In the meantime…feel free not to try to “educate” me on anything. Republican or Democrat, you don’t need my buy-in to continue wrecking this country.
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I have never really understood the point of facebook. Yes, I know it is popular but the fact is it is being used for things it is very poorly suited for, such as pro-liberty activism, by a great many people. There is even a samizdata facebook group (largely inactive, as again I really cannot see the reason for it and only created it as several people asked me too). So when I was asked to join a (worthy) facebook group lamenting the fact facebook summarily and without explanation shut down a (worthy) group of anti-anti-smokers with 800,000 members, I joined it and posted this:
Facebook… yawn. No thanks… I have the internet. Oh, and by the way I have nothing against LOL-cats. August 11th, 2009 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Everyone was quiet: If you’ve got nothing to say, now is a good time to not say it – the incomparable Michael Yon, reporting on British military operations in Afghanistan from very much up the sharp end. If you do not regularly read his site, you really should as it is filled with gripping stuff. Please consider dropping your mouse on this link to contribute to keeping Michael Yon in action. August 11th, 2009 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
Okay, be honest now… this time last week, how many of you had heard of Georgian blogger Cyxymu? Hello? Anyone? No, I suspected as much. Me neither. So… imagine you are some Russian nationalist jackanapes hoping to silence a critic of Russian foreign policy and you get a bright idea:
Pure genius. Now, does anyone who reads the tech press (or indeed the mainstream media) not now know who Cyxymu is? Although Russia abounds with fascistic nationalists who could have done this off their own initiative, in truth an epic fail of this magnitude anywhere in the world generally implies government involvement.  August 8th, 2009 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
Russia continues its steely eyed march into hilarious self-parody and irrelevance (unless you happen to be a tiny powerless neighbour)…   … get yer pecs out Obama, your soul mates want to play. August 8th, 2009 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
One of the Republican senators who voted for the new US Supreme Court member has quit to “get on with his life”. As the man is a Cuban, perhaps he will consider doing that back in Cuba as clearly he cares nothing for private property rights (Sotomayor supported the majority on Kelo)… or maybe he supported Sotomayor because he thinks race trumps al? … either way he is exactly the sort of person who needs to be drummed out of the party in disgrace. August 8th, 2009 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
… for the US Supreme Court. Quelle surprise, Judge Sonia Sotomayor gets approved for the highest court of the land in the USA.
Thus sayeth Sonia Sotomayor in 2001. As Newt Gingrinch pointed out, can you imagine the reaction if a white male Bush appointee for the Supreme Court had ever, and I mean ever said:
The New York Times and Washigton Post would be filled cover to cover with KKK allusions and the nomination would be ‘challenging’ to say the least. But of course this only works one way. This is yet another useful litmus test on Republican politicians (and indeed anyone who calls themselves ‘conservative’). Did they implacably oppose Sotomayor? If not, they are indisputably and unequivocally ‘on the other side’, which is to say they are unalloyed statist collectivists and exactly the sort of people who must be driven from the party if it is even going to be worthy of the title ‘opposition’, rather than ‘Obama’s Loyal Cheerleaders’… and until the Republicans can become a meaningful opposition party, it cannot be a alternative that is worth voting for because in truth voting for such a party is just voting for more of the same, just in a different wrapper: a toxic illusion of choice. Now is not the time for Republican unity, it is the time for for the party to tear itself apart and put a great many people to the political sword without remorse or pity… starting with nine US senators. August 7th, 2009 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
Dan Rather is calling on the state (naturally) to prop up the old mainstream media and had this to say:
From your lips to God’s ear, Dan. But innovation is indeed ‘solving’ this ‘crisis’ as the meteoric spread of blogs and other forms of new media are demonstrating. And Dan, if you think all those bloggers who are pissing on the ashes are trying to help put the flames out, I assure you their motives are rather… different. (Via Instapundit) July 30th, 2009 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
Someone called Tara Parker-Pope in the New York Times has written about the use of alcohol in the latest Harry Potter film and I must say I find her article deeply… something…disturbing? No, not quite right… alien… yes that is it. It is deeply alien.
If she found funny drunk people funny, it sounds to me like her daughter understood just fine.
So why is this alien? Partially because booze really is a quite effective ‘coping aid’ that people have used since time immemorial to pluck up their courage to put their arms around the object of their affections for the first time. Why? Because at the risk of stating the obvious, it bleedin’ works. Is this really shocking or alarming to “parents, educators and addiction experts”? I rather doubt my folks would have found a drunk giant and some pie-eyed teenagers in a film all too perplexing. But then they were hardly puritans and came from a more robust generation who felt there was value in a child occasionally colliding with life’s sharp protruding edges. Nor did they get the vapours from the sight of their little treasure’s bumps and bruises or feel any need to call in ‘experts’ when I intermittently got rat-faced drunk. And what exactly is an ‘alcohol educator’? Pointing out that drinking can make you drunk and being drunk can make you walk into lamp posts or crash cars requires a specialist ‘alcohol educator’? How did anyone reach adulthood before such people existed I wonder? Well I learned that drinking has its downside too, not from an ‘alcohol educator’ but from puking my guts up rather too often. I recall a teacher seeing me once heaving miserably after a school event and did he send me to an ‘alcohol Teachers and parents teach children many things. And many of those things are true, half true or pure unadulterated lies. And most children know when what they are taught is hogwash. As a consequence, they learn the importance of critical judgement in ways that were not really intended by the person doing the ‘teaching’. So when we hear this…
…any 100+ IQ child who has had a few beers learns something valuable: his parents, and Dr. Welsh writing in The Journal of Child and Adolescent Substance Abuse, are full of it, because for most people it really is okay and their own experiences confirm that. They sank a few brewskis, had a giggle and maybe made an ass of themselves, and 99.9% of the time, no one died, got pregnant or lost an eye. And this is an important lesson we all learn when growing up: some of what we are taught makes sense and quite a lot of it is complete and utter tosh, and just because your parents tell you something, ain’t necessarily so. And when an ‘alcohol educator’ is trotted out to tell you something, it is because he is being paid to tell you that, and often there is quite a bit more to it than he is letting on. There is only one kind of professional ‘alcohol educator’ worth listening to, and they are called sommeliers. July 30th, 2009 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is a subject that we often return to on Samizdata when discussing things, and that is ‘meta-context’. This is the frames of reference, the unspoken assumptions, the underpinning world view if you like, within which people see things and discuss them. Context is usually explicit, whereas meta-context is implicit and very much in the background. This is a useful concept for understanding why discussions get framed in the manner they do. When the meta-context of two people is widely divergent, they tend to talk past each other, because much of what they say will not be what the other person understands. A great deal of the success of the statist political establishment comes from their control of the meta-context, so that in the minds of many, much of what states do simply goes without saying… that is just the way it is, even if on a contextual level a person is not predisposed to like or trust the political establishment, the state’s basic purview is essentially a given and thus not really pondered deeply, much like the sun rising in the morning. So when David Cameron and Gordon Brown exchange meaningless ritual barbs in the House of Commons, we hear an exchange between two people with somewhat different politics and personalities, but they are as one at the meta-contextual level. Each understand the other completely on a great many levels and both understand instinctively what are the ‘proper’ limits of their political ‘disagreement’. So when someone comes along who does not share meta-context, all sorts of interesting things happen. Not only is there going to be a profound non-meeting of minds, there is going to be both misunderstanding and often great antipathy as people struggle to fit the opposing person’s views within their own meta-context, assuming things that are actually not the case at all and imputing meaning that tell you far more about the person doing the imputing than the person they are discussing. And so I present you with Randy Cohen, who blogs for the mainstream statist-left newspaper the New York Times as The Ethicist. The article which caused my meta-contextual antennae to start tingling a few days ago was titled How not to talk about health care. → Continue reading: So genuine opposition is… unethical? July 26th, 2009 | 33 comments - (Comments are closed)
A chance encounter? Perhaps not. We need to try this in the UK as well. Releasing rabid pit bulls in Parliament (and then locking the doors with everyone inside) might be more culturally appropriate however. July 23rd, 2009 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
Apparently it is news that the UK is still in recession, or as the headline says Economic recovery in UK ‘on hold’. On hold? The government is debasing people’s saving as quickly as possible and stripping money out of productive sectors and pumping it into unproductive sectors, and generally trying their damnedest to drive businesses and wealth creators out for years now… and the fact this is tearing a huge hole is surprising to who exactly? July 19th, 2009 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
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