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 decision to go nuclear has exposed the whole environmental cause for what it is: not a well intentioned drive for clean power but a spiteful, mean-spirited drive for less power. Because less power hits richer countries and richer people the hardest.
I’ve argued time and again that the old trade unionists and CND lesbians didn’t go away. They just morphed into environmentalists. The red’s become green but the goals remain the same. And there’s no better way of achieving those goals than turning the lights out and therefore winding the clock back to the Stone Age. Only when we’re all eating leaves under a hammer and sickle will they be happy.
I’m serious. All the harebrained schemes for renewable energy are popular among Britain’s beardies only because they don’t work.
– Jeremy Clarkson
I have written before of the nationalisation of politics in Great Britain. In short, I think Peter Oborne’s thesis in the the Political Class is almost right, but back to front. We are much closer to the authoritarian “no-party state” advocated by Brian Crozier, realised, however by Djilas’ New Class sucking up consumerism and the New Left rather than through caudillo-corporatism. But I did not realise it had gone so far: how much the constitution has changed in that particular respect the last decade; how much in public discourse the government and the governing party are now identified.
Peter Hain MP is in trouble. His inexplicably luxuriantly financed campaign for the deputy leadership of the Labour Party, turns out not to have counted over £100,000 in donations. It is all over the newspaper and the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, and the Electoral Commission are both investigating. I’m sorry? Apparently the failure to account is a criminal offence. It what?
Now maybe it couldn’t happen to a nicer bloke, Mr Hain (an African by birth) having moved from being the leader of the Anti-Apartheid Campaign in the UK in his twenties to one of the leading advocates of a new pass-law system for his adopted country. But I am outraged on his behalf in this case.
Someone has to be. All Mr Hain has done is to say he was too busy to notice the alleged offences being carried out in his name, not challenge, as the younger man would have done, the ludicrousness of the context. All the media has done is have vapours about the wickedness of using money to send leaflets and not reporting it to officials, and ridicule the poor man’s “orange” complexion in a way they would think disgusting and itself borderline criminal if he were an ethnically darker African.
Maybe I have not been paying enough attention, but I have not read anywhere yet the obvious point. … → Continue reading: Party = state?
The ballot initiative to end the income tax in Massachusetts has survived the challenges of some of the State’s worst tax whores and will be on the ballot this fall. If you live there, brace yourself for a cacophony of awesomely silly claims. You will soon be hearing the schools will close, your children will grow up to be heroin addicts, your pets will die of Ebola and the Atlantic Ocean will rise and smite thy town should you have the temerity to vote ‘yes’ in spite of the warnings of your betters.
Do you think I am kidding? The Governor of that State has already tried to relate tax repeal and Darfur. I kid you not. According to Jeff Jacoby:
So Governor Deval Patrick is cranking up the rhetoric. He told the Associated Press last week that undoing the income tax is “just a dumb idea” that would utterly devastate Massachusetts.
“Patrick said he has lived in places with no taxes, including the time he spent in Darfur 30 years ago,” AP’s Steve LeBlanc reported. “He says there were also no bridges, no good roads, and no public safety there. ‘Civilization costs something,’ he said. ‘If we could have something for nothing, which is the fiction that has been sold by the right for some time now, then we wouldn’t have a $19 billion upkeep backlog for the roads and bridges.’ “
You have loads of time to tell your friends and neighbors about this Initiative. Get out the vote and give the Statists their head on a platter this November.
Ezra Levant is not someone I had heard of before but I already take my hat off to the man. He has been summoned before a kangaroo court in Alberta to answer for daring to publish the Mohammed Cartoons in 2006.
His opening remarks to the absurdly named ‘Alberta Human Rights Commission’ are, quite simply, pure uncompromising brilliance. Read the whole article yourself as no mere snippet can do them justice.
Update: go to the root Ezra Levant site and watch the videos. Oh. My. God. The man is simply magnificent. Watch and learn. It is a master class in confronting the enemies of liberty. Head on.
I invite people to do what I just did… if you feel Ezra Levant speaks for you too, go to his site and drop your mouse on the button ‘Donate to fight the HRC’ to help defray his legal costs. Put your money where Ezra’s mouth is.
For, despite the warnings of the accursed health and safety apparatchiks, who enjoy nothing more than closing paths of self-discovery, the human spirit will not be tamed. That is the important lesson of Hillary’s life, a lesson that is worth passing on to children growing up in a world where everything must be measured and known.
– Michael Henderson, talking about the late Sir Edmund Hillary, who died last week:
Cato have written about why they are not real keen on Ron Paul and although I pretty much agree with the generality of what causes them such discomfort, I do not actually end up with the same set of conclusions. The money quote for me is:
And now he and his associates have slimed the noble cause of liberty and limited government.
Please, gentlemen, take a deep breath. I realise racism is the cardinal sin of our time and that it carries the automatic penalty of public abomination and auto da fe, followed by burning at the stake (it even gets you banned from commenting at Samizdata, although probably not for the reasons most people think), but the notion that the cause of liberty is inextricably tied up with Ron Paul’s campaign is excessive hyperventilating, both from Ron Paul’s supporters and his detractors.
I never felt he was the dream candidate, just the only one serious about shrinking the size of the state and frankly if he wanted to do that in order to preserve the purity of his precious bodily fluids rather than to increase the general sum of liberty, well so be it, just so long as he really is serious about shrinking the state.
Just as I am (still) quite willing to support him in spite of, rather than because of, his view of foreign affairs as foreign affairs just ain’t the most important issue at the moment in my view, similarly this admitted lapse of judgement by Ron Paul regarding these dismal newsletters does not really change much in my opinion.
He is a politician, for Christ’s sake, what did you expect?
I was talking to a friend this evening who noted that a bank had sent him a letter promoting a loan; confounding the pessimists who think that the days of easy credit are completely dead. He observed that the letter contained the phrase “The mill that produced this paper supports sustainable forestation”.
It is hard to believe that the bank really cared that much about the source of their paper, but banks, being creatures of the market, are sensitive to their customers, and make efforts to please them. The small but noisy minority of ‘environmentally friendly’ customers that would have approved of the bank’s effort to be eco-friendly would be appeased, and the rest of the client base would care not a jot.
But we are seeing more and more of these nods to the environment being enforced with the power of national governments. It is rather like what happened to ancient Rome in the Fourth Century. The first Christian Emperor, Constantine the Great, lifted restrictions on Christianity in 312, and Christianity backed by the power of the state made slow but steady gains at the expense of the old pagan faiths before the Vestal Virgins were disbanded by Imperial order in 394.
I am not sure what will really qualify as comparable milestones in the rise of environmentalism as the official faith of the West, but for those of us of a skeptical nature, I think it does rather have a feel of being like a Pagan in 4th Century Rome.
IN 2006 EMI, the world’s fourth-biggest recorded-music company, invited some teenagers into its headquarters in London to talk to its top managers about their listening habits. At the end of the session the EMI bosses thanked them for their comments and told them to help themselves to a big pile of CDs sitting on a table. But none of the teens took any of the CDs, even though they were free. “That was the moment we realised the game was completely up,” says a person who was there.
– The Economist reports on the decline and fall of the music studios.
…or should I say Ron Paul. The previous post makes the case against Ron Paul as a champion of the libertarian faction of the US Republican party.
However, I shall be speaking about the US primary system and what Congressman Paul’s campaign means at the Putney Debates tonight. I shall try to get a summary up over the weekend, either on Samizdata or here. The title of my talk is ‘Change at the Top: How the US Election Process Works and What are the Opportunities for Ron Paul?’ Details from here.
I shall also be continuing to cover the US primaries on my election blog.
Although I like a lot of its articles, I have to say I got irritated with some of the intellectual flabbiness of Reason magazine a few months ago and my subscription lapsed. I am also trying to save a bit of money and realise that I have rather lot of subscriptions as it is. The magazine spends too much of its time desperately trying to make libertarianism cool and funky by devoting so much stuff to drugs etc, for my liking; but I do check out its website and I enjoy reading its writers such as Brian Doherty. But something of its old hard edge has gone. Maybe I am just becoming an old git (I am sure readers will agree).
It appears one of its former editors, Virginia Postrel, is none too impressed by the judgement of some the magazine’s writers. This has to hurt:
I do fault my friends at Reason, who are much cooler than I’ll ever be and who, scornful of the earnestness that takes politics seriously, apparently didn’t do their homework before embracing Paul as the latest indicator of libertarian cachet. For starters, they might have asked my old boss Bob Poole about Ron Paul; I remember a board member complaining about Paul’s newsletters back in the early ’90s. Besides, people as cosmopolitan as Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch should be able to detect something awry in Paul’s populist appeals. (Note that by “cosmopolitan” I do not mean “Jewish.” I mean cosmopolitan.) I suspect they did but decided it was more useful to spin things their way than to take Paul’s record and ideas seriously. As for Andrew Sullivan, his political infatuations are not his strong point as a commentator.
The line right at the end about Sullivan is a devastating put-down for being so polite.
The incident reported the other day of Iranian Pasdaran threatening the USN has produced an Iranian rebuttal of the US version of events.
Press TV said the video, released by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards a day after the force dismissed the Pentagon video as fake, included a recording of what it said was the exchange between the two sides. Guards Brigadier General Ali Fadavi said Iran’s boats had only approached the US ships to examine the registration numbers as they had been unreadable, Press TV said.
My take on this? The incident probably did happen but from what I have read, unlike the Iranian regular navy and the army, the Pasdaran only has tenuous control over its own people, who are more or less by definition religious nutters. The incident in question may well have horrified the powers-that-be in Iran as much as folks in the west. If I am correct, the possibility of a war due to an incident that neither Tehran nor Washington wants is a very real one. Maybe a good time to have a few Crude Oil call options tucked away if you have some spare cash.
According to American Thinker, there is a move afoot to nationalise the ability of people to control the temperatures of their own homes (yes, really!) in, where else, the People’s Republic of California:
What should be controversial in the proposed revisions to Title 24 is the requirement for what is called a “programmable communicating thermostat” or PCT. Every new home and every change to existing homes’ central heating and air conditioning systems will required to be fitted with a PCT beginning next year following the issuance of the revision. Each PCT will be fitted with a “non-removable ” FM receiver that will allow the power authorities to increase your air conditioning temperature setpoint or decrease your heater temperature setpoint to any value they chose. During “price events” those changes are limited to +/- four degrees F and you would be able to manually override the changes. During “emergency events” the new setpoints can be whatever the power authority desires and you would not be able to alter them.
In other words, the temperature of your home will no longer be yours to control. Your desires and needs can and will be overridden by the state of California through its public and private utility organizations. All this is for the common good, of course.
Good grief. Presumably the same logic will be extended into all your household functions. As for the “and you would not be able to alter them”, has the political class’ dislike of so-called ‘assault weapons’ been extended to ban hammers and screwdrivers?
However I must say that American Thinker demonstrates what a big part of the problem is:
Building codes and engineering standards are generally good things.
By which I assume they mean politically derived and state imposed building codes and engineering standards (and if they do not, ignore all that follows). Well guys, all your are doing is reporting on the logical progression of these ‘good things’ that you like so much. Building codes and engineering standards demanded by insurance companies on the other hand are far less likely to have ‘mission creep’ built into the process. American Thinker makes the classic statist mistake of assuming that order can only be imposed by the state regardless of all the evidence to the contrary (or as Bastiat put it, “Paris gets fed” without any central planner). People want and need order. Order is at the core of what civilisation is about. But it makes little sense allowing a monopoly provider of order to decide how best to achieve that. When you do, you end up with shit like this.
(hat tip to Dropsafe)
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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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