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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In order to get ‘into’ a sport, it usually helps to have grown up with it. I grew up with shooting, sailing and rugby in so far as those where the things I took to during my (mostly) English school days. Although I also served time doing part of my education in the USA, American Football, Baseball and Basketball never really appealed… not that I really have anything against those games, I just do not ‘relate’ to them myself. Strangely, the only times I have ever played soccer was in the USA as that seemed a more understandable sport to me, perhaps for the simple reason that although it was never a school sport in my neck of the woods in the UK, the ambient presence of ‘footie’ is hard to escape in England.
I do enjoy watching soccer and although the prospect of the World Cup did to some extent sweep me up, but the more matches I watched this time, the more this strange sinking feeling came over me. No doubt it is just me but there just seems to be something desperately unheroic about the game these days, at least at an international level. Perhaps the fact that every time I watched Italy, the eventual winners, play, they seemed to be taking more dives that Jacques Cousteau. I for one find athletes rolling around on the ground play-acting terrible injury when someone so much as brushes up against them such a pathetic and unmanly spectacle that perhaps the Italian team should replace their national flag by flying a petticoat from the nearest flagpole. Although Italy seem to be the worst offender in this regard, it does seem to be an increasingly widespread tactic (that said, anyone playing against Croatia need engage in no injury play-acting given that team’s ‘robust’ approach to the game).
Overall, I cannot help but feel that the whole thing was rather unedifying.
Yesterday… I saw a homemade butane-powered cannon shoot a saboted blueberry muffin across my lawn.
– Tamara K
A budget impasse caused by New Jersey state governor Jon Corzine attempting to increase taxes has caused many of the state’s functions to be shut down for the first time in New Jersey’s history.
This is of course splendid news and I hope the longer the shut down lasts, the more people in that bastion of statism that is New Jersey will realise that life goes on without the nanny state constantly interfering. More than half the state work force, 45,000 people, have been ordered to stay home. Perhaps people will eventually conclude this is actually rather a good thing and wonder why they have been paying for these people all these years. Moreover when it comes to things people really do seem to want, I would be willing to bet that most of the statistically challenged folks who entertain themselves in the now closed Atlantic City casinos would be just as happy to gamble without state regulators on the premises (who after all are there primarily to make sure the state gets their tax money).
Jon Corzine is showing the way: the world is not going to come to an end when large chunks of the state stop functioning. More and faster please.
It may sound like an odd thing to claim that a ‘saint’ has nothing to do with religion but in the case of St. George, that is quite a reasonable thing to say. Thus when the politically correct functionaries of the Church of England start floating the idea of replacing St. George with St. Alban as the patron saint of England, I would have to say that the Church of England are flattering themselves if they think it is actually up to them. Dating from the reign of Edward III, a certain conception of St. George has been part of English iconography considerably longer that there has been a Church of England and I suspect the association of this mythic dragon-slayer with ‘Englishness’ will outlive England’s established church comfortably.
In a post-Christian society like England, St. George, who may or may not have been a Roman general, is really just a cultural construct that embodies certain mythic values ascribed to England. And that is, of course, why the emasculated appeasers who make up the leadership of the Church of England really want to replace the mythic warrior St. George:
But the Church of England is considering rejecting England’s patron saint St. George on the grounds that his image is too warlike and may offend Muslims.
And given that Britain is fighting two wars at the moment in Iraq and Afghanistan, against an enemy who are Muslims, I can think of nothing better to commend St. George to a nation which may feel the need to summon the fortitude of warlike archetypes more than it needs an irrelevent and collapsing Church.
There is a fine article in the Telegraph rebutting anti-Americanism and another which features a splendid quote from an unnamed US embassy spokesman who responded to claims that a poll has found many British people are opposed to the US decision to overthrow Saddam Hussain and suggesting many had a low opinion of US civil society:
“We question the judgment of anyone who asserts the world would be a better place with Saddam still terrorizing his own nation and threatening people well beyond Iraq’s borders. With respect to the poll’s assertions about American society, we bear some of the blame for not successfully communicating America’s extraordinary dynamism. But frankly, so do you [the British press].”
Quite. Never apologise to your enemies.
A few days ago former Clinton Secretary of State Madelein Albright condemned the American Libraries Association (ALA) for its tepid response to the Cuban state’s repression of intellectual freedoms by its policies of banning certain books and imprisoning independent librarians who do not follow the party line.
However all I ever need to know about the ALA is revealed in this article with the line “But she won her loudest applause for oblique slaps at President Bush”. Hostility to Bush roused the emotions of more ALA librarians than defending oppressed librarians in Cuba. Of course that Americans are more concerned with American affairs is hardly surprising but when an organisation decries its government’s leadership at home on civil rights grounds and yet balks at heaping any significant opprobrium on an old style communist tyranny off the American coast, I think this is an organisation that can be safely consigned to the useful idiots category.
No doubt many in the ALA are impressed by the more than ten fold increase in the number of public libraries under Castro, ignoring the fact that these libraries can only stock books which are not deemed ideologically unacceptable by the regime. Somehow I rather doubt books by the oafish Michael Moore or Marx are in any shortage in the American libraries presided over by the ALA (and rightly so).
I just discovered that O.G. blogger Acidman passed away last Monday, which is really too bad as he was a splendidly cantankerous and hugely entertaining SOB. I always thought of him as the Ted Nugent of the blogosphere.
If my blog does not meet your standards, then LOWER YOUR STANDARDS. Who the hell do you think you are, anyway?
Rock on, Rob.
Want to see Tony Blair getting a political kick in the cobblers?
Sweet. Agree or disagree, it is nice to see some political hardball. UKIP thrive on such confrontations. It is hard to imagine the pointless milksops of the ‘Conservative’ Party getting stuck in like that.
Logic has made me hated by the world
– Abelard of Le Pallet
When someone denies the essential historical facts about the Jewish Holocaust, here at Samizdata what that means is you get moved into the category of presumed paleo-fascists or racist Jew-haters with whom intelligent discourse is highly unlikely to be possible.
Even so, when such remarks arrive in our comment section, that alone is (usually) not enough to get you immediately banned from commenting here. Opinions offered by members of the commentariat which are very much at odds with the world view propounded here by Sazmizdata’s authors are hardly rare and even more rarely constitute a ‘hanging offence’ (i.e. banning). No, what tends to get people banned is when they make (and keep making) assertions so preposterous that they are almost certainly not made in good faith.
For an example, take when someone makes obviously fantastical assertions to explain why Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ‘has a case’ when he denies lavishly documented historical facts of what occurred more than half a century ago in Central Europe, claiming he is not simply a racist Jew-hater (i.e. hates Jews for being Jews) but is rather just ‘anti-Zionist’ (i.e. opposes a political movement):
Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has a case for querying the Holocaust. His argument is that Nazi Germany simply didn’t have the facility and technology to dispose of some six million corpses (or whatever it was) within the assumed time frame. Therefore, the authorized version, while not entirely a fiction, was a huge exaggeration.
So let me get this straight, the claim here is that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ‘has a case’, i.e. he is not a liar and/or a complete jackass if he thinks that Nazi Germany, a nation which produced and operated tens of thousands of combat aircraft, fielded the world’s first operational jet fighters, built and deployed the world’s first effective guided missiles, glide bombs, and military supersonic ballistic missiles, installed tens of thousands of concrete fortifications and shelters, placed hundreds of thousands of concrete and metal anti-tank obstacles across Europe, surrounded its cities with great flak batteries, laid thousands of kilometres of railtracks (re-gauging much of European Russia’s rail system!), had the logistic capacity to support millions of men equipt with vast fleets of motor vehicles in operational areas from North Africa to Norway and the French coast to the Urals, DID NOT HAVE THE FACILITIES OR TECHNOLOGY TO DISPOSE OF SIX MILLION DEAD BODIES OVER SEVERAL YEARS?
The notion is so absurd that I do not for a second think it could be said in good faith. That is what often gets a person banned from Samizdata.
President Bush, a man I have never had much affection for and about whom I have very few good things to say, has just struck a blow for the good guys of the issue of eminent domain abuse (UK= compulsory purchase) by signing an executive order that the US federal government can only seize private property for public use and not in order to turn it over to private property developers.
Although the vast majority of property seized in the United State is does by state and local authorities, this is nevertheless a very welcome development indeed and a definite move in the right direction.
There is a remarkable article on Media Influencer about Sir Martin Sorrell, the CEO of WPP (a marketing communications company), in which makes a very perplexing assertion. He has described the internet, an overwhelmingly unregulated (i.e. not politically directed) social network, as ‘socialist anarchy’, adding “The internet is the most socialistic force you’ve ever seen”. Of course he is not the first person to make a preposterous conflation of those sort of terms, neither will he be the last spout such oxymorons. Sorrell is clearly someone who has little grasp of the meaning of the political terms he bandies about, which I find surprising considering the man is running a communications company.
Although the internet could be reasonably called ‘anarchic’ in the most loose sence of the word as it is largely unregulated by states (though that varies), the internet is not really ‘anarchy’ as national laws regarding defamation (etc.) are often invoked regarding conduct on-line… but the real absurdity is to describe it as ‘socialist’. Socialist? In what way is the internet being allocated to people via political direction? In what way is the internet being used to impose collectivism and politically constrain markets?
I can only speculate what confused reasoning leads Sorrell call the internet ‘socialist’. Perhaps because the web is extremely threatening to the business model of WPP and most other ‘marketing communications’ companies (threatening as in “you are going to be dis-intermediated and destroyed”), he might therefore see the internet a sort of virtual jacquerie, a horde of angry torch bearing peasants moving towards his corporate castle in a threatening manner, thereby deducing that anyone who destroys a company’s business model must be a ‘socialist’ because socialists want to destroy companies, right?
I am just guessing here of course, but perhaps Sorrell needs to read about capitalist ‘creative destruction’ and reconcile himself to the fact his industry is in the process of being creatively destroyed by capitalism. The reason sections of the economy go the way of the dodo is nearly always caused by people following eminently capitalistic and quite several (as opposed to collective) motivations in responce to changing conditions. The internet is the most individually empowering tool in human history and has nothing to do with socialism but rather a lot to do with creating dis-economies of scale and breaking the mass markets so beloved of large businesses into a mass of niche markets… the key word here being markets.
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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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