We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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The stunt pulled by pro-hunting protestors of intruding into the inner sanctum of the House of Commons has produced a large number of very predictable responses. MPs and other establishment figures harrumphed that “Parliament’s privileges have been infringed!” and “This is an attack on democracy itself!” and “We must protect this most important of our institutions!” and “The protestors must not alienate people by acting so despicably!”…
Well I have a suggestion for the pro-hunt protestors: ignore all those remarks because the only way to win is to fight your battles on ground of your choosing. As David Carr pointed out earlier with regard to when one of the protestors in the Commons shouted “This isn’t democracy. You are overturning democracy.” – Wrong. This is democracy in action and you are on the receiving end of it.
What they really, really need to understand is that the majority of people in Britain are urban folk who are at best utterly indifferent to the protestor’s concerns and frequently somewhat hostile to them. The hunters and their supporters cannot hope to convince a majority that hunting is something that is either important or even needs to be tolerated.
Do not waste your time making arguments about ‘country livelihood’ or ‘managing pests’ because not only do most people not believe you (such as me, for example), most simply do not care because they feel no particular affinity with you. It is preposterous to argue that the only effective way to put down vermin is to chase them on horseback with hounds.
It is simply not a matter for highly questionable utilitarian arguments but rather for arguing for free association to do what you will on private property. That is the only coherent and more importantly resonant argument to make.
If gay men can congregate together in clubs to do things the majority of people find deeply distasteful, without having to worry about being raided by the fuzz, why cannot foxhunters congregate together to do things the majority find distasteful without worrying about the Boys in Blue showing up? Successfully point out to gay rights activists that making the prejudices of the majority the law of the land is not something they should be comfortable with… and suddenly the class warriors behind the hunting ban might find it much harder to ‘bash the toffs’ as the implications of where this is clearly heading starts to dawn on altogether different groups.
In short, stop making invocations to the graven idol called ‘Democracy’ because it will not hear your prayers. Accept that you are a heretic and raise up an idol of your own. Call it, say, ‘Liberty’ and then challenge your enemies to denounce it.
If you want to defend your liberty to do things in free association with likeminded folk on private property, you will have to come to some very sobering realisations. → Continue reading: Confronting reality
acronym. Mainstream media
Sometimes it takes a stark juxtaposition to shine the spotlight on the vacuity and moral cowardice of our Fourth Estate.
I was watching the early evening ‘news’ yesterday on ITV1, the more popular terrestrial, commercial station. This is something I can bring myself to do only very occasionally as commercial TV “news” presenters are such unwavering amplifiers of fatuous Nulabour propoganda that they make the average BBC reporter look like Rush Limbaugh in comparison.
Yesterday evening’s first (and, by scheduling implication, most urgent) item was a piece of political agitprop by some organisation calling itself ‘Mothers Against Guns’, barely dressed up a ‘news’ feature.
Not content with the strictest anti-gun laws in the Western world, these people are upset because (wait for it) replica guns are still commercially available. Rooted to the spot, I squirmed through the next five minutes of shockingly blatant manipulation mixed in with junk statistics that were so obviously and ridiculously fraudulent as to be beyond parody. “Nine Tenths of all deaths in this country are caused by replica firearms which are converted to fire real ammunition”. Yes, the Mothers Against Gun frontwoman actually said that and got clean away with it. → Continue reading: How about ‘Mothers Against Victimhood’?
I have just attached a comment to this posting by Bill Hobbs. It could all, as I explained in it, be nonsense, but since postings here have been a little thin of late, I thought it worth a copy-and-paste to here. But please understand that what follows is a think-aloud guess that only just now occurred to me, and that I would not feel personally wounded if it was immediately comment-banged into oblivion.
I am a Brit, living in London, and have watched the Dan Rather forgery story with fascination.
But until now, like Dan Rather himself, I had assumed that George Bush’s conduct in the National Guard was indeed not to his credit. But now I am starting to believe that this might have been entirely made-up nonsense.
Two things I am learning about your President are that (a) he loves to win, and that (b) one of his favourite methods for winning is to sucker his opponents into a battleground where they think they will win… and then kill them.
I get the feeling that Bush is now doing this to the Sadaamites in Iraq. Let them (and their cheerleaders in the West in general and among the Democrats in particular) think they are winning and that Bush is losing, let them choose what they think is the perfect battleground, and then crucify them. Operation Crucifixion is just now getting underway, if I understand present circumstances in Iraq rightly. Interesting timing, eh?
What this latest ABC story suggests to me is that maybe Bush is also doing something very similar to the Kerry Campaign re Bush’s service in the National Guard. He has suckered the Democrats into a frenzied focus on Bush the skiving daddy’s boy and fake warrior, only now to hit them with the story, at just the right moment, that this was actually one of Bush’s more honourable early episodes.
I hereby place a bet on your forthcoming Presidential election: f**cking Bush landslide. Thermonuclear. If Kerry thinks it is bad now, let him see how it all looks in another month. 25 point poll difference. Meltdown chez the Kerry campaign. Bush looking so smug the Democrats will be jumping off ledges.
As I say, I am only a watcher from a distance and this comment could itself all be made-up nonsense, and the worst sort of wishful thinking. But … well, we shall see. Just some late night thoughts.
Forgive me, I am not a regular reader of this blog [i.e. of Bill Hobbs’ blog], and if it and its regular commenters have explained/demolished all this at length already, then my deep apologies for the repetition.
The left thinks that the issues around the TANG service are relevant – Bush was AWOL then, Bush lied about WMD, both instances involve acronyms, and can’t you SEE the cloven hooves? It’s the same sort of thing that gripped the feverish elements of the Right in the 90s: Clinton winked at drug-smuggling out of Mena, therefore he sold nuclear secrets to the Chinese for campaign donations. ISN’T IT CLEAR? But that sort of nonsense was confined the margins; the editor of the Clinton Chronicles wasn’t sitting in the presidential suite at the 2000 convention like Michael Moore sitteth at the left hand of Jimmy Carter in 2004.
– James Lileks via Hugh Hewitt
It is so bloody infuriating when some ungrateful, selfish kids simply refuse to acknowledge the fact that they are ‘disadvantaged’:
Scientists have witnessed the birth of a new language, one invented by deaf children.
A study published today shows that a sign language that emerged over two decades ago now counts as a true language.
It began in a school for the deaf in Managua, Nicaragua, founded in 1977. With instruction only in lip-reading and speaking Spanish, neither very successful, and no exposure to adult signing, the children were left to their own devices.
Preposterous nonsense. They must be making it up. It is totally beyond question that things like this can only happen by means of an appropriate legislative framework, an appointed governing body and generous levels of public funding.
RC Dean correctly identifies the blog-banging of Rather and his forged document as an exercise in distributed intelligence. So, can this model for cooperative intellectual activity be applied to other tasks? Can the combined power of the Internet be brought to bear on other creative tasks, rather than just the destruction of the pretensions of forgers and their mainstream media dupes?
Open Source software famously makes use of distributed intelligence. And I seem to recall hearing on the British BBC1 TV show The Sky at Night that the Internet is also already used to do combined astronomy. Also, I recall reading, but do not recall where or when, about a list of famous maths problems that have baffled the greatest maths minds for centuries, which have now all had cash prizes attached to them.
But in the case of those maths problems it is only the publicising of the problem that uses the Internet. The solutions will pretty much come from individuals. Or is that wrong? Will major proofs of major theorems get themselves constructed line by line, in public, with dozens of different mathematicians chipping in with their own pennyworths, with each step not being enough to justify a journal article, but the combined effect being mathematically stellar?
Could a film script perhaps be concocted in this way? → Continue reading: Some more distributed intelligence
I cannot help but suspect that Babbage and Turing never really envisaged the marvellous uses to which computing devices would be set.
Cats? Fish? Click here.
Parliament today finally voted by a substantial majority to outlaw hunting with hounds:
MPs have voted to ban hunting with dogs despite mass demonstrations and the debate in the House of Commons being interrupted by protesters.
The ‘fearless and principled’ Tony Blair (having pushed this law forward as a sop to his increasingly fractious party) failed to show up for the debate and did not even bother to vote.
But plenty of hunt supporters did show up to rally outside the Houses of Parliament in a protest that turned into a pitched battle. By 5.00pm this afternoon, the radio news networks were reporting that Westminster had been closed off by the chaos and blood on the streets. Five hunt supporters even managed to invade the floor of the House of Commons:
It was shortly after 1620 BST that the protesters rushed in, with one shouting at Rural Affairs Minister Alun Michael: “This isn’t democracy. You are overturning democracy.”
Wrong. This is democracy in action and the hunters are on the receiving end of it. Tempers are flared:
“Banning Easy, Enforcement Impossible – That’s A Promise” and “Tally Ho Tony, We’re Off Hunting” suggested many would not see a ban as the final word.
Particularly popular among the younger protesters were T-shirts which had hijacked French Connection’s controversial slogan to read “FCUK yer ban”.
“These people are very angry,” said Davina Morley, 53, from Yorkshire, who has been hunting all her life.
This is not the end. It is just the beginning.
Recent events in the United States have demonstrated the effectiveness of political blogging on the reporting of the presidential campaigns in the established media. They also provide a useful comparison with the United Kingdom where this relationship between the media and the blogosphere has not been cemented. The difference that blogs have had in the political cultures of both countries lead on to wider questions about the preconditions required for the political bloggers to play such a useful role, as they do in the United States.
There are distinct aspects of the development of the blogosphere in the United States that could not be replicated in the United Kingdom. Both the political culture and the press is far more decentralised and local, allowing new entrants to disseminate information and find new audiences with far lower barriers. The press in the United States was also far more highbrow and expected to maintain high standards of accuracy and objectivity by its readership.
By contrast, the British press has taken a far more visible role in forming and leading public opinion with a greater emphasis upon comment, sometimes likened to a published version of talk radio. Facts and objectivity are not as important in the British press as they are in the United States. It is also a far more centralised concern reflecting the concentrated nature of the British state and the Westminster village. Such a small circle breeds tighter and more incestuous networks of journalists and politicians who maintain control over the flow of information between the political class, the press and the interested public.
The other key difference between the two countries lies in the attitude of the professional towards blogging. → Continue reading: The Blogosphere and the Open Society
I frequently hear “Oh blogs, they don’t really have any influence” and “What real difference do blogs make?” – Individually it is certainly true that popular blogs like Samizdata.net or even Godzilla-blogs like Instapundit are dwarfed in numbers of eyeballs they attract by major newspapers and TV networks… but just as a single piranha is not so fearsome a beast, a large school of them is another thing all together. When you look at a blog, you are just looking at a single node: you need to stand back and look at the network.
Tony Blankley over on Townhall.com has written an interesting article called A revolution in news:
As in all revolutions, first, the old order must be destroyed, then we will learn both the strengths and the shortcomings of the new order. We got a glimpse of the Internet blogger’s strength this past week.
For three quarters of a century until last week, when CBS News had entered a fight it had been an unfair mismatch for its adversary. The credibility, research capacity and gate-keeping monopoly of CBS would overwhelm its victim. But last week, it was breathtaking to see, moment by moment, the Internet blogger’s advantage.
[…]
As each of these experts added their information to one blog, other bloggers would monitor it, pass it on, add a new fact, reorganize the analysis and synthesize new information. If new information proved wrong, it was corrected by yet another expert in the blogosphere. Mistakes were cheerfully admitted and instantly corrected.
[…]
The Internet bloggers picked CBS’s story as clean as a school of piranhas would pick clean some poor water buffalo that wandered into their river.
This is the distributed intelligence that has been discussed here before. Blogs have in many ways been over-hyped but that is mostly because it is not blogs that are the revolutionary driver… it is the blogosphere.
Old media is learning the hard way to be sure of their facts because somewhere out there, sitting in front of a computer in Biloxi or Berlin or Bombay, is someone knows the subject you claim to be an expert in a damn sight better than you do with a whole lot of bloggers looking over his shoulder.
The Guardian, biased but, so far as I can tell after one skim-through, accurate:
For supporters of John Kerry, who have seen allegations about the Democratic candidate’s military record sap his campaign, it must have seemed like a case of just deserts.
The president, George Bush, was last week looking vulnerable on the same grounds after CBS’s flagship current affairs show, 60 Minutes, broadcast a report claiming he had been suspended from pilot duties for failing to meet the required standards. It was also claimed that a commanding officer had been put under pressure to ‘sugar coat’ Mr Bush’s performance reviews.
But while CBS stands by its story, allegations have now surfaced that 60 Minutes based a large part of the report on forged documents.
Now as in last Friday. Surfaced as in we have now heard about it other than just via the blogosphere, who have been all over this for some time. But, better late than never. Much better.
Later on in the same report:
60 Minutes does not have a reputation for irresponsible journalism – it was the show that first broadcast the now notorious photographs of prisoner abuse at the Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq – and it takes the reliability of its stories seriously.
The CBS news president, Andrew Heyward, told the Baltimore Sun he had confidence in the story and it was appropriately vetted, but conceded it was a “political hot potato”.
Indeed. CBS throws more chips on the table with every passing hour.
My one objection to this Guardian report (apart from the fact that I knew it all already) is that it refers to things like “a report on the Free Republic weblog“, while linking only to the Free Republic weblog in general, rather than actually linking to the particular post it refers to. But such links – there are others to the top of other weblogs (Little Green Footballs, Power Line) – are, again, far better than no links at all.
If you do want links, you can of course track all of this on Instapundit. Scroll down and, you know, find the postings for yourself. Unless you think that everything of importance has all been said here. Oh all right then, here is a good Insta-posting to start, with lots of links, to other actual postings.
Changing the subject completely, I have just been reading a very fine description in this book (Maritime Supremacy and the Opening of the West Mind by Peter Padfield) about the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Light, better armed, much more agile little English ships sporting cruelly with the stately galleons of Philip II of Spain, occasionally capturing one, and changing the course of history. An excerpt (about the country that gained most from the Armada’s defeat, Holland) from the book can be found here. Sorry. Flying off at a total red herring tangent. Must stop doing that.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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