matter. Labour looks to be headed for defeat at the next election, which must happen by 2010, and who wants to be the man or woman at the helm when or if that happens?
Watching the BBC television networks this morning, I see Labour folk blaming the government’s woes on the economy. This is pretty disengenuous. Yes, of course, the darkening economic situation is a worry for millions of people and Labour – which shamelessly tried to claim credit for the previous fat years – is now suffering from the effects of rising economic worries. But the reasons for the public anger go much deeper. There is a sense that this government is lazy, out of ideas, corrupt, incompetent.
I also like to think that the government’s assault on freedom, particularly civil liberties, might have something to do with the public anger, plus its shameful behaviour over the EU Constitution, sorry Treaty, being rammed through parliament in flagrant defiance of Labour’s previous election promises. It would be nice to imagine that authortarianism was a reason for hatred for this government.
Its always so gratifying when you can say “I told you so”, especially when you have an appellate court backing you up.
As I noted a month ago, it seemed to me there were serious questions about the State of Texas taking custody of all 460-odd children living at the YFZ Ranch, a fundamentalist polygamy sect located in Eldorado, Texas, just south of my home in San Angelo.
Background (shamefully omitted from my first post): The YFZ (Yearning For Zion) Ranch was founded by the FLDS (Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints) a few years ago. The FLDS split off from mainstream Mormons back when the Mormons officially gave up polygamy. They have run into trouble with the law at some of their other locations, and their current “Prophet”, one Warren Jeffs, is actually serving time as an accessory to (statutory) rape in connection with an underage marriage in his church. Their Eldorado ranch was raided after an anonymous call, since determined to have been a hoax, in which a “16 year old girl” (actually a woman in her thirties with no connection to the FLDS) claimed to have been beaten and raped there.
The Texas Court of Appeals heard an appeal relating to the seizure of children at the ranch, and threw the state out on its ear. Basically, the Court of Appeals found that the state had presented no evidence that met the statutory requirements for summarily seizing children from their parents, namely, that the children were in imminent physical danger and that there was no alternative to seizing them.
The appeal related only to 38 children, and so its not entirely clear yet exactly what its effect will be on the other 400-odd children (the number jumps around as some are found to be adults, and others are born). The language of the opinion is pretty sweeping, though. The state presented exactly the same case with respect to all of the children, and the Court of Appeals even indulged in a bit of obiter dicta, noting (even though none of the children in the appeal were pubescent girls) that the state had not even presented evidence that the pubescent girls at the ranch were in imminent physical danger.
The local court was in the process of grinding through the “60 day hearings” (so called because the state has to come back and make a full case 60 days after the emergency seizures). An attorney I know who is involved in the case told me the 60 day hearings had been cancelled. At this point, I see little alternative for the state other than returning the children to the ranch, but the state has obviously been planning to shut down the YFZ Ranch for some time, and I don’t expect it to just give up and go home. Careers are on the line, after all.
Certainly the FLDS is a distasteful lot, but this seems a pretty clear case of state overreach. The core of the state’s case can be fairly summarized as a claim that being raised in the FLDS is per se abuse. The Court of Appeals declined to start down that dangerous road, and should be applauded for it.
I am glad to see that a long-standing US friend of mine, Russell E. Whitaker, is back posting to his blog, which has had a bit of a haitus due to the man’s shift from California to New York and his being incredibly busy with work. Russell writes a lot and has a lot of knowledge of martial arts. Thanks to him, I started to go to Bujinkan classes in London’s Hammersmith. It is great fun and an extremely useful set of skills about self-defence, although physically tough as well to learn. Unfortunately, due to work reasons – I had to work late in the evenings last year – I was not able to attend as much as I liked last year but that has changed and I intend to resume. In the meantime, I have started to fence. Fencing, I find, is even more physically demanding than Bujinkan (yes, really). Initially, I am learning to use the foil, a very light sword where you score if you hit the opponent on certain parts of the body. Depending on which type of sword one uses, you score differently by hitting certain body parts. Of course fencers wear lots of protection these days so there is little chance of getting injured although you cannot afford to be reckless. I find it incredibly good for eye-hand co-ordination. I have also learned that one needs to do lots of stretching exercises since fencing requires people to be flexlible. My knee joints felt pretty sore the following morning after a class. It is a good incentive to get really fit.
Our lead instructor is a Frenchman – French seems to be the language of fencing – and another instructor is a Hungarian. More than half of the class are women, who are often much better than the men.
On the subject of fencing, we all have our favourite films. There are some great sword fighting scenes in Cyrano de Bergerac, Le Bossu, and in the excellent Ridley Scott film, The Duellists (starring Harvey Keitel).
For those interested in fencing as a sport, here’s a book worth looking at. But in the end, if you want to have a go, you have to go to a class. One word of warning: the kit can be expensive, so it is best to go to a few classes, use the class stuff to see if you like it first.
Last week, as I was wandering around a slightly shabby (but brightly coloured) neighbourhood of Santiago, I encountered the following restaurant, which was sadly closed at the time of day I visited.
It is likely that if a restaurant put up such a sign in Britain or America, it would soon receive a cease and desist letter from DC Comics or some other branch of Time Warner. However, despite the fact that the Chileans were undoubtedly required to enact some ghastly DMCA-like concoction as a consequence of the negotiations that led to the United States / Chile Free Trade Agreement, enforcement is somewhat laxer than it would be in Europe or North America.
This is, in my opinion, a good thing. If such a sign were taken down, there would be no consideration of the most important question related to it, which is What in the name of Apocatequil were these people smoking?
Everyone has things that they would destroy them if they were publicised. I once orchestrated a coup in a small African country from a base in an extinct volcano with the aid of a lot of fit-birds in 1960’s specs and very short lab coats, holding clipboards for no apparent reason, whilst I stroked my Persian cat. That should never be revealed. Oh, bugger! Like all Bond villians I give it away towards the end.
I love that. Readers will recognise the inimitable prose style of regular Samizdata commenter NickM, who now writes regularly at this place. This is taken from an excellent attack on the idiotic efforts of UK police to prevent people from criticising Scientology. It shows how respect for freedom of speech – which must, by definition, include the right to offend and upset – is now under serious assault in this country.
Any attempt to censor criticism of belief systems is an outrage. So long as the critics do not try to violate the lives and property of the people they are criticisng, the law should stay well out of it.
Read the whole of Nick’s piece.
Or perhaps a ‘stupidity’ of congressmen? A ‘fantasy’ of lawmakers? An ‘arrogance’ of representatives? They all seem to fit.
The House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved legislation on Tuesday allowing the Justice Department to sue OPEC members for limiting oil supplies and working together to set crude prices, but the White House threatened to veto the measure. The bill would subject OPEC oil producers, including Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela, to the same antitrust laws that U.S. companies must follow.
The measure passed in a 324-84 vote, a big enough margin to override a presidential veto.
The US House of Representatives have just in effect declared that all foreign governments and businesses must be subject to the wishes of US politicians and their regulations and sell oil at prices that US legislators like. Or else. The sheer absurdity of this is breathtaking. Exactly what sanction were they planning against OPEC? Perhaps not buying their fungible oil? Yeah, that will do the trick.
This would have been the Samizdata quote of the day if there was not one already. It is from our own Michael Jennings, commenting on this posting at my blog, which is about the promising future of specialist publications online – as opposed to general purpose ex-newspapers:
Newspapers employ “fact-checkers”, but their job is not to check facts but to avoid libel suits. Therefore they check that Gordon Brown really did say that, but if the article says that “The moon is made of green cheese” it will go straight through because the moon is not going to sue.
This was only in a comment, so Michael should not be blamed too severely if his facts turn out a bit wrong. Very probably, the moon does now have lawyers.
There are certain things you have to be realistic about. Dirty Harry would not be on a police department at my age.
– Clint Eastwood. Speaking at the Cannes Film Festival.
Wired reports on a scheme to make new nations:
Tired of the United States and the other 190-odd nations on Earth?
If a small team of Silicon Valley millionaires get their way, in a few years, you could have a new option for global citizenship: A permanent, quasi-sovereign nation floating in international waters.
With a $500,000 donation from PayPal founder Peter Thiel, a Google engineer and a former Sun Microsystems programmer have launched The Seasteading Institute, an organization dedicated to creating experimental ocean communities “with diverse social, political, and legal systems.”
Excellent. Most of the bad ideas about how to govern nations have been tried out for centuries. They work moderately well for luckier ones amongst the plunderers, more or less appallingly for the plunderees. The good ideas, like very low taxes, very light regulation – in short: liberty – have been attempted only very occasionally. Anything which tilts that balance in the good direction is to be welcomed. I strongly believe that all social, political, and legal ideas should indeed be allowed on these jumped-up oil rigs (rather than merely my own social, political, and legal ideas), as the Seasteading Institute clearly envisages, but only if all those involved in each attempt consent to being part of it.
That should shoot most of the collectivists at the starting line. Most collectivist political ideas are about what should be done by them, the evil collectivists and their evil friends, to others who can’t defend themselves against their ghastly ideas even by running away, let alone resisting plunder. If only for that reason, the evil collectivists are all going to hate this stuff. And if only for that reason, I already like it, even if it never gets much beyond internet speculation.
The more honestly deluded among the collectivists, who really think that people will consent and go on consenting to their rancid notions, like those 1620-vintage (have I got that date right?) settlers on the east coast of what is now the USA, will, if they are ever silly enough to try one of these schemes, get a crash course in what they really should be doing and how the world really works.
I found out about this plan via one of my internet favourites just now, BLDG BLOG. The BLDG BLOG man is torn between architectural excitement and political unease:
It’s not just a question of producing better loft apartments, for which you can charge an extra $300,000, or of perfecting the art of luxury kitchen space; it’s a question of designing architecture for extreme conditions and, should your architecture survive, thus opening up room for a new form of what might be called post-terrestrial sovereignty, i.e. governance freed from landed terrain.
Which is not to be confused with advocacy of the project; I just like discussing its political side-effects: architecture becomes wed with, indeed inseparable from, a political project. It is construction in the service of constitutionality (and vice versa). Wed with oceanic mobility, the architecture of seasteading doesn’t just aesthetically augment a natural landscape; it actually encases, or gives physical shape to, a political community. It is architecture as political space in the most literal sense.
He’s not advocating it, you understand. Perish the thought. Who knows what frightful political genies may be let out of the bottle of the twentieth century collectivism to which most architects are still wedded? But, he can’t stop himself thinking: cool. I hope he’s right. About the coolness, I mean.
I’ve been doing some more reading of the Wired piece. One of the moving spirits behind the Seasteading Institute is Patri Friedman, who is David Friedman’s son. If David Friedman is anything to go by, Patri (whom I have not met but whose blog I dip into from time to time) is surely a great guy. However, this makes me fear that the people doing this particular scheme are experts not on money, power, etc., but on libertarianism. This is not a good sign. Schemes like this cannot merely be virtuous. They have to work, and I fear that this one won’t. I mean, if it only starts to look like working, think of the number and nature of the people who will want it squashed. I really do hope that I’m wrong about this particular scheme. If I’m only wrong once about schemes like this, it will be a different world and a massively better one.
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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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