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]
“America is the world’s most successful economy because it is a democracy”, sayeth Iain Martin. I am not convinced.
It is not a coincidence that the United States is such a success and a democracy. It is such a success because it is a democracy. Indeed, the American impulse is rooted in the rejection of tyranny and scepticism of excessive government power. That commitment to free competition – sometimes imperfect, often producing uneven results – is what drives innovation.
It is a point made brilliantly by Guy Sorman in his latest piece for CapX, published this week. As he says, if you want meaningful innovation, the lifeblood of technological improvement, rather than copying and refining existing technology, then you need that clash of ideas that happens in a free society in which those in charge can be kicked out or established players can be outflanked by upstarts.
But it is liberty, not democracy, that brings these things. It is constitutionally separated powers and limited government, which is to say limiting the scope for democratically impelled politics, that enables people to challenge established business models.
And those limits on what government can do are in precipitous decline in the USA (and elsewhere) regardless of ‘democracy’… and often because of it. A great many people are quite happy to vote for excessive government power and more ‘free stuff’ that other people will have to pay for.
Stop calling what happened in Kenya a ‘tragedy‘. A bridge collapsing is a tragedy. A house burning down is a tragedy. Dying from Ebola is a tragedy. What happened at Garissa University in north-eastern Kenya was an atrocity. People did this on purpose.
If you are an adult and want to work as a model in France, the French government will decide if the way you look is appropriate in their view. And if not, the people who hired you will be fined or jailed.
The dismal forces are indeed massing as I predicted. That well documented fountain of fraudulent claims the NSPCC and all the usual dismal censors, from assorted statists of the nominal right like Sajid Javid, to the usual leftists are indeed starting to metastasise into another effort to control the internet. For the children of course.
We need products than make proxy servers and geolocation spoofing default-easy for the 95 IQ user, something people just use because it is cheap and largely invisible… with end to end encryption and all those other things that states hate integrated in at the lowest level possible.
The downside of zero inflation is that it does nothing to erode the value of debt, much of which is denominated in money terms. If your mortgage is £100,000 and the price level doubles, its real value has fallen to only £50,000. The world is still burdened with excessive debt, which is a worry for policy-makers. But a low inflation world forces them to confront this issue honestly, and not try to evade it by using the subterfuge of inflation.
… and in order to fit in better with the people around you, feel the need to blast off about ten IQ points, you are in luck! Just watch this from our good chums over at the BBC. It is an experience a bit like holding a live piranha to the side of your head.
The horror in Kenya is almost beyond belief. Almost. One hundred and forty seven dead, mostly Kenyan university students. I wonder how ‘the west’ will get blamed for this one?
Back in the 1986, we actually had that bastion of idiotarianism, Channel Four, run a program called “The New Enlightenment: the rebirth of liberalism”, about Frederick Hayek, Milton Friedman et al. But I would have never guessed that in 2015 we would be experiencing a New Endarkenment.
Fuck you. No seriously, fuck every last one of you who turned off those lights and made parts of glorious London look like North Korea.
Well my house was a gleaming beacon I can assure you, with every single light turned on. Maybe I will purchased some searchlights for next year’s endarkenment.
Yeah, this is my ‘hang over’ from ‘Earth Hour’ rather than this incident per se.
Rather than engaging Russia in a futile pre-modern discourse about race and ethnicity, Ukrainians should integrate into multicultural, multiracial, tolerant Europe.
As for Russia, it would have done a lot better if after the collapse of the Soviet Union it had declared itself a new nation, born on the day it rose up to defeat the hardline communist coup in August 1991. Had it started from a blank page, the way the United States did in 1776, it might have freed itself of its damaging 19th century imperial hangups.
I assume this risible claim by NSPCC (the quango responsible for the discredited family destroying ‘satanic‘ moral panic of the 1980’s/90’s), is priming the pump for the next assault on civil liberties to justify its existence, yes?
A tenth of 12 to 13-year-olds fear they are “addicted” to pornography, an NSPCC ChildLine survey has concluded.
One in five of nearly 700 youngsters surveyed said they had seen pornographic images that had shocked or upset them, researchers found
…”researchers found” is a phase that is pure gold, it is not? Perhaps children have fundamentally changed since I was one, but when I was in my early teens, if I saw a ‘helpline’ being advertised that could assist me regarding porn, I would have called it on the assumption they were going to help me find the ‘good stuff’ rather than those hairy porkers in Mayfair or Men Only 😉
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.
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