Blogging Archives

Saturday, May 03, 2003

If you want something cultural to read, I recommend postings numbers one and two of Nikos Salingaros week, over at 2Blowhards.

The postings are interesting. But even better, in my opinion, are some of the comments. I've posted tangential comments of my own about the "New Urbanism", briefly on Transport Blog, and at somewhat greater length at my Education Blog. Meanwhile here are bits from two of my favourite of the Blowhard/Salingaros comments, so far.

First, here is "Tom", replying to something Michael Blowhard had said about suburbs:

You are so right about the zoning, transportation department, fire department rules ossified since the 50's creating inevitable horrible suburbia. I have done work in suburban areas and the results are completely predetermined by setbacks, maximum lot coverage areas, single use zoning, minimum parking space numbers and transportation department road standards. This is where the problems with modern architecture really are - a socialist/utopian attitude towards city planning. Even in many areas where they object strongly to this kind of thing, the solutions are always increased regulation - appearance reviews, stricter zoning, etc which just makes the problem worse. The reason all suburbs in america look the same is because there are two (i believe) companies that publish model codes for towns that they just buy off the shelf. The role of new urbanism should be fighting these standards.

But I am nervous about blanket condemnations of any kind of architecture. Modern architecture is not quite the force for evil in the world that I keep reading on this blog. That said, modernist urban planning is as bad or worse than has been expressed. What we need to be worried about is any totalitarian vision for architecture or urbanism. A strong town or city has the capability to absorb any style of architecture or building type, but any utopian or totalizing scheme will always destroy the city. Hitler and Speer's megalomanical plan for Berlin (dispite it's neo-classical style) was not a good thing regardless of how much Leon Krier liked it. We need architecture and urban planning that is anti-utopian and anti-totalitarian, not necessarilly anti-modern.

And second, here's Michael Blowhard himself, commenting on posting number two, having a go at A. C. Douglas:

… I don't know about you, but I have a hard time reconciling ACD's language with his implicit claim that he's the reasonable one here. Um, to say the least: his words seem to me to be dripping with irrational fury. Castigations, imprecations -- hey, son of a gun, that's the language of the offended religious nut! I'll resignedly point out, feeling slightly wounded, another anomoly -- that ACD, despite his habit of presenting himself as the ultimate arbiter of all things civilized, never shows the grace to express even the smallest appreciation for the way 2Blowhards occasionally stimulates a little conversation on architecture topics. No, he just seems to want to stamp it out. Tres civilized. …

You need a bit of heat in among the enlightenment of a good debate. Michael then goes on to offer an example of what he has in mind. In general, the needle between the Blowhards and ACD is something to savour. My opinion of ACD's views on the Modern Movement in Architecture is that I agree with most of what he says about the operas of Wagner.

My take on all this is that Salingaros is onto quite a lot of good stuff, and stirs in quite a lot of opinion-wrapped-up-as-science sense and ditto nonsense. I don't plan to read his magnum opus until it is (a) a huge best-seller and then (b) remaindered. I'm not holding my breath.

The way I prefer to write about modern architecture – well, maybe I mean the way I prefer to see it written about – is one bad idea at a time. And there are plenty of those, believe me. I'm strongly with "Tom" in wanting to see fact and opinion separated, as Salingaros and Douglas are both very bad at doing. In my opinion.

In my other postings on this subject I've been recommending in particular this article, entitled The New, Neighborly Architecture.

Meanwhile, my congratulations to the Blowhards on some fine blogging and some truly outstanding blog-debate hosting, terrific even by their standards.

Friday, April 25, 2003

I find it fascinating to see which blog posts generate passionate interest and a deluge of comments.

Often it is articles that I expect will shuffle down Samizdata.net's page largely un-remarked before falling into the archives which turn out to be the ones greeted with clarion calls and angry-villagers-waving-torches, whereas some of what I think are 'dynamite articles' generate little more that a subdued murmur and the occasional burp.

Monday, April 21, 2003

Blogger Sina Motallebi has been arrested by Iranian authorities for the 'crime' of giving interviews to Persian language radio stations outside Iran and for his blogging (in Farsi).

I suspect giving his plight as much publicity as possible may give the notoriously intemperate Iranian security services at least some motivation to play it cool if they think the spotlight of world opinion is on them.

It is a good thing we in the west have freedom of the press and internet, eh? No way would such heavy handed tactics be tolerated in somewhere like the USA, right? Right?

Monday, April 14, 2003

Bloody media. Always complaining. Thus Rumsfeld at the end of last week, himself complaining about all the newspapers featuring looting instead of liberation.

Last night, I caught John Simpson of the BBC opining that the fall of Saddam is of no significance to any country outside of Iraq, and I don't know where to start, so hopelessly mistaken does that strike me as being. The argument was that because Saddam's regime was a "dead end", it couldn't therefore be of any greater consequence when this inconsequential regime was toppled. And then various other Talking Heads took it in turns to agree. They didn't seem to understand that there could possibly be anything between America invading a country and smashing all its statues and bombing all its bunkers and decapitating all its leaderships, and having no effect on a country whatsoever, despite having lots of bases in a newly liberated country right next door. Twats.

Nevertheless ...

Nevertheless, as this guy for one (and kudos to Instapundit for linking to this guy given the kind of thing this guy says about him) points out:

# of important news stories Glenn Reynolds broke during war: 0
# of important news stories journalists broke during war: All of them

It's from these same media people that I get the evidence in the light of which I choose to regard their editorial biases as biased, their conclusions and prophecies and prognostications as mistaken, or not as I please. The media are still the people supplying the news, even as they try to spin it in ways that the samizdata related blogosphere mostly disapproves of.

The media are, I think, rather like Windows. There are all sorts of things wrong with them, but, with occasional cock-ups and catastrophes, they get the job done, approximately speaking. If you are prepared to put a bit of effort into learning how they work, you can usually dig below the surface and get what you want, if you really do want it.

When that CNN guy revealed that they'd been concealing the truth in order to keep the flow of nice TV footage, I can't say that I was especially surprised. Only the candid way he admitted to it struck me as in any way out of the ordinary.

As to the present coverage of the Iraq war that Rumsfeld was so irritated by, I would far rather have the media biased against what the powers-that-be are doing than biased in their favour, even when I agree, approximately speaking, with the powers-that-be.

Suppose our newspapers and TV screens had indeed swamped all mention of looting and pillage with falling statues and cheering crowds and nothing else. Would the world in general, and Iraq in particular, really be better places? I say not.

Perhaps the problem is that the media do several different jobs. Two in particular have been seen colliding with one another in recent weeks, namely reporting, and complaining.

The complaining, as is natural just before a military campaign is being embarked upon, has taken the form of prophecying a succession of disasters. And the reporting has consisted mostly of admitting, sometimes through gritted teeth, that most of these disasters have not occurred. Iraq has not proved to be Vietnam. Baghdad has not been Stalingrad. When Baghdad fell with hardly a skirmish, we were told. When that statue fell, we saw it. When the Iraqis finally felt sure enough to smile and cheer, we saw their smiles and heard their cheers. And we drew our own conclusions, to the effect that our original conclusions about all this had been right, and that the media's had been mostly wrong. Are we really going to begrudge the media one genuine disaster, one which neither the blogosphere nor they foresaw, in the form of the looting that is now still going on?

They may be exaggerating this story, but it is definitely a story and they are quite right to be telling it.

Non-looter Iraqis have been shouting at camera crews that the bloody looters are making their lives a misery, and doctors have complained that their hospitals have no drugs or security guards. Well, good. Good for the camera crews and good for the Iraqis. Who suffers from these complaints? Coalition leaders impatient for their triumphs and their rounds of applause? Tough. Who benefits? The good citizens of Iraq and the wounded of Iraq and their carers, who get their law and order and their drugs about two days quicker than they would have done if the media had merely been blowing fanfares of praise to the soldiers and their commanders. There'll be plenty of time for handing out testimonials and retractions and apologetic analyses concerning what went right, albeit mostly from different people to the original Cassandras. Meanwhile, things are not completely perfect and the Cassandras are still complaining. Quite right. That's one of their jobs. And another part of their job will be to say: oh it's stopped, and oh, it wan't that bad, as and when it stops, and if it turns out that it wasn't that bad.

Meanwhile, you can interpret the complaints about looting very differently to the way that the complainers are mostly interpreting them now. One way of discussing Iraqis cursing the Coalition for screwing up the first few days of the peace is to say: the Coalition is screwing up the first few days of the peace. Which they did. But another is to say: well, thank God the Iraqis feel safe enough to call the Coalition a bunch of arseholes for screwing up, and to do it on camera. Maybe law and order is a couple of days away yet, but civilised politics, the sort where you can call Bush and Blair a couple of wankers without having your tongue cut out and bleeding to death in a basement, has started as of now.

The media are rather bad at dealing with important problems where the problem is knowing exactly what the right thing to do is. Most of what most of them know about such things ain't so. But when the problems are urgent, and the answers are pretty obvious – subdue looters, anaesthetise the wounded when they are being operated on, feed the starving, switch on the damn lights, comfort the bereaved – the media are at their best. Instead of the murderously sedate solving of the problems (or not as the case may be) away from the glare of the TV lights that those in authority would prefer, unaccompanied by any embarrassing questions about why they hadn't thought this through a month ago, there must instead be an undignified scramble to sort things out, accompanied by the lies and contradictions of press officers. It must be galling to get onto world-wide TV to complain about not knowing where in hell your next thirty meals are going to come from, but still not to get a meal. But such arrangements save lives, nevertheless.

Rejoice, rejoice, says the blogosphere about this war, now winding down. I say, with the media and against the blogosphere: hold the rejoicing, there's still work to be done. Now, Rumsfeld, about those anaesthetics …

Stepping back and looking at the larger picture, would all that military planning – the stuff that mostly went very right indeed – would have been done so well had the soldiers not known that failure would involve not just the hell of battlefield reverses but the further hell of being sneered at by those media arseholes? And were they not further encouraged in their work by the thought that success would means far fewer friends dying, and wiping the smug sneers off the faces of the arseholes? That's a big stick, and a big carrot. The media tried to destroy the military attack on Iraq. But they didn't destroy it. And because they didn't destroy it they made it stronger.

Looking at the even bigger picture, for "military attack on Iraq" read: everything. The media, the complaints department of capitalism. They demand the impossible, and sneer when they don't get it. When they do, they move immediately on to the next impossibility. Hurrah for capitalism. It finds creative uses even for socialists, which is more than you could ever say for socialism.

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, and the price of vigilance is the arseholes who do it mouthing off about what they think about what they see on their various vigils. It's a price well worth paying, I say.

Wednesday, April 09, 2003

Patrick Ruffini is having server or hosting problems and thus has set up a temporary blog at patrickruffini.blogspot.com.

Wednesday, April 02, 2003

An interesting debate has been going on about one warblogger's reporting in particular and about bloggers and source attribution in general. Apparently, Stratfor accused Sean-Paul, the Agonist warblogger providing minute by minute coverage, of plagiarising their news that are available by subscription only. There are various threads to this discussion. Here is the Agonist one, here Metafilter is asking some pertinent questions about blogs and copyright, and here is the latest from Strategic Armchair Command.

Most comments on the Agonist are adoringly supportive of Sean-Paul, encouraging him to carry on providing what they see as an invaluable service to them. Most comments on Strategic Armchair Command who positioned themselves against the Agonist are sufficiently abusive to make someone stop blogging. There are a few comments that break the rank and this one comes from a supporter who sees beyond the gung-ho attitute of some parts of blogosphere in taking on the mainstream media.

Actually, I am an attorney. There isn't a problem if SP is just reprinting headlines that Stratfor provides on its site for free. But if he was republishing wire reports that Stratfor sells by subscription, that's a serious problem and SP should have known better.

This all reminds me of littlegreenfootball's assertion that his site broke a story of WMD suits found in Iraq, when all he did was link to the newspaper that actually did break the story. Bloggers are confusing what work belongs to someone else and what is their own.

And another reasonable sounding voice:

I can understand why alarms have been raised. *If* a lot of content is being posted from a subscription site without mentioning the source, some might be lead to believe the author of this site was trying to infer he had unique or personal sources that don't exist.

In plain terms: anyone can scour sites and post links to the material he finds, but if that's what you're doing you should provide sources. Otherwise, when the curtain is pulled aside, folks may be disappointed to find the little man working the levers. If you do have your own unique sources, highlight those somehow, so no confusion can arise.

People post an awful lot of value-less material out on the net; this site has provided some interesting material though. Understand though, that when a site like this grows in popularity, it's likely to be scrutinized by many who are well-equipped to discover any cracks in its integrity.

Perhaps there are better or more illustrative comments in the threads I link to above, but I have not had the time to go through the hundreds of comments on the Agonist alone. Some are quite surreal in attacking the very idea of copyright from angles that boggle the mind, invoking anything from Dark Ages to free ideas for all.

My view on the controversy is straightforward. For me, good blogging is one based on credibility. Audience is, for most part, discerning and it does not make for good practise to make yourself look bigger & better than you really are. If you can't come up with new interesting ideas, there is nothing wrong with using someone else's as long as it's clear. In fairness, Sean-Paul posts were not meant to be creative, but to be on the 'breaking edge' of news.

Another essential feature of blogosphere is linkage. Not linking to sources is a cardinal sin for a blogger, in my opinion, and I am often annoyed by the pseudo-blogs that have started to emerge, namely the BBC Reporters' Log or ComputerWorld blog that do not link and individual posts cannot be linked to.

Also, when something as controversial as the war in Iraq becomes the focus of the news, objective reporting and information are not the only factors at play. People's allegiances, emotions and self-interest often outshout voices of reason and objectivity. And as the commenter in the first quote points out "cracks in integrity" become more apparent. On the other hand, I can understand the race to breaking news as I share the bloggers' desire to become more influential vis-a-vis the maintream media.

We have a few simple rules here on Samizdata.net. A very lenient editor whose occassional editorial spankings are a gentle reminder that minarchy rather than anarchy is the game... Links to and/or attritbution of any quotes and text lifted from elsewhere and although we occassionaly nick a picture or two, we try not to make a habit of it. I would certainly consider it good practise to be careful about using paid subscribtion sources, let alone not crediting their material. And I would certainly not want to see a backlash against bloggers from the traditional media, especially if it is triggered by careless rather than bad practice.

I am sure this is not the first or last controversy about copyright and blogs and I will welcome any contributions to the debate.

Monday, March 31, 2003

A true story about Little Bobby Fisk that deserves extensive spreading across the blogosphere.

Many years ago, in the mists of pre-history, or as they say here in Australia, back when the blacks were bad, a little boy called Robert Fisk thought he'd become a journalist and tell the truth to the world. You and I know that never happened, and time is running out for him to repent his sins. To show that he's always been an arrogant, self-opinionated prick, I present the following - Robert Fisk and the Magic Roadblock.

Full story here, thanks to Tom Paine of Silent Running.

Wednesday, March 26, 2003

Our faithful readers may have noticed that Samizdata.net was down. Hopefully, the problem is fixed now and we shall be blogging our hearts out... from a critically rational libertarian perspective, obviously.

Some of us have also joined the ranks of warbloggers at The Command Post as we collectively surf the breaking news.

Click for on-target news

Saturday, March 22, 2003

The reason why there has been a relatively small number of posts on Samizdata.net is the simple fact that we have been glued to our TV screens. We don't have better access to facts and news than the media and there will be time for analysis later...

Thursday, February 27, 2003

I followed Instapundit to this:

America's oldest institution of higher learning has hopped on the Internet's hottest new trend, hiring software developer Dave Winer to help get students and faculty blogging.

Harvard University has given the former software executive a fellowship at its Berkman Centre for the Internet and Society, part of Harvard Law School, in order to head up the new Blogs at Harvard Initiative. Winer, who studied math at Tulane University before collecting his master's degree in computer science from the University of Wisconsin, will instruct Harvard students and faculty in the art of posting daily dispatches to the Web.

That took me to this, and I went from there I came across this:

SEOUL, South Korea – The earnest young man in tortoise-shell glasses spends up to 18 hours a day peering at a computer screen. Despite his unassuming appearance, Hwang Myong Pil's online moniker is ''Nuclear Bomb,'' and he is one of the secret weapons of South Korea's president-elect, Roh Moo Hyun.

Hwang, 29, is a volunteer for an online fan club that is an increasingly important player in South Korean politics. The fan club, popularly known by a Korean acronym for ''People who Love Roh,'' boasts 80,000 members -- most of them in their 20s or early 30s with little previous taste for electoral politics. They are widely credited with playing a major part in Roh's upset victory Dec. 19, and they are taking an unusual role in the transition to his inauguration today.

Meanwhile Freedom and Whisky links to a grumpy journalist complaining about blogging.

I WORRY about the internet. Useful it might be in many ways - make that some ways, rather like the occasional usefulness of a mobile phone - but the prat, nerd, geek, wonk, crank and fanatic count continues to rise inexorably.

People who surf the net for hours tell me that it is fascinating. Wrong. Unless you are looking for a specific piece of information that can be located within seconds by Google, the search engine which is a remarkable and useful invention, surfing simply wastes time.

Millions of people are apparently happy with that. They spend time on sites for sad people such as the "re-live your schooldays fantasy" of Friends Re-united, or track down weird theories about what’s wrong with the world, from global warming to athlete’s foot or how aliens are responsible for power cuts.

And they blog. Blogging, I’m told, is producing an online diary. Anyone can do it, inflicting the result on the world’s overloaded net rather like over-filling a slurry tank, to coin a farming metaphor.

Well, the man has a point. Not all blogs are as good as some blogs. But there are giveaway phrases: "I'm told" (he doesn't really know about this stuff), "I worry" (yes, it's not just harmless chit chat, his job could eventually go), and above all: "Anyone can do it" (!!!).

This bloke senses that the culture is shifting underneath him, and he doesn't like it. The internet was fine when it was just a machine to help him write his columns. But what if millions of people out there would rather spend their time writing for a blog and reading other blogs, than reading his newspaper columns, or gawping uncritically at the television where his mates do their thing? What if people start having their own weird theories about everything, instead of getting them from him? Scary thoughts indeed.

His answer is: "Just say no." Which never works.

Monday, February 24, 2003

Is this the first 'blogger-marriage', I wonder?

Regardless of whether it is or not, many congratulations to Andrew Dodge and Sasha Castel who are now Mr. and Mrs. Castel-Dodge.

Wednesday, February 19, 2003

I still cannot say the word 'blog' in any non-blogger company without being confronted by blank faces and puzzled expressions. The medium isn't really 'out there' yet.

But gradual recognition in the circles of orthodox journalism gathers apace although I am not, perhaps, as wildly enthusiastic as I ought to be about this BBC editorial:

"Weblogs, for those of you still outside this ever-increasing loop, are personal web sites, updated frequently, and increasingly interlinked and interconnected to such an extent that some people have started to think of them as a kind of "hive mind" for the internet community.

As American technology writer Dan Gilmor, who first reported the Google/Blogger story, has realised and publicly stated many times: with the advent of weblogging, the readers know more than the journalists. And the journalists had better remember that."

The hook of the editorial is the acquisition of Pyra by Google but I suppose that it's a good sign that they've been interested enough by blogging to write about the medium in fairly glowing terms.

They do mention one or two blogs specifically and, naturally, both are left-wing but then the BBC can hardly be expected to even acknowledge the existance of anyone or anything that isn't.

Do you think they've noticed this one yet?

Monday, February 10, 2003

Samizdata voted No. 1 Group Blog by a fairly large group of the great and the good of the blogosphere (or the mad and the bad, depending on your p.o.v.) Nice. True. Stiff competition, too.

Wednesday, January 29, 2003

In the course of my duties as a occasional and strictly-when-I-feel-like-it culture blogger, I watched, with a view to commenting on, a short profile that was shown on BBC2 TV last Monday night about the great conductor/pianist Daniel Barenboim, a musician I've admired and enjoyed the recordings of ever since I first heard him in the nineteen sixties. The show only lasted half an hour and there wasn't time for much to be said, but one very interesting thing was said, by conductor/composer Pierre Boulez, who, perhaps somewhat surprisingly (trad classical musician versus enfant terrible avant guardist, etc.), is a close friend of Barenboim's, as well as a musical collaborator from way back.

Boulez pointed out that Barenboim is unusual in being a musician whose repertoire and general interest in the world and its affairs have both broadened over the years rather than narrowed. And it's true. The typical top-flight classical music career starts in a blaze of somewhat indiscriminate fireworks and political pontifications, and then as age sets in our wunderkind becomes a not quite so wunder-mensch, cuts out the political posturing and the extraneous repertoire, and homes in on a gradually diminishing core of favourite pieces, and then disintegrates and dies.

Barenboim is doing the opposite. He started out as your typical sheltered prodigy who loved the great classics of classical music to distraction, and ignored just about everything else. But his repertoire has never stopped expanding, and simply as a result of being an A-list classical musician, and especially in his capacity as boss of one of the Berlin opera houses in the years since unification, he has found himself reflecting, if not quite on the wider world as such then most certainly on the place of classical music within that wider world. (You don't conduct the first Wagner ever played in public in the state of Israel without thinking about that very carefully!)

To this end, he writes. Go to his website (see the link above) and you'll see what I mean.

Barenboim is not an actual blogger. He is no daily diarist. Nevertheless, his writings are referred to at his website as a "journal", and had this site been set up only a few years later, it might have included a bona fide blog. After all, these classical musicians are having to sing for their suppers, to fight for their arts council grants and their permanent recording contracts, and they know it. (And if your appetite for supper is anything like Barenboim's, you really have to sing, let me tell you. Old style opera in the newly wilting German economy. That's one hell of a sell.)

So, Barenboim writes. My question is: are any genuine Barenboim-level celebs actually finding the time to blog, in approximately the kind of way that we guys do?

I rule out writers, because that is not enough of a sideshow to really be a sideshow. But how about sportsmen? Do any movie stars blog? Perry mentions film producer/occasional blogger Brian Linse here from time to time, and he could become very famous if things go well for him. But, unsurprisingly, Linse seems like he's too busy to put frequent postings on his blog. Either that, or he just can't match that Barenboim level of energy. (Few can, let me tell you. That's no big criticism.)

I'm guessing that some pop stars blog. But are they any good? Also, I tend to discount them because, if they write lyrics, that sort of makes them writers too.

But that's my question. Who is the most famous blogger? Not famous for blogging, but who happens to blog about the life that does make him or her famous. Anyone?

Sunday, January 19, 2003

I have long known that the world is essentially a madhouse with no locks on the doors, but when I read that a former Taliban soldier who fought against British and US forces in Afghanistan will be given asylum in Britain because the pro-western government in Kabul is 'persecuting' him, I start to really wonder at what the word 'asylum' really means. Did rational people object to former members of the National German Socialist Workers Party being 'persecuted' in the aftermath of World War Two?

A few days ago, American bloggers Andrew and Sasha arrived in Britain, neither of whom have ever fought against British soldiers, or called for the death of Christians and Jews, or joined any organisations like Al-Muhajirun which aims to make Britain a muslim caliphate...

...and yet they were nevertheless detained at the airport upon arrival in the UK on Thursday and grilled for nine hours before being provisionally allowed into the country. In fact Sasha's blog was examined by the Immigration agents and its content used as the excuse to initially deny her entry. It is strange that the content of Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammad's website does not seem to get him kicked out of the country.

The state is not your friend.

Friday, January 17, 2003

This is a terrific idea, and this is how nytimes.com reported it (scroll down to where is says "Sam's blog"):

A new online diary made its debut on Jan. 1. Yes, there are already millions of such personal Web sites. But this diary belongs to Samuel Pepys, who lived from 1633 to 1703, long before "Weblog" cracked the lexicon.

Pepys (pronounced peeps), a British naval administrator, was a compulsive diarist who recorded his life in detail for nine years beginning on New Year's Day 1660. The resulting diary is the most comprehensive personal account of life in the 17th century. The site, The Diary of Samuel Pepys (pepysdiary.com), posts Pepys's entries in a Weblog format as if they had just been written - a new one is added each day - with the goal of allowing people to read along for nine years.

Phil Gyford, a Web developer in London, set up the site because he had always wanted to read the diary but found it "daunting and uninviting" in its long form. "I haven't read much further ahead than what's on the site," he said by e-mail. "I'm enjoying reading it along with everyone else."

Mr. Gyford also had the inspired idea of allowing site visitors to annotate the entries. The annotations can be personal comments or explanations proffered for obscure terms and historical references. The result is like reading a book along with a group of clued-in friends.

Still, Pepys should not be taken as a model by today's online diarists. Although "Pepys's diary shows us that the smallest of everyday details can be fascinating a few hundred years in the future," Mr. Gyford said, "I wouldn't want to encourage Webloggers to put even more of the details of their lives online."

Gyford started this project on January 1st of this year. Pepys himself started on January 1st 1660. To make a start yourself, go here and scroll down.

I have a small personal link to all this through the late Robert Latham, one of the editors of the latest edition of the Pepys Diaries, and, it seems pretty generally agreed, the best and most complete one. Before going to Magdalene College Cambridge to work on Pepys full time, Robert Latham, a memorably jolly man as well as a great scholar, was a Professor at Royal Holloway College, Englefield Green, which was a walk away from my childhood home, the Lathams and Micklethwaits being good friends. Robert Latham's son went to the same preparatory school as me and my elder brother.

I wonder what Robert Latham would have made of this project. He might have had mixed feelings, because the edition that Gyford is using is, alas, not his, but an earlier and less complete one, simply because only the earlier one is now out of copyright.

I've always meant to read Pepys but have never quite got around to it. This is my chance. All sorts of people are congratulating Gyford for having embarked on this project, but Pepys himself kept at it for nine years, and I will save my heartiest congratulations for the year 2012 when Gyford is scheduled to complete the job. So far he's managed just over a fortnight of it.

Back when I was running an ISP here in Belfast, I was a regular reader and occasional poster on an email list about business in Eastern Europe. Steve Carlson, the list founder, moved with the times and the list expanded to general European internet business discussions; it spun off First Tuesday meetings all over Europe; then it became nowEurope, a more tightly edited Digest...

And now it's a blog. They've got some good writers who have been involved with it from the beginning. I sort of dropped out as I moved on to other things. Well, truthfully, 90% of my writing goes to Samizdata now. So there!

The nowEurope blog looks interesting, but I hope they soon learn how important cross linking is: they currently are pretty stand-alone. So visit them and urge them to join the community.

Thursday, January 16, 2003

In some cases, it is a heavy price.

The Swordsman, Iain Murray, one of the brightest stars in the blogging firmament, has just been summarily dismissed from his job:

"My employment was terminated this morning, with this blog stated as the reason.

It sounds like he has been treated very shabbily indeed. He has a wife and a small child so, if you can, please make your way over to his blog and leave something in the tip-jar. If you unable to do that, then at least let him know that you care.

Wednesday, January 08, 2003

Glenn Reynolds' latest TechCentralStation piece is up, and in it there's a link to one of those Famous Articles you know you should have read, in this case Garrett Hardin's 1968 piece called The Tragedy of the Commons. I went to it, and since it's not a piece I actually know very well (I may or may not have read it, and if so how thoroughly I can't remember, a long time ago), I decided to have a read of it.

And I immediately, without further conscious thought, whistled up a complete print-out.

This was, I feel, one of those revealing moments. Well, maybe it was and maybe it wasn't, but here's my surmise.

The much famed "collapse of attention span" that we've all been suffering from lately is mostly no such thing. All that we are suffering from is the limitations of the computer screen compared to paper, which (to recycle a very old joke), if it had been invented after the computer screen rather than several centuries before it, would have been hailed as a huge advance.

When I am thinking about reading something – anything – I need to know when I start what I'm getting myself into, so that I can decide now if I have the time and the effort ready for the job, and so that I can generally work myself up into the correct state of determined receptivity, like a sportsman psyching himself up at the start of a long race or a big fight. That's maybe over-dramatising it a bit but that, in a mild form, is what's going on when you "settle down" to read something.

When I have my read in my hands, on paper, I can immediately tell approximately what I'm in for. But the computer screen, despite all kinds of software trickery that's been devised to help with this exact problem, only really tells you what you are facing if you can see all of it on your screen, or at the very least can scroll down very quickly to the end. (Am I the only one who often finds a brief moment of scrolling a wildly inaccurate method of guessing length?) If I stop this blog posting very soon, I'll just about be in under this particular bit of wire, and I will in fact try very hard to do just that.

Another way to answer the length question for the reader is to establish a pattern that readers are familiar with, the way samizdata does. Our readers know that even if it says "MORE" on one of these things, they'll only be troubled for a certain sort of length of time, and thus they can embark on the reading with that vital part of "settling down" process having been done for them. (And by the way, clicking on "MORE" has the effect of "separating out" the piece from all the other bloggage here present, and thus making an assessment of the length even of the not-so-short samizdata pieces that much easier to do. At the end, there's not more bloggage, there's just empty space, which makes length-guessing a lot less confusing. At least you know which piece this ending is the ending of.)

Computers have created a new niche for pieces short enough to be "settled down to" very quickly, without you having to scroll down carefully or go to the bother and expense of a print-out. But because our attention spans have not in fact collapsed that enormously, computers have created a very big niche, for a lot of such pieces. In short they have created the blogosphere.

I could, I'm sure, say a lot more here about all this, but that would obviously be a very foolish thing for me to do.

Wednesday, December 18, 2002

Today I had lunch (a sandwich and coffee anyway) with my friend Kristine Lowe, who is a journalist - you know, one of those people who writes stories for a "newspaper", which is "printed", on a Big Machine somewhere in London. The newspaper that Kristine writes for is called the "Daily Express". She had a story in it today, about the improving business performance of a company called London Clubs International, which is now doing better than it was, because of the relaxing of the British regulations concerning gambling which apparently occurred last August. (So something is being deregulated here, even if it's only gambling.)

The reason I am reporting for Samizdata.net on this meeting is that, much to my surprise, I found that I was able to tell Kristine things - about business, about the big wide world, about the world of men trying to damage each other - things which she didn't know much about and which I knew somewhat more about, as a result of me being a blogger. I talked of Glenn Reynolds (K: Who is he? What does he do when he's not blogging?") and of Trent Lott ("Who's Trent Lott?" – this despite Lott having finally made it to the British TV news shows last night), of the arguments about data copying and patent protection, in connection with the music industry and the pharmaceutical industry. I told her of particular bloggers to pay attention to, such as Stephen Pollard (pharmaceutical patents and intellectual property generally), Michael Jennings (telecommunications), my recent discovery China Hand (China), and Reynolds of course (for the Lott story, and for his very different take on intellectual property).

I had assumed that my blogging activities would be a matter of at most polite interest, but basically indifference – like amateur dramatics talk to a real professional actor. But actually Kristine started scribbling things down and didn't stop until her lunch hour did. Interesting. I wonder if anything – Daily Express-wise – will come of this.

We haven't become The Media. But we are starting to be a part of The Media's nervous system.

Monday, December 16, 2002

Perry de Havilland gave a talk about "a year in the life of samizdata", last Friday, at the Tim Evans Parents household, which which got me thinking about the rise of amateurism generally, and the rise of the amateur Foreign Correspondent in particular. I found myself arguing that the present tendency of the blogosphere not to have real foreign correspondents is surely temporary.

Yes, the blogosphere is now a whole lot stronger, as Perry said, in editorial comment on the news than it is in news gathering itself, but soon, I surmise, there will be many new "foreign correspondents" blogging away. I might have added, but did not, that for many of us the majority of bloggers are already foreign correspondents on account of so many of them living in the USA, and many of us not.

How on earth would I have found out about Trent Lott, and about what an imperfect person he is, had it not been for the blogosphere?

(And yes, that is a fine double monosyllable to be called isn't it? "The name's Lott. Trent Lott." But apparently he's not that kind of forthright, no nonsense person at all. Very nonsensical indeed it would seem. This I have learned from the blogosphere's numerous American correspondents, lead of course by the ultimate foreign correspondent, Instapundit.)

And the network is growing. One of the more exotic ones is a (for me) recent discovery called China Hand. Here are the concluding paragraphs of a recent piece from him about the recent rise of Chinese Christianity:

I should have seen the writing on the wall in the 80’s when my old teacher, a rabidly leftist ex Red Guard, suddenly started sending Christmas cards. Even today when I passed one of the glitzy new department stores in Huizhou – its whole forecourt is covered in Christmas trees.

The question the Religious Right need to begin asking themselves is: What if the Chinese government suddenly announces it is changing into a Christian country in which most of the leadership and many lower levels openly practice Christianity. It’s not too far fetched. Ever pragmatic, the Chinese leaders know that the Chinese people are much in need of ‘opium’ at present as they struggle with the new challenges of a market economy. And one which makes them more acceptable to the West would be a bonus. Everyone knows that the party is Communist only in name. It wouldn’t take much to change it to the Christian Democratic Party of China. The Democratic element could, for the time being, remain an aspiration just as the Communist element was. But not for long surely.

As for the established US religions, it’s too bad they can’t get access for their franchise operations and branded products – it’s a protected market. But their calls for trade boycotts and human rights investigations against an avowedly Christian country would be somewhat muffled. It would be an interesting situation!

It would indeed. Now presumably this China Hand is not an amateur in the sense of not having any sort of job. "Hand" certainly suggests that he is turning that organ to something useful and advantageous, and when I read back I'm sure I will learn what. But his job is surely not blogging. No one is paying him to write his informative and diverting postings.

How long can it be before the Old Media start simply reprinting "the best of the blogs" pieces like these? And how long before the blogosphere has a network of correspondents all over the planet, each of them as good as this man seems to be?

It's worth remembering that the original meaning of a "foreign correspondent" was a person a lot like a modern blogger, namely an amateur who just wrote letters from time to time to those friends of his in London (or wherever) who ran a newspaper and wanted stories from faraway places. Then the best of these people started to get paid. Then they started to get sent. What we may now be witnessing is the winding down of that process, ending up with the amateur foreign correspondent who just happens to live somewhere exotic and occasionally newsworthy, and who is thus able to tell us all about some great event in his vicinity a lot better than any ignoramus rushed there by a faraway newspaper one vital day after it all actually happened.

Of course many of the bloggers who at first seem very impressive will turn out to be unreliable or unsatisfactory or just unable for one reason or another to keep it up, but if so we can rely on other bloggers to step up and fill the gaps. There will be a Darwinian sorting process, and the best will be good enough to impact seriously on the Old Media.

(Maybe this Trent Lott business will make the US Old Media really notice the blogosphere. Certainly that's the gist of articles like the one Instapundit links to, above, or the article that Joanne Jacobs linked to last week.)

Saturday, December 14, 2002

TANSTAAFL Times is dead. In early 1996 I founded a libertarian newspaper called TANSTAAFL Times. The title was based on Robert Heinlein's coined motto: There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. To date the publication has made me a small profit (under $100). The original intention was to publish twice monthly and as material became available I would shift to a weekly format.

The first edition carried two cartoons I drew (badly) myself, a news report and an opinionated feature article. It sold for 50 pence and went like hot cakes at a Libertarian Alliance conference. I had little trouble finding subscribers, my peak being 97 and with a peak print run of 250. I doubled the price without any problems.

Despite these low circulation figures and the fact that I paid contributors, I never made a loss. I managed to sell advertising space which alone covered all my costs except postage.

So why did only 24 editions appear in six years? After all if Samizdata offered to pay $50 for a 500 word article or a cartoon, I'm sure our editors would be at risk of being crushed in the stampede of eager wannabe contributors.

I took a lot of criticism, some of it to my face, for the failure to produce regular editions of TANSTAAFL Times. True, 24 editions is six times more than the average periodical achieves in a lifetime (anything more than five editions is a sort of success). The critics didn't help, because they failed to understand the nature of editing a periodical.

I calculated that there were 74 distinct tasks involved in producing TANSTAAFL Times properly. As owner, editor, chief columnist, sole reporter, designer and subscriptions administrator (I'm forgetting some of my job description) I estimated that the job could not properly be done in less than eight days a month. But this assumed that I had material to publish. The reason that I offered $50 per article was twofold. First I wanted to be able to refuse rubbish. Second I wanted to attract lots of libertarians with something to say.

In six years I received exactly three unsolicited articles one of which was 10,000 words long. One was published. I had one offer of cartoons, but no samples. For two years every week I begged a cartoonist (who complained that he was broke) to let me have a look at the rejected material he offered to Private Eye which they found too "politically incorrect". I offered £20, £30, once going as high as £150. Nada. In total I managed to scrape fewer than twenty articles out of different authors, most of which refused payment. I note that Samizdata gets more contributions than that every single week.

I had intended to produce a glorious 25th edition of TANSTAAFL Times, I've written four articles for it. But the fact that I knew that I wouldn't get any authors without a fight was simply a battle not worth fighting.

So I've decided to write this blog and acknowledge that Samizdata.net is achieving what I had hoped for, and that I'm better off, at least for the time being, as a regular contributor to this blog, than ruling my own dilapidated kingdom.

I hope in due course to put an on-line archive of the 24 editions of TANSTAAFL Times. In the meantime they can be accessed through the British Library. I like to think that TANSTAAFL Times was ahead of its time: offering a libertarian slant on current affairs. I will miss it.

Sunday, December 08, 2002

The excellent Reason magazine is starting a blog called Hit & Run, which will be up and running first thing Monday (US time). The new blog will be presided over by Reason's new Web editor, Tim Cavanaugh, formerly of the much-lamented commentary site Suck.com.

Wednesday, December 04, 2002

Sean Gabb will tonight be speaking at a debate - "This House Believes Promoting Diversity Causes Discrimination" is what he will be arguing - organised by the Local Government Association. (Sorry, I realise now that he didn't say where this would be.) He has been circulating the proposed text of his speech to other Libertarian Alliance people, and I can therefore (and with his permission, given by phone this afternoon) tell you the kind of thing he'll be saying:

I will begin by questioning the notion of diversity. What does it mean? As commonly used, it means that we should work for the sort of society in which every organisation, public and private, is filled with representative numbers of women, black people, homosexuals, and the handicapped. Anything with less than representative numbers of these and other groups is to be investigated on the grounds that it is probably discriminating. In describing the ideal society according to this view of diversity, the old sneer about jobs for black, one-legged lesbians is not that unfair.

Now, this is a diversity of sorts. But it is not the diversity that really exists when not as carefully managed and constrained as a bonsai tree. This is the diversity that concentrates on superficial differences between individuals. When it comes to matters of opinion, there is no diversity. Everyone is expected - in public, at least - to endorse the kind of opinions that would not be out of place in a Guardian editorial. Let there be diversity of belief - let someone say the number of black people in this country has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished; or that America is the Great Satan, and got a jolly good hiding in New York last year, and should mind its ps and qs over the Middle East in future if it wants to avoid more of the same; or that homosexuals are the spawn of Satan, and aids is only the beginning of God's punishment for their abominations - let anyone deviate from the Guardian line on any issue dear to the promoters of diversity, and there is an end of talk about diversity. The cry will go up for sackings from employment, for police and security service harassment, and of course for censorship laws with criminal sanctions attached. Promoters of diversity as the word is commonly used are inclined to tolerate only the diversity of which they approve. Where they do not approve, they will happily manufacture excuses for hate crime laws as arbitrary and soon perhaps as draconian as the religious laws of Elizabeth I.

That, I suspect, is the diversity promoted by the Local Government Association. …

Sean tells me that he intends soon to write a report of how this all went, in his Free Life Commentaries series, hopefully tomorrow.

During our conversation this afternoon, I also heard myself urging Sean Gabb to start his own blog. I believe Sean is a blogging natural. He already produces a steady stream of (by blog standards) longish essays. But, as his Free Life "Editorial Jottings" have long proved, he also has it in him to produce numerous shorter pieces that will throw a most entertaining light on the present, and the past. He could call the combined operation something like "A Old Whig". That's what he is.

Were Sean to do a blog, I believe that he would bring with him into the blogosphere his already large email readership for his Free Life Commentaries. Many of these readers are presumably already blog-aware, but I'm fairly sure than many of them aren't, so the blogosphere would gain them, as well as Sean himself of course. I believe he would lose no readers, and could even slice out the big set-pieces to distribute in the old war, for those unwilling to follow him into the new medium. And once set up as a blogger, I believe Sean would attract a vast new throng of readers.

Sean was not unreceptive to this idea. I think it may happen, perhaps some time after Christmas.

Up until now, Sean has ignored the blogosphere. He didn't have a problem, and didn't need a solution. But now, he does have a problem. He has an expensive new house to support. He can't always find the time to do those big pieces he'd like to do. But he would be able to fit in many smaller pieces, in among his other duties. And of course some would magically lengthen themselves, having only begun as jottings.

Once again, the fact that you can have a blog and have a life is the decisive fact here, that is to say I hope it will be. I'll keep you posted. Don't hold your breath, but, any month no …

Friday, November 29, 2002

From pixalated passions to physical phrolics, the cabalistic Sasha Castel and the vampiric Andrew Dodge - a union made in heaven, hmmm, ... or perhaps the other place [A little known village in Dorset].

The blogosphere is agog.

Thursday, November 21, 2002

At my suggestion Perry recently added Sofia Sideshow to our blogroll. I've rarely commented directly on other blogs, but I'll make an exception this time.

It's fun. Go read it. And oh yeah, bro' Brian, you should get together with him since you're producing a film in his general region of the world.

Mr jcrank: If you ever need some intros into the commercial space world for an SF movie, feel free. I'm part of the Artemis Project.

Tuesday, November 19, 2002

This is very cool. Here is a tube map (underground metro) that allows you to locate nearly 250 bloggers in London.

Saturday, November 16, 2002

Alas Dodgeblog is dead... yet despair not for Andrew and his eldritch minions have gone slithering and gibbering over to their new cobwebbed lair in some dark and dank corner of the otherwise fragrant realm of La Blogatrice, Sasha Castel.

Also, former Dodgeblog alumnus Mommabear has found a new den at On The Third Hand.

Wednesday, November 13, 2002

I loved this, which I have only just found, "The Warblog of J. Alfred Prufrock". It was posted on March 4th of this year, so I think it okay to give away the ending.

I must post…I must post…
I shall link to bloggers that get linked to most.

Shall I write a scathing essay? Do I dare to make a stink?
I shall make my page quite shocking, with my fonts fluorescent pink.
I have seen the A-list linking, link to link.

I do not think that they will link to me.

I have seen them writing onward down the scroll
Thirty posts daily makes a breathless tale
Plus columns and interviews and e-mail,
I have waited for this moment in the sun
On web-sites read and stored in my cache
Then InstaPundit links me! And I crash.

I don't remember Samizdata attending to this on, say, March 5th, but I am very occasionally wrong about things blogular, and even sometimes about things generally. No doubt I'll be humiliated by some commenter. "Sorry Brian, but …" Oh well.

More seriously, I want to say that whereas a "week-old piece of election commentary" would indeed be tiresome (I read that somewhere last night but sorry, didn't keep a note of where), a nine month late blog-reference to something of enduring entertainment value is surely okay. Is not one of our blog-duties to keep the best bloggage from months and years ago alive, even as the rest sinks into the informational sediment that will be of interest only to future generations of info-archeologists?

Sunday, November 10, 2002

At least that's what Law.com says.

We always knew Glenn was destined fer a better title than Perfesser...

Thursday, November 07, 2002

By which I mean blogs which have 'link buttons' such as those below. In addition to the plain brown wrapper blog links in the sidebar of Samizdata.net/blog, I am collecting complimentary graphic links to other blog for our External Links page sidebar.

If you have one and we are linked to you (or even if we are not), e-mail us with your nifty graphic and we will probably add it.

Tuesday, November 05, 2002

Who reads comments on Samizdata postings long gone? The writer of the original posting does because Perry sends them to us, so I read this one, from Chloe (of this blog), yesterday, about a posting whose only previous comment had been five days earlier. I had said that blogging is nicer, by its nature, than email chat-rooms. But Chloe said:

I see a difference between chat rooms, e-mail discussion lists, message boards, and blogs. I think it has to do with how easy it is to use the thing, and that reflects the mentality.

However, I believe if you haven't read a blog you hate, you haven't read many blogs.

Certainly there are rat-blogs out there. PLENTY of them. So many I hear of a new one every week.

But I guess it just depends on if you agree with it, or disagree with it. Maybe the hateful rat-blog I can't stand would be the comraderie-laden paradise you love.

It's all about perspective.

I sit corrected. However, here is further proof of just how subtly nice bloggers can be, when they're trying to be.

The other day, my recently acquired friend Alice Bachini was having, if you'll pardon the expression, a blue period:

I don't get lots of readers

Is this bad? If not, why not? Any thoughts? Maybe I should take the site meter off though in case new readers look at it and find out how relatively alone they are and get empty-restaurant syndrome (ie wander off for someone more popular and therefore probably/"probably" better).

Don't suppose I'll get lots of comments on that either, it is rather dull as subjects go. But I can do duller.

Mutual friend and Samizdatan David Carr tried to cheer her up with some comments, but Alice wasn't having it.

But then, and I'm sure not at all coincidentally, we read on 2Blowhards, the following:

Something I’ve come to appreciate over the past few months is blogging as an improvisatory performance art. What generally seems to create the most buzz in the blogozone is political ideas. Steven den Beste and Glenn Reynolds, for instance: brainy guys doing impressively heavyweight things -- and I hardly ever look at them. No music or poetry (or something like that). Culturebug that I am, I’m drawn instead to style and personality, and gravitate to the likes of (among others) Colby Cosh, here, who has a heavy-metal guitar-solo way with a posting, and Kelly Jane Torrance, here, a model of class, grace and generosity.

I'm happy to report some tiptop recent blog discoveries, both of which project a ton of likable personality, and both of which have style to kill. They’re distinctive without trying too hard; they just seem to "have it.” (Of course, that “it” may take a lot of effort to achieve.)

Alice Bachini, whose blog, A Libertarian Parent in the Countryside, is readable here, is a Brit with an eccentrically winning manner -- lots of playful irony and mock-naivete, delivered with a verbal gift that’s enough to make an American feel cloddish and want to give up. This is blogging as charming chatter -- until you realize how much substance, daring, and fresh thinking is also whirling by.

Exactly so: "mock-naivete" and substance - couldn't have put it better myself. (But as for that "enough to make an American feel cloddish" stuff, Michael, you ain't foolin' no-one.)

An Alice quote follows, in 2 Blowhards Bold, followed by an equally canny and kind push for this guy.

My point is, there is more than just "communication" going on here. Real friendships are being forged, between people who have never yet met each other in meatspace, and quite conceivably never will.

Small dramas like this are being played out every minute all over the Internet, and they were being done with nice e-mails long before nice blogging came along, as Chloe might also have said. More and more, we are living in a world where "perspective" (as Chloe did say) is the place we get our friends from, rather than just place itself.

Monday, November 04, 2002

(Early) this morning on Brian's Education Blog I mentioned my unease about links to electronic newspaper articles that may, but may not, remain linkable-to. (I reproduced great gobs of an independent.co.uk piece, maybe superfluously.) John Ray (of this - which is a link that is likely to go on making sense for the foreseeable future) sent me this email:

I share your concern about linking to articles on sites run by newspapers. My solution is to put up on a separate site copies of articles that I think might "disappear". See: www.foxhunt.blogspot.com.

I'd be particularly interested in comments on this matter. (For these purposes I suggest we treat the shambles that is the blogger/blogspot/whateverit'scalled archiving system as a separate issue.)

Much is made by bloggers of the notion of the "blogosphere". We bloggers understandably focus on the distinction between a "blog" and a "not blog". (See for example the critical comments on this Samizdata piece I did - and let's all hope that that link still makes sense in five years time! - about what is apparently a "not blog".)

But I believe that a more fundamental distinction is the one between all the stuff that is available at one press of one button (i.e. linkable to), for ever, and all the stuff that will perhaps not be available for ever, at one press of one button, either because it never was in the first place, or because, having dangled it in front of us all for a few months, the danglers are then instructed by their accountants and/or lawyers to put the stuff behind a registration and/or money wall.

John Ray's solution seems unwieldy, and also vulnerable to small-print-wielding lawyers forcing him (or someone) to take the stuff down from his special site.

I'm not querying the right of electronic newshounds to behave like this – not in this posting anyway. (It's costing them money to write these pieces, and our plan is that eventually we spoil their on-paper circulation numbers, right?) I'm merely wondering what we can do (that we have and will go on having a legal right to do) about it, in such a way that keeps all our postings making sense.

Because Perry de Havilland's solution - quote great gobs of the original piece thereby making the link less crucial - is not perfect either.

That's the good news:

Survey: Big Business Eager to Hire Bloggers

(2002-11-03) -- A new survey of Fortune 500 companies reveals that 81 percent are eager to hire weblog writers (called bloggers) at substantial pay rates. Many bloggers currently spend hours each day reading news and writing views. …

This new study, by the Center for the Promotion of Income for Bloggers (CPIB), found that many corporations are awakening to the value of having a "staff blogger."

The bad news is … it's Scrappleface. Thanks for the link to Instapundit, who also steers the blogosphere to those party photos below. I was genuinely excited, almost as if I was back at the party (I'm the one with the yellow British teeth). But then I read:

"Big business has begun to realize the need to have someone on staff who can express open hostility with cutting wit and a generous helping of obscenities," according to the CPIB news release. "Of course, these qualities have been in rich supply within most organizations for years, but their expression has been reserved for private emails, and restroom stalls. Now, companies are willing to pay, and pay well, for these bitter screeds."

The CPIB study was underwritten by income from a Pay Pal "tip jar" on its web site. The statistical margin of error is plus or minus 100 percent.

Well, you never know. There's many a truth that started its career as a jest.

Saturday, November 02, 2002

One year ago today, we first started blighting the Internet with a pixilated stream of opinions, rants, pictures, invective and sundry insightful pontifications.

Like most bloggers, we started out using www.blogger.com to publish, using the vexed blogspot servers to host our site... and also like so many we migrated to the ever more powerful Movable Type. Nevertheless, credit where credit is due to Evan Williams of Blogger.com for making it possible for blogs to explode onto the Internet scene with such vigour.

Also special thanks to Glenn at Instapundit for providing the inspiration for starting this blog, not to mention a few early links that well and truly got the show on the road for us.

Above all, thanks to Dale Amon for bringing the whole concept of blogging to my attention. If you really love (or hate) us, he is the one you should thank (blame) for getting me started!

Tonight we are having the inevitable party (we never need much of an excuse for a party) at the Black Widow Pub to toast our continuing diatribes.

Thanks to all our readers for coming along for the ride as we lionise all that is right with the world and rail against everything that irks us.

We have only just begun to fight!

Tuesday, October 29, 2002

Everything I ever say about blogging, the internet, emails, email chatrooms, etc., has to be prefaced by the caveat that I'm a ludicrously late comer to all this stuff, and what do I really know? But one thing I do know is that I prefer being a blogger to being an emailer in an email chatroom.

The thing I hate about "chat" rooms is how you seem to get these constant eruptions of abuse. It's like being a rat in one of those horrible experiments which prove that rats can't live like that. Every so often fights break out and with every fight that's fought more fur falls out, more immune system damage is suffered, more rats abandon procreation as a life goal, and each rat is one fight nearer to just laying down and dying of a broken heart at the sheer horribleness of it all.

Blogging often gets frisky, especially in the comments sections (which seem to me to be a lot like the nicest of the chatrooms) but basically, I'm convinced, blogging is not like that.

Have a read of this piece by James Lileks, for instance, saying kind and shrewd things about the late Paul Wellstone, and about those who now miss him most keenly. Lileks is here opposing a characteristic email ratroom sentiment - which he encountered in various blogs but which is not the dominant attitude in the blogs I've been reading. This rat-mail says that Wellstone was a Stalinist monster, and just because the bastard is dead that doesn't mean we should for one second stop speaking ill of him. Good riddance and let's all stamp on his grave. Says Lileks:

… I read stuff here and there that took glee in Wellstone’s death. Some folk seemed to think that a refusal to bury the hatchet and mutter the funeral liturgy was a Brave Stance, that the times cried out for a Truth Teller who branded Wellstone as the treasonous hell-bound scoundrel he really was. But there’s nothing brave about that. There’s no consequence aside from a few angry emails, scowls in the comments section, removal from a few visitors' bookmark lists. None of these people, if they had the opportunity, would say it to the face of anyone who had a loved one die in the plane crash. Hey, our prayers are with you, but I still think the man should writhe for eternity under Satan’s hoof. Sorry, but someone has to say it. They’d hold their tongue - either their own sense of decency would win the moment, or shame and cowardice would close their throat.

And a lot more to that civilised effect.

Here, I believe, we clearly see the superiority of the blogs over the email-chatterers. Blogs really and truly are an outreach exercise.

Ratmail chat is not outreach. It's the converted idiotically trying to convert only each other, and regularly erupting in rage at their inevitable failure, rage for which they suffer no punishment because ratmailers know who's reading this. We are. Us. Only us rats. It's a tiny list of, er, enthusiasts, and that's it.

If a rat gets idiotically angry - "Which part of fuck off didn't you get?" - "Please engage brain before exercising mouth" - "You are simply mad, and I have no interest in arguing with mad people", blah blah blah, argue argue argue, for several more paragraphs and several more equally demented emails – no third parties, no casual onlookers, no representatives of the civilised world, pass by and mark the rat down as not good conversational company. Well (this is my internet inexperience showing through) maybe some do, and maybe the King Rats keep better control of things than the King Rats I observe do. But this is still, I find, the dominant tone. And even when ratmailers are not actually fighting, there is the relentless suggestion, in email after email, of short tempers are being ostentatiously kept just this side of breaking point, and that a ratfight could break out at any moment.

I hate it. I absolutely hate it.

Blogs, as I say, are different. It's the difference between a big public notice board in a crowded hall, and a dimly lit cave. When Samizdata got into its stride, people complained on the Libertarian Alliance Forum (which is where I acquired most of my anti-ratmail prejudices, see this) there were complaints about how talent was haemorrhaging away to the blogs, as it definitely was. But then, guess what, one of the bigger LA-F talents (someone called Tim Starr), who had himself complained on the LA-F about the "silly fad" of blogging, himself got an offer to be a blogger, and accepted. He took a new and personal look at the costs and the benefits of blogging versus ratmailing and chose to turn away from the dark side, into the light. (See, e.g., this recent contribution by Tim to the ongoing music of freedom discussion.)

I don't know why blogging is so much nicer, or even, to be perfectly frank, if it is, always. But assuming it is, I think it's because when you blog, you never know who might be reading. Reading a blog means typing in one line of code, or better yet, just clicking your mouse button, one little time. Even a techknownothing like me can manage that. No registration, no warnings about how you have to refrain from being a rat, and no worries about what the other rats might do with your email address once you give it to them. You can just start reading. And because of links, bloggers perform not only to their one little writer/readership of hard-core true-believers and obsessive anti-true-believers, but to the whole blog-readership out there, at least potentially. If we put on a civilised and friendly show, that whole readership will just keep growing and growing and we'll all do better.

In those rat-mail caves, everything that gets snarled is strictly between you and the other rats. But when you write for a blog, you really can imagine Paul Wellstone's family and friends maybe getting to hear what you said about the guy, and what's more, if what you said was kind, and if it drew a big fat civilised line between disagreement and malevolent glee, then you never know, they might even read your actual piece of writing, on your actual blog. You never know.

Seriously. I don't think it's that far-fetched to suggest that Mrs Wellstone might, any day, week or month now, have a read of what Lileks said about her late husband, and send him a nice little email saying thanks for your kind words, they helped.

In a ratmail cave, you know there's never going to be any connection of that kind.

EMBARRASSING UPDATE: Just had this email from fom John Swartz

Mr. Micklethwait,
>
>I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure Mrs. Wellstone was on that
>plane too. I heard a discussion on the radio here referring to the
>semi-tradition of appointing the widow to the post which has
>happened at least a few times but is a non starter in this case.

Thank you John. As Marine Colonel Jack Nicholson says to Navy Lawyer Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men, after enquiring after Tom Cruise's Dad's health and being told he died (and I'm only guess remembering this): "Ain't I the fuckin' arsehole?" Says the Cruise character, very handsomely: "Not at all sir." I beg the same forgiveness, and hope for similar forbearance from all concerned. There was no excuse for my error. I needed only to read the Lileks piece more carefully.

Luckily, my general point stands, even if that particular imagined illustration of it collapses in ruins. For wife read someone else close, but still alive.

Friday, October 25, 2002

Alas poor Brendan, we knew him well...

No, Brendan O'Neill is not a dead blogger... he has not kicked the bucket, nor shuffled off his mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisibile! He is not an ex-blogger!!!

The reason he has not posted on his blog for a while is that his blog publishing software has gone tits up in a big way. We will report when he is back on line and pooping all over the blogosphere again.

Update: Brendan has fixed his technical problems and is once again 'with blog'.

Wednesday, October 23, 2002

Tim Evans of the Centre for the New Europe has just emailed me to tell me about the blog which the CNE have been quietly running for the last few weeks, or at any rate quietly enough for me not to notice it until now. It's called The Pulse, and looks well worth a regular read. And hello, what is this? Goodness me, a fulsomely admiring link to this. Coincidences will never cease. Of course what that actually shows is that Tim Evans is a man who knows how to get a blog noticed.

Rather more seriously, I think that The Pulse is part of the answer to that question we all ask from time to time: How Can I Get Paid To Blog? Because I get the definite feeling that The Pulse's regulars, Tim himself, Helen Govett, Stephen Pollard, Helen Disney, Johan Hjertqvist (the last two being new names to me), are not exactly starving as a result of their association with this blog. The CNE is a real-world olde-world, meat-space institution - with secretaries, carpets, conferences, a website with swank pictures of the honchos shaking hands with swank politicians - in short with money, money that it is presumably willing to dole out in noticeable amounts to the right blogicians.

Interesting too that The Pulse follows the Samizdata example of having a team of bloggers, to make sure that it keeps fresh and keeps coming.

(PS: While checking the link to Stephen Pollard's blog, I found myself reading his piece yesterday (Oct 22) on the impact of the Bali bomb on the thinking of the "Bali generation", originally for the Wall Street Journal of Europe. I can't make any sense of Stephen's targetted links and I'm sure that's just me, but this piece is most interesting.)

Sunday, October 20, 2002

I went on a random blogwalk, as you do at Sunday lunchtime if you live alone and are still wearing your pyjamas, and came across The Spleenville Journal – A Subsidiary of Spleenville World Domination Enterprises. Aaah, world domination …

First reaction: nice looking, witty, a fine answer to what Michael of the 2Bs was saying about envy and aesthetics, see here, I should tell the 2Bs. Anyway I scroll down, and find this. Everyone has already been introduced, and here's me introducing them to each other all over again. Imagine.

But, it's all being done so loudly and pretentiously that all you little people out there can't possibly miss who we all are.

Wednesday, October 16, 2002

I really like comments, both here and elsewhere. I especially like the comments on Little Missy, because unlike the regular stuff on Little Missy I can actually read them because – and this is very odd - they're in bigger writing. The comments on LM are usually just LM's friends chitchatting amongst themselves, but since I don't know what they chatting about I don't know what they're chatting about, if you get my drift. There's no harm in friendly chitchat of course, but often comments jump out at you as deserving more than just to be forever buried away as number 17 of 24, or whatever. Consider this:

The puzzle of why brilliant people (and I'm talking G. B. Shaw and Sartre here, not Starfish) are often so stupid politically has interested me for a while. My theory is that artistic types have long despised the middle class (despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of them are born into the middle class). This disdain for the boring old sods who become bankers and lawyers and businessmen, along with the tendency to romanticize either the aristocracy or the lower classes predates communism, but with the rise of communism, those old feelings of dislike and contempt became politicized.

I think that's one reason why the left has never come to grips with the horrors of communism or wanted to admit that capitalism, with all its faults, offers more freedom and opportunity to ordinary people than any other system. Admitting that would mean changing one's attitude toward the dull, plodding middle classes and that's too strongly ingrained in Western culture for intellectuals to easily give up.

I think that's good. Also, there is no mention of guns or killing apart from the inevitable reference to communism itself, which for Samizdata just now is a plus, I think. That was comment number 32 (you have to scroll down for it) by "Donna V", concerning comment number 21 by "Mookie Wilson", both apropos of a piece in Little Green Footballs about some arts people who have signed an anti-GW2 internet petition.

Or, for those more bloodthirsty readers who want a more immediate body count in the foreground of the picture, I also think that this comment deserves more attention than maybe it has so far got:

We will know that President Bush and co. are serious about the war against the Islamofascists, not when they bomb cities full of women and children, but rather when we start reading on the back pages of the papers about mysterious deaths (falling in front of street cars, say) happening with suspicious frequency to men rumored to be supporters of radical Islam (including spokesman, apologists and financiers along with the gunmen). We should take a leaf from Mossad - that exploding telephone yesterday was genius (not that the CIA has either the intelligence or ops capacity to pull something like that off). This may not be as immediately gratifying as nuking the SOBs, but the time is not ripe for that. Mr. Islamiya would be a good start.

That comment was posted by Doug Levene on October 15, 2002 03:57 AM, and was one of 28 (so far) on this, here at Samizdata. Do fellow Samizdata writers have other comments to offer? - by other people I mean, which they think deserve to be elevated into actual postings? Has His Holiness Instapundit ever linked to or quoted from a mere comment?

Friday, October 11, 2002

Thanks to Instapundit, I have just come across this gem of a blog. It seems to consist of three guys writing a fairly lengthy and very well thought out articles about French anti-Americanism, Rousseauian Conservatives, New Jersey, UN and global warming, American politics, EU, you name it. Last Tuesday they even discovered John Fonte and his Tranzi article. Welcome to the fold!

Go and see for yourself, they are definitely worth the read!

Wednesday, October 09, 2002

That veritable taste sensation and Slavophile angst muffin of the blogosphere, Shannon Okey needs help from you technical engineer types... so surf on over and see if you can lend a hand.

Shannon wants you badly

Wednesday, October 02, 2002

It's the way the blogosphere works. Something happens in your back yard. Instapundit picks it up and tells you about it, and you get to work. It, in this case being an article in the New Statesman called "Bloggers of the Left, Unite!", by James Crabtree. The New Statesman not itself being very blog-friendly, Crabtree decided to put his piece up at the "iSociety" bit of one of his his own websites. Here's how it ends.

Should the left worry? Definitely. The blogsphere is an example of Willard Quine's coherence theory of truth: that things are true if they agree - or appear to agree - with other things that are held to be true. Right-wing bloggers are thus creating their own world, in which their truth exists often without debate. And the same may be about to happen in the UK. The journalist Stephen Pollard, the only British political blogger on the left, notes: "There are plenty of new British political blogs. And they are all - all - on the right." But political blogging is in its infancy here. It remains up for grabs. Got a computer? Got a view? Get blogging. There is a war to be won.

Or lost.

"Blogsphere"? Is that what they're going to call it?

There appear to be no links from iSociety to "all – all" – or even any-any of - those right wing Brit-blogs, nor to Instapundit nor to Andrew Sullivan, both also mentioned in the piece. Wouldn't want people actually trying to find out for themselves how unthinkingly and unargumentatively right wing or not as the case may be said blogs might be. For someone declaring war, Crabtree seems somewhat reluctant actually to engage with his enemy. But I suppose that when the attacks do start to come, from real blogs, there will be links.

And as for Stephen Pollard being "on the left" … Smack in the Blairite centre middle, more like, and with all kinds of market bells and whistles attached. Ditto Crabtree, to judge by who's paying for his web activities.

Friday, September 20, 2002

There is something extremely endearing about a blogger (or Blogatrice, to be accurate) who lists amongst her many personal interests:

...alchemy, soapmaking, Hermetics [...] laughing.

Go visit her new site at sashacastel.com!

Monday, September 16, 2002

Instapundit has a link to ScrappleFace, which looks like it's worth a regular visit, and a rootle around in its archives. The target, all the time, is the portentously urgent and cliché-riden prose of the mainstream US media.

I couldn't find any mention at ScrappleFace of Samizdata, but this could be because Scott Ott of ScrappleFace, judging by an early posting about Darwinism, is opposed to such things as Darwinism, as, on the whole, aren't we. And then again, maybe I didn't find any mention of Samizdata because I just didn't find it.

I'm also enjoying the Orrin Judd versus Jonah Goldberg stuff, also flagged up by Instapundit.

Judd's case is that although blogs won't replace the mainstream media, and although bloggers won't make any money, they do still profoundly influence the mainstream. One of the "under the radar" notions that Orin Judd noted as starting in the blogs and only later getting to the regular media is popular hostility to Saudi Arabia. Changing my subject somewhat, to content, it occurs to me that what President Bush may have in mind is that if all goes well in Gulf War 2, the USA will then have itself a new and staunch ally (Iraq) in the Middle East. And from this new Iraq, it can then turn around and start to discuss matters in Saudi Arabia, from a somewhat new perspective. Instead of depending on Saudi Arabia to influence Iraq, Bush will have Iraq to influence Saudi Arabia with. Which just might explain the difference in attitude of the Saudis towards Gulf War 1 and Gulf War 2.

I doubt that this kind of speculation has been much featured on the regular media, if only because the US government wouldn't want it on the regular media – not just yet. But I bet I'm not the first bloggist to have said such a thing, and I further bet that the comments on this will quickly prove me right. (Prove me right someone – quickly please.)

Thursday, September 12, 2002

You may be aware that there are blogs for every corner of the human mind. Well, almost every corner, since the thought of blogs for some of the corners of the human mind makes me shudder. It is also axiomatic that people who came up with the weblog technology will have their own corner (or basement) of the blogosphere where their blog about blogging, that is, meta-blog to their heart's content.

Although I am not a techie by any stretch of imagination (thank you, you may stop now!), I am very interested in technology and so the following post of a techie blogger, Jon Udell of John Udell's Radio Blog caught my eye:

Every web user engages daily in this process of information refinement. Many share their results - that is, URLs with annotations - in the form of FYI ("For Your Information") emails. Some also share their results on personal "links" pages. And a few employ a new tactic called weblogging. A weblog is really just another kind of annotated links page, typically in the form of a daily Web diary that filters and reacts to Web information flow according to personal and/or professional interests.

The current weblog craze is, in all likelihood, a passing fad. If you visit Blogger, a portal site that aggregates over 1000 weblogs, you may conclude that this form of communication has already suffered the same fate that befell the Usenet. One "blogger" (short for "weblogger") recently complained that although there was once a hope that the weblog could become a powerful tool for reaching out and connecting with the world, it has become a powerful tool for self-gratification and self-absorption.

Two years later, he makes a similar argument:

Despite massive uptake of blogging in certain circles, I don't see evidence that it has made much of a dent in scientific communities. The same is true, I think, in many other professions. Blogging seems huge to those of us engaged in it, and in important ways it is. Culturally, it represents a style of communication that is genuinely new. Technically, it may be the most popular application of XML. But blogging is still a drop in the ocean of email. It's far from ubiquitous, and at the ETech conference, both Sam Ruby and I were surprised to see how little-understood RSS feeds were even among experienced bloggers.

Whether Jon Udell is right about the overall impact of blogging is not central to my point here, which is simple - understanding the technical side of information generation and dissemination opens more opportunities to generate and disseminate them as well as maximises the use of existing channels.

Underlying the weblogging movement are two technological trends - RSS headline syndication¹ and pushbutton Web publishing. I have recently come across the squabble over RSS formats that from a fifty-thousand-foot perspective looks like a tempest in a teapot. Neither the simplicity of RSS .9x nor the extensibility of RSS 1.0 matters to someone who has yet to experience the 'virtuous cycle' that is only recently being discovered by so many - for example, Don Box:

While spending my evening with RSS, I had two epiphanies:

1. The connection between blogging and RSS is deep.
2. WS-IL² is the closest we have to RSS in the web service space.

With respect to the first observation, the cycle looks something like this:
while (true) {
ScanRSSFeeds();
RantAboutStuffYouSawFromRSSFeeds();
ExposeYourRantsViaRSS();
}
What an amazingly virtuous cycle!

Before you start thinking of how sad spending one's evening with RSS is and of any stupid puns on epiphanies or of any of the usual responses that the non-techies fall upon to compensate for their lack of understanding of squiggles, a much more important perspective springs to mind.

The above is worth noting, as technology is making difference to those who find themselves opposing the mainstream or standing aside from it. Communication via the internet, email, weblogs and other channels to come has transformed and will continue to transform the private and public discourse. Many bloggers have discovered the joy of sharing with the world ideas whose expression had, until recently, been confined to conversations over a pint of beer or a cup of latte. Not that there is a cause for rejoicing every time such idea is liberated and this freedom has its price (for a more precise total scroll down the left hand bar here for Havens of Fluorescent Idiocy). I do believe that we have merely scratched the surface of what blogging could do in terms of generating information and, more importantly, in terms of its aggregation.

On a more immediate note, RSS has to do with information filtering and as such is relevant to the blogoshpere. Various blog digests have been set up and disappeared, trying to find an intelligent way of sorting out the data and passing on information that is of interest. Preferences akin to mail filters would allow the user to filter only the data in which they are interested onto the page, from the entire pool of data. For example, a user interested in articles about "Football" would be able to set up a personalised channel that simply consisted of a filter for Football, or even for a particular team or player. Or for all references to Slashdot.org, or whatever. This would give him the largest selection of content, with the greatest degree of personalization available. Tools would be made available to simplify the process of creating these files, and to validate them, and life would be good.

I have risked boring you to tears with techie acronyms in order to get my message across - I see technology as the main tool (and a weapon, if necessary) of education, development, protection and dismantling of the modern state. If we fancy ourselves as making any impact with our arguments, campaigns, thoughts and outpourings via blogging, let's at least explore it's potential to the full.

Disclaimer: Those who blog purely for personal gratification and self-absorption, please ignore my rallying call. No need to spend evenings with RSS and various assorted technologies.

Note¹: RSS - a dialect of XML, a vocabulary for representing annotated links. What exactly RSS stands for is itself a subject of controversy - Rich Site Summary, RDF Site Summary, Really Simple Syndication, or John Udell's favorite, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.

Note²: WS-IL - Web Services Inspection Language (WS-Inspection) 1.0

Wednesday, September 04, 2002

Occasional Samizdata.net guest writer Alice Bachini has been bitten by the blogging bug and has her own splendid blog called A Libertarian Parent In The Countryside.

It may well have the longest blog address I have seen (libertarian_parent_in_the_countryside.blogspot.com)!

Check it out.

Monday, September 02, 2002

The much reported contretemps between occasionally hilarious Jewish-American comedian Jackie Mason and largely unknown Palestinian-American comedian Ray Hanania has also received several mentions in the blogosphere.

However to my knowledge only blogger Al Barger on the Culpepper Log has followed up this with some investigative reporting of his own. After Googling previous remarks by Ray Hanania and coming up with some controversial views in a Lebanese newspaper, Barger e-mailed Hanania to get his side of the story and he did indeed reply. The exchange of e-mails can be seen on the Culpepper Log.

Well done, Al... this sort of thing reflects very well on the entire concept of blogging.

Thursday, August 29, 2002

Whilst cruising Brian Linse's Directory of 'left wing' blogs, I was trying to make sense of who was listed and why.

There are the blogs of the fuzzy and cuddly 'soft left' such as Brian's own Ain't no bad dude, ranging all the way to Chomsky adoring pro-totalitarians like Blowback: two blogs seemingly as far apart as robustly anti-left Cold Fury and the joyfully idiotarian WarBloggerWatch. But there are also hard to classify blogs like AirstripOne. When 'Emmanuel Goldstein' of AirstripOne writes things like...

That being said, Britain has no business opening up its markets just because it will help Third World countries. The argument for free trade must come from British interests.

...it should be clear that Emmanuel's views owe more to Burke than Marx. This is pure old paleo-conservative Tory values: free trade may be allowed as an expedient if it is conducive to 'national' ends but it is certainly not carried out by right between free individuals. So does AirStripOne belong in a 'leftist' directory?

Yes actually. And so do links to Pat Buchannan or Ross Perot, because Brian's 'leftist' directory is not really a 'leftists' directory at all, but rather a 'Civil Interventionists Directory' (i.e. the opposite of a 'Civil Libertarians Directory') because that is the only common thread between this disparate listing. What all these folks share is the belief that it is okay for a violence backed state to forcibly intermediate itself into private people's lives, not just in emergencies but within the context of normal civil society, in order to change how they may choose to live.

Tuesday, August 06, 2002

Before I gat hauled before the Blog Complaints Commission, I issue this apology for not acknowledging that the BBC Bias blog was established by Peter Cuthbertson.

Well done, Peter.

The path of true progress has been pockmarked with inventions that are simple and wickedly effective. Mostly they are also so obvious that all who encounter them proclaim "why didn't I think of that?"

Has anybody ever thought of a blog (or indeed any vehicle) dedicated to exposing and highlighting the outrageously left-wing bias of the BBC? Too late. Somebody has. Better still they are somebody (or, actually, somebodies) that we all know well. Our very own Natalie Solent is a contributor as are shining stars of the blogging firmament Patrick Crozier and Ben Sherrif.

They have a very zippy little cgi-bin thingy which all readers are invited to employ in order to send in their own damning evidence of BBC Bolshevism and I intend to employ it liberally. I urge all our readers to do the same. I am confident you will not be short of material.

I wish I had thought of that. I didn't. But personal gratification be damned. Let the fightback begin

Occasional inhabitant of these pages, Andrew Dodge, has joined the current vogue in blogdom and acquired a new masthead for his site and pretty funky it looks too.

In fact, on close inspection, there are some, er, veeerrrrrrry interesting symbols indeed! He also echoes some earlier comments by yours truly and Perry de Havilland about the idiocy of the current Church of England and its idiotarian Archbishop, who threatens to replace Chris Patten (or is it Petain?) as my number One Target. That is until George Michael regales us with more wit and wisdom on the war against terror, of course.

Monday, July 22, 2002

Sarah Lawrence, the object of the previous article by Brian, is in fact the latest member to join the Samizdata Team, as eagle-eyed perusers of this blog's sidebar may have already noticed.

She is an indomitable advocate for children's civil liberties via her organisation Taking Children Seriously and her view can be found expressed on her own site SarahLawrence.org.

We look forward to seeing Sarah's often highly controversial views on Samizdata.net!

Thursday, July 18, 2002

At about the same time as Samizdata went through its metamorphosis, my old computer motherboard began its jarring death-rattle and, shortly thereafter, expired both graciously and soundlessly.

It was time to break open that stash I keep under the floorboards and upgrade, upgrade, upgrade. Now, thanks to the assistance of a quite remarkably useful Russian systems builder called Yuri, I am surfing the net on the equivalent of a twelve-cylinder roadbeast. I have every bit and byte and bob and meg and gig and ram and rom known to humanity. I am a souped-up, hyper-driven and power-processed blogger. I have Weapons of Mass Digitization and I intend to use them in a Holy Jihad against Idiocy.

Yes, thanks to Yuri and the new, improved Samizdata I am ready to roll like mountain thunder over the arid plains of mediocrity and mendacity.

And a little addition to my 'Glorious Ironies File': Yuri was once a soldier in the Red Army, stationed in East Germany and trained to kill Yankee Imperialists and bring down Capitalism. Now, he is running his own successful business in London and helping me to spread the seed of Capitalism all over the Net. Splendid!

Wednesday, July 17, 2002

Just went awandering, via Natalie Solent and a mention of an open letter, which I never got to) about Algeria. (Natalie says that it would have been better for the Algerian fundamentalists to have kept their election win and taken Algeria down the Iran trail, which eventually, if Iran itself is anything to go by, gets better. I think I agree.)

Anyway, what I actually found was this fascinating report about the recent huge forest fires in the USA. It turns out that the enviros may have severely contributed, by legally contesting every second scheme the foresters proposed for cutting back trees to make firebreaks, and such like. What's more, local politicians are actually starting to say this. It would seem that the "noble ends justify any means" philosophy of the average green is backfiring. So to speak.

Changing the subject completely, when Perry was over here yesterday we invented, or probably re-invented, the word "blogule", which is of course rehash of globule. Usually you already have the meaning and then devise the word. In this case we have the word, but what exactly does it mean? I think it may be a single blogged idea. A meme of the blogosphere, which only achieves blogular status if it gets circulated. If so, then this posting contains two definite blogules, and an attempt at a third. My spellchecker is getting very excited.

Friday, July 12, 2002

Here's an interesting thing. I was surprised to receive an e-mail from John Braue of Rat's Nest, asking whether I had sent him an e-mail headed "Fw:darling" with no text but two attachments.

I had not.

I tried to post a virus warning on my blog, but Blogger wouldn't let me. My Blogger troubles aren't the interesting part though. This is: Dawson kindly posted a warning on my behalf and added that he had had similar fake e-mails purporting to come from other bloggers, including himself. Now, am I wrong, or does that suggest not the random spatter-gun malice of most viruses but a individually-targeted campaign to diminish trust within a community, namely ours?

By the way, it's an ill wind that blows no one any good: I have now discovered the Rat's Nest: a splendidly outspoken blog. And, apropos of Brian's post next but one down, the latest blogger blug that takes you to the wrong link is not unique to UK Transport. It's hit me, and several others too.

UPDATE: I have been advised that my virus was probably something called "the Klez worm" or simply "Klez."

And that's only trivially because Patrick deals with other countries besides the UK. The deeper reason why all should periodically attend to UK Transport is that what it says about transport often applies with equal force to the rest of the universe. Consider the following, from a posting yesterday about airline seats.

I think there are archive problems over at UKT, because I couldn't make the first of those two links work. Here's the stuff I mean:

It may be that left to its own devices the market will solve the problem. But, of course, these days markets are not left to their own devices. Right now, at an airline near you the following conversation could be taking place:

"Why don't we increase seat sizes?"

"Because, the government is thinking of introducing some new regulations."

"How does that affect us?"

"Because, if we go ahead and change all our seats we could find they're too small and have to replace them again."

"Oh. And if they're too big?"

"Then with the new regulations, everyone will assume that the problem has been solved and we'll lose any competitive advantage we might have had."

"So, we're better off waiting for the government?"

"Precisely"

So, the change will be late, you won't have a choice and the state will take the credit.

Now I think that's about a great deal more than just airline seats, don't you?

Saturday, June 22, 2002

The quotes below come from a new blog called This Blog has no Title just Words and a Loon. I'm indirectly responsible for this. After posting my personal attack on Patrick Crozier the other day I rang him up to tell him not to take it personally, and it emerged that he had all sorts of other non-transport thoughts he wanted to blog and talked about starting Words and a Loon, although not by that name. For whatever difference it may have made I said go ahead, because I admire Patrick as a writer and will go there regularly. Patrick explained the thinking behind W&L in another non-transport posting on UK Transport. Then he started W&L, and it already has several bits including "The newspaper is dead". At first I thought of just cutting and pasting the concluding paragraph, which has stuff like:

Newspapers exist (I presume) because it is not actually possible for one person to write the article, print it and distribute it to the millions of possible customers. There has to be some kind of division of labour. But the internet changes that.

But we've most of us had thoughts like that. I reckon these earlier ones are more illuminating.

I have no principled objection to paying for content. What I would object to is having to subscribe to masses of different publications. It might work for some of the bigger publications but if it comes to a choice of fumbling for my credit card for that one article in Peruvian Railways Monthly then it's a non-starter.

What I would like to be able to do is to make ONE payment of, say, £20 a month and then be able to access everything.

Like all good libertarians, Patrick invents new businesses by just thinking aloud. He describes what they might look like, anyway. I don't think he's a loon.

Thursday, June 20, 2002

Samizdata readers distressed that there has been no mention here for two whole days of the World Cup can slake their soccer thirst over at UK Transport. Or should that be UKTran Sport? Some while ago, Patrick Crozier explained that since he finds the World Cup more interesting than transport, he was going to talk about the World Cup more and transport less. I just went looking for the relevant posting, but couldn't find it in his voluminous archives (although I did chance upon an interesting posting with guest emails galore about compulsory purchase orders/eminent domain of May 7 2002 that I missed the first time around). Anyway, Patrick is taking his own threat seriously and has done several World Cup postings without even the pretence of transport relevance, culminating in a long report this morning of the televising on BBC1 last night of the 1970 Brazil/England game.

Samizdata is intended to be somewhat self-indulgent. We're supposed to be talking about whatever takes our fancy. And we've at least made some effort to relate the World Cup to the libertarian agenda, for example by wondering what is the relationship between the apparent collectivism of a pub crowd watching the World Cup to the individualism we're supposed to believe in? Football, soccer I should say, has also proved to be a fun way to get to know some of our American readers better.

But I think that Patrick is taking the joke a step too far. There's plenty he could say about the World Cup that is transport related. What are the problems of shifting crowds around which are huge but which will only be there for a few weeks? What is transport like generally in the places where the World Cup is taking place? Where, because of transport considerations, does it make sense to put football stadiums in the first place? What sort of buses do the various teams like to use? Are their any ex-bus-drivers or ex-train-drivers or qualified pilots in any of the teams? But Patrick isn't handling the World Cup like that. He's just plain writing about it. To hell with transport. If I was a journalist looking in at UK Transport for a possible transport story, I might be seriously irritated, and that might very well my story.

Wednesday, June 19, 2002

As soon as I started writing for this blog, I got the impression that in some form, blogging is going to affect my journalistic working life and not just my private, ideological, libertarian part. A good article in Tech Central Station by Dominic Busulto makes for an excellent overview of the phenomenon and how writing about business and analyzing companies will change as a result.

Certainly, in my brief experience, the arrival of the weblog has already started to affect how I work. When I get in to work in the morning I usually scan my firm's website (www.reuters.co.uk) before looking at various websites pitched at the financial world to see what other news organisations have been reporting on. But I also click on to certain blogs for current affairs and related financial news. Very often I find that a blog, like that of prolific Glenn Reynolds will have unearthed an important news story or theme which would have been missed by the mainstream media. And this surely beats the hell out of trawling through acres of newsprint, although I do have an incurable need to read the printed sports section of the Daily Telegraph.

Very soon, I think, blogging will be the accepted form of business analysis by economists and journalists in the City and Wall Street when it comes to checking out company results, mulling over future trends, or trying to figure out what investors think. Analysts, who have been chastened by the collapse of U.S. energy giant Enron and concerns about the financial results of leading companies, will increasingly not be able to get away with issuing grand press releases giving their views, but instead have to see their ideas challenged, chewed over and discussed through the vibrant medium of the blog. The same goes for news columnists who like to make guesses about the future.

Journalists are going to have to become blog-savvy. I guess this puts yours truly in a nice position. Still, I haven't yet figured how we get to be millionaires out of this. Let's just say I am working on the notion.

Tuesday, June 18, 2002

It may seem odd to find an answer to this question in a book published in 1889, but if one can ignore merely local labels of party, Trevelyan expressed well the way in which consensus can be overturned by the cumulative effect of many small efforts at persuasion.

"But the outward aspect of the situation was very far from answering to the reality. While the leaders of the popular party had been spending themselves in efforts that seemed each more abortive than the last, --dividing only to be enormously outvoted, and vindicating with calmness and moderation the first principles of constitutional government only to be stigmatised as the apostles of anarchy, [Here my analogy temporarily loses it as some of our more enthusiastic brothers leap to their feet and cry, "Way to go, baby! Down with government! Anarchy forever!"]--a mighty change was surely but impeceptibly effecting itself in the collective mind of their fellow countrymen.

"For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in the main."

- Sir George Otto Trevelyan, Bart, The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay.

Brendan O'Neill asks, "Why is blogging a right-wing thing?" and adds various unflattering remarks about us, our guns and our mid-life crises. As I said to him in a private e-mail, I would dearly love to rend his gobberwarts.* But there's a problem. I agree with him. He says:

"I have always suspected that the right-wing blogging phenomenon is a result of the right's increasing isolation from the mainstream - from mainstream politics, mainstream journalism and mainstream debates. Over the past 10 to 15 years, traditional right-wing views have become ever-more unpopular, as Third Way and consensus politics have take centre stage. The Reaganites and Thatcherites who were in the ascendant in the 1980s have found themselves out on a limb in an age where we're all supposed to be caring, sharing, non-argumentative, environmentally-aware centre-lefties. "

You can't say truer than that. It's like being a sheepdog on a sensitivity training course these days. Pah. But after this strong start the limitations of Mr O'Neill's mindset soon become clear:

"And rather than build an effective and coherent opposition to the new political orthodoxies, some on the right seem happy to retreat into the 'Blogosphere', from where they can throw insults at their enemies without having to challenge them fundamentally."

Huh? Just what sort of fundamental challenge do you think I was putting up before the blog? Cleaning the toilet in a right-wing way? Non-multicultural clearing up after breakfast? The point about blogging is that it costs next to nothing, anyone from housewives to executives can do it, and you don't need to go through an editor. Mr O'Neill's disdain for such low-intensity warfare comes through in his repeated use of the word "challenge":

"...the very nature of the Blogosphere ... means it is best suited to poking fun or poking holes in the mainstream media, rather than actually challenging it at a serious level."

Er, yes. Such a relief. As I write this post now I know that it is well short of the serious and weighty response that I could be composing were I Gladstone reborn. How nice that I'm not, and it's just a blog post that I can get done before nipping round the shop for some more milk. For all his romantic attachment to the spirit of 1798, Sir Brendan the Serious has all the attitudes of a nobleman demanding that these oiks put down the longbows and fight properly (with the very important caveat that first they have to buy the horse and the armour i.e. get a journalism degree and a proper job.)

"...it's safe to say that The Guardian - now the most mainstream, pro-government paper in Britain - won't be quaking in its boots."

No, but it's turning red and shuffling about. Did I ever tell you the story of Matthew Engel's column that was laughed right out of the Guardian archives?

"...it means that many on the right will end up simply talking to themselves, rather than building a real opposition to the Blairs, Clintons and Schroeders of this world. That is one of the reasons I have a lot of time for Iain Murray. Iain and I disagree on many things, but his Conservative Revival weblog was a good stab are thinking about actual alternatives to New Labour and how such alternatives could be reconstituted as an opposition."

He means proper politics again. Join a party. Become activists or local councillors or journalists. Get a proper job. (Not that I have the slightest objection to Iain Murray (May his sword arm be ever strong!) or anyone else doing these things. But it all boils down to play nicely! To which I say, "Shan't!"

"In short, I think blogging is a right-wing thing as a result of the right's increasing isolation - and as a result of right-wingers' fancy for short, sharp, pithy attacks on an enemy that, in fact, they don't feel like they can take on."

Classic guerilla tactics. And a classic guerilla error is to be tempted before you are ready into full scale battles that you are certain to lose.

Whoah, brakes on. Perhaps I'm in danger of letting my military metaphor push me into conclusions I don't really believe. Although I do think the right wing three quarters of the blogosphere does indeed do much of its work by pinpricks, it may have its greatest effects through conventional means. As Brian Micklethwait says, 'Blogging is going to impact seriously on all this, by identifying non-left and libertarian journalistic talent, giving it a start, training it, and then feeding it into the mainstream media.' So come on Brendan, gis a job.

*As Terry Pratchett fans will know, not as much fun as it sounds.

(Given that Brendan O'Neill threw down two gauntlets in my direction, by sending me duplicate e-mails, one addressed to me alone and one as a member of this mighty Libetarian organ, I feel that I am entitled to scurry out of his way and squeak from the sidelines in duplicate as well. So an almost identical post to this one also appears in my blog.)

Monday, June 17, 2002

I am at long last able to post my stories directly so if I have any readers out there who still remember my name... expect to hear from me on a much more regular basis in the coming weeks.

Since the end of February when we "upgraded" to BloggerPro I've had to send my raw html text to Chief Editor Perry de Havilland for insertion. I understand Perry loves matching html tag pairs with a passion only outdone by his love of reading the London telephone directory in braille. The sales blurbs claimed lack of support for Linux was a "temporary" matter. Unfortunately, I do not have a great deal of time for anything beyond my consulting work and some activities with the National Space Society, so the extra burden was just enough to make me think twice when an article started buzzing about my head...enough trouble that I tended to swat the idea away rather than do anything about it.

Then preparations for the ISDC (International Space Development Conference) hotted up as April slipped into May. I am the Chair of the National Space Society committee that oversees the local Conference committee so this kept me rather busy. More so as I was dumb enough to also volunteer to run a track of programming on Novel Propulsion Systems on top of assisting with liaison between NSS and the Moon Society (Artemis Project) on the lunar programming track...

Speaking of the Lunar Track... No Glenn, I didn't see the anti-capitalist, anti-settlement, anti-commercial space, anti-space resources, anti-property rights, anti... [you get the picture] guy who decided he'd like to speak at our conference. I was running my own track next door at the time with speakers talking about fun things like Launch Loops, Gas Guns, Electrodynamic Tethers and the like, so I didn't have a chance. However I can confirm there were no bloodstains left over in the Lunar Track room by Banquet time, so our lads and lasses were polite enough to let the fellow get out of our midst alive. Darn.

I really must give the fellow (Richard Steiner) credit for courage. Walking into a room full of space activists who would shave their grannies into hamburger for a chance to get off the planet and suggesting the entire Moon be made off limits to settlement is not something to be attempted by the faint of heart. It also won't happen and we wouldn't obey it even if it did happen.

Besides... on the surface of the moon environuts are easily dealt with. If one should chain their self to a rock (no trees!)... No prob.

We'll just sit back in the cab of our lunar rover and take bets on when their Oxygen runs out.

Tuesday, June 11, 2002

Yet again our crappy pox ridden 'tech-support-vanishes-at-Five-O'clock-on-the-dot' domain host is down... so if you want to send us e-mail, send it using this address rather than the usual 'libertarian-samizdata.net' addresses. Grrrrrrrrrrr.

In the not so distant future, Libertarian Samizdata will be moving both to a different domain host and probably off blogspot in order to make everything more reliable.

Both Blogger.com and Soho-uk.com
are living on borrowed time

Update Problem fixed... normal e-mail addresses working again.

Monday, June 10, 2002

Blogger N.Z. Bear has a cool feature on his blog "The Truth Laid Bear," in which he attempts to quantify the flow of blog-to-blog links within the blogosphere. He identifies the blogs that are most often referenced by other blogs, and he also identifies the blogs that most frequently link to other blogs.

You can probably guess who is #1 on both lists. Where does Samizdata rank? We are tied for 18th place on the list of blogs most cited by other bloggers. However, we are way, way down there in terms of linking to other blogs, tied for 96th place. So, here is a link to HappyFunPundit, which is on a roll with its last two entries. HFP's "music industry suckage report" is one of those pieces where you realize that someone else has just articulated what you thought all along but couldn't quite express yourself. And while the Kevin Richardson vs. George Voinovich flap is funny enough as a straight news story, HappyFunPundit's take is even funnier. Well done, Dan and Steve.

Thursday, May 30, 2002

I just noticed that UK Transport now has a hit counter, and I pushed the little cross, expecting just a number. But as most readers of this probably know far better than I, what you actually get is a whole new page of numbers. And the news is that the UKT cup is either almost completely empty, or else starting to get definitely, detectably damp at the bottom, depending on how you look at it. VISITS: Total: 869, Average Per Day: 29, Average Visit Length: 1.10, Last Hour: 5, Today: 24, This Week: 240.

You can see how a regular journalist, looking at numbers like those, would say, forget about that. I, and I hope Patrick, with our backgrounds in unofficial paper pamphlets stuffed into envelopes and the like, are more easily impressed. I definitely am. Compare Total with This Week, or Average with Today (that was at 11.30 am today), and maybe you'd agree. Patrick seems to be excited, because (as Natalie Solent also noted) he was up at 6.43 am this morning. This is about when I go to bed.

There's a mass of recent UKT stuff to look at, and Patrick does write beautifully, with a decent sprinkling of human being outbursts and idioms to enliven what from other keyboards would be uninterrupted number and date crunching. What I like about Patrick is: he's honest. You always feel that he's saying it like he's seeing it. If he's confused, he says so. If he deviates in his head from the libertarian orthodoxy (e.g. on Compulsory Purchase Orders being necessary to build railways) he deviates right there on UKT. Which means that when he does express a strong judgement that counts for something.

Nevertheless, of all the recent stuff on UKT, the thing that most impressed me was an email from Tim Hall, whoever he is. It's full of insider knowledge about the sad fate of brand-new but never used railway carriages, or something, and what it means is that UKT looks like continuing its slow but steady rise to significance. Patrick doesn't have to write the entire thing himself. He may not know as much about roads and planes and ships as he does about trains, but there are surely others out there ready to fill in, as soon as they hear of UKT's existence. In a year or two, he could have himself an entire ideologically simpatico circus of regulars. Patrick is a one-step-at-a-time sort of person, and he'll probably say something like: you're very kind Brian, let's hope you're not too kind, wait and see, etc, etc. Which is all part of why I'm starting to get seriously optimistic about UK Transport.

Saturday, May 25, 2002

For sex (bikini reference!), violence (attack by dog! blood!) and much, much more, go to Bitter Girl!

Friday, May 24, 2002

One of the many joys of the Samizdata is that it is a truly marvelous tool for weedling all manner of Libertarians out of their various hidey holes. So it is with nothing but pleasure that I accept the gentle rebukes of Paul Marks from whom I have not heard since sometime before the last Ice Age.

For the benefit of Paul (and others) let me make it clear that I accept that President Bush is not beyond criticism and I will leave it at that for the moment.

And, like Paul, I welcome the likes of Messrs Prodi and Petain speaking their minds. It means that blind people can hate them as well.

Tuesday, May 21, 2002

Natalie Solent links (Monday May 20) to a Guardian piece about blogging. That "fact checking your ass" meme is never going to die is it? They mention Glenn Reynolds of Instpundit by name and by blog. Do they know his meta-context?

I'm sure mostly they do. I've always rated the (what it now, just about, still, makes sense to call) "left" at least as good a bet in the long run for libertarianism as the (ditto) "right". Most Guardian-readers love idea-based radicalism (making trouble for the high and mighty, such as many current Guardian-writers) more than they love socialism, if forced to choose. Many British (at any rate) onservatives, if forced to choose, love the high and mighty more than they love trouble-making (i.e. idea-based radicalism). (This is one of the meta-contextual reasons for the spat between the Libertarian Alliance and the Daily Telegraph. The LA suspects betrayal as the old establishment welcomes the new. The Daily Telegraph regards the LA as politically insignificant and out of the power loop, and hence socially inferior. Both have a point.)

Will there soon be lots of left wing blogs for us to link to and quarrel with? That would be something. Or will they all just be spoiler or defensive salaried offshoots of the mainstream media, like – and no offence is intended here, I'm just being descriptive - the Guardian's web operations. (Mixed metaphor warning: can a mainstream have an offshoot? Make that journalistic treetrunk.)

Thursday, May 16, 2002

None other than the talented and angst fuelled Bitter Girl!

Friday, May 10, 2002

Steve runs quite possibly the strangest blog in the entire blogosphere, rejoicing in the name of Scrofula (morbid condition featuring swelling of the glands), tagline: News, Rumours, Stupidity and Muck.

He is particularly adroit at, um, interesting graphics (I particularly like his 'Conan the Egalitarian' and 'David Blunkett as Robocop'). Many of his works are rather splendid animated gifs: watch Robert Fisk come to grief again and again! Make sure you visit his picture archive for maximum juicy goodness. Steve has a much better idea for a new EU flag than that silly barcode...

Uncle Joe loves EU

Tuesday, April 30, 2002

I liked Francis Moore's short sting-in-the-tail posting over at the Liberty Log yesterday. 1), 2) and 3) are familiar enough this-versus-that contrasts (Korea, China, Germany), although deserving of infinite repetition. 4) (Britain) contains the provocative duo. Clue: they do the Liberty Log in Scotland.

Freedom and Whisky is also a Scottish inclined blog. There were two more good postings by F&W boss David Farrer yesterday, about Adam Smith and about the PC menace to Ryanair.

Have all these Scotbloggers been introduced? Presumably. If not, this should connect them.

Sunday, April 28, 2002

The epidemic spread of Britblogging is definitely this weekend's Britblogging story. Perry says he doesn't want too much blogging about blogging, because, well, even to explain would be to break the rule, nevertheless …

… posted on the Libertarian Alliance Forum at 4.54 pm today, by long time Libertarian Alliance supporter David Farrer: "My new blog is now up and running."

The first posting was last Wednesday, thus:

Welcome to this new blog. The title Freedom and Whisky links the two themes of this blog: libertarianism and Scotland. The libertarianism will, however, sometimes extend beyond events in Scotland and I shall also be covering non-political news of interest to me north of the border. I have therefore included links to a variety of Scottish sites which I often use.

Last Friday was the last Friday of the month, and that meant a meeting at my place. Libertarian Samizdata supremo Perry de Havilland talked about blogging, and many of those present were either blog bosses (Perry, Patrick Crozier of UK Transport, Andrew Dodge of Dodgeblog) or blog contributors (such as Samizdatans Tom Burroughes, David Carr and me).

The dark horse in the herd was Chris Cooper. He has written a number of things for the Libertarian Alliance over the years. One of my favorites of his was the first Personal Perspectives piece we ever published called Mere Anarchy, and he was writing about why Free Market Broadcasting would be a good idea long before most people realised that such a thing was possible, let along desirable. But he has been too busy working, raising a family, etc., to do as much libertarian writing since then as we'd all have liked. An ideal blogger, in other words. So I was especially glad when he showed up on Friday. And, it turns out that for the last month Chris Cooper has been doing Chris Cooper's Blog (CCB from now on). Having glanced through CCB in amazement on Friday night, I gave it a proper read on Saturday.

Perry made a distinction in his talk between "mezines" and "pundit" blogs. CCB, rather like Natalie Solent's Blog, looks to be both. Like Natalie, Chris is an uncompromising libertarian but he doesn't hit you over the head with it all the time. And when he does it can take a few seconds to register, such a tabby cat does he usually seem, what with writing about other things besides libertarianism.

You'll probably need a longer attention span for CCB than for your average blog. It's more like a nineteenth century gentleman's diary, kept as much for its author's pleasure, now and in later decades, as for anyone else's benefit. If you want to read CCB over Chris' shoulder you're very welcome, but he's not begging. But just like those nineteenth century gentleman he can write, I promise you.

CCB has not so far been strong on links, but this may merely be because Chris has yet to master the technicalities of that. I know the feeling. If that's so, the fact that Patrick Crozier was deep into technical confabulation with Chris over my computer on Friday night could prove significant. In particular, CCB's left hand bit, now decidedly blank, should soon come alive.

I shan't organise my life around Chris Cooper's Blog, not yet. But I will be giving it a look every few days.

Tuesday, April 23, 2002

No, not really... but Brian Linse is back home in L.A. after completing filming of his movie Den of Lions in Budapest. He is back to his old blogging habits at Ain't no bad dude.

Monday, April 22, 2002

Last week, immediately after returning from my trip to France, I visited St Andrews University in Scotland, courtesy of the Liberty Club guys, to speak at a meeting they'd organised. It was all a great pleasure, and not just because the lodgings they shared with me for the night after the meeting are so nicely situated right by the sea or because they are such nice people or because the weather was so nice.

Even nicer is that the Liberty Club is doing so well.

Universities are vitally important places if you're in the idea spreading business. You've got a clutch of bright people relatively early in their lives, selected for their brightness and put together into a community. And, for once, community really means community. As I wandered about the town with Alex Singleton on the day after the meeting, he kept greeting familiar faces. Messages sent out in one part of the place don't just meander off into the wild yonder. They double back on themselves, and if you keep on with them you can very quickly dose the entire place. Universities are, to use a word libertarians are particularly fond of, meme machines.

So, if you do what the Liberty Club does, and hold a series of different meetings on different topics, and if you get thirty people to each meeting but not always the exact same thirty people, and if libertarianism is the meta-context of the people organising all this, then pretty soon everyone in the university with any interest in such matters gets to hear about libertarianism. You don't agree with it necessarily, in fact you may disagree with it all the more fiercely on account of understanding it all the better. But for the rest of your life the libertarian attitude is fixed in your head as an attitude that you can have, that other intelligent people do have, and that you could switch to if you ever felt like it.

The Liberty Club is one of the most if not the most active student organisation on the entire St Andrews campus. It is (a) definitely libertarian. It is in particular (b) not conservative. And it is in general (c) not stupid. Its leading lights are not thoughtless, unfunnily self-mocking posturers, of the "we don't mean this really we're just students arsing about" variety. They give off vibes of philosophical and political passion and intelligence.

Their Liberty Log is a modest operation, with bits appearing only every day or two rather than every hour or two as here. Before leaving I contributed a piece to it concerning the meeting I spoke at, and there's only been one further posting (by Marian Tupy) since then. But that's a pace they can sustain, and their web activity (see also their website), is but the seasoning of the philosophical and intellectual dish they are serving up to their local target community. The meal itself is face to face contact and face to face argument and public debate. What their internet activity does is add a few more libertarian memes to an already meme-rich environment, and supply heavyweight back-up for any who want to pursue libertarianism further, either to agree with it or to attack it.

Like all capable people, the St Andrews Liberty Clubbers worry that they could be doing better. Couldn't we all? Alex mentioned setting up some kind of organisation for reaching students everywhere, and that might make sense if it could be done without too much strain. But I'd say that what they're already doing is a model to libertarian groups in colleges and universities everywhere. And thanks to the internet, others really can look and learn. My bet is that they've already "infected" several other campuses without even realising it.

Friday, April 12, 2002

There is a nice article about blogging by Daniel Sorid on Reuters. At last someone who actually understand why blogs are better than Usenet.

Wednesday, April 10, 2002

Recently my computer, a Blue-White G3 PowerMac, gave up the ghost after years of stalwart service and this, plus some rather more harmonious distractions, has been responsible for my suspicious absence from the Samizdata.

However I shall soon return to inflicting my views on the blogosphere. The multi-talented Andrew Dodge proved that he is capable not just of invoking evil spirits, scaring horses, authoring anti-statist tracts and smoking vile smelling cigars but also of helping me drop a cool £2,500 on a juicy new Quick Silver G4 PowerMac and setting it up for me. I am still accelerating up the curve of coming to grips with OS X (which is beyond cool) but I expect to be blogging my heart out soon.

Friday, April 05, 2002

Unqualified Offerings has recovered from an attack of technical problems and is once again broadcasting wild eyed libertarian wonders to the masses!

If you like intellectually challenging perspectives and rigorous arguments, then check out Jim Henley's excellent blog.

Thursday, April 04, 2002

UK Transport isn't a blog name to make the heart race, or so Perry and I have been telling Patrick Crozier. Transports of Delight? Freedom Wheels? Libertarian Travelblog? But UK Transport by any other name would smell just as sweet, for just as long as he can keep it going and keep it coming.

For example, among several nice things there was a beautiful little piece there yesterday (Wed April 3) entitled Safety Costs Soar. I know: yawn. But read it. Says Patrick: "There is something of a shifting of the tectonic plates going on in government circles at the moment." Trust me, this is about more than safety. It is but the grain of sand in the molecular depths of which a whole world is revealed.

Tuesday, April 02, 2002

Gosh, what a lot of e-mails I had waiting for me asking why I have not posted for a while. Unfortunately I have been too involved with unexpected business travel and family matters to be able to blog. To make matters worse my portable is sick and so I can only post from my office, which is a bit difficult.

I hope to do a few postings this week if my crazy schedule permits!

Monday, April 01, 2002

In the small hours of Monday morning I went to visit A Coyote at the Dog Show, on account of it being the first on the blog list on the Samizdata sidebar links. The Coyote man quoted (on Thursday March 28) an interesting opinion from Bill Quick:

Tens of thousands of folks are getting a charge out of creating and maintaining blogs, with absolutely no financial rewards - except for a handful of bloggers so tiny their numbers are statistically meaningless noise. The charge is enough for now, but it won't last, and the blogosphere, currently in full expansion, will shrink like a popped balloon in another year or so, as hundreds of thousands of blogs go dark and dead.

The problem is simple: it requires too much work and talent to maintain a good blog, work and talent that brings in nothing tangible for the creator.

A similar thought had been occurring to me. Patrick Crozier tells me that keeping UK Transport in full flow is already an effort. Natalie Solent is off at the seaside. Will they go dark and dead? I do hope not.

I don't think Samizdata will expire soon. Perry seems like a stayer to me, and is not arrogant enough to assume that he can keep Samizdata going indefinitely all by himself. Maybe he could, but why take the chance? There's a team of us, and Perry is always on the lookout for more. (Libertarian, supermodel, good sense of humour, advanced philosophy degree, is the kind of CV he seems to like best, if you're thinking of applying.)

Plus: We're ideologically motivated. We have something big to say, and to keep on saying. We don't get money, but we do get prestige within the libertarian movement. The Libertarian Alliance has chuntered along for two decades fuelled by little else, inspired by the mere dream of readership numbers per year of the sort that Samizdata now gets in a week. Samizdatans will come and go, but Samizdata itself could well continue into the 2020s.

Nor will Samizdata be the only survivor. Blogging won't go away, any more than insects will merely because so many of them die per hour. Bill Quick thinking that it will sounds to me like the wishful thinking of a professional writer (which the talented Bill Quick is), wanting to believe that these damned amateurs will vanish and restore the status quo ante. Many will, true. Blogging, like the internet as a whole, will have downs as well as ups, but enough blogs will stick around to prove Bill wrong. Even if blogging is for many only a brief shining moment, millions will want that moment, and then millions more, until some even better way of writing your mind comes along.

And some of the blogs that do stick around will become much bigger than any blog is now.

Thursday, March 28, 2002

Here is a picture of the intelligent and attractive Missy Schwartz. Sigh

Tuesday, March 26, 2002

All round gentleman-about-town, raconteur, degenerate smoker of communist cigars and worthy blogger Brian Linse also moonlights as a film producer when he is not doing his proper job of blogging.

The production of his very interesting looking film called Den of Lions is well underway, shooting on location in Budapest, Hungary.

Progress reports and numerous pictures can be found at the film's own blog site! Check it out.

Wednesday, March 20, 2002

Blogger Chris Johnson of Midwest Conservative Journal may be a benighted conservative but at least he is my favourite kind of benighted conservative. His blog is wide ranging, informal, staunchly anti-idiotarian and laced with humour (such as his 'break up LibSam' campaign) [Ed: at least we hope he is joking!] with remarks like:

Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy responded by saying, "I don't look at judicial nominations through a political prism," but had to cut his statement short when his growing nose poked a reporter in the eye. The reporter was not seriously injured.

If you like to sample conservative blogging but find some of them too po faced, then Midwest Conservative Journal might be just what you are looking for.

Monday, March 18, 2002

Samizdata slogan of the day

Bloggers may not be able to change the way newspapers are written, but we can change the way people read them
- Perry de Havilland

Thursday, March 14, 2002

What I flagged up as a mere possibility here on Friday, March 08, 2002 in my article 'St. Andrews is at it again' is now a fact. The St. Andrews Liberty Club have started their own blog, and … well don't take my word for it, go to The Liberty Log itself, and see what they say about the dinner at Tim and Helen's where Tim and I showed them how Libertarian Samizdata works. And see also their excellent anti-anti-smoking stuff.

Tuesday, March 12, 2002

John Weidner's Random Jottings is a rambling, strangely structured blog that reminds me of wandering through an antique shop. It is a place filled with peculiar and fascinating artifacts, some clearly desirable and collectable and others curious but of unclear purpose like a button hook or silver chatelaine.

You are as likely to find information about a resurgence in skilled oriental rug making in Turkey as you are to see commentary on the war in Afghanistan. It may be the only blog I would describe as 'charming'. Visit daily because who knows what you might find?

Monday, March 11, 2002

As is obvious from the previous article, we have a new gun in town... by the name of Adriana Cronin. You will quickly discover she is blogosphere's very own Lara Croft, complete with serious motorbike and a need for speed.

Sunday, March 10, 2002

The Samizdata Team based in and around London was delighted to be able to meet famed blogger Joanne Jacobs and her daughter for lunch in Central London yesterday.

Joanne and her daughter looked on impassively whilst the Guardian journalists were burnt in effigy for their amusement.

Natalie Solent regaled the room with her 'The time I went shopping and forgot to leave the Chieftain Tank's hand brake on' story.

Monday, March 04, 2002

Former lefty Brian Linse has more or less succumbed to Stockholm syndrome and we will soon be asking him to become a regular contributor to Samizdata.

It was tough but although he is still in a state of denial, the process is irreversible and we will have him signing his soul away signed up to 'The Cause' very soon indeed.

Mark my words, he will not be able to resist the forces drawing him back to salvation in London for long. We all know that latent libertarians like him never have an easy time coming out of the closet. Still, it was touching to see him actually eat the autographed picture of Barbara Streisand he used to carry around in his wallet.

You don't believe me? Well I lured him into taking the Ethical Philosopher Selector test and this was his top 5 results (I was peeking and he didn't cheat):

1.  Rand   (100%)
2.  Sartre   (98%)
3.  Stoics   (90%)
4.  Kant   (88%)
5.  Nietzsche   (79%)

That's right... our former pet pinko aced RAND! We may have created a monster!

Sunday, March 03, 2002

The Daily Dose is a wide ranging newsblog, consistently libertarian in outlook but less likely to assault you with polemics than yours truly. Blogstress Orchid presents numerous brief-comments-with-link entries daily plus the occasional lengthier prognostication. A typical Orchic flowering:

WHY THE DOTCOMS FAILED: Yeah, yeah, we've heard it all before... overinvestment, shoddy business models, the arrogance of 24-year-old CEOs. This rant (scroll down below the images) points out something that most chroniclers of the DotBombs underemphasized: human nature.

(Is chroniclers a word? Oh, well, you get my drift.)

If you like your bloggage in informal quick-fix Daily Doses, then this is the blog for you.

Boy, I take my eyes off Adil Farooq of Muslimpundit for a week and he gets a severe dose of blogorrhea.

As usual his stuff is top notch.

Does your blog lack a certain zip? Does it fail to reach other parts other blogs reach? Does Glenn Reynolds treat your blog like a bidet? In short, does your blog suck? Well perhaps your problem is that your refreshments, so essential to good blogging, are in pedestrian porcelain... your crockery is a mockery!

The truth is that hardcore bloggers prefer their bourbon toddies in a Bitter Princess mug. It is not enough to just hang out with a 'Mittle European' fixated Bitter Girl... to feel the full effects that are so efficacious to superior blogging, only a Bitter Girl mug will do! I find that running my tongue along the edge and thinking of Shannon greatly enhances the creative processes.

Tuesday, February 26, 2002

The Capitalist Chicks site has had a major update, featuring interesting articles (including one from Samizdata's capitalist non-chick David Carr), the beginnings of a picture gallery and other good things, such as...

Tuesday, February 19, 2002

From this little article lifted in its entireity from today's JPMorgan Chase Tech Industry Daily, it would appear that the corporate world is starting to take notice.

Will bloggers compete with journalists?

In January alone, at least 41,000 people created new Web logs using Blogger, Wired News reported yesterday. A Web log, or "blog" for short, is a tool for self-publishing on the Web, and often features links to Web sites that the writer finds interesting. It's like a one-person discussion group. Web logs have now crossed a tipping point, leaping from a "self-contained community" to a group "large enough that there's many different Web logs," according to Evan Williams, who runs Blogger, one of the most popular services for creating a blog. Some have put the total number of Web logs at more than 500,000.

Blogging boosters have proclaimed Web logging a new form of people's journalism. Now comes the backlash. John Dvorak of PC Magazine said that while a few blogs were insightful, many new webloggers were getting into blogging for all the wrong reasons. They are "wannabe writers" who are looking for "ego gratification," Dvorak wrote.

[Tech Daily] Editor's comment: Starting a blog is just like creating your own Web homepage for those who don't know how to create one. Blogging software is a PC-based "client" that enables the writer to use a browser to post a blog to a server. That server can be inside or outside a firewall. To start a blog you first go to Blogger or one of the other blogging-service sites and download a small piece of software. You're given a URL of your own, and you can then start publishing your thoughts right to that URL. Will bloggers replace journalists? Bloggers are to journalists as ubiquitous video camera owners are to professional photographers. It's the talent and not the tool. Still, amateur video has a place in recording the events of our time.

Blogging has some potential in a corporate context in support of knowledge management, workgroup collaboration, or corporate communications. But blogging will take time to find a home in the corporate environment. The key to its adoption will be to find one-to-many communication requirements where other tools like e-mail and Web pages aren't as effective. Blogging within corporations will probably follow the same route as instant messaging. IM started with kids and spread to adults as its effectiveness within corporations became evident. I'd be interested in hearing from anyone who knows of effective corporate blogging solutions.

Fellow bloggers, hang on to your hats. This ride could get wild.

Within the next few hours we will get our 100,000^th visitor (as I write this we have already had 142,643 page views)... we would be grateful if the person who makes it 100,000 takes a screenshot and sends it to us.

We are small fry compared to Instapundit but that is not shabby for having only been around for four months!

In the last 72 hours we have had e-mail from USA, UK, Ireland, Italy, Switzerland, Senegal, Pakistan and Australia.

Sunday, February 17, 2002

The Blue Button is a highly polemical independent libertarian blog. It is largely limited to American issues but within that purview tends to throw a fairly wide net. The blog has a blunt 'in your face' style and it would be fair to say ambiguity and nuance are eschewed for the Monster Truck car crushing approach.

I'll tell you what really gets on my tits about Tom Tomorrow and the whole Village Voice "we're not commies, honest" liberal set. They've all been doing a bang-up job documenting and bitching about privacy and civil liberty violations but when it's cast-your-ballot time, where are they? In the booth with the statists.

Quite so. The Blue Button says it the way the author sees it. If you like opinions straight from the shoulder, then this is the blog for you.

Thursday, February 14, 2002

As there was quite a lot of interest last time I showed one of these, here is the latest one.

This is a snapshot of where Samizdata visitors came. Also in the last 72 hours we have had e-mails from Brazil, USA, Canada, UK, Ireland, Spain, Italy, Germany, Israel and Australia.

Like all self respecting cabals of sinister globalist illuminati, we have a motley widespread and close-knit network of voyeurs spies reporting back to us with prurient valuable information... one of them has managed to get a snapshot of a well known bellicose blogger. We need assistance positively identifying her however.

We are watching you

Monday, February 11, 2002

"Blog this, you Bounder!"        "Bloggin' 'ell!"

A veritable verisimilitude of Bloggers from Blighty  Samuel Johnson
Only a very few spaces left. E-mail for details if you are a blogger in the British Isles.

Sunday, February 10, 2002

You have nothing to loose but your hackneyed diet of stale media...

This is a snapshot of where Samizdata visitors came from earlier today, demonstrating the truly global appeal of blogs. In the last 72 hours have had e-mails from USA, UK, Denmark, Spain, Italy, Slovakia, South Africa, India, Hong Kong and Australia.

And these are just the early days of blogging. Richard Bennett started the ball rolling, Glenn Reynolds gave it a kick and the rest is yet unwriten.

The subtitle is: cryptography, censorship, copyright, thoughtcrime and this is definitely truth in advertising. Zem:blog is tightly focused on those issues, eschewing the occasional off-message flights of whimsey found in places like Samizdata.

I do not mean that as a criticism however, it is just that zem:blog is very serious about focusing on what are frankly serious issues to anyone who regards civil liberties as nothing less than the bedrock of civilisation, as zem clearly does... and as do we.

zem:blog tends to focus on technical issues as they relate to civil liberties and he takes a truly global view, reporting in the last few days on matters in the Europe, USA, Britain, Iceland, Swaziland and Egypt. The enigmatically named 'zem' is an Australian software developer in the telecommunications industry and thus knows of what he speaks.

Recommended

Saturday, February 09, 2002

John McGuinness chides NRO's blog The Corner for their disinclination to link to articles they reference.

I'm enjoying National Review's new Blog -- The Corner, but one complaint is that they don't seem to be as diligent in linking to articles they're referring to as most bloggers are. So it's not always easy to tell if they're representing opposing viewpoints fairly.

John makes a very good point. I also groused about that and why it is actually counter-productive in an earlier article. I suspect the NRO team are so steeped in old-media-think that it just does not seem 'right' to link to people they incorrectly view as competitors. Well the fact is that links are what makes the blogosphere and the very internet itself go around and they are a resource in themselves... and like unilateral free trade, which works even if the idiots in other nations are protectionists... I will continue to link to Corner if I quote them (and they are also in the blog side bar) because it is in my interests to do so for both the reasons I mentioned in my earlier article on the subject "Jonah Goldberg comments on the joys of group sex", and also for the valid reason John McGuinness gives: it actually boosts credibility to be able to check the facts yourself.

So guys, what are you afraid of?

Tuesday, February 05, 2002

At least the ones which are not so alarming that I do not want to show them!

via google.com: retirement+party+funny+pictures+slide+presentation

via google.com: james+c.+bennett+islamic+fundamentalism

via alltheweb.com: email+addresses+of+arab+leaders

via google.com: false+mustache+makeup

via alltheweb.com: japanese+cheerleaders

via google.yahoo.com: spanking+kylie

via google.com: world+grid+gamma+rays+human+brain   huh?

via google.com: enron+baxter+suicide+conspiracy

via alltheweb.com: clandestine+ladies

via google.yahoo.com: Turner+Prize+judges

via google.com: dark+side+ayn+psychopathy

via search.lycos.com: I+ain't+afraid+of+bugs   oooooookay!

via suche.lycos.de: dripping+lips

via google.com: cuba+kennsington

via google.com: bush+choked+on+pretzel+buddy+clinton

Monday, February 04, 2002

For me it is like walking through some exhilarating global weather system, an interactive one at that. I see some article that does not particularly interest me and it is like a raindrop against my skin or a passing breeze: I am aware of it but in a moment it is gone and forgotten.

And then I see something that interests me, like light from some distant sun touching my face through the shifting clouds of data. Or then suddenly I stumble upon something that angers or startles me, like a lightning bolt hurtled up into the sky from New York or Wellington or Belgrade or Delhi or London, only to strike the ground near me, illuminating everything for a moment and shocking me with its force.

The Internet makes me feel like I am some luminous being working a magic device that transports me up from my little corner of the Balkans until I can not only look down over the sound and fury of the whole world, but like some pagan goddess with my shimmering wings powered by Blogger.com, fling my own thunderbolts back down at it, watching them strike in London and Warsaw and Calgary and Athens and Pretoria.

The Internet is so much more than the slow moving dead text of yesterday, something remote from yourself held at arms length figuratively and literally. It is the seething, howling, singing, snarling voice of the global gestalt that surges through you and carries the sound of your own voice away with it to unseen ears on the other side of the world. It is utterly intoxicating.

My experience is quite different from Brian's. For me the Internet has "always been there". I had access to its earliest form when I was a grad student at CMU in the early 70's. Although I became a card-carrying Libertarian during a time when I lacked access to the university computers, that soon changed. I've been continuously on the internet from 1983, and a researcher who digs hard enough will find my very libertarian oriented Space Digest postings from that period.

This brings me to a point it has long been my intention to make. Blogs did not come out of a vacuum. Many writers like myself have been debating, arguing and posting for two decades. That's a lot of practice. We're not people who sat down one day and said "Oh, I think I'll start writing about current affairs". Some of us have been writing for every bit as long as the "mainstream" journalists. Our editors were not our bosses but our peers; they gave us the harsh critique of people who knew the facts and were unafraid to let you know it. You also learned to withstand attacks that could be harsh and personal. Libel? Hah! You just returned fire. Courts were for wimps!

I do understand a little of what Brian says, because I can remember a time when I could say I knew all of the key people on the internet. That is certainly no longer true. I feel honoured to have been in the circles of those early days and that ring of acquaintances is one I still find valuable to me professionally and otherwise.

If there are journalists reading this who have spent their working lives in the traditional print media, the blog phenomena must be quite disconcerting. It seemingly appeared from nowhere around September 11^th. Things do happen fast on the net, but I assure you many of us have been writing for as long as yourselves. The format has been different, the rules have been different, but we are really quite as experienced (and blooded) in our media as you in yours.

Back to Brian's Lament (sounds like an Irish trad song title, don't it?)... we each add our small contribution. Being the most read or the top rated isn't what matters. The Internet is our home and its residents are our friends and neighbours. It takes a bit of getting used to, this non-territorial territory we live in, a "place" where your neighbors may be physically anywhere that humanity is to be found and proximity is defined by shared interests and values rather than place.

But it's a good place and it is where the history of this century will be written.

I note a state of mind which I have detected in myself, and wonder if any others share it?

Once Upon A Time, I was a happy libertarian. I knew only about a dozen other libertarians at all well and I was one of the cleverest and most dedicatedly productive of them. The rest of my little world consisted of the Great Unenlightened, the Statist Masses, all of whom I outranked. I knew of other libertarians, in far away countries of which I knew little such as America, but they didn't loom large in my mind. Occasionally they sent us little bits of writing through the post, but nothing impressive enough to threaten my sense of my own libertarian magnificence. I and my little gang of friends, we few, we happy few, were shining the torch of liberty in little England. I thrashed out Libertarian Alliance pamphlets, secure in my own libertarian splendour. I was a Big Fish in a Small Pond.

Then came the Internet. Suddenly I am becoming acquainted on a daily basis with the clever - often very clever - thoughts of as many dozen libertarians as I can make myself attend to. Worse, Little England no longer needs me to tell it about libertarianism, for it too can plug into the great Magic Filing Cabinet in the Sky, the Great Conversation Machine. In such a world, does my little voice, my little computer keyboard, count for anything? What do my Libertarian Alliance pamphlets signify, when set beside the thousands upon thousands of other libertarian writings out there? I still crank out Libertarian Alliance pamphlets, because it's what I do. It's what I am. But what I now am is a Small Fish in a Big Pond. I feel melancholy.

This experience is not confined to libertarians. I am suffering from a universal syndrome caused by better global electronic communications. (I've even read a book about this, by, I think, someone called Oliver James.)

Because of daily TV broadcasts of the best club and international football matches in the world (which he knows others are watching even if he can't bear to watch such things himself), a man who was happy when thinking of himself as the second best footballer in Doncaster, is now forced to contemplate the fact that he is the 9,673rd best footballer in the world - a depressing demotion indeed. Ditto in every other area of human endeavour.

It sounds to me as if most of my fellow bloggists here at Samizdata found their first voices, so to speak, as contributors to the Great Global Conversation, and are making steady, satisfying progress up the relevant, if huge, pecking order. "Last week I was the 934th best libertarian" (or however exactly they classify themselves). "Now I'm the 919th best. Next year, if I keep it up, I'll make it below 900", etc. I'm talking subjective experience here and my guess numbers are just that, pure guesses. I am aware of no rating system for libertarian writers and activists of this kind, of the sort which now says that Sachin Tendulkar of India - for I think it is he - is the now the best test match (i.e. international cricket) batsman in the world (thereby depressing all other batsmen everywhere). Thus, the other bloggists do not feel melancholy. But then again, maybe if you are starting out at the bottom of the global libertarian pecking order, the prospect of that long trudge from 900 to a probably peak of, I don't know, about 300, and then back down to 1,000 followed by oblivion, depresses them too.

Serious confessions of unhappiness are not cool, coming from libertarians, and especially not if the cause of the unhappiness is something so triumphantly capitalist as modern electronic communications. Trivial snarlings about the annoyances of the latest version of Windows or non-trivial snarlings about politicians and their many misdeeds, yes, fine. But confessions like this one cross some kind of line.

Which of course is why I choose to write thus. Good writers regularly cross such lines, and I'm still bashing on, trying to write well. So don't worry everyone, everyone who cares that is to say. My confession is serious, but the unhappiness I confess to is not overwhelmingly serious. I'm not talking suicide here. I'll soldier on, and all the better if this piece of confessional therapy does its job and helps to reconcile me to my new (small) place in my new (big) world.

But, does anyone else out there know what I'm talking about?

The dependably interesting John Weidner at Random Jottings has a wonderful article on the daddy of all bloggers.

[He] was a lousy writer. At least when he wrote books and articles. His books are cranky hotch-potches; formless and almost unreadable. He was very combative; he was at his best in the quick give-and-take of argument, and was very successful as a lawyer. But he rarely took the time to organize his (often excellent) ideas into reasoned discourses.

However, unknown to the world, he spent much effort writing in a different style. He owned the best library in North America, and the books he read most often were those whose arguments he hated! He would fill the margins of those books with comments and refutations. He would tear them apart line by line. Does this sound familiar?

If you want to know who this mystery proto-blogger was, you will just have to go take a look at John's article.

Sunday, February 03, 2002

But certainly not a site for the weak! The curiously named Rantburg is a tightly focused geopolitical warblog with a robustly anti-idiotarian view of things. I do not always agree with Fred Pruitt's particular spin, though I frequently do, but it is nevertheless a good and and often quite detailed read. He has a fine grasp of the regional players about which he writes (unlike a few blogs I could mention) and he understand real-world political dynamics (unlike a few other blogs I could mention).

Visit daily.

Over on National Review On-line, sometimes inspired and sometimes confused Jonah Goldberg describes the new NRO blog Corner for those unfamiliar with the format:

For those of you who don't "get it," here's what it's about. Various NR editors and members of our extended family get to comment on anything we like, including each other's comments. We try to keep the posts short and the most recent appear on top.

There are no editors, no rules, and no master plan. Yes, as many, many, many readers have pointed out, it's very much like a blog along the lines of AndrewSullivan.com or Instapundit.com. The difference, however, is significant. Those guys run one-man operations. If you can't see the distinction, look at it this way. Sex with one person is very different than sex with more than one.

Someone needs to spank that boy with a rolled up copy of National Review and set him straight on a few things: Firstly "Corner" is not "very much like a blog"... it is a blog. Secondly, it is bad form not to link to Andrew Sullivan and Instapundit if you are going to mention them. We are not competitors, Jonah, we are actually a resource for each other and "Corner" is no different. Unlike dead tree media, which is chasing the same dollar, cross links actually feed readers at the people we comment on and visa versa. In fact, the more of us there are and the more cross links there are, the more readers we all get by virtue of the increased content and broader catchment... people who might not be seen dead with a copy of NR or ever think of typing www.nationalreview.com (i.e. quite a few libertarians) might nevertheless follow a link they find here to NRO just to see what we are talking about, which is surely what NRO would want.

Bitching aside, "Corner" is actually quite a fun blog. We are glad they liked our multi-contributor format so much that they copied it. It is even nicer to know that when Jonah thinks about blogs, he thinks about sex. I'd like to think we can take credit for that too.

We are of course well aware that the cognoscenti like Jonah only come to Samizdata for Natalija's "go for the throat" articles.

Wednesday, January 30, 2002

This picture of me was taken by a famous Italian archeologist a few years ago whilst we were off on a little 'expedition' to gather up a few bits and bobs in some out of the way places.

And to think some clown from the Third World part of the blogosphere thought I might look like "God as portrayed in Monty Python And The Holy Grail". Pffff.

Tuesday, January 29, 2002

I have a slightly sore throat so I am drinking what I always drink at such times. Take one large mug into which put:

· Fresh squeezed juice of one medium lemon
· One large teaspoon of English heather honey
· One hefty shot of Kentucky bourbon (Bulleit Bourbon)
· Fill with boiling water
· Stir
· Drink

But what makes this unusual tonight is the large mug in question, for on the side it says: I'm a BITTER Princess. www.bitter-girl.com

And the bitter Princess in question can be found here. She may be bitter, but she is also rather splendid in my not so humble opinion.

Manly philosopher Will Wilkinson over on The Fly Bottle has posted a picture of himself getting in touch with his, um, feminine side.

Three of Samizdata's intermittent guest contributors are revealed (but not reviled)

The sinister Andrew Dodge of Dodgeblog infamy

The mysterious Lagwolf

The ubiquitous Mommabear

The owl man has requested that I post the most recent picture of myself. I think the photo shop goofed and gave me the negative instead!

Monday, January 28, 2002

This is me conferring with my political advisor. I have often been accused of being a libertarian hawk, but perhaps an owl might be more accurate (which presumably means I am wise... or then again perhaps it means I hunt at night and eat mice)

Update: In response to all the e-mails, yes, of course I went to Hogwarts.

So this is me and my famous skidding car that I was in when I had my mishap on an icy road in Austria.

These pictures show two of my favourite things in the background:

First picture was taken on the London Eye by Alice and shows favourite thing number one: London

And the second shows favourite thing number two: Libertarian Alliance pamphlets

I just want everybody to know that I have been forced into doing this against my better judgement. I was perfectly happy blogging away in semi-anonymity but I have now been un-burquered by Perry. He telephoned me tonight and told me that if I didn't upload a photograph he would have no choice but to use the hood and goggles on me (again!)

This photo was taken about 4 years ago when I took a career break from the law to become a scriptwriter and stand-up comic. It was snapped by a producer at a cable TV company who was going to use it as a part of comedy show promotion. I was supposed to exude street-wise cynicism and moodiness but I'm not entirely convinced that I managed to pull it off

If Dale can get away with an old picture then so can we...so that you (sort of) know what we look like, here is Walter Uhlman and Perry de Havilland back in 1986, before we got older and fatter.

Walter and Perry

This was back when we both worked as henchmen for some guy with a white cat called Bloefeld. The pension plan was great but then SPECTRE was involved in a merger with ENRON and the rest is history.

When our esteemed (or steamed?) editor Perry de Havilland put out the photo opportunity call to the Samizdata team, I found my scanner wanting. The scans came out dark beyond Imagemagick's Redemption. In lieu of something newer, I found this old black and white from a gig of my old Belfast rock band Transit. It's a decade old, but it will have to serve for the moment.

Sunday, January 27, 2002

There is a funny post on the NRO Blog 'Corner' by Rod Dreher relating to Lord of the Rings. The final remark is hilarious... but they do kind of have a point!

Friday, January 25, 2002

As Glenn Reynolds on Instapundit points out, it is nice to see National Review On-line deciding to copy Samizdata's format of multi-contributor blogging. I am sure we were foremost in their minds the whole time

Update: Cal Ulmann over on Where HipHop and Libertarianism meet has a rather entertaining take on NRO Corner. Cal wrote:

The Corner on National Review Online is National Review's attempt at a blog. They don't want to call it a blog though. I guess that would mean their opinions are no better than anybody elses opinions.

Monday, January 21, 2002

Our very own Balkan Blogger, Natalija is showing signs of life once more, so expect a wave of post-illness Croatian candor and Slavic snideness from the banks of the River Sava

Welcome back.

Friday, January 18, 2002

Glenn Reynolds has some well aimed remarks about Tim Cavanaugh's rather meandering article about bloggers. Whilst I concur with Glenn's remarks, he lets Cavanaugh off far too easy. Cavanaugh states:

For all the bitching they log about the mainstream media, none of the bloggers are actually cruising the streets of Peshawar or Aden or Mogadishu. Thus, they're wholly dependent upon that very same mainstream media. You can cut on Salon all you like, Mr. Blogger, but they have a man in Afghanistan. Do you?

He does not seem to grasp that we are about punditry not field reporting. The fact is, there are bloggers all over the world pointing out obscure stuff and commenting on it... hell Samizdata alone has contributors in Britain, Ireland, USA and Croatia (and occasionally Australia). Without Tim Blair and Jason Soon, how many of us would pick up on the Australian stories they bring to our attention? Salon may have a reporter in Afghanistan, but of all the commentary about Muslims that I have seen in Salon, is it really more insightful or informed than that found on Adil Farooq's blog Muslimpundit? No, it is not.

Instapundit has so many eye balls each day that it is clear from Glenn's posts he gets a huge amount of useful pointers and comments from readers, which provides news and perspectives in and of itself. Cavanaugh seems to have missed that altogether. There is a degree of responsiveness and dynamism that more established, less immediate media channels cannot match. We blogs are not trying to replace the established media, but rather we have popped up to fill an empty but useful ecological niche, rather like the birds hitching a ride on the back of a hippopotamus and in return nibbling at unwanted parasites in the hippo's unscratchable nooks and crannies. If we are the birds, and BigMedia^tm is the hippo, guess what that makes Tim Cavanaugh...

And as for Cavanaugh sneering at the fact we all refer to each other, there are two points:

Firstly, we can afford to be civil to each other because we are not all competing for a limited pool of jobs (no wonder he hates us)... we see each other as a resource rather than rivals, even more so when we disagree.

Secondly, it is that 'hive mind' thing Glenn once mentioned. Someone picks up on a story and the 'hive' swarms together, dissecting it and commenting, with a slew of follow up posts as the hive's different 'takes' collide...such as the various 'interblog' gun wars or Enron debates (for that is what they are, debates). Established media pundits feed off their network reporters... bloggers feed off each other in much the same way, following their hyperlinks to their sources. And as our sources are far more varied (Peter Jennings is not prone to dissect all too many odd Pravda or Zambia Post or bonkers Feral Tribune articles he found by listening to someone else's broadcast), so too are the opinions and directions we go in. And of course the editorless 'screw the received wisdom' blogger ethos was never going to make us friends in Cavanaugh's circles.

Glenn is of course right that bottom feeders like Cavanaugh just do not like the competition... and the fact many of us write better than he does and about more varied things. But most of all he dislikes us because we do not fit into any of his limited pigeon holes neatly. He reads us but his silly article shows he sure as hell does not understand us.

Also we have seem some previously unknown search engines... some of these are definitely 'things that make you go hmmm.'

Via Google: Kunduz+rescue+pakistan+helicopter+brigadiers

Via Buscador.Lycos: sinister+creative+killing

Via Lycos: Cicero+economics

Via Lycos: oppressive+governments

Via Google: Bond+supervillain+bin+Laden

Via Sidesearch: american+indian+beliefs

Via Tsunamisearch: kylie+minogue+fake

Via Tsunamisearch: kylie+minogue+naked

Via Whatuseek.com: public+rationality

Via Google: al+qaeda+airlifted+antonov+afghanistan

Via Tsunamisearch: jeri+ryan+porn

Via Brisbane.t-online: England+porn

Via Google: sig+239+vs.+sig+229

Via Google: Bennett+Anglosphere

Via Google: fortune+born+on+22January+astrology

Via Alltheweb: Arabic+bikini

Via Alltheweb: Poland+citizenship+request

Via Redesearch: libertarians+and+greens

Via Search.kvasir: ladies+spanking

Thursday, January 17, 2002

Over on the exquisitely named Insolvent Republic of Blogistan, there is a brief round up of who participated in the dog pile on Mr. Raimondo following his much responded to sortie into hostile territory.

Saturday, January 12, 2002

When I am so wound up after a party or a night on the town that I cannot sleep even when I am tired, sometimes I get on the Internet and see what is new. Now that I have discovered blogging, I have another cure for insomnia... but the trick is to make sure that what I write is not a cure for other people's insomnia. I would rather my writing gives people sleepless nights that sends them to sleep.

Tuesday, December 25, 2001

The regular Samizdata contributors are reading and listening to:

Dale Amon
Last book read: Winning Colours (Elizabeth Moon)
[No Dale, Guinness beer mats are not 'a book' even if you did have a bunch of them stuck together]
In the CD player: Christmas with the Miracles (Smokey Robinson & The Miracles)
Last magazine: New Scientist

Perry de Havilland
Last book read: The Rose Garden (Sadi)
In the CD player: Praise the Fallen (VNV Nation)
Last magazine: The Economist

Walter Uhlman
Last book read: Art of War (Sun Tsu)
In the CD player: The Wall (Pink Floyd)
Last magazine: Paladin Press Catalogue

David Carr
Last book read: To hell in a handcart (Richard Littlejohn)
In the CD player: Itaipu (Philip Glass)
Last magazine: Free Life

Christopher Pellerito
Last book read: Guilt, Blame and Politics (Allan Levite)
In the CD player: The Word (featuring John Medeski and the North Mississippi
All Stars)
Last magazine: Car and Driver

Natalie Solent
Last book read: Getting the Message (Laszlo Solymar)
In the CD player: All Solent household CD's are currently in use as beer mats
Last magazine: House and Garden (huuuuuge pile of back issues)

Natalija Radic:
Last book read: CIA World Fact Book, 1995 ed. (US Government)
In the CD player: Dawn Maiden (Lidija Bajuk)
Last magazine: Schlagzeilen issues 36 and 60

Samizdata Illuminatus
Last book read: De Vermis Mysteriis (Ludwig Prin)
In the MP3 player: Return of the Deadly Mantis (Namanax)
Last magazine: 2600

Tuesday, December 11, 2001

Back on December 6th, we reported in Grim tidings in blogland, that Natalie Solent was hors de combat with a busted brain box. However the world is once more running in well oiled grooves: she is is back in action and blogging her heart out!

...He chortled in his joy.

Hurrah! Someone must have poked Adil Farooq with a sharp stick because because the excellent Muslimpundit blog has once again started loudly proclaiming some common sense from the minarets.

He is in effect pointing out the absurdity of 'multiculturalism' (which is of course nothing of the sort) and puts the boot in where it is sorely needed. The fact such self-evident remarks are even controversial is a testament to the degree of stupidity often heard on the subject

I would have thought that any attempt to accelerate the integration of citizenship-seeking immigrants into Britain, thereby preparing such people at the outset to take advantage of more opportunities to help increase their welfare, would have been welcomed by all. After all, this is what immigrants come for - to increase their living standards through seeking jobs. Taking English classes would make this easier

It is a dark marvel that there are people who cannot understand that!

Muslims often claim that their religion is misunderstood by America and others in the West. Well, in the aftermath of September 11, that is no longer the case. Non-Muslims have bent over backwards to understand Muslims, their history, their religion, even the source of their grievances, in an effort to understand what they are dealing with. The onus is now on the Muslims to do the same, and to actively throw off the shackles of ignorance and misunderstanding that they persistently have had have of America and others in the West. It will not be easy, but then serious introspection never claims to be, especially in the Muslim World, where vast hordes of people are almost always wrong almost all the time.

Now if that is not a brutally objective critically rational perspective, then I don't know what is!

A highly recommended blog for all, but particularly those who mistakenly think the merest whiff of Islam invariably causes homicidal dementia and an urge to take flying lessons. Now all we have to do is hassle the hell out of Adil to update the blog more often.

Thursday, December 06, 2001

Alas but that vertiable babe of the bloggistas and erratic contributor to the Samizdata, Natalie Solent is out of action with a broken computer. We will have to manage without our daily fix of her sardonic Frédérique Bastiat impersonations until she can shell out for the repairs. Visit her blog and donate vast sums of money to her.

Tuesday, November 06, 2001

Like Dale Amon, I lose my co-blogging virginity today, indeed at this moment. That's like not with for any tabloid journalists reading this. If any are, keep reading. You might learn something for a change.

Many hear will have heard me gushing on about (a) blogs and (b) being paid for them as the Wave of the Future etc. The "being paid" bit strikes me as important because only money can transform the provision of decentralised, unmediated news from a hobby of the intelligentsia to a major former of opinion. We need a system where you can, without effort, pay a tiny sum to read a web page.

But it's not all good news. An obvious problem is that of preaching only to the converted. If the "team" list under the toilet sign at the top of the screen all contribute, this blog looks likely to become the Real Libertarian Alliance Forum. I find this somewhat worrying, and not only because it'll make Mario Huet feel bad as his numbers go down through no fault of his own. We'll all become - dare I invoke Banquo's ghost? - atomised.

BTW I have set up my own blog at http://nataliesolent.blogspot.com. I don't think my blogspot's evolutionary niche lies in discussion. Rather I aim to just post comments about news stories and thoughts that interest me. So my dears, don't be sad that I haven't invited you, because I haven't invited anyone. All I want in life really is to be a James Bond supervillain and have a cool wall of TV screens. My Birman cat already fits the part beautifully.

Monday, November 05, 2001

There is a first time for everything I suppose. This blog post is just the latest in a long line of first times stretching back to unremembered first steps and a very well remembered... well I won't get into that. In any case, I feel the need to pre-apportion the blame before I unleash myself on the world. Basically it is all Glenn Reynolds fault. Firstly for writing such an interesting blog. His instapundit has become my first point of contact to global news throughout the day. Within days of first reading it (at Jim Bennett's suggestion) Glenn had permanently weaned me from the whinging and whining trivia that CNN supplies as news. And secondly... he's now so "famous" that I can't get him on the phone or email any more.

Secondary blame goes to Rand Simberg and Jim Bennett for suggesting that I should get a blog, or when was I going do so. Thirdly, blame Perry de Havilland for threatening my manhood if I didn't join this fray after getting him hooked on it by pointing him to the Great Satan Glenn's site.

So world, here I am. Be afraid. Be very afraid...or at least hide your daughters; dig a foxhole if you're of a socialist nature; make that a reinforced concrete underground bunker (shock mounts optional) if you are of the uncritical anti-technology ilk and in general keep your head down when I get in the mood for a good verbal dustup.

I've a lot of pent up thoughts from the last few weeks of post-history history, so... Let the fray begin!

Friday, November 02, 2001

If we can eventual get enough people posting to this blog, then we will be able to attract interest from outside our circle of heavily armed capitalist libertarian illuminati. Initially I expect we will be 'preaching to the choir' but if the Libertarian Alliance Forum is anything to go by, libertarian choirs tend to like singing out of key

As for your tech oriented posts, Walter, I suspect you will find Dale Amon a kindred spirit. Hopefully we can induce him to post techie items as well for us techno-weenies to go 'ohhhh...ahhhh' over.

Blog away, me heartie!

Blogging!

Great concept. Great name. Looking forward to blogging it out.
I didn't recognize some of the names on the invite list, but you mentioned they are all of similiar mindset. While that is a rather scary though vaguely comforting thought, I was wondering if we will be just preaching to the choir or if some of the others have a different enough perspective to keep things interesting.
Also, are you looking for mainly political oriented input or can we just sling in anything? As you know, I usually approach things from a technological viewpoint and am more interested in how the exploding technology shapes our lives and futures in ways we often don't realize until greatly after the fact.

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