From Crossbows to cryptography: thwarting the state via technology.

Libertarian Alliance Showcase Publication No 2:

David Davis

These days, we seem to have lost the optimism about the triumph of libertarian ideas through the inventiveness of individual humans, poised as we thought it would be against the galumphing stalinism of the State. Nowadays, the State seems to have all the technology, and private suppliers of ever-more-intrusive kit seem ot be falling over themselves to “sell the rope with which they will be hung”.

It is worth remembering that we published this about sixteen years ago.

http://www.libertarian.co.uk/lapubs/scien/scien009.pdf

It’s encouraging that the rise of the internet, and stuff like Youtube (eternally being blocked and unblocked in places like Pakistan and Turkey and China and Malaya – what have these in common then?) continually annoys the governments of (many) countries, whose citizens manage to get round all sorts of censorware and “government servers” in order to keep in touch. But I personally count it a pity that people who make hardware and stuff actually want to sell it to governments. I would have thought that this was strategically counterproductive: the use of it by states must and will ultimately lead to the reduction of opportunities for individuals to be creative in the first place.

No more “global warming”? That’s a problem for “policy makers” (what are those, please?)

David Davis

Here we discover what has happened to “Global warming’s missing heat”. It was never going to arrive in the first place. “Reason magazine reports Reuters commenting on an article in “Nature”.

When I were a nipper, “Nature” was globally regarded as a sound and objective science journal. The school paid for us to have it in the Chemistry library, along with the new Scientist – another one that’s gone to the Gore-dogs. It seems no longer. When great and old journals, such as this and the scientific American, spend more and more pages trying to lobby “policy” “makers”, for left-popular political strategies, and less and less time doing real-science-reporting, it’s time to build libraries, and stock them with hard knowledge.

As the planet cools (as it will when the Sun’s radiated output starts to fall to another Maunder minimum in about 100-150 years) and as the great global warming scam-scare unravels bloodily in public, what are the greenazis going to think of next, to hobble Man in a pre-capitalist barbarian time-warp, again?

WHAT, I ask, WHAT? WHAT is it about the socialists, global-warm-mongers and Gaians? Why, exactly (for I do not know and can’t tell) do they hanker for a mythical, pre-modern, supposedly neo-pastoralist “golden age”, in which Man was “in harmony” with “his” “environment”? Which is to say that his life was risky, often brutal, hard, painful and fairly short, and he had to spend 97.2%+++ of his time trying to simply grow (if lucky) (or find) food and eat it.

What, I beg to ask, is wrong with simply agreeing that the Christian West, liberalism and Hard Science have – in that order – won the battle for Human Survival? And not only that – they have won it for All Mankind? Look guys. we offer you all this knowledge, and for nothing!

We even gave you the internet, so you didn’t have to get out of your chairs or sign anything, to see that we are right. You don’t even have to go to a sodding library, where all the useful books have been cleaned out because they are written by dead white bourgeois male mysogynist conservative Christian twats.

Get out more. Get a life. Do some work (and stop singing work-songs.) Stop wearing Che Guevara t-shirts (no, you must not, really! It’s even less cool than when I criticised you before, and I think even the Guardian and the Indymoney will look down on you now for that.)

This gentleman celebrates St George’s Day the whole year round. Buy meat from him.

David Davis

 A picture will appear as soon as I can work the editor. Here?

As you know, I plug local businesses on here from time to time, such as Tesco, and little electrical shoppies on Shaky-Street***. I think it’s only right and good.

He’s called Graham Eve, and he sells really rather good meat in Churchtown (near Southport) Lancashire. Most of it’s “locally-reared”, so all you green lefties (trying to kick the socialist habit of a lifetime by reading our blog) can go to him with a clear conscience.

***It’s local slang for “Shakespeare Street”, near here.