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]
|
“I just think to get under Piers Morgan’s skin you don’t tell him he’s “snooty” — he aspires to be snooty. You tell him he’s a shallow-thinking tabloid clown who’s mistaken himself for an intellectual, and someone that CNN only hired due to its own deep intellectual and cultural insecurity. He’s Jerry Springer with upper-middle-class English accent, but not particularly articulate.”
– Ace of Spades.
The blogger, who is right on substance, of course, makes the still-contested allegation that Morgan wiretapped, or encouraged others to wiretap phones. Has that been conclusively proven to the extent that Pc Plod is going to extradite this stoat from the US back to Blighty? I am not sure it has. (A recent programme makes similar claims.) Otherwise, my only other query would be the use of the word “articulate”. Being articulate is not the same as being intelligent. George Monbiot, Richard Murphy, Morgan and Polly Toynbee are “articulate”. Whether they show a command of logic, insight or respect for evidence and data is another issue entirely.
The Times (behind a paywall) reports:
In a bold stand for gun control, New York newspaper has had to take an unfortunate course of action to maintain its freedom to act without fear or favour. The Journal News, which prompted outrage by publishing the names and addresses of local gun owners, has hired armed guards to defend its offices from irate readers.
The Rockland County Times, the paper’s rival in the Hudson Valley, reported the news with a gleeful headline: “The Journal News is Armed and Dangerous.”
The move apparently followed mounting concern at the newspaper for the safety of its staff, who have borne the brunt of a backlash against the paper’s campaign to publish the addresses of gun owners in the wake of the school shooting in Newtown.
Records at Clarkstown Police Department seen by The Times show that Caryn McBride, the paper’s Rockland County editor, had made at least two complaints to police over the “large amount of negative correspondence” in recent days. “Today she received an email from an unknown subject who wrote that he wondered what McBride would get in her mail now,” wrote an officer, in a police report, adding that the missive was brief and did not contain any specific threats.
The officer went on to say that he had spoken to a private investigator named Richard Ayoob, whose company, “is doing private security on location at the Journal News as a result of the negative response … His employees are armed and will be on site during business hours through at least January 2, 2013.”
Emphasis added. Boldly and without fear, favour or concern for mixed metaphors, I sing of arms and the editor:
(To the tune of Brave Sir Robin Ran Away)
Brave Dame Caryn hired a gun
She bravely hired a gun, a gun
When danger reared its ugly head, she left her principles for dead
Yes, brave Dame Caryn turned about, and gallantly she chickened out
Bravely cringing at a tweet, she thought it best to pack some heat
Bravest of the brave, Dame Caryn!
You see, it doesn’t count as being armed so long as you are rich enough to hire someone else to hold the gun. Anyone can see that morally that is completely different to actually, you know, touching the thing yourself.
“Civilization is not just about saving labor but also about “wasting” labor to make art, to make beautiful things, to “waste” time playing, like sports. Nobody ever suggested that Picasso should spend fewer hours painting per picture in order to boost his wealth or improve the economy. The value he added to the economy could not be optimized for productivity. It’s hard to shoehorn some of the most important things we do in life into the category of “being productive.” Generally any task that can be measured by the metrics of productivity — output per hour — is a task we want automation to do. In short, productivity is for robots. Humans excel at wasting time, experimenting, playing, creating, and exploring. None of these fare well under the scrutiny of productivity. That is why science and art are so hard to fund. But they are also the foundation of long-term growth. Yet our notions of jobs, of work, of the economy don’t include a lot of space for wasting time, experimenting, playing, creating, and exploring.”
– Kevin Kelly.
The article nicely challenges the idea that the “Third” industrial revolution (the Internet and so forth) has been far less transformative and productive than the Second one (electricity, etc).
“Sports is remarkably cognitive. I think it’s underrated just how smart it is. Actually, if I had more time, I would spend more time with sports. Watching it, reading about it, I think it’s oddly underrated.”
– Tyler Cowen, being interviewed about himself and his interest in things such as where and how to find good, tasty food. As to his remark on sports, I guess that one of the benefits of watching it – say if you are into baseball or cricket – is improving your basic maths. It does not surprise me that Samizdata’s Michael Jennings is a PhD in maths and a cricket fanatic.
One of my favourite books is this one, Creative Destruction, which Cowen published a few years ago now.
I like this:
Given that time is a continuous variable, there is a certain arbitrariness to the way in which it is measured. For a long time, society has agreed a system composed of multiple units and one of those units, you may have noticed, just went up by one. Welcome to 2013.
It’s Simon Gibbs of Libertarian Home, greeting the new year and looking back over the old one. The posting contains many things of interest, but allow me in particular to draw your attention to one of Libertarian Home’s projects that Gibbs lists as having done well, in the year 2012:
Getting a push from Samizdata my video and article on the The Reality of UK Uncut is a late entrant from December.
The push in question being this. A reminder, if any of us Samizdata contributors need it, that our blog can make quite a difference, in this case to the morale of a fellow libertarian, with a bit of linkage that consumed only a fraction of the time and effort that went into the item being flagged up. When I did that Samizdata posting I had no idea how definite would be the boost supplied to Libertarian Home’s traffic. Good.
And here is a mention of another libertarian whose links can make a huge difference to whoever and whatever he links to. Says Gibbs:
The Newtown shooting however is the grim source of this year’s number one story. Receiving a push from Guido the story earned 10% of the sites total traffic in the last few days of the year. It’s an interesting kind of success story for a blog that starts with the death of 26 people, but it’s a success story that makes me proud.
Something like 2000 people saw that graph on this website, a graph that rubbished the idea that the UK’s “gun free” society is automatically safer than the United States as a whole. The real picture being far more complicated. It is a small contribution to a very important and intense debate but it is the kind of detailed analysis that can change the minds of many rational readers. The graph has also been widely copied and linked to and I like to think that this blog, and Richard’s number crunching will make it a little bit harder for the Obama administration to succeed in a further clamp down on gun ownership. If you believe, as I do, that gun ownership prevents violent crime then this blog’s success story is one that might make the world a little bit safer and a little bit better and that’s why we do this.
As I am sure Gibbs realises, at any rate in his more pessimistic moments, Libertarian Home is probably not daily reading in the White House. But, politicians do react to the opinions of others, even if their own opinions and ambitions remain unchanged by mere analysis. Every little helps.
Two men dressed as Oompa-Loompas – characters from Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory – are being sought by police in Norwich after an attack in the heart of the city.
The Daily Telegraph.
Look, I know that folk from East Anglia – where I come from – are used to being abused for being “in-bred” or having “webbed feet” and other silly nonsense, but to be accused of trying to commit crimes while dressed as Willy Wonka’s employees is a bit much. (Just in case anyone wonders, I am not making light of what might be a serious crime.)
Mind you, Norwich did used to have several chocolate factories. Oh well, it makes a change from reading about the US “fiscal cliff”. I promise to be a bit more productive on this site than I have been in recent months. 2012 was effing busy.
The main problem with monetary policy today is that there is such a thing as monetary policy.
– This is buried deep in a not very recent (December 11th) blog posting by Detlev Schlichter (recycled at the Cobden Centre a day later). But it deserves pride of place here as our first quote of the day of 2013. It is the second sentence of the paragraph just above where it says: “If only the euro was golden!”
In far too many matters, when you look at Anything and what is going wrong with Anything, you find that the main problem with Anything policy today is that there is such a thing as Anything policy.
… a prosperous and subversive new year.
Expect some new voices and views here soon. And some confusion over names…
|
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.
|
