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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Steve Sailer is a name I hear now and again, every few weeks, but I know very little about the guy. Someone commented on this, which I wrote last night (about men wearing their shirts outside their trousers), to the effect that Sailer had something to say about this, about a week ago, that was relevant. I couldn’t find it, but I did find this 1995 piece about the nuances of why race relations in the US army are so much better than race relations in US colleges.
It’s no surprise to me that treating people in a totally meritocratic way, regardless of race, makes for better inter-ethnic relations, or that armies can’t allow inter-ethnic rivalries to build up in the ranks, so they don’t. So it was another less than completely obvious idea that I found striking in this piece, which is that the way for an unpopular racial or ethnic group to make an admired impact on the wider society is for it to concentrate and conquer niches rather than disperse and try to do well across the board. Sailer’s point is that academic racial preference policies undermine (to name but one of their many drawbacks) this benign process, by over-dispersing the group supposedly being helped. → Continue reading: Niche achievement versus dispersed failure – Steve Sailer (and me) on race relations
Through the good graces of the Libertarian Alliance forum, I can bring Samizdata readers some remarkable chunks from an article by Amanda Platell in the Telegraph of last Tuesday, which I think will explain rather well to baffled Americans just why some of us Brits are so much less enamoured of our Prime Minister than they are. (I can’t find this piece at the telegraph.co.uk site. I think it was only a paper piece. Anyone who can – please correct me if that’s wrong.)
The start of the piece sets the scene, which of course is the death of Dr David Kelly, and then we get to the heart of the drama:
I was a journalist of nearly 20 years, editor of a national newspaper, when I decided to run a story about Peter Mandelson’s Brazilian boyfriend. My belief then, as now, was that the identity of a gay minister’s partner was as legitimate a public interest as that of Robin Cook’s mistress. Mandelson was then one of the most powerful men in government.
Before the story was even published, my executives and I underwent a barrage of calls from the Press Complaints Commission, the proprietor Lord Hollick (a New Labour peer who took the Labour whip) and from Mandelson himself.
Most chilling was the warning relayed to me by one of my executives from a senior Blairite that if I printed I would be damned – he would destroy my life, my career, my family and my children.
It was a threat made in desperate anger but one I have subsequently learned had been used before. Even then I suspected it was a “one threat fits all”, as I have no children, but the effect was no less shocking. I was sacked weeks later.
→ Continue reading: Blair as Nixon
I’ve no time (but someone here should definitely try to make the time) for a longer response to this article by Stephen Robinson in the Telegraph.
Its title – “Identity cards won’t stop the terrorists: they’re only a fig leaf ” – will do for starters.
What’s this about?
Meanwhile, mobile-phone services were mysteriously available in Baghdad yesterday, bringing cellular service – banned under Saddam Hussein – to ordinary people in the Iraqi capital for the first time.
Officially, a tender for the three mobile-phone licences the US-led administration plans to offer across Iraq has yet to take place.
A US military spokesman could not explain why the lines turned on or what that meant for the tender.
Users of foreign mobile phones were able to make and receive calls and send text messages. Currently, few Iraqis have suitable phones. Foreign workers in Baghdad, who have widely relied on expensive satellite telephones to stay in touch, were greeted with the words: “MTC-Vodafone wishes you a pleasant stay in Kuwait.”
Those are the concluding paragraphs of a Scotsman story, a story that is mostly about happy reactions in Baghdad to the Uday/Qusay killings.
David Masten of Catallarchy, to whom thanks for spotting this twist at the end of this story, thinks it’s the free society doing its thing.
In other words while occupation forces are trying to set up the new addition to their mercantilist empire, some people are just doing what is necessary to make life and society better, without any centralized direction or even permission. In a land where landwire communications infrastructure has been little more than rubble for over a decade, cell phones are a quick and easy way to build up communications networks.
If licensing and nationalized services are the US government’s idea of ‘freedom and democracy’ for Iraq, bring our boys and girls back home.
Well that could be the story. But couldn’t it merely be that one bit of the new administration (the bit that was setting up this auction) was operating in ignorance of what another bit (a bit that was just setting a system up regardless) was doing? Much as I’d love to praise this as free market anarchy in action, I have my doubts. It could surely just as easily be the other anarchy, state anarchy. Anyone who has ever worked for a state will know that anarchy never goes away.
Michael Jennings knows everything about portable phones, but he’s in Provence right now, and so may not comment as quickly as he would normally. But eventually he’ll clarify everything for us.
Meanwhile, the general point that portable phones are great news for the poorer and less stable parts of the world is reinforced once again. In that sense this is definitely yet another for the Samizdata Triumphs of Capitalism collection.
Regular phones depend on wires. And not just on any old wires – on wires that have to stay connected throughout their entire length. Portable phones rely on only a few fixed installations, which can be defended against marauders and can therefore stay in business. They are also, even in a totally law-abiding place, quicker to get started. I recall how they were able to crack ahead fast with the reconstruction of East Berlin, immediately after the Wall came down, thanks to the magic of the portable phone.
I do love a good technical fix. Just who presided over this one I for one am not clear about, but a technical fix this nevertheless is.
Two comments have appeared on a long ago posting of mine here about the menace to Western Civilisation posed by people dropping chewing gum all over the damn place.
Comment 1:
i like chewing on gum^^ It should have neva been banned!!! I feel sooooo sorry for the singaporeans….owell beta get on wiv my english assignment nowz…byebye 🙂
Lana
Comment 2:
Hi its me again (Lana) if anyone noes any interesting facts about Singapore then can u plz email me qt_mashi@hotmail.com, bcuz this is for my english assignment and its very important THANK YOU 🙂
Lana
You know what? Lana likes chewing gum, and I like her. She has her own individual take on English spelling, although maybe it’s her whole generation and they all spell because bcuz. But, she seems to be able to spell in the regular manner when she wants to (“any interesting facts about Singapore”) or when she is forgetting not to, plus she has a nice ingratiating manner and understands the value of a smile. I think she should be encouraged.
So, if anyone has any interesting facts about Singapore, please email them to her.
Here’s a link to an article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about the War on Terror.
So you think there’s no chance that you’d be quizzed by FBI agents about what you read or who you pal around with?
Well, just ask Atlantan Marc Shultz, who works in an Atlanta bookstore. According to an account Shultz wrote in Creative Loafing, he was interrogated by two FBI agents because he’d been reported as reading something suspicious in a coffee shop.
That suspicious something was an article by Hal Crowther, “Weapons of Mass Stupidity,” in a Tampa alternative newsweekly. The Crowther piece is a scathing criticism of corporate media, such as Fox News, in the post-Sept. 11 environment.
Atlanta FBI spokesman Joe Paris wouldn’t comment on the Shultz story or even confirm it. He merely said, “We have an obligation to follow up on any information we get of a terrorist-type nature.”
A terrorist-type nature?
There’s an important principle involved here. Well, plenty of principles, but one in particular that strikes me. It’s the combination of individuals being allowed – and I’m guessing: encouraged – to inform the authorities of their suspicions, and the obligation – that’s the word FBI man Paris uses: obligation – to investigate the matter. This means that person X who has, for some reason of his own, taken a dislike to person Y can invent some plausible suspicions about Y and phone them in, and the powers that be have to be all over Y with their investigations.
Practised political stirrers aren’t going to be too bothered, and may even rather enjoy it. Either way they will exploit it all for the publicity and the fifteen minutes of fame, the way this Marc Shultz guy seems to be doing, and good for him. But for other less public souls, this could surely be very bad.
I mustn’t exaggerate, but this is the sort of thing that happened in Stalin’s Russia, in logical structure even if not remotely as bad in scale or intensity. In place of a decade in an arctic camp ending in premature death, substitute a week or two of anxieties at the hands of the government, and maybe a rather scary legal bill because you figured, best let my lawyer keep track of all this.
The point is the authorities not having any power to drop the matter, but being obligated to go through the motions demanded. To begin with, the policemen doing this are only doing it because they have to. But what we are liable to end up with is an altogether different kind of policeman, the kind of policeman who really likes these scenarios, who truly believes that scaring regular citizens half to death is the heart and soul of good government.
Here’s an interesting BBC story about internet usage in China. White Rose relevant paragraphs:
Now there are more than 68m Chinese people on the net.
…
These figures make China the second-largest net-using nation on the planet after the US. In the first six months of 2003, almost nine million Chinese went online for the first time.
…
The China Internet Network Information Center gathered the figures and said that the slowdown in numbers could be due to the imposition of strict regulations on cyber cafes.
Over the past few months the Chinese Government has worked hard to close down illegal cyber cafes following a fire in an net cafe last year that left 25 people dead.
The government has also asked legitimate net cafes ones to step up their monitoring of what people do online.
Today I received the following email:
Brian,
Brian has started a webring of Brians with blogs. If you would like to join us, go and sign up here.
Brian
What is a webring? If I signed up to it, would the rest of my life be ruined? The Brian who sent me this email seems to be gay. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, consenting adults, some of my best friends…, I’m personally in favour of gay marriage, blah blah blah. But if I sign up, will I be bombarded with gay porn for the rest of my days?
In general, I feel that it is good that we Brians are getting together, and if a webring is what I think it may be, we can perhaps sit on one, in a circle, perhaps somewhere in the countryside, and discuss the Brian Issue. That is, we can discuss why cuckolded husbands, send-up substitutes for Jesus Christ, etc. etc., in the movies, all seem to be called Brian. Brian is not a cool name, is my point. Maybe we Brians can get together and change that. (The danger, of course, is that by getting together in such ways as these, we might merely confirm all the existing anti-Brian stereotypes, and cause Brianphobia to become even more deeply entrenched.)
Meanwhile, how many indisputably cool Brians can be assembled? I offer two outstanding contemporary sportsman: the West Indian cricket captain and ace batsman Brian Lara, and the Irish rugby captain and ace centre threequarter Brian O’Driscoll.
There was an Interesting article by former CIA Director James Woolsey in the Guardian over the weekend, about “World War 4”. The White Rose relevant paragraphs, so to speak, are these ones, I think:
Liberty and security
If that is who is at war with us and why, what do we need to do about it, both inside our own countries and in the Middle East? Inside the US, during the Cold War and the decade of the 1990s after it, we became very used to the proposition that liberty and security do not conflict, that we do not need to worry about that. Liberty we had plenty of, or as much as almost any reasonable, modern society could, and security was something that the navy, the Central Intelligence Agency and so on dealt with overseas. September 11 rather changed that.
The US at least has to understand that for a number of years we will have to face conflicts between liberty and security that did not occur before. We really did have people who were legally in the United States training in aircraft simulators to work out how to kill thousands of Americans. There really were terrorist cells in places like Lackawanna, Pennsylvania.
So we are going to do things that are effective against terrorism, and which may involve steps like special scrutiny of Wahhabi-backed charities, for example, that would not have happened prior to September 11. We also have to realise who we are. We are not a race or a culture or a language. We are creatures of fourth US President James Madison’s Constitution and his Bill of Rights. We can never forget that.
These two conflicting concerns – security and liberty – are going to be with us for a long time. They will conflict in ways they did not appear to before September 11. We have to choose wisely and remember both. We cannot forget the need to be effective, not just politically correct, in the way we deal with the real threats to us. We also cannot forget the Bill of Rights.
This is the X is important BUT argument. The “but” turns everything before it upside down. So look out X, which in this case means look out liberty.
I’m not saying that this man is totally wrong. I’m just saying: he’s saying it.
The war against Canadian drugs has caused the RCMP in Newfoundland to want to make the purchasers of cellphones present ID, including a photo, when they buy them.
Sgt. Greg Smith says officers have a hard time investigating some drug dealers because they can buy many phones and remain anonymous.
Whatever next? Buying a phone without being anyone in particular. It has to stop.
One recent investigation lasted more than five months and cost more than $100,000. Police say it was because the suspect used 11 different phones, none of which was in his name.
The police want to be able to monitor the calls and find out who’s on them. That’s easier when people are using regular telephones that have known owners and fixed addresses.
Stores don’t require the name of a cellphone purchaser.
Retailers say they have no reason not to sell phones to anyone who can afford one, and they’re under no obligation to ask for identification.
Funny how tradesmen threatened with a change in the law just announce that the existing law is whatever it is, as if that is, in and of itself, an argument for it to stay like that. They point out that as the law stands they’re not breaking it, so they’re law abiding, so … well, so, they ought to be able to carry on doing like they always have, what with them being so law abiding and all. It’s almost as if they think that no one’s allowed to change a law until the existing one is being universally broken. Idiots.
Samizdata has been getting very political lately. I blame all these Conservatives who have wormed their way on to the Samizdata writers list.
So, to more serious matters. Here is an item to warm the cockles, drawn to my attention by this guy. He made this Portillo bon mot his quote of the day, and I think that this gem that he linked to last Friday deserves a chance to sparkle more universally than I have noticed it sparkling so far.
Masturbating more than five times a week between the ages of 20 and 50 could protect men against prostate cancer, Australian researchers claim today.
Excellent. The Anglosphere continues to pull its weight, scientifically speaking.
Inevitably, the Mother Country, in the shape of a charity worker, disapproves.
Dr Chris Niley of the UK’s Prostate Cancer Charity said: “It’s plausible – which isn’t the same as being true. One of the unanswered questions is whether the young men who were questioned may have exaggerated how many ejaculations they had had.
Speak for yourself you boring killjoy.
What we now need is another study about the correlation between being a rabid believer in expanding the power of the state, and getting prostate cancer, along the lines of this. That’s prostate as in pro-state.
This has just popped up on the Libertarian Alliance Forum courtesy of Dr Chris R. Tame, who intends to live for ever and who therefore keeps an eye open for such things:
(7-3-03) BOSTON, Mass. – A new pill, developed by CereMedix, a biotech startup at Northeastern University, could restore the body’s natural defenses so drastically that people might routinely live to be a healthy 120 years old, researchers say.
The substance, which promotes the production of natural anti-oxidants, is set to be tested in two prescription forms, one designed to repair lung damage from smoking and the other to speed recovery from heart surgery.
In prescription form, the drug could have valuable applications for a wide range of ailments, including Alzheimer’s Disease, stroke and coronary damage, diabetes and virtually any illness that results from oxidative stress. In addition to the two prescription drugs in trial, CereMedix has another version in development: an over-the-counter supplement that would slow aging and increase energy by stimulating the production of natural anti-oxidants.
Etcetera etcetera, miracle miracle.
As one of those people who has no idea what a natural anti-oxidant is, I file this under: “This sounds marvellous – hope it works one day”. Although that bit about how they are threatening to repair the damage to lungs caused by smoking will already have made them very unpopular. Their laboratory has probably already been surrounded by baying anti-capitalist hooligans. Bad. But also good, because this will drag them into politics if they haven’t been already, and will turn them into devout believers in the Samizdata meta-context, if they aren’t already.
That aside, the worst news this could be is that yet another bunch of scientists got all excited and thought they’d achieved more than they had.
And the best news it could be is yet another triumph of capitalism in the making, and a truly spectacular one.
“Biomedic startup.” Whenever you hear of Americans using the word startup, you know that they are seeing dollar signs as well as the betterment of mankind. And what’s wrong with that, I’d like to know?
The usual burst of technologically well-informed comments would be very nice, to explain to us all whether there is anything to this or if it’s just hype and hot air.
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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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