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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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This is a poster I saw the other day, outside St James the Less, which is a church very near to where I live. And no, I am afraid I do not know what “the Less” means, although perhaps a commenter will.
What I found bizarre was how they describe God. They do not come over as monotheists. They make it seem like there are lots of gods (with a small g) to choose between, and they chose a big one. Or maybe they have a big god of their own stashed away somewhere.
Interested? Here is the website. Although “equipping through ministry for mission” does not sound like much of a slogan to me.
Interesting how these things get around. The word of these amazing photos of Mexico City got to me from him, who got it from him, who got it from him, who apparently found them here, which is where, for me, the trail went cold.
The picture Patrick Crozier chose to reproduce is particularly extraordinary. Talk about ‘fake but real’. Something to do with how the guy photoshops the pictures to make things clearer, I am guessing. I often do the same with shots I take from airplanes.
Architecturally, I think this is particularly bizarre. There are times, may the God Who Does Not Exist forgive me, when I yearn for a violent revolution in sleepy little Britain, just so that the planning permission (i.e. non-permission for almost anything remotely interesting except when the government wants it) system collapses, and people could build, in Britain’s still overwhelmingly green and pleasant land, whatever crazy thing they liked. Just as a for instance, why are there not more castles built nowadays, with cylindrical and pointy towers?
Mind you, extraordinary things are still being built in Britain, by the sort of people who are still allowed to do such things.
A year ago, a headline like this was pure comedy. And this Evening Standard headline that I snapped last night even now has a slightly comic, Carry On Farming feel to it.
Alas, bird flu seems to be getting rather serious.
Governments thrive on infectious diseases, because only governments, or institutions that are very hard to distinguish from governments, can contain them. Which is why I always suspect that such “pandemics” (pandemic seems now to be the regular word for an “epidemic”) tend to be somewhat exaggerated. But if I were a politician, I would never dare to say such a thing.
I do so agree with what Madsen Pirie, who is now guest blogging at the Singleton Diet, says about mustard:
Second breakfast consisted of a croissant with the rest of the honey-roasted ham, this time with Florida mustard and fresh orange juice. After it came black coffee. As you might gather, I like mustards, pretty well all of them, wholegrain, English, Dijon, French, Florida, and so on. I even regard sausages as just an excuse for mustard.
I have a jar of Tesco wholegrain mustard on the go right now, and very tasty it is too. I also often eat meat just to eat mustard, but I never really spelled this out for myself before, so I am grateful to Madsen Pirie for doing this for me.
The Singleton Diet, as already reported here, started out as occasional Samizdatista Alex Singleton blogging about what he was eating. The idea was for him to get slimmer. But after a while, Alex got fed up with blogging every day or even every few days about his dietary intake, and the Singleton Diet faded. (Whether Alex is now any slimmer, I am not sure, but I rather think he is.)
But now, the Singleton Diet has sprung to life again, with Madsen Pirie as a guest writer. I think this is a really good idea. Who wants to blog about everything they eat for ever? Almost nobody, and if anyone did, who would want to read that for ever? But a succession of different eaters is another matter entirely.
As regular Samizdata readers will know, if you have a pro-freedom attitude towards the world you will always have lots to complain about. But the economic rules and institutions that we favour have also poured forth a Niagara of good news, and in no area of life is this more true than in the matter of food. Thanks to the farmers and especially to the food retailers, we – especially we who live in London, as Alex Singleton, Madsen Pirie, and I all do – now have a world of exciting and exotic food products to choose between and to enjoy. What better way could there be for a man like Madsen Pirie, one of the most notable of London’s freedom mongers of recent decades, to demonstrate that he is capable of enjoying life and not just of proposing improvements for and regretting the derangements of it caused by others, than for him to do a spot of food blogging? It should be a lot of fun.
Mick Hartley yesterday blogged, in response to this, about the slippery slope that the smoking ban is towards the top end of:
My point isn’t that there’s no truth in this. Of course there is. We know nicotine is addictive, never mind the whole nervous what-to-do-with-my-hands-in-this-tense-social-situation stuff which adds to the compulsion. But when you start going down this road, where do you stop? The more we find out about neurology and psychology the more we discover all these compulsions and genetic predispositions and all the rest of it, and behaviour which used to be seen as a matter of moral choice gets therapeutised as a manifestation of some syndrome or other. Antisocial bastard? He’s got mild Asperger’s Syndrome. Greedy pig? A compulsive eating disorder. Arrogant sod? Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Carry on and ultimately, at some level where Buddhism meets neurophysiology, maybe all our decisions are illusory, and the active responsible agent who’s supposed to be making all these personal choices just disappears.
Great stuff, but I’m not sure that I entirely agree. If this was indeed the slippery slope involved, I would be with Mick Hartley in wanting us to stay at the top of it. But I don’t think it is. I think the smoking ban is about pollution, and about the way that pollution is seen as not being a property rights issue, but instead as a criminal assault issue. Blowing smoke at someone is now seen as like stabbing them. The result is similar; it just takes a little longer. Next on this slippery slope are not individual behaviours, like being a greedy pig, so much as other smoke-belching activities, like driving cars and airplanes, with the rules of what exactly constitutes “smoke” being ever more tightly written.
After all, smoking has been turned from a mere habit into a crime by this ban. And crimes are all about the individual responsibility of the criminals who commit them. I do not hear anyone saying that smoking is an illness, the way they do about drinking alcohol too regularly and too much.
You can argue, and I do argue, that “passive smoking”, like smoking itself, is something you do, and consent to doing, by being near smokers rather than keeping away from them, which you can do if property rights are allowed to operate, and to create areas where smoking is forbidden by the property owner. As Mick Hartley says, in circumstances like that,: “you turn around and go elsewhere”.
But what about people who are obliged, in various degrees, to consort with smokers? Does the fact that a battered wife “consents” to being abused (by not earlier abandoning the abusive relationship) excuse the abuser, when the battered wife finally gives up on the relationship, and calls in the police and presses charges? And what about children raised by smokers? Is that not like beating them every day for no reason? That is the parallel that we now find ourselves arguing about.
And if the argument is that cars and airplanes stink up the entire planet, nobody has anywhere to go to escape from that kind of repeated assault, if that is what it is. So there is no consent argument against banning those nozious practices. Collectivists love pollution, because pollution often is collective, that is, hard to avoid.
So if you want to apply the “what next?” argument to the smoking ban, think noxious fumes, and also things like evil electrical effects from phones, power stations, heaters, carpets, etc. Actually don’t. Don’t give them ideas.
Where neurology arguments might push us down a slope is in those areas and arguments where it is said that this or that crime should actually be less of a crime than it is now. Things like small robberies committed by the unemployed, by ethnic minorities, or by the physically handicapped, etc. Then, I think that Mick Hartley’s argument would be spot on. But smoking is not that kind of issue at all. Not at the moment anyway.
Harry Hutton speaks for many, I am sure, when he says this:
It’s been a pretty good week for all you non-smoking, non-terrorism glorifying, pro-ID card tossers. All going your way at the moment, isn’t it? Must be feeling pretty pleased with yourselves.
For now you triumph. But you’ll get your comeuppance, you swine. That slippery villain is going to ruin us all. You think he doesn’t have plans for you too? You think that just because you don’t smoke or glorify terrorists you’re off the hook? Just wait. You’re gonna learn the hard way.
Personally I have never really bought in to this Blair-is-evil meme. Perhaps if I met him face to face I would feel differently, but to me he merely seems desperately eager to do good, but somewhat dim about how to actually contrive goodness, like a trendy vicar. Good at winning elections though, and making speeches, and doing Hugh Grant impersonations. The man knows his rhetoric, and if, at any time during the twenty first century, Blair were to step down from being the Prime Minister, I think his rhetoric will be sorely missed by the next government, assuming it’s Labour. Slippery, yes. But a villain? Not really. I don’t think so, anyway.
But whatever his motives may be, and however little he may have any deliberate plans to screw the non-smoking, non-terrorism glorifying, pro-ID card tendency, Blair, or the processes he has now set in motion, will still do this. But, he meant and he means no harm.
But feel free to disagree.
While you are still allowed to.
From the ever informative Dave Barry blog, I learn that a Hollywood type superhero is joining in the fight against al-Qaeda:
Batman may utilise his extensive knowledge of caves to fight his latest foe – al-Qaeda.
Batman writer, Frank Miller, has told a comic-book convention that his upcoming novel, “Holy Terror, Batman!” is a piece of propaganda.
“Batman kicks al-Qaeda’s ass,” Miller said.
Miller said the comic was: “an explosion from my gut reaction of what’s happening now” and “a reminder to people who seem to have forgotten who we’re up against.”
So how many Batman movies have there been so far? Is it four? What’s the betting that the next one does not feature al-Qaeda as the villains?
Mark Holland is on a blogging roll just now, and one of the more interesting things to be found on his blog earlier in the week was a link to and a big chunk of a speech made by Winston Churchill, on June 4th 1945, which I assume Mark to have found here. (Mark himself offers no link.)
Quote:
But, you will say, look at what has been done in the war. Have not many of those evils which you have depicted been the constant companions of our daily life? It is quite true that the horrors of war do not end with the fighting-line. They spread far away to the base and the homeland, and everywhere people give up their rights and liberties for the common cause. But this is because the life of their country is in mortal peril, or for the sake of the cause of freedom in some other land. They give them freely as a sacrifice. It is quite true that the conditions of Socialism play a great part in war-time. We all submit to being ordered about to save our country. But when the war is over and the imminent danger to our existence is removed, we cast off these shackles and burdens which we imposed upon ourselves in times of dire and mortal peril, and quit the gloomy caverns of war and march out into the breezy fields, where the sun is shining and where all may walk joyfully in its warm and golden rays.
Now I am not trying to say or even to suggest that what governs Britain now is what was meant in 1945 by “Socialism”. That hard-line root-and-branch government control of everyone and everything is a horror story has by now been well understood by all but a tiny few lunatics, if only because the promised economic benefits of such a system have all turned to dust and rust, in Britain and everywhere else where such Socialism has been attempted. Churchill’s team won that argument, even if this took rather longer than Churchill had hoped in 1945. But the book which prompted Churchill to say these things, Hayek’s The Road To Serfdom, paints a more complicated picture than just simple tyranny. Hayek also foresaw chaos, and an ever more desperate governmental effort to correct chaos, with even more chaos. And at the moment, governmentally induced chaos probably looms larger in our lives than governmental tyranny. But the means of inflicting a more self-conscious and deliberate tyranny at some future date are now pretty much all in place.
And, once again, the traitor in our midst is war. In 1945, it was the recently concluded war against Nazi Germany, and the warm glow of team spiritedness which that war gave off, for those who had good wars like formerly poor soldiers who had lived through victories (rather than those who had died during defeats), and like behind the lines enthusiasts for central planning. Now, it is the so-called War on Terror, which creates an atmosphere in which the Government does not demand or expect to know everything, but does insist upon its absolute right to know anything in particular that strikes it as important. And, now as in 1945, the British people, on the whole, do not object. Rather do they expect this, and complain only when the Government fails to keep an eye on things enthusiastically enough.
Lynn Sislo:
Some people might find this site disturbing but I trust that there will be no rioting.
Indeed.
I have always had a particularly soft intellectual spot for David Friedman, the economist, for it was he who wrote the first book I ever read which seemed really to describe for me how I wanted to think about the world. It is called The Machinery of Freedom. (David Friedman has a father, called Milton, who also dabbles in economics.) And I now like David Friedman’s blog, which he calls simply Ideas.
However, I do not always agree with David Friedman. Here are some recent thoughts of his:
Finding presents for friends and relatives is often a problem, made harder by the economist’s puzzle of why one should give presents instead of giving cash and letting the recipient, better informed about his own preferences, decide how to spend it. A possible answer is that although I know less about the recipient, I know more about the gift. Acting on that principle, I occasionally pick a book that I and my wife particularly liked, buy a bunch of copies, and give them out as Christmas presents.
What giving money and giving the same book to several different friends have in common as present giving strategies is that they both exhibit an unwillingness to think about the individual desires of the person receiving the gift. “It’s the thought that counts” is no empty slogan. And the particular thought that matters is: “What particular kind of person is he, and what might he really like?”
In one of my very favourite movies, The Apartment, the Shirley MacLaine character’s rich and uncaring married man lover, chillingly played by Fred MacMurray, gives Shirley MacLaine a twenty dollar bill as a Christmas present. He does not even put in a pretty envelope. He just gets it out of his wallet and hands it over. Soon after that, she dumps him, and quite right too. Why? Because this moment proved that he did not care enough about her to give any thought, before meeting with her, to getting her a real present, of the sort that she would like, and which would show that he had thought about what she would like. He simply hadn’t been thinking about her.
Were I one of David Friedman’s friends and I got the same book last Christmas from him that several of his other friends had also got, I would feel ever so slightly slighted, and for the same reason. “He has thought about his own opinions, but he has not thought about mine.” (A copy of The Machinery of Freedom with a carefully composed and hand-written message inside the front cover would be another matter entirely.)
Blog postings, however, are different. Those, like Christmas presents, also come free of charge to the receiver. Yet I do not feel in any way slighted because a blogger has failed to craft an individual thought entirely for me, but has instead given the same thought away to all his readers. On the contrary, incoming emails full of individual thoughts, just for me, can be rather scary, because, like Christmas presents, they can imply an obligation to reciprocate, also individually, which may be unwelcome.
However, notice that a similar principle applies, and in a good way, to blog postings with which one happens to disagree, by thoughtful people like David Friedman, as applies to Christmas presents. A present that shows that the giver has done some thinking is welcome, even if one already has that CD or that book, or happens not to like that kind of chocolate. The “wrong” thing is still right, because it’s the thought that counts. I feel the same way about David Friedman’s occasional wrong (as I think) thoughts in his blog. These mistakes, if mistakes they be, show that he is at least always thinking. Far better lots of thinking, and the occasional consequent disagreement between me and him, than no thinking, and a mere string of truisms.
One of my very favourite blogger quotes of 2005 was this, just after the July 7th London bombings:
A friend of mine visits a strip pub, once a week, down by the Gray’s Inn Road. Despite the bombs, he went along this afternoon, as usual, and was the only guy with four strippers. But, he told me, he had to go – ‘otherwise the terrorists would have won’.
In that spirit, I will tell you, not about how I feel about Those Cartoons – no need for any link, see just about everything else here at the moment – but about the Six Nations. Rugby. American Football without the poofy protective clothing. Or: “All those men’s bottoms”, as my now very elderly but still just about functioning mother put it to me yesterday, explaining why she prefers regular football to rugby football. → Continue reading: The first weekend of the Six Nations and the first upset
I have been in the habit of buying zone 1 (i.e. very central London) tube (i.e. London Underground railway) tickets, in clutches of ten, for a reduced price, compared to what such tickets would cost if you bought them one at a time. I tried again, a few days ago, but it seems that as of January 1st 2006, the only way to get cheaper tube travel is to buy an Oyster Card. Oh no, please no, I said, you’ll make me fill in a ludicrously complicated form. No, they said, just buy an Oyster Card. What just buy it? No name, no address, no grandmother’s maiden name. Yes, just buy it, and put some money on it. Okay then.
A day or two ago, I was out and about, and had forgotten how much money I had left on my Oyster Card, and saw a machine which looked as if it might tell me, if I put my Oyster Card on the sign, like the one you use when you are passing through a ticket barrier. It duly told me how much cash I had left, and it also gave me the option of learning about my ‘card usage’. I pressed that. And this is what I got (click to get it bigger):
The message is loud and clear. We know where you have been, and when, and we want you to know it. Because, combine all that with surveillance camera info, and they can tell at once who you are.
The times we now live in.
How long before not wanting to buy an Oyster Card is itself regarded as cause for suspicion?
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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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