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 powers-that-be are moving to remove that annoyance to business-as-usual called the United Kingdom Independence Party by killing them with a legal move.
The UK Independence Party faces a crippling demand from election watchdogs to forfeit more than £360,000 of donations. The Electoral Commission is due to announce today that it is launching legal action to recover 68 separate donations made to the anti-Brussels party by one of its main backers […] The threat has stunned Ukip’s leadership, which admitted yesterday that forfeiting the money would effectively leave the party penniless […] He and Nigel Farage, the party leader, are furious at what they say is over-reaction to a “simple clerical error”. Mr Farage, who said Ukip’s annual income was about £250,000, said: “I would have expected a rap on the knuckles.”
What seems strange to me is that UKIP actually appear to be surprised something like this could happen. They are trying to break The System and neither of the two main parties who benefit from it really has any interest in seeing the vast body of consensus they both share threatened by outsiders. The LibDems are a predictable ‘given’ that do not really threaten the status quo… UKIP on the other hand is a wild card. If the UKIP thought the risk they posed as a spoiler was going to be fought out amongst ‘gentlemen’ via the ballot box, then they are more naive than I thought.
Also a pet peeve of mine… “launching legal action to recover 68 separate donations…” Recover? The money will be gobbled up by the Treasury. Seize, confiscate, appropriate, take, perhaps, but in order to ‘recover’ the money they would have to give it back to the donor. I have always though the legal use of the word ‘recover’ was the state speaking at its most euphemistically disingenuous.
To date, libertarian ideas have had no material impact upon the body politic.
True or false?
It must be a good show when a sociologist (who does not seem to think his discipline is a by-word for socialism) says:
A lot of progressives have stopped believing in progress… and have begun to look nostalgically to the past and have come to reject modern life in many respects and, in a very kind of desperate way, believe that in the good old days when things were small and tangible and when people lived in small villages, everything was all right.
Yah. When asked if those making charitable donations to certain green organisations campaigning to halt industrial-scale development in the third world realise the consequences of their support, this same individual says
Absolutely not, people do this for the best possible motives, but the kids don’t realise that by going there and telling them ‘this is the way you must live your life’, you’re actually being fairly coercive; you’re imposing upon people a lifestyle that is quite ill-suited to their circumstances, and you end up becoming complicit in an authoritarian world order where one group of people’s world-view becomes the dominant one and everyone else’s becomes quite secondary.
[my emphasis – JW]
Who is this erudite chap? Why, it is Professor Frank Furedi, interviewed on the excellent Mine Your Own Business documentary. This movie has been billed by some as a ‘right-wing’ counterpart to a Michael Moore production, but it comes across as considerably less polemical – and enormously more believable – than the average output from the portly and infamous self-declared son of Flint.
This is a useful film for the liberal cause. I am twenty six, and I have a lot of friends who I would describe as instinctively left-leaning. I have shown the film to some of them. I would like to describe a ‘road to Damascus’ scene, but there were no Pauls in my audience. Still, several seeds of doubt were planted, and that is a great start – I too was a socialist, but for that seed of doubt planted several years ago. Consequently, I talk to a lot of young people about extending the principle of personal responsibility. I have often thought that the young are natural libertarians – yet, because they are frequently reliant upon the patronage of others for their livelihoods, matters of economics concern them not. Socialism appears affordable and desirable when one pays less than 10% of their income to the tax man. Regardless, I have discovered that it is not so hard to convince a young person of the merits of what is dismissively described as “rugged individualism” by statists – until the environmental question is raised. This is much harder to overcome, because the underlying science is arcane, mastered by few and is thus vulnerable to manipulation. I firmly believe that green politics represents the ultimate bulwark against the adoption of liberal ideals. Therefore I recommend this film. It graphically displays the victims of international green politics – the world’s poorest – those that the green movement purports to champion. For this alone, Mine Your Own Business is a useful production. Young people who are socialists are generally well-meaning. They want to help the poorest. Fine – help the poorest the liberal way. Help them via voluntary charity. Decouple the link between the Greens and the poor, because the poor confused Greens are inherently antipathetic towards the plight of the poor, whilst championing them. They are no good to anyone – in fact, they can be positively deadly.
Thus, it is essential that the Greens are denied the ability to become a large ‘catch-all’ political movement by encroaching meaningfully into the economic arena. Scarily, they have come thus far and we must aim to roll their influence back to saving sequoias and killer whales, because when it comes to economics – that is, the realm of human welfare – Greens are instinctively genocidal. Of course, they will deny this, but ask them about the earth’s grave overpopulation problem. Most will concur but not extend this rationale to its logical conclusion because they are good (and misguided) people who would never associate themselves with a cause that overtly demands the slaying of billions. Deduction, fools! Admittedly, the Greens have their consistent advocates. And you thought the Final Solution was a pretty fucking awful idea.
The point is that the Green movement has crept into the mainstream. It urgently needs to be repulsed to the ideological fringes, because it is inherently anti-human. Mine Your Own Business contributes to this process, so it should be supported.
Only Blair could repackage scuttle as a political victory. The situation in the south of Iraq has worsened over the last few years as British troops have withdrawn from the main towns, leaving the local areas in the control of the Mahdi Army and the Shi’a militias, often under the influence of Iran. The Times reports that the main tasks assigned to the British Army: pacification and reconstruction, have not been achieved.
Anthony Cordesman, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washing-ton, said the British move would simply hand more power to the Islamist groups backed by neighbouring Iran. “The British cuts will in many ways simply reflect the political reality that the British ‘lost’ the south more than a year ago,” he said.
Although there is no Sunni-Shia carnage to compare with Baghdad, the Shia-dominated south has been torn by a cutthroat internal competition for power that has turned bloody. Since August, both Diwaniyah and Amara have been convulsed by clashes between the mainly Shia Iraqi Army, and Sadr’s militia.
Unwilling to increase defence expenditure and recruitment, the government tried to hide behind a victory message whilst hoping to prevent the possible creation of a Shi’astan with a reduced force. Soldiers have done a sterling job under impossible political conditions, whilst stabbed in the back by the hypocrites in the Liberal Democrats. If the government cannot fulfil the security commitments that Blair undertook on our behalf, it should say so honourably and withdraw leaving the United States to hold the ring. If a hot war results from the Shi’a-Sunni tensions ensuing, Blair’s legacy will stand out: defeat abroad, failure at home.
One of the grey areas in European Union law is the primacy of community law in relationship to the constitutions of the Member States. As the treaties have encroached more and more upon the national sovereignty of Member States, this has become a fraught issue. It has resulted in a staunch defence of sovereignty or a surrender of the national prerogative. The country having the strongest debate upon this issue is France.
In a recent case at the Conseil D’Etat, Arcelor had requested a ruling on whether EU law violated the principle of equality in the French Constituion as steel companies had to comply with climate change laws whereas the competing industrial sector of plastics was exempt. The Conseil D’Etat declined to make a ruling and referred the case to th European Court of Justice. This has caused a debate in France as to whether the French constitution is now subordinate to the European Court of Justice.
The French court’s decision not to conduct a constitutional test on EU legislation is seen as significant as it arguably places France’s constitution below the ECJ in the legal hierarchy.
Although the supremacy of EU law over national law has been well-established, the status of national constitutions has been less clear not only in France but also elsewhere, including Germany.
Leading newspaper Le Monde was quick to predict on the day of the ruling that sovereignists and eurosceptics would probably interpret the judgement as a “Waterloo” of French sovereignty – something which became a self-fulfilling prophecy as sovereignists were eager to stress that even Le Monde called the ruling a “Waterloo.”
There is some debate as to whether this was the groundbreaking referral that some commentators have stated. As the ruling concerned EU law, it has been argued that the Conseil D’Etat was only deferring to the European Court of Justice on this matter as equality was a governing principle with European law. Therefore the European Union and the French Constitution are complementary.
Despite the radical arguments of some who view the entry into the EEC as a watershed that fundamentally abrogated British sovereignty, the right of Parliament to bind the powers of its successor is not a recognised convention yet. Given the political will and a majority in Parliament, the United Kingdom could democratically withdraw from the European Union and assert the primacy of British law. The illiberal EU may not recognise self-determination except as an entry principle, but the constitutional recognition of European law is a parliamentary derogation, nothing more.
This has to rank as one of the strangest reports I have read so far this year:
Two circus clowns have been shot dead during a performance in the eastern Colombian city of Cucuta, police say…
Last year, a prominent circus clown, known as Pepe, was also shot dead by a unknown assailant in Cucuta.
I find clowns deeply irritating but surely lethal force is a little excessive. Don’t they have custard pies in that part of the world?
As in: creative accounting:
We’ve had experience in the past – the New York City subways come to mind – with businesses that began as conventional, for-profit corporations, and, for one reason or another, were later rendered unprofitable while still being viewed as essential services. It’s time to apply some creative thinking to newspapers and, for that matter, to serious journalism in other media. Then we need to convince Americans that they should pay attention to it – and pay for it.
Convince as in force people who do not want newspapers to pay for them nevertheless.
I do not know who Steven Rattner is (here are a few clues. His wife is apparently a fundraiser for the Democrats). Nor do I know what the Quadrangle Group, LLC is, of which he is managing principal, whatever that may mean (again, some clues here). But he seems like a fool. The entire essay of which the above recommendation for plunder is the concluding paragraph is about how Americans are becoming less interested in “the news”, and more interested in other things. Which is why, actually, they are less willing to pay for the news than they used to be.
It is also about why tradesmen do not need newspapers any longer to reach potential customers, which is why tradesmen are less willing to pay for newspaper readerships.
That ought to lead to a simple recommendation to potential investors in newspapers. Do not invest in newspapers. Let people tell each other the news for free, for instance by people writing and reading blogs. If some still want the news, then let them read news blogs, which gather together what various different bloggers think is the news.
But Mr Rattner seems to love newspapers. So, seeing no profit in newspapers as a business, he switches to the second-last resort of the scoundrel, a bare-faced claim that the taxpayer owes him and his friends a living. Having ceased to be attractive to mere readers, newspapers must be transformed, by some kind of political hocus pocus, into “essential services”. Like the BBC, if you please. And when all that falls on deaf ears, he will presumably go with the cosmeticised version of the same claim, about how taxpayers should pay for newspapers despite not wanting to read them anymore, because this is their patriotic duty.
Via the Norman Geras blog (and in turn via Glenn Reynolds), is a long letter that challenges head-on the disgraceful spectacle of Iran’s conference of December 2006 to “debate” whether the Holocaust existed. Good. It is a letter that reminds us that thousands, maybe millions, of Iranians do not subscribe to the same claptrap as its leaders. It is welcome and important that such views get an airing. I hope it happens a great deal more often.
I have just discovered that I am clearly a member of the scofflaw demographic, as I suspect are a great many of Samizdata’s contributors and readers.
What scofflaws need now, and what the majority of our population will wish for in the future, probably at the point where the government finally does try to seize every handgun or require every citizen be fingerprinted and have his or her DNA sequenced and recorded in a permanent database, or when every financial transaction, no matter how trivial, must by law be processed electronically, by a credit card company, or when traffic at lighted intersections is tracked by remote cameras, or when our employers begin forcing us to piss in cups as a condition for keeping our jobs (wait a minute…), is a refuge from the unrelenting psychological, political, legal, religious, economic and physical coercion we are daily subject to at the hands of our employers, our governments and everybody in-between, and from the over-politicization of every facet of our lives.
Great article, read the whole thing.
Sometimes you see a set of numbers and they really make you sit up and gasp:
Last year, more than 350 companies went public in Europe, selling $86
billion of stock, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. In the U.S.,
235 companies raised $48 billion in IPOs. In 1999, 507 companies went
public in the U.S., selling a combined $63.93 billion of stock. Not one of the 10
largest stock issues of 2006 was listed in New York.
Nice work, Messrs Sarbanes, Oxley and Spitzer.
We know what she is smoking (see below), so the real question is: What is taking her so long to move there?
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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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