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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At the heart of almost all ‘redistributive’ statism lies the idea that it is perfectly okay to take money from one person, backed by the threat of state violence, in order to give it to other people deemed more worthy of that money. The ‘worthy’ people are those who have managed to make the political process work in their favour in some manner, such as students in Britain.
People like Will Straw, son of British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, call education a ‘public good’ and thus sees that as ample justification for the National Union of Students demanding that students like himself have their education paid for by money taken from others… and yet is not the opening of a corner shop or supermarket a ‘public good’ as well? It offers not just needed products but also employment. Is not almost any lawful economic activity between two willing parties a ‘public good’ for much the same reason, as it generates wealth and satisfies needs?
Yet unlike education funded by theft, these other activities involve only consensual relationships and private capital allocated with private insights and information… If I buy a product or open a shop, it is because I think it is in my interests. However I am not going to use force to extort people into buying products at my shop or acquire things by violent robbery.
Although Will Straw may think it is in my interests for him to be educated, I happen to disagree. However he is quite prepared to have the state use force to compel me to provide for his education. Like most who feed at the public trough, he casually accepts the morality of the proxy violence of the state provided it benefits him.
There are some actual ‘public goods’ in the sense Will Straw uses the word, such as defence, the prevention of crime and perhaps discouraging communicable diseases, but those are really the only legitimate role of state… for the likes of Will Straw to think something like his personal education is something that compares to those true ‘public goods’ is strange thinking indeed, for it violates the true public good of the prevention of crime: he would have the state rob me for his benefit.
No, I don’t mean some figurative ‘holy grail’, nor do I mean Monty Python & The Holy Grail, I really do mean the real purported The Holy Grail.
A group of modern day Knights Templar will be using modern thermal imaging and ultrasound technologies to search Rosslyn Chapel, in Scotland, long thought to be final resting place of what is said to be the real Holy Grail.
I love snow, but in London we often get none at all and only very rarely does it snow heavily, which is to say, actually leaving a nice white carpet (yes, I know… that hardly counts as snow at all by some standards).
Yesterday however, I got my wish, with the heaviest snowfall in London in 12 years…
The view down my street
It will be mostly gone by tomorrow in all likelihood but it at least I get a day to enjoy the ephemeral splendours of winter.
To all those who believe that first-world farming cannot survive without the theft of subsidies, please then explain how New Zealand seems to manage with hardly any help from the state.
I second the suggestion by Ross Clark in The Spectator… let’s have a buy-cott of New Zealand’s theft-free farm produce: the Kiwis puts British, European and North American agriculture to shame.
Our favourite pinko blogger, Brian Linse is in London…
Little does he know the effect of drinking out of a Samizdata.net Coffee Mug will have on his fragile political sensibilities…muuuahhhhhh!
Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott plans to restrict the right of council tenants to buy their homes. This is very encouraging to me as it is a policy calculated to remind the large ‘new bourgeoise’ of former ‘working class’ people with aspirations to become property owners just how out of sync a socialist meta-context is with their real lives.
The problem is now that some tenants have bought their homes at big discounts, and then sold them on to property companies, who in turn sell them on at a profit.
Yes, shocking. When ‘working class’ people (a largely empty term when in reality the majority of British society is utterly bourgeois) make too much money, they start getting strange notions that they should be allowed to keep it and that is clearly something the Labour Party needs to stamp on! The notion of poor people turning a big fat profit by engaging in capitalist activities like selling their own property is anathema to a party which exists to dole out other people’s stolen money to a supplicant class.
In a manner which is actually technically more in tune with the fascist variant of socialism, they are happy for people to ‘own’ private property’ (e.g. such as allowing a person to purchase their council house), but if they then dispose of that ‘private’ property for their personal benefit in a manner not in accordance with ‘national objectives’, that is seen as an ‘abuse’. Which is to say, Labour shares the fascist view that private property is just fine, particularly the bit in which the former council tenant pays the council for the property… provided it does not actually then mean the new ‘owner’ in reality controls the thing he has just paid for.
Economically at least, modern regulatory statism has a large streak of fascist thinking at its core and this is an good example of that sensibility at work.
Gun crime continues to rise in Britain, with two young girls shot dead
at a party last night.
Perhaps Britain should ban all handguns. Oh, that’s right… they already are banned. So let’s ban… I dunno… let’s ban something else… toy guns, just like they are in Sweden! That will do the trick!
I am trying to figure out who ‘Holland & Barrett’ are worried might sue them if they discovered NUTS in their packet of… Whole Cashew Nuts!
I have visited Kenya several times over the last thirty years and have always regarded it as one of the few outposts of relative sanity in that part of the world. Over the last fifteen years however it has grieved me to see one of the brighter sparks on the continent gradually sink into the kleptocratic morass that generally characterises African nation states.
So I really do hope that the fall of President Daniel arap Moi and his corruption riddled Kanu party spells a new beginning for Kenya. I am far too cynical to automatically assume that Mwai Kibaki and his victorious National Rainbow Coalition will not succumb to the ‘African Disease’ but I suppose the mere fact that the passing of the old political order was so painless is grounds for a little cautious optimism.
Garry North at LewRockwell.com tells us:
Once the United States military has established control over the oil fields, which I assume it will do at the beginning of the invasion, Iraq will not be able to feed itself. Control the flow of oil, and you control the only thing worth controlling in Iraq. The government will topple. Even if it doesn’t, who cares if the U.S. government controls the oil?
At that point, the oil-drilling concessions will be handed out by the United States government’s puppet regime. “Y’all come!” This will buy off Europe’s foot-dragging politicians, who will be able to go to their voters and say, “fait accompli.” They will have offered token resistance to the United States, which is all that European voters expect. Now they will reap the rewards, either directly by the participation of their national oil companies or indirectly by enjoying a lower price of oil.
The USA wants to invade Iraq to ‘control’ the flow of oil. Bush wants to do this in order to increase the supply of oil and therefore lower the price… and clearly saying “Y’all” is prima facie evidence of conspiratorial evilness. Gotcha.
However…
“Iraq’s oil fields are capable of providing far more than an extra million barrels of oil a day. This is why the United States has in effect capped Iraqi wells by its oil-for-food embargo.
Right, so Bush has been doing beastly things to Iraq to keep oil prices up then?
Richard Perle is the chairman of President Bush’s Defense Policy Board, a civilian advisory group. He co-authored a paper in 1996, “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” which was published by the previously mentioned Institute for Advanced Strategic & Political Studies. The report is still on-line. It calls for the establishment of a new balance-of-power foreign policy in Israel – the same system, it might be added, that twice led England into world war, and which twice required the United States to bail out England. The report made suggestions to the Likud Party, which is Ariel Sharon’s party.
Ah, its not about oil, its about Israel. Right. And if ‘balance-of-power’ is such a terrible idea, when why are LewRockwell.com always so bent out of shape by the current pre-eminence of the USA?
And what is this about bailing out England? I guess Scotland, Ulster and Wales were not ‘bailed out’ then? It is usually a good indication of someone engaging in a cranio-rectal insertion when they refer to the UK as ‘England’, which is rather like describing the USA as ‘New York State’. And this is someone who has such knowledge of International Affairs that he can see through the machinations of the sinister Oil Illuminati.
The United States must defend the interests of the alliance by bringing new supplies into production. This was what the invasion of Afghanistan was all about: establishing protection over a new pipeline from the Caspian Sea oil fields, either through Afghanistan and Pakistan and into the tankers, or through Turkey. This pipeline is important if Russia is not to control this flow of oil. The Great Game of the 19th century – Russia, Turkey, England, Afghanistan, and India – is still being fought. For a good analysis of the pipeline issues, see the September, 2001 article on Turkey and the pipeline, which is posted on the Web site of the joint Israeli-American organization, the Institute for Advanced Strategic & Political Studies.
Ah. Its all about Russia! Or more accuratly, depriving Russia, the world’s second largest oil exporter, of oil. Gotcha. And that is what Afghanistan was ‘about’ too… in case an oil pipeline might, some time in the future, go through there. Or through Pakistan. Or through Turkey. Or maybe Gloucestershire?
The oil lever is the lowest-cost foreign policy tool at the government’s disposal. This will require American troops in Iraq on a permanent basis. This is a deliberate no-exit strategy. The Administration plans to send in troops that will become as permanent as its 5,000 troops in Saudi Arabia. How many troops will this be? As many as it takes to control the marginal price of oil. The United States government is about to replace OPEC as the pricing agent of world oil. The name of the game is still cartel pricing, but there will be different hands on the spigots.
Oh, so it is all about oil then! If someone can explain what this gibberish actually means, I would be very grateful. And to think there was a time when I actually admired the Lew Rockwell group.
Computer games are evolving at an astonishing rate, acting as the primary driver of desktop computer development (after all, how many people actually need a 2.5 GHz CPU, a 128 Mb graphics card and 512 Mb of RAM to do word processing and spreadsheet work?)
Back in the Paleolithic age of computers (the 1980’s), computer games looked like this…
Wolfenstein: Shoot! Mild fun… but not for long
Mildly amusing but crude in the extreme. By the early 1990’s however, came the advent of the ‘FPS’: the First Person Shooter!
Wolfenstein 3D: Shoot! Great fun… but not for long
They seemed astonishing at the time, actually putting you inside the gun wielding hero. The graphics were rather basic, to put it mildly and after a while the lack of multifaceted interaction tended to make the games rather tedious after the initial ‘gee whiz’ factor wore off… other than opening doors, the only way to interact with things was to shoot at them.
My goodness how things have changed!
Wolfenstein 3D begat Doom, which begat Quake, Hexen, Marathon, Unreal, Duke Nukem, Tomb Raider etc, etc… all worthy ‘shooters’ of steadily increasing graphic quality.
Sudden surges came with games like Half Life, released at the end of the computer games neolithic era (1998) and yet still playable now…and featuring not just excellent graphics but Artificial Intelligence which actually shows a bit of intelligence, rather than just a desire to commit virtual suicide… Half Life & the spin-offs Blue Shift and Opposing Forces brought also the ability to ‘talk’ with the computer generated denizens of the game as opposed to just shoot at them.
Half Life: Don’t shoot, he is on your side.
Great fun… for hours on end!
Then games like No One Lives Forever (NOLF), a spy thriller set in the 1960’s with frequent plot specific cut scenes came along, and suddenly the story line of the computer game actually started to matter.
NOLF: Cate Archer, at the grave of her ‘dead’ mentor
The next generation of releases saw the success of story intensive NOLF and soon games of almost cinema grade plot and characterization started appearing, such as the conspiracy ladened Deus Ex and then the gritty darker than dark Max Payne.
And so yesterday the new Gamespy PC Game of the Year was announced, and it is the excellent No One Lives Forever 2.
As well as being superb graphically (caveat: you do need a high spec computer to get the best out of this game), it is just down right funny! Set in the 1960’s, this ‘spy shooter’ owes more to the wonderfully camp ‘Man from U.N.C.L.E.’ than James Bond or Smiley’s People. Although slightly more ‘serious’ than Austin Powers (but only slightly), it provides endless entertainment by allowing you to eavesdrop on the all-too-believable conversations of other people.
NOLF2: This Indian H.A.R.M. agent has a sword…
but Cate has a Kalashnikov
I look forward to continuous progress in computer games… pure distilled essence of capitalism married to explosive creativity. Within a few years, interactively with the virtual environment will be almost total, opening up steadily more ambitious story telling possibilities whilst at the same time the holy grail of photorealism comes closer to realization. The future is so bright, we are going to need shades to see it. I can hardly wait!
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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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