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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With the occurrence of yet another violent attack on a crowd of disarmed people in the news, Glenn Reynolds suggests we start sueing the universities. If a University or any other organization defines its facility as a ‘Gun-Free Zone’ it has an implied contract duty to protect you, and if it has failed to take measures to do so is in breach of that contract.
Think of it this way: you have a constitutional Right of self defense. When a property owner or government makes entry onto that property contingent upon waiving that Right, they imply they will in return defend you against harm. This is not all that different from a situation I faced a decade ago as a C-level manager at a UK ISP. If our net news feeds were wide open, we were a common carrier; but if we put any sort of filtering into effect we were expressing editorial control of content and therefor liable for what we missed, be it child-porn or whatever.
Let the fun begin!
Some people are their own worst enemies. Take, for example, the rather eccentric-looking chap in the photograph below. He appears to have rather clumsily allowed himself to be portrayed as a depraved menace when he is but a makeover away from becoming a card-carrying member of The Great and The Good.
A network of “suicide gurus” who use the internet to advise people how to kill themselves has been exposed…
One of the most notorious figures on the internet suicide scene is Nagasiva Yronwode, a self-confessed Satanist who runs a shop selling occult books and charms in the small Californian town of Forestville, north of San Francisco.
Yronwode, 46, describes himself as the “outreach director” for an extremist cult called the Church of Euthanasia, which advocates suicide as a means of saving the world from the effects of overpopulation.
Does this self-defeating fool not appreciate just how seductive his central message would be to the bien pensant? Indeed, they are treading water just waiting for someone like him (only a plausible, marketable version) to come along. All he needs to do is to make himself a bit more presentable. → Continue reading: Image is everything
Kosova has declared its independence from Serbia and if ever a people have justification for not trusting the political institutions of another, it is the Kosovars. Perhaps this will, as some fear and other hope, start a wave of reasonable and logical separations… starting with Taiwan maybe?
Michael Totten has a superb article up that compares the approach to counter-insurgency followed by Israel under the dismal Ehud Olmert, and that of the US in Iraq under General David Petraeus.
What Totten points out is that the policies promised by Barack Obama for Iraq (in essence remove the army and drop bombs on anyone who seems to be the Bad Guys) is essential the same as the demonstrably failed approach used by Ehud Olmert in Lebanon. Israel blew the crap out of Lebanon from the air and achieved precisely zero of its war aims.
Read the whole article.
The latest control freak ravings from UKGov are the impending crusade against bottled water:
Drinking bottled water should be made as unfashionable as smoking, according to a government adviser. “We have to make people think that it’s unfashionable just as we have with smoking. We need a similar campaign to convince people that this is wrong,” said Tim Lang, the Government’s natural resources commissioner. Phil Woolas, the environment minister, added that the amount of money spent on mineral water “borders on being morally unacceptable”.
Very telling, no? People deciding to spend their own money on something “borders on being morally unacceptable”. Let me what you what is morally unacceptable: that force addicted control freak tax parasites like Phil Woolas have the gall to tell people how to spend their own damn money. “Immoral”? You do not know the meaning of the word, Woolas.
I loath almost all canned and bottled soft drinks (or ‘soda’ in American parlance)… vile phoney tasting sweet muck… and so I am delighted that finally the UK has followed long standing European custom and now conveniently sells bottled water almost everywhere.
And it is The Economist. Unlike some of my fellow Samizdatistas, I am a fan [1]. But then, I am a liberal – conservative only in my suspicion of social management and ‘fixing’ things without enquiry as to whether they are actually broken.
This week in the print edition there is an excellent supplement: The electronic bureaucrat (introduction here). It is clear-sightedly critical of e-government of all kinds, without falling into the know-nothing technophobic rants that I fear some of those who oppose the database state do:
[G]loom, fear and optimism are all justified.
[1] Though I sincerely hope putting Martin Sheen on the cover of the Intelligent Life quarterly was one of its deadpan jokes.
Late last year, HM Revenue & Customs succeeded in losing details on 25m Britons. That was quite an impressive achievement; the loss of data on disks, unencrypted, had an almost artistic quality about it. It was glorious to watch BBC rottweiller Jeremy Paxman reduce some hapless junior Treasury minister to dogfood on the BBC Newsnight programme. (The Chancellor, Alisdair Darling, was too busy dealing with the disaster of Northern Rock to go on the show). As Paxman argued by way of a statement more than a question to the hapless government minister (I forget her name, she is totally forgettable): “This does rather kill off the idea of ID cards, doesn’t it?”
It certainly does. And alas, my wife this morning received a letter from HMRC to inform her that details she sent to it in relation to her business (I will not give any further details for obvious reasons), have all been lost: date of birth, registration numbers for VAT, the whole shebang. The letter informed us of the need to be super-vigilant about bills, invoices etc. We will have to use services like Equifax or Experian, the credit-check companies, to ensure that our credit history is not damaged. All a great nuisance. I am also writing to my local member of Parliament, Mark Field (Conservative), who voted against ID cards to his immense credit, to inform of this latest case. About 40 or so forms, according to the letter sent to us, have been lost in this latest HMRC cockup. I will ask Field to raise this matter as part of the Tories’ opposition to ID cards. There is, of course, no point informing anyone on the government side about this.
Or is it a cock-up? I wonder about what is happening at the moment. If you are a conspiracy theorist, you might start to wonder whether there are criminals working in civil service jobs or major banks – which increasingly operate like state departments due to the amount of regulations these days. The recent massive fraud that hit Societe Generale, the French bank, was, remember, carried out by at least one, if not more, insiders who had knowledge of how the compliance operations of these complex organisation work. Or, it is possible that someone in HMRC has an agenda against ID cards and is using incidents like this to discredit the whole project.
Anyway, whatever your views about ID cards and government use of data, I strongly urge people to use credit-check and verification services at least once a year to ensure they have a clean bill of health. In the current difficult credit market environment since the US sub-prime mortgage disaster, even the smallest blemish on a credit record could cause an individual serious problems, such as inability to get a loan.
Bastards.
Hunter did something that none of us had the guts to do – he led the kind of life that secretly all of us would like to have the guts to lead. To hell with the whole thing, just stay drunk and high and smoke and hang out and write outrageous things. He’d never lived his life on anybody else’s terms.
– James Carville, chief strategist for Bill Clinton’s 1992 election campaign, on Hunter S. Thompson
We get emails! Some people still entertain the idea that it is possible for sharia law and its adherents to operate cosily alongside a code such as the English Common Law. I have already described why I think sharia and a liberal legal tradition on matters of marriage and treatment of women are like oil and water; it is also remiss for the Archbishop not to spell out what criteria he would use to judge which bits of sharia are okay in England and which are not; he is far too vague on the latter point. Rod Liddle, writing in this week’s Spectator, points out that is rather presumptious for the Archbishop to lecture Muslims about which bits of sharia are legit and which bits are not in England. As Liddle says, it might be a more productive use of this man’s time to focus on preaching the message of the Gospels, although I accept that talking about the love of Jesus, sin, redemption and all that boring stuff is so, well, Bible-Belt, dahling.
Anyhow, a gentleman wrote the following email to Samizdata HQ:
Johnathan Pearce criticized Archbishop views on sharia law but didn’t
seem to actually have read Dr. William’s speech, which seems to me
eminently reasonable from a libertarian point of view.
Alas for this correspondent, I have read the speech all the way through – all the way through its tortured logic, non-sequiturs, question-begging expressions and the rest. A second reading or a third does not improve one’s experience. Dr Williams’ feeble grasp of the subject means a second or third read is like the experience of drinking another glass of an indifferent red wine; it only tastes good if you are already slightly pissed.
Matthew Parris, a libertarian to the core, has also read the speech. In his civilised, gentle way, Parris states what is painfully obvious: the Archbishop of Canterbury is not a particularly intelligent man. Having a white beard does not make one smart or benign.
Newsreaders still feel it is worth a special and rather worrying mention if, for instance, a crime was planned by people ‘over the Internet.’ They don’t bother to mention when criminals use the telephone or the M4, or discuss their dastardly plans ‘over a cup of tea,’ though each of these was new and controversial in their day.
– Douglas Adams quoted (last month but who cares?) by Kevin Marks
While I’m linking to what is probably common knowledge here at Samizdata, let me throw in a link to Iowahawk’s new Canterbury Tale for Bishop Rowan. In the unlikely event you haven’t seen this already, you really, really owe it to yourself to click through.
Just a little taste:
41 Sayth the libertine, “’tis well and goode
42 But sharia goes now where nae it should;
43 I liketh bigge buttes and I cannot lye,
44 You othere faelows can’t denye,
45 But the council closed my wenching pub,
46 To please the Imams, aye thaere’s the rub.”
I had run across some of David Wong’s work in the past and really enjoyed it, so I was delighted to find his home base at Pointless Waste of Time. He is one smart, funny guy. Browse around, but I particularly recommend the classics “Inside the Monkeysphere,” “The Ultimate War Simulation”, and “The God Fuse”.
The first two I had run across before, so they’ve gotten some exposure, but I was glad to find their home, as they are definitely worth re-reading.
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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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