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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Another Brian, the Rev. Brian Chapin, calls this collection of 174 newspaper front pages from 26 countries around the world “the coolest thing I’ve ever seen on the internet”. That may be an exaggeration, but it is a nice thing to be able to see.
You can’t actually read the text on these front pages, although of course you can read the headlines. The images aren’t detailed enough for that. But you can go from each front page to the website of each newspaper featured.
I’m not sure if the front pages that appear are updated each day. I’m guessing yes. Perhaps a commenter can clarify.
STOP PRESS: I went back, when checking that the link worked, and yes it is today’s front pages. The clue was in the title of the webpage, which, I now note, is: “Today’s Front Pages.” We Samizdatistas don’t miss a thing, do we? (Don’t answer that.)
We are not going to put our players in a situation where they have to shake hands with the president of Zimbabwe.
–Tim Lamb – chief executive of the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB)
Zimbabwe is in the news, and so it should be. Several million Zimbabweans are probably going to die of starvation in the next few months. What’s more, this is, despite what President Robert Mugabe will tell you, a classic Communist-type famine, a state mass murdering its people, in this case all the people who dared to vote against Robert Mugabe in his recent election.
Now is the time for something to be done about this, not in a few months time, and to the credit of all sorts of people, not including me until now, this seems to be widely understood. Various efforts are being made to kick up a fuss about this horror. Last night, for example, British TV news had lots of Zimbabwe stuff, despite the imminent prospect of a war that our Prime Minister is having difficulty convincing anyone in Britain about who isn’t, like me, already convinced.
Peter Oborne, for example, did a Channel 4 documentary which went out last Sunday night, of him travelling around Zimbabwe, surreptitiously photographing Zimbabweans describing what remains of their abject daily diet, or warehouses where maize imported in order to feed the starving but immediately stolen by the government is being allowed to rot, or else is being corruptly sold in tiny amounts at extortionate prices by organisations headed by Zimbabwean Cabinet Ministers. Oborne has also written a piece for the Spectator about his journey.
What is to be done? If the South African government greeted Zimbabwean refugees with food camps instead of barbed wire rolls that would help, ditto if they pressurised Zimbabwe by threatening to cut off its supply routes. If Britain pressured all concerned a bit more publicly, that would help. If the Belgium government were to be swallowed up by a giant fireball, excellent. That would mean “Europe” being a lot less despicable about all this. If President George Bush could make the time to refer to this thing more loudly in among his Iraq preparations than he has so far, that would also save some lives.
And although it might not be practical in the immediate future, some of us could at least put the wind up your Average Sub-Saharan African Despot and his Many Apologists Worldwide by saying that all this black-on-black murdering does rather strengthen the case for the reconquest of Sub-Saharan Africa by, you know, white people. (Please understand that I’m trying to insert some more heat into this row, rather than just to shine a little more light on it.)
There’s half a book I could write about all this, but let me end with a word about cricket. The cricket point is that there is a cricket tournament coming up, a few of the matches of which are scheduled to be played in Zimbabwe. This is the Cricket World Cup next month. As atrocities go, the fact that these cricketers are probably going to play their games in Zimbabwe and be photographed not being very bothered about the fact that the government there is busy murdering about a quarter of its citizens doesn’t rank very high on the scale of human badness. It’s not their fault. And frankly, I don’t care one way or the other whether this tournament is deranged to the point of serious derangement by protests about the mass murdering in Zimbabwe or not. If I had a button to push that would do it, I’d probably dig up every tournament pitch now, and fly a plane over the mess with the slogan (thank you Peter Tatchell) “Berlin 1936 Zimbabwe 2003” attached to it. Or something. But the bigger point is, this cricket tournament has turned a very boring little report about Africans murdering one another – and what’s newsworthy about that? – into an already noisily singing and dancing Major Western News Story. The opening ceremony for this World Cup will be on February 8th, and the timing is good.
So, blogospherists, if you are looking for a hook, use cricket to spice up this story, which I very much hope that you will tell to each other and to anyone else you can interest. Say how much you loath and despise cricket, and how completely you would normally be ignoring it, but … Or like me, say how much you love cricket, except that in this case … Or say that cricket isn’t the point; mass murder on the other hand … (That’s what Oborne did at the start of his Spectator story.)
One way or another, please spread this news. It already is news. Please help to make it bigger news, before too many more people die.
When I hear the words “new push” I always think of a) the First World War, and b) the Soviet Union. It’s what people do when their systems aren’t working – apply more mindless force. So, no surprise to find that schools are being instructed to do more new pushes. Next they will be going over the top and introducing Five Year Plans.
– Alice Bachini (in her new blog Rational Parenting yesterday)
About once every blue moon, Blogosophical Explanations springs to life, and there was another posting there as recently as December 14th of last year. It included this, from Herb Gintis, Emeritus Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts:
… Economists are fond of using the Folk Theorem of repeated games and the Tit-for-Tat simulations to argue that human cooperation can be understood in terms of long-run, enlightened self-interest, but we will argue in chapter 11 that this view is profoundly incorrect. There are two major problems with the idea that cooperation can be understood in terms of long-run self-interest (charitably interpreted to include regard for kin). The first is that self-interest results in cooperation only when agents are sufficiently future-oriented (i.e., the discount rate is very low); but in situations where a social system is threatened and likely to be destroyed, cooperation is most central to survival and agents are likely to be very present-oriented, since the probability of future interactions is low. Therefore, societies in which cooperation is based on long-run self-interest will invariably collapse when seriously threatened. The second problem is that there is sizable evidence that we are considerably more prosocial than is predicted by the long-run self-interest models.
Except in the context of anonymous market interactions, the idea that human beings are self-interested is particularly implausible. Indeed, some of the major predictive failures of game theory stem from not recognizing the positive and negative aspects of preference and welfare interdependence. Homo economicus might be reasonably described as a sociopath if he were to be set loose in society.
There are many more tangents there to fly off at than one little Samizdata posting could possibly have space for, but allow me to indulge in just one.
As a description of the full panoply of human society, Tit-for-Tat is surely every bit as inadequate as Gintis says it is. All humans, provided only that they are allowed to, train each other to be more axiomatically cooperative than that, in societies which expect to survive past their next big collective crisis.
But how about Tit-for-Tat as a description both of the nature of actually existing “Soviet man” and of the collapse of the Soviet system? → Continue reading: Tit-for-Tat doesn’t explain us but it does explain Homo Sovieticus
One of the reasons people used to pay so much attention to politics was that it offered cheap entertainment at a time when entertainment was scarce. Now entertainment is plentiful, and much of it is more entertaining than politics.
– Glenn Reynolds
I don’t know what to make of this, but it is surely interesting. The story, in case this link to it goes dead for some reason or another, is that some French-based (it would seem) Muslim entrepreneurs have contrived something called “Mecca-Cola”. It presumably tastes pretty much like the usual Clona-Cola stuff, but it has an Islamic spin to its marketing.
I’ve just caught a British Channel 5 TV report about this, and they made it look as if the “average Muslim” is all for it. And the sales pitch C5 were reportng was: buy Mecca-Cola and demonstrate against the USA and its vicious anti-Muslim war, a troubling combination of messages.
I don’t know if this is us infecting them or them infecting us, or what the hell is going on here, beyond the obvious of some people trying to make lots of money. Is Mecca-Cola making its way in the USA? Comments anyone?
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.
Through a family connection, my eldest brother Toby has got himself involved in the cake business. He used to be an accountant and a management consultancy hotshot, and the widow of his late wife’s brother used to run a cake-baking operation. So when she also died, Toby was one of the people who rallied round to help. That was a few years ago, but the resulting enterprise, Columbine Cakes, is still very much in business. Everything depends on how the cakes are baked, and the cook, the human hinge of the whole enterprise, is still going strong.
Columbine gets most of its business from already satisfied customers who come back for more, and from those lucky people with whom those customers share their purchases, often on special occasions like weddings when only the best will do. Columbine also has a nice new website, which will supply you with all the details if you want to purchase any of their products or get onto their mailing list.
Toby gave me a Columbine fruit cake for Christmas. It wasn’t quite as good as the cakes our mother used to make at Christmas time, but it was the nearest thing to such a miracle that I’ve ever tasted, that you can buy in a shop or through the post. If this fruit cake was anything to go by, then any Columbine product – and there are now quite a few – would be worth a try. None of them are cheap. These are not cakes for the penny-pincher, or, I imagine, for the calorie-phobic. But if you give any of them a go, I truly believe you won’t regret it. Enjoy.
I hope that this won’t be a surprise to the reader, but a whole generation has grown up in which lying, deception, and manipulation are just part of the game; a generation where too many people think that responding to a question with, “That depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is” under oath is a sign of cleverness.
– Clayton Cramer (in his article What Clayton Cramer Saw and (Nearly) Everyone Else Missed for History News Network yesterday, about the Michael Bellesiles affair – link via Instapundit)
Thanks to Chris Tame of the Libertarian Alliance Forum for flagging up this story by Marc Morano of CNS News:
A man who turned the tables and fatally shot a would-be carjacker in Nashville this week deserves a “good citizenship” award for fighting crime, according to a national gun advocacy group.
According to published reports, Billy J. Brown stopped at a convenience store in South Nashville at around 1:00 a.m. on Dec. 29 to get a snack. When he got back into his car, he was surprised by two carjackers demanding that Brown start driving.
Instead of following orders, Brown pulled out his gun and shot and killed one of the carjackers who had jumped into the backseat, according to police and press reports. The other carjacker fled the scene, but was later apprehended by police and reportedly admitted to the attempted carjacking. Brown has not been charged with any violation of the law, but the local district attorney is expected to review the case.
“I hope there is some agency at the state level that is prepared to reward this guy or give the guy an award appropriate to the circumstances,” said Joe Waldron, executive director of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, in an interview with CNSNews.com.
“[Brown] deserves some kind of a good citizenship award,” Waldron said.
→ Continue reading: “A complicated issue”
Whenever David Carr writes one of his we are doomed doomed pieces, I try to cheer myself up by pondering the excellence of capitalism and its products, with a view to giving one of the better ones that extra boost into product super-stardom that a mention on samizdata surely guarantees. And of all the candidates in range of my personal ain’t-capitalism-great? scanner, I think that the one I’m most impressed by at the moment is Swiffer cloths.
Says Cynthia Townley Ewer of OrganizedHome.Com:
Electrostatic dry sweepers fill a household cleaning niche. While these dry mops won’t replace a damp-mop for stain or dried soil removal, the new sweepers are far superior at picking up and removing dust and dry debris.
Use electrostatic dry sweepers before damp-mopping to remove loose dirt and speed mopping chores. Use them between damp-mopping and instead of daily sweeping or vacuuming.
The cloths alone are great dust removers for televisions and computer equipment, and will take dust from furniture quickly and easily. Without a doubt, these new products represent a true innovation, and have a place in today’s organized home.
I am myself a satisfied Swiffer customer. I find Swiffers invaluable for those deposits of dust that accumulate over the months and years. Whenever, as happens from time to time, I need to rearrange some of my possessions, such deposits as these used to have to be moved as if manoevring a delicate item of scientific investigation, in order to avoid hurling all that dirt into the air and perhaps into my respiratory system, which functions imperfectly at the best of times. Now, I Swiffer the offending deposit. I ensure clean TV and computer screens by Swiffering them also, just as Ms, Townley Ewer says.
→ Continue reading: Swiffer!
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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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