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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Natalie. This time I’m going to fall into the trap of taking your obviously humorous posting seriously.
The point is, it’s for portable computers. Although now still somewhat clunky, the new gismo will soon get very small and then be very easy to carry about in your pocket, probably soon as part of your portable. You try carrying a keyboard around with you on your travels, unless it’s a foldable one like mine.
Keyboards compatible with your portable computer are hard to find, but plain flat surfaces are pretty common, all around the world.
And as for non-portable computers, we must understand, Natalie, that not all people are like us. For some strange corporate beings, a computer keyboard is clutter, and one that can be switched off would be ultra-cool.
Next: VKB must do the same for the screen. Then, answering Natalie’s objection, they may want to supply the clear desk space for the keyboard and the screen for the screen themselves, so that the thing can sit on top of the festering pile of junk that is permanently between Natalie and the top of her desk, just like a regular portable computer or computer keyboard now.
The new standard portable computer is: four white (or whatever turns out to be the best colour for receiving projections) bricks, 12 inches by 3 inches by ¾ of an inch, joined at the long edges by three hinges. The outer two hinges enable the white bricks to flatten out and form the keyboard surface and the screen surface, while the central hinge is like the one hinge on a portable computer now. The keyboard is projected towards you from a little hole in the bottom brick of the screen. The screen is projected upwards from a little hole in the far brick of the keyboard surface (or maybe fownwards from a thingy that sticks out from the top of the screen, and doubles up as part of the case).
I’m glad that’s clear.
Note that different keyboards will be projectable at the press of a key, just as “different screens” are already presented to us all now, ditto, which is not possible with a hardware keyboard. I’m an inventor.
Richard Barber: thanks for this link, which is an improvement even on the one I finally got around to supplying. We weren’t inundated with link info, so far as I know, following my failure to include any in the rare first edition of my original posting. It is Sunday. You and I, Richard, are stuck at our old-style mechanical computer keyboards, making our peculiar lifestyle choices. Most people are out doing … what? Things, I suppose. Who knows what normal people get up to?
Meanwhile, as Richard says: “Ain’t capitalism grand?” It is indeed.
Tomorrow’s World is a BBC TV show that features gadgets that may or may not be about to change all our lives for the better. I watched it last Wednesday (May 8th). The BBC being the BBC there was much talk about impractical and expensive looking electric cars which will probably never catch on unless forced on us by politicians, and there was a machine featured which told you just how much damage you were doing to your respiratory system by smoking, thus motivating you to stop. Be still my heart. (This being what will inevitably happen to you, they kept helpfully reminding us, if you insist on smoking. Cue lying statistics about “smoking related” diseases.)
But one gadget they showed did truly impress me, and I meant to pass it on that evening but something else must have got in the way. (Oh yes, my computer modem stopped working.) This impressive gadget was a new kind of very-portable computer keyboard.
I already possess a folding (“Targus Stowaway”) keyboard with which I type stuff into my Hewlett Packard Jornada 548, which when folded fits into a space hardly any bigger than that occupied by a Hewlett Packard Jornada 548 (i.e. my jacket pocket), and I had supposed that this was as small as a keyboard big enough to type on properly could get. Not so.
On Tomorrow’s World they showed something quite new, at any rate to me. Instead of offering you a physical keyboard, what the new gismo does is shine a keyboard onto your desk, and then watch you while you type on it. The thing itself is no bigger than a cigarette box, and soon all portable computers may contain such a thing inside them. Superb. In an earlier version of this posting I did an hour ago, I did the BBC a semi-injustice. I said they didn’t say who make this midget miracle. They didn’t on the TV. But follow the link above and you get to VBK Ltd. This is an Israeli company, and I don’t remember them saying that on the TV either.
Just thought I’d tell you. What with assassinations, European Unions, train crashes (another one here in Blighty on Friday), and all the usual politically administered misery, it’s as well to remember that some things in our flawed but fascinating civilisation are being done extraordinarily well, and ever better as the years go by.
The worst enemy of truth and freedom in our society is the compact majority. Yes, the damned, compact, liberal majority.
– Henrik Ibsen, in An Enemy of the People
One of the things that the blogosphere provides is stories, for the mainstream media. And I’m starting to believe that the multinational pharmaceuticals corporation Pfizer – best-known in the UK, if known of at all, for producing the world-renowned wrinkly recreational drug Viagra – is a story.
The thing is, Pfizer supports the free market, with arguments and with money. The magazine Prospect, for example, now contains, on the inside of each front cover, not mere adverts for Pfizer, but essays under the heading “Pfizer forum”, frequently of a decidedly pro-free-market persuasion. In September of last year, for example, they had one by Milton Friedman.
Go to the Pfizer website. Look there under “public policy” and you get the Pfizer forum website. It turns out that one of those pro-free-market essays is by Johan Norberg and is called “In Defense of Global Capitalism”. So they’re not making much of a secret about being in favour of capitalism, are they?
I have already passed the question on through a mutual friend, of mine and of Pfizer. (He wrote one of the Pfizer forum essays.) I repeat the question here: What if the global anti-capitalist left decides to “expose” Pfizer? What if they try to turn them into corporate demons, the way they demonised Dow Chemicals (napalm, if I remember it right), and then Monsanto (genetic engineering)? What if anti-capitalist stirrers start showing up at Pfizer annual general meetings? Maybe this has been tried, but hasn’t worked.
Pfizer must have thought about this because like I say they are not supporting capitalism in secret; they are advertising that they support it. Yet if you type “Pfizer” into Google, you have to wade through a ton of pro-Pfizer material before you encounter anything remotely critical. (The first anti-Pfizer thing I spotted was Oxfam complaining about Pfizer’s attitude to their patents. I guess Pfizer believes that their patents are theirs.)
It is because most multinational corporations do not like the answers to questions like the one I am asking that they do not support capitalism other than in apologetic whispers. How come Pfizer thinks it’s good business to support it out loud? I am delighted they do. Nevertheless, why? I am sure some of this story has already been written, but not so I have noticed. And written or not, like I say, it is a story.
Hello again. I’ve had a long day. I had to get up early this morning to welcome The Man Who Was Coming To Mend My Computer, but as it turned out he overslept and only got here two hours later than he said – although to be fair, when he did get here he did mend the computer or you wouldn’t be reading this masterpiece of the blogger’s art. But he took all day and as soon as he’d finished I had to depart for a Putney Debate. These are the second Friday of the month events run by Tim Evans. This turned out very good. I’ve just now got back, and would in the normal course of things be going straight to bed. But Samizdata’s Big Cat Perry is away, and he gave strict e-mailed orders that we mice must play a lot in his absence.
I was going to do something about how the new Euroflag is a big mistake, but I fear that this is wishful thinking. True, the new flag won’t be as easy for school-children to draw (which was going to be my heading for this), what with all the different coloured pencils they’ll now need, but I don’t suppose that will stop them and they might even like that. And in general I think the new design could prove very clever. You can imagine all kinds of variants. Sticky tape. The Union Jack done with strips of the thing. All sorts of Euro-objects dancing about in front, with the stripes as a background. No, I think it could work very well, more’s the pity. And it will adapt very prettily as more nations are engulfed.
Adriana, please could you add some links from this to the two previous flag articles, i.e. this one and that one. Thanks. If she hasn’t done it yet, they were, I don’t know, whenever they were. Scroll down and find them.
This is better, although a complete change of subject. The Duke of Edinburgh, the Queen’s husband, is famed in these islands for saying something offensive every time he opens his mouth in public. But I came across this item of dialogue from the Queen Husband which I thought genuinely amusing. It was from a book I was reading (while waiting for the Man Who Was Going Eventually To … etc.).
The D of E has just got home from an airplane journey, and one of his flunkeys asks him obsequiously:
“And how was your flight, Your Royal Highness?”
The Duke sighs. You know how it is when you’re really tired. Everything seems harder to deal with. Even the simplest question can only be answered with a great effort. Finally HRH says:
“Have you ever been on an airplane journey?”
“Why yes, Your Royal Highness, many times.”
“Well it was like that.”
Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit takes a swipe at the awarders of the Nobel Peace Prize (May 7, 10:21:39 am), but I suspect him of misunderstanding the problem.
The basic problem of the Nobel Peace Prize is that it is awarded for effort rather than for achievement, and often not even for effort, merely for general niceness, and not infrequently for the kind of niceness that might well stir up a war.
My guess is that Glenn Reynolds disagrees with the Nobel Peace Prize awarders about the mere meaning of niceness, and that this is the basis of his disdain for them. I probably share his view of what niceness is, more than I do that of the Nobel awarders. But niceness is one thing; peace is quite another.
With the much more widely respected Nobel Prizes for various sorts of science, the awarders do the vital thing they don’t do with their Peace Prizes. They wait, to see if something of lasting value has actually been achieved. With science they often don’t have to wait that long, because with science the fact of significant progress is often clear for all to see.
But peace, by definition, has to go on for a decent length of time before it can reasonably be called peace. It is idiotic to award Peace Prizes to the signatories of a “peace treaty” before the ink is even dry. What if peace breaks down? Only time will tell if the lasting peace supposedly being attempted was in fact lasting.
Giving the Peace Prize to Shimon Peres for doing some “peace” deal or other in the Middle East a few months previously is idiotic, not because Perez is a bad man hell-bent on war (I don’t know what sort of man he is), but because he was so plainly still in the thick of the struggle and it wasn’t at all plain that peace would result. Surprise, surprise, it turns out that it hasn’t.
A decent Nobel Peace Prize ceremony would drag obscure old diplomats and forgotten statesmen out of retirement for well deserved pats on the back, for things they did thirty years ago, which, we can now see, caused a prolonged outbreak of peace in some hitherto intractable and now – because so peaceful for the last thirty years – utterly forgotten circumstance.
Examples? Can’t think of any off hand, what with peace being so unmemorable. Maybe readers of this can suggest some genuinely worthy Nobel Peace Prize recipients.
But I foresee further problems. One is that diplomats in their active phase tend to be older than star scientists. By the time you realise that a diplomat did a good job he’s liable to be dead. (Perhaps Nobel Peace Prizes should be awardable posthumously.)
And another even deeper problem is that the means of achieving peace can often be so not nice. Victory can be hideous in the manner of its achievement yet impeccably peaceful in its consequences, and hence in the total amounts of war and of peace that it gives rise to. Abject surrender can likewise do wonders for peace.
I recall witnessing a “peace” demonstration during the Falklands War, in Trafalgar Square. Said a plaintive placard: “PEACE IN THE FALKLANDS” (i.e. “Britain stop fighting”). Also saying “PEACE IN THE FALKLANDS” was a nearby news placard advertising the Evening Standard. For once, the instant prophecy proved correct. The British army, ignoring the “peace” protesters, had carried right on fighting and had on that very day won (as it turned out) the Falklands War, thereby establishing (as it also turned out) a period of peace which has lasted to this day.
The BBC‘s John Simpson was shown on last night’s TV news interviewing the late Pim Fortuyn. Fortuyn said something along the lines of: “we have guests who are trying to take over the house.” Said Simpson: “That sounds very racist to me.” Replied Fortuyn: “Give me a definition of racist.” At which point the BBC report ended.
I sympathise with Fortuyn on this. If ever there was a word that can mean several different things within the same conversation, or even the same paragraph or sentence, that word is “racist”. David Carr and I had an exchange on Samizdata not long ago in which I said that the number of definitions of “multiculturalism” was two, while he replied that it was zero. Number of definitions of “racist”? Well, let’s see how many we can think of.
- Believing that races differ from each other.
- Believing that races differ from each other in important ways, like intelligence or physical abilities.
- Believing that races differ from each other in important ways, like intelligence or physical abilities, for genetic reasons rather than because of cultural or environmental circumstances.
- Believing that because of such differences, members of different races should have different political rights.
- Believing that a particular group of people who are racially different are also different in their culture.
- Believing that a particular group of people who are racially different are also different in their culture, for genetic rather than historically contingent reasons.
- Not liking the different culture associated with a different race and wanting that culture changed, opposed, corrected, or confronted.
- Because of believing that a member of a different race is likely to be different in a particular way, believing that this particular member of the different race is himself likely to be different in this particular way.
- Believing that this particular member of a different race is different in this way, even when you have got to know him individually and know that it isn’t so.
- Believing that all the members of a particular race should be murdered.
I haven’t polished this list, or tried to make it exhaustive. I’ve listed ten different meanings, but if you took as long doing your version of the list as I have just taken doing mine, it would probably contain a different number of items, and if you took as long as you needed to get yours exactly right, your list would probably be a lot longer (as would mine). But my point here is not to start a “how many meanings and exactly what are they?” debate.
My point is merely the simpler one that according to some definitions of “racist” almost everybody is racist, while according to other definitions, hardly anyone is.
Who does not believe, for example, that races differ from one another? Who but a total ignoramus about the world and its ways sincerely believes that there is no such thing as a cultural difference associated with any racial difference, anywhere?
But, so frightened are we of being called racist that we would sooner deny everything on the list, whoever compiled it, rather than risk being thus labelled. The few brave or perhaps brutal souls who are prepared to admit to “racism”, that is, who tick yes to some of the items on the list, even as they strenuously deny others, demonstrate with their fate why denying everything makes sense.
Yet for the majority of thinking people to be denying everything is also very dangerous, because important truths get neglected in public debate, such as the exact truth about Muslim culture, and the exact things that ought, and ought not, to be done about this truth.
Equally dangerous is that if, under challenge from someone like Mr. Le Pen, any of the items on the list are admitted through clenched teeth to be true, it is then liable to be assumed that therefore the entire racist agenda, racist by any definition, has been acknowledged to be correct, when in fact defensive lines can be dug in between different items, and should be. It is assumed, that is to say, that the one huge defensive line must be drawn this side of “racism” by any definition. But this is to concede that no worthwhile lines can or should be drawn between different items on the list.
It is this latter syndrome that the nastier racists stand ready to exploit, as soon as any of their more obviously true complaints are conceded to have merit. I can see why lots of the people who read things like Samizdata want even quite nasty racists to do well electorally. Few of such readers are themselves nasty racists, but they want some of the more obvious truths about racial matters to be faced rather than funked in public debate. The trouble is that the nasty racists won’t stop there. They’ll use what power they are able to garner with the truth to spread untruths and to do truly nasty things.
For further intelligent thoughts on this subject, see Natalie Solent‘s posting last night. As for what she posted in the morning, let me just say: my sentiments exactly. Thanks Natalie.
In his first posting yesterday (Saturday May 4) on UK Transport, Patrick Crozier posts a challenge to libertarians everywhere. Can you build railways without compulsory purchase orders (or what Americans call, I believe, “Eminent Domain” laws)? I’m sure this question has received many answers over the years, but I haven’t come across one I liked. I’d like to. Maybe the answer is that railways are inherently anti-libertarian. If so, a pity, I say. Maybe railways can be run by libertarians, once they exist, but not built by them. Ugh!
And a question to Patrick, with whom I discussed the matter by phone the other day. What is it with airport landing “rights”, awarded, it would seem, by politicians, to the airlines that are cleverest at lobbying? What’s the story there? Surely there should be a market for the right to land (and, presumably, take off). If there was, what would happen? Would prices surge? Would they fluctuate a lot? Is there anywhere which already has such a market?
There are times when everything in your life comes together so sweetly you almost want to cry. On Friday this arrived by e-mail:
Dear Brian – My name is Miranda and I got your email address from the Internet and the Libertarian Alliance website.
I am most interested in the LA and got details about it from an English dominatrix who I met whilst travelling around Australia. She declined to give her real name as she was working in Australia without a work permit but was known as Madam Extreme. She told me she had been in association with your organisation about ten years ago and referred me to a number of your publications. Having read the views of LA particularly in regard to prostitution and drugs I can say that I am a capitalist anarchist and in line with your views.
I am English and also work as a dominatrix. I am still living and working in Australia, (also without a work permit) as I have a boyfriend here. He also agrees with LA views and we wondered if there was a similar organisation in Australia that you could recommend?
Well the main reason for writing is that I have been watching with interest the Unionisation of Sex Workers going on in the UK now. Sex workers there have formed a union called the International Union of Sex Workers which recently joined the GMB Union. Well I can tell you as a dominatrix working in Australia where sex work is legalised and licensed by the state and the projects for sex workers are funded by the state the situation is horrendous.
I work as a independent operator outside of the state system and not only because I do not have a work permit, but also because I do not want the way I work to be controlled by the state. Most of my Australian friends also operate outside the state system for the same reason.
The sex worker projects that are funded by the state allow only those views to be expressed that are in line with state ideology and are full of political correctness. There is a rule book about what can be expressed and what can not! As a female the sex worker projects are run by women only. Note that they are not run as self support groups by those in the industry, they are run by professionals licensed by the state and it is explicit in the employment contract of these state employees that they must not be sex workers themselves! Yet they run the projects! They are basically a bunch of what I call state feminist fascists who only want their idea’s to be allowed to be expressed and no-one else’s!
I refuse to use their services and employ a private doctor and buy my equipment from private suppliers. In other words I purchase on the free market which is also where I sell my services.
I also do not use the word “sex worker” to describe myself as (a) I do not sell sex and (b) I object to it because it is a politically correct term!
The sex worker projects here support the unionisation of sex workers which I also oppose because I believe that sexual services should operate on the free market not under state collective control. If a person operates as self employed there is not need for a union. I do not like unions any way, but those who promote them here say they are needed to protect the rights of sex workers who work in collective situations e.g. brothels, that are controlled by others e.g. owners/managers. And who are these owners/managers? Those individuals that are licensed by the state as being allowed to run brothels. The very situation brought about by the original legalisation of sex work now becomes the very basis for arguing that sex workers need to be unionised! Is this control upon control upon control or what? And guess who runs the unions? Yes the same state feminist fascist thought police that campaigned for the original legislation that first started to control the sex workers who prior to that had operated quietly and discreetly in the black/shadow economy. (Read for that the free unregulated untaxed libertarian market!)
Note that I am not talking about people forced into sex work and controlled by pimps. That is another issue and not allowed by LA politics anyway. But it seems to me that most of the sex workers that continue to operate in the now hidden shadow economy, like me, are natural born libertarians!
I know you can guess now that I am totally opposed to the legalisation of prostitution and the mess it has caused here and I am currently writing a paper about this and also my opposition to the unionisation of sex workers. I wanted to submit my paper to “Respect” the newspaper of the recently formed International Union of Sex Workers in the UK and guess what? It was censored. Why am I not surprised?
I was therefore wondering if the LA would be interested in taking a look at my paper with a view to publication …
I e-mailed Miranda back. Yes the Libertarian Alliance would love to consider any writing Miranda cares to send us. I remember the English dominatrix lady. She wrote a piece for us called The Morality of Prostitution. Please give my best regards to her if you see her again.
An internet search yielded two Australian libertarian societies, namely The Australian Libertarian Society and The Libertarian Society in Australia.
Also try these two Aussie-based blogs, Zemblog and The Catallaxy Files. It’s interesting the way that “legalising” something could actually make it worse. This has long bothered me with regard to drugs “legalisation”.
Oh, and could Miranda send us a photo of her no doubt great looking self? (I explained Samizdata’s policy on gorgeous women photos: we like gorgeous women photos.)
Miranda came back to me on Saturday:
Sorry I have to say no about the photo. I don’t want to be on the Internet in photograph form just yet. …
You win some, you lose some. But get this. She also said:
I’m on the Internet now listening to LBC and your good self is on there discussing drugs. Good debate! …
Crikey, you really do win some. Miranda the dominatrix, in Australia, listening to me! LBC Radio radio is not on the regular radio anymore here in London. It’s only, I had lamented to myself, on the internet. I only did the show down the phone from my kitchen rather than from a studio like they wanted, for fun and for practice. But before I was on I’d said here what and when I was on, and my huge worldwide fan base was able to tune in. So now it’s an official global fact. All drugs should be legalised, and I mean really legalised, not just “better regulated”.
Shame about the photo though.
One of my favorite movies is The Hunt for Red October. Lovely. You sit back and watch Cold Warriors get not just very cold, but very wet, very scared, and in a few cases very dead. In among it all an American Admiral played by Fred Dalton Thompson says, in a way that for some reason I find hard to forget (I guess that’s movie acting for you):
“This thing is going to get out of control.”
I know just how that Admiral felt. Charlie Banks of Nyack, NY USA, emails thus:
It’s an even more complicated situation than that (this is the kind of thing I learned early on back in my bartender days).
The Scots aren’t the only folks that make “whisky”… Canadian whisky is spelled the same way. Pick up a bottle of Canadian Club or Seagram’s VO and you’ll see that little “y” all by its lonesome on the end.
We Yanks, on the other hand, are of a mind with the sons of Erin in our “whiskey” habits. Woe betide the poor mixologist who would dare mix a julep or old-fashioned without something ending in an “ey.”
Congratulations. You’re now familiar with all four nationally-categorized varieties of whisk(e)y.
No Charlie. You think we all now have closure, but you don’t understand these things. Further e-mails can be expected from feuding Pacific Islands, different states in the purportedly “United” States, dissenting fragments of Northern Ireland, places in Africa we’ve none of us heard of until we learn that they have their own way of spelling “wiskee”. And can we assume that this alcoholic debate will be confined to the Anglosphere? What’s the betting the Czechs and Slovaks are already disagreeing about this? As Trevor Howard (playing Air Vice Marshal Park in another movie favourite of mine, The Battle of Britain) says, with equally mysterious memorability:
“They won’t stop now.”
I should have just e-mailed Liberty Log. I should have let David Farrer fight his own spelling battles. “This thing” has already sparked one international incident. Expect more.
…convey my deepest and most heartfelt apologies to all Slovs.
I was going just to email the guys at Liberty Log, but then I thought, no, it’s an interesting item of dirty washing, worth doing in (approximately speaking) public. There’s nothing like a little unpleasantness between comrades to keep us all honest and any passing non-comrades entertained.
And the bit of dirt is: when alluding to and linking to Freedom and Whisky for the first time, they spelt it “Freedom and Whiskey“. (Or they did when I looked. Maybe by the time you get to bother with this they will have been e-heckled by F&W‘s David Farrer into correcting the matter.)
Scotch whisky is whisky. Whiskey with an e is Irish Whisky. That’s what my extremely Little Oxford Dictionary says, and how it says it: whiskey n. Irish whisky.
I guess that’s what happens when some English guys, an American and a Slovakian are running a club based at a Scottish University. They try to be Scottish, but every so often their alien underwear shows through.
Maybe I’m being all superior about this whisky/whiskey thing because I’ve only just learned it myself. When I first set eyes on the words “Freedom and Whisky” at the top of Freedom and Whisky, my immediate, instant reaction was: Holy Christ on a Buffalo he’s mis-spelt the title of his own blog!
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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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