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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“Hitler remained closely involved with the crusade against tobacco to the very end. He banned smoking at his Austrian base, the Wolf’s Lair, and in the Fuhrerbunker in Berlin. In 1942, he voiced regret that he had ever allowed his troops a tobacco ration; a ration he would soon be forced to increase to boost morale when the war went from bad to worse. In 1943 he made it illegal for persons under the age of 18 to smoke in public places. A year later, with the Third Reich crumbling around him, Hitler personally ordered smoking to be banned on city trains and to protect female staff from second-hand smoke.”
“Hitler committed suicide in April 1945 and, after burning his body, SS troops lit cigarettes in the Fuhrerbunker for the first time. Within weeks, cigarettes became the unofficial currency of Germany, with a value of fifty US cents each. Hitler ultimately, if inadvertently, succeeded in reducing smoking in Germany but only by bringing the country to its knees.”
Pages 76 to 76 of Velvet Glove, Iron Fist: A History of Anti-Smoking, by Christopher Snowdon.
Last night, when flicking through the TV channels, I watched the “documentary” film-maker, Michael Moore, talk about his own views on the Occupy Wall Street/wherever people. And he adopted that seductively reasonable tone of voice, although the general effect is spoilt by that annoying baseball cap he insists on wearing (who is he trying to fool, exactly?). The questions from the Channel Four interviewer were fairly softball stuff. At no point did the interviewer say something like: “So, given what you have said about greedy bankers and corporations, can we take it that you oppose the multi-billion bailouts of Wall Street banks, Mr Moore?”
I suspect that some of the OWS might indeed think that bailouts for banks are wrong, although if they follow their views through to a logical conclusion, it leads to laissez-faire, not the socialist nonsense of the film-maker from Flint. We need to keep making this point.
This is priceless. It is a Friday, and it is good to have a laugh, even of a dark sort. Halloween’s on the way:
“Sir, I am saddened by the naivety of William Cash in juxtaposing wind farms and housing development as comparable threats to “our heritage”. If we do not tackle climate change there will be no heritage worth preserving, and probably no one around to appreciate the old piles. Not to mention, in the interim, the untold suffering caused to countries more immediately affected, such as Pakistan and the Horn of Africa. Opposing means of reducing carbon emissions is little better, where the likely consequences for human beings are concerned, than appeasing Hitler. Wind turbines are not, actually, particularly ugly, and certainly less so than the pylons we have lived with for decades.”
A letter from “Antony Black”, of Dundee, published in the 22 October print edition of the Spectator, page 30.
I love the way that this man likens skeptical views on Man-made global warming, and resistence to things like giant windmills, to the appeasement of a proven thug. It is worth quoting people like this man, not because it will have the slightest effect in changing their views, which constitute religious belief in its mix of fervour, self-righteousness and faux-rationality, but because it is important to show how such seemingly articulate people can believe such tosh, and get it printed in what is a relatively respectable publication.
James Delingpole, the British journalist, has a good take on the sort of folk that form part of the Climate Change alarmist crowd.
This is interesting:
“In the past 30-or-so years, hip hop has tried politics and it has tried gangsterism. But in the end it settled for capitalism, which energised it and brought it to a position of global dominance. American rappers like Puff Daddy and Master P, men who fought their way into the big time, did so by selling a vision of independence, empowerment and material success. That vision is also found, if less vividly, in Britain’s rap music. And though hip hop retains unpleasant features, the core message, that people can have better lives, is incontestably a good one.”
Prospect Magazine.
A point for we pro-market zealots to remember is that defending the market is not the same as defending all of the stuff that gets bought or sold in a market. The freedom to produce and sell products and services is emphatically not the same as saying that all of these things are splendid. Some are mediocre. Some are bloody awful, like rap music, in my opinion. Musical taste is, in any event, notoriously subjective. (I even know of friends who hate music, period). But it is interesting how even a lefty magazine such as Prospect points out that how the profit motive can have its own benign effect on a genre as aggressive as rap. You can tell that capitalism is weaving its magic when people start moaning that a certain once-rebellious arts and music genre has lost its “edge” (ie, it is no longer downright nasty).
The conventional word that it employed to describe tyranny is ‘systematic’. The true essence of a dictatorship is in fact not its regularity but the unpredictability and caprice; those who live under it must never be able to relax, must never be quite sure they have followed the rules correctly or not. Thus, the ruled can always be found to be in the wrong.
– Hitch-22: A memoir. By Christopher Hitchens, page 51.
This is probably the best autobiography I have ever read. In the passage above, he’s referring to his life in an English public (ie, private) school.
Here is a website that I have come across about the late, very great John Barry, the composer best known for all those superb James Bond tunes, as well as films such as Out of Africa.
He was never nominated for an Oscar for any of his 007 tunes. As Mark Steyn has observed, a classic case of snobbery at work.
I came across this good collection of messages via Tim Sandefur. “We are the 53 per cent” puts my sentiments across exactly.
I don’t want to sound overly harsh; some of the Occupy Wall Street people, as Brian Mickelthwait notes, might have some decent views and with a bit of outreach, could be helped to understand the statist dimension to our current problems. But I am afraid that with a lot of them, I tend to share the scornful analysis of George Will.
Talking of those who feel they work too hard to spend their time protesting, there are echoes of Sumner’s “Forgotten Man”.
This caught my attention, at a site called “The Smart Set”.
“If the zeitgeist has a face, it supposedly belongs to Ayn Rand and her capitalist philosophy of Objectivism. Talk radio hosts adore the author’s demands for limited government; Congressman Paul Ryan insists that his staffers read her overstuffed opus Atlas Shrugged; picket signs at Tea Party rallies suggest that we all “READ AYN RAND.” And yet, some pieces are missing. Ayn Rand was anti-war, but spending for hundreds of military bases and two-and-a-half wars remains sacrosanct even as Congress made the debt ceiling a major issue. She found homosexuality “immoral” and “disgusting,” and yet gay marriage has regained the initiative in the public square. And Randian heroes are explicitly — nay, objectively — elitist. They are genius millionaire square-jawed heroes who walked right off the screen at the movie matinee. The average Tea Party rallier, not so much.”
A bit of a jumble. Rand was anti-war, certainly, but she certainly was no pacifist, either about the Nazis or any other totalitarian regimes. She had a problem about homosexuality, but I doubt she favoured the state using its violence-backed powers to suppress it; indeed, from my reading of her journals and other material, I don’t know if she had developed views on this subject at all. As for the line about her support for “elitism”, it does rather depend on what you mean. For Rand, and most who broadly support her views (as I do), the idea was that people are entitled to develop their lives and talents to the greatest extent possible in free trade with their fellows. There is plenty of room for upward mobility, striving and competition. This has nothing to do with privilege, which is often what can be meant by an “elite”, for example. (Elitism is, of course, a boo word for the egalitarian left, and I suspect the author of the piece tilts in that direction).
“There is another writer whose political and philosophical influence is finally being felt in the public sphere. You may have read one of his books as a child. His name is Robert A. Heinlein, and he wrote science fiction. He was a libertarian enamored of military might, a conservative who championed free love. His heroes are certainly competent. They’re also folks who hack the systems in which they live, not elitists who abandon a corrupt world full of moochers and looters to worship the dollar as an end unto itself. And unlike Rand, most of Heinlein’s work is actually readable.”
Some of this is true, though I don’t think Heinlein was “enamoured” of military might; he understood that values need to be defended, of course, so to that extent he understood the warrior ethic and code, but he also understood the trader ethic, too. He was able to see how military codes develop and why they exist (his book, Starship Troopers, is about this very issue).
The idea that the characters in Rand’s Atlas Shrugged “worship the dollar as an end unto itself” proves that the author of this article clearly has not thought straight. The point for Rand is that the dollar, preferably a gold-backed dollar, is a symbol of liberty, not something that you worship as a totem.
It is sometimes instructive when a writer from outside the usual field opines about something about which you know quite a lot, as I do about Rand and Heinlein, having read pretty much everything they wrote. The author of this article hits on some good points, so don’t be put off by my nit-picking.
Somehow, this man, Eoin, appears to be so thick (he’s a Doctor, apparently) that I fear he should be banned from handling heavy machinery:
“We are taught by Cameron to regard small businesses as the engine room of entrepreneurial spirit in the UK. We are led to believe that their inventions, wealth creation and profits lead to employment and growth. But this is the stuff of fantasy. Three quarters of the 4.5million businesses in the UK employ no one. Their wealth creation serves their own ends. They create no jobs and do nothing to solve youth unemployment. The vast majority of small businessmen are in business for themselves. Evidence of civic virtue or a desire to create jobs is in preciously short supply and thus Cameron was wrong to shrug off record rises in youth unemployment as something that could readily be solved by small business.”
So my wife, for example, who set up her own business (marketing for SMEs) has done nothing to reduce unemployment. So all those people who, for example, lost a job at a firm and who set up on their own are not doing anything to reduce unemployment unless they employ someone? Is this man for real?
Of course, given the job-destroying impact of red tape, employment protections on full-time and part-time staff, taxes, and so on, it sometimes is a marvel that anyone ever gets a paid job at all. I am a minority owner, and employee, of a small business in wealth management/media sector and every decision on hiring someone is taken with the utmost care, since it is difficult to fire someone if they are not up to scratch.
There are times when I fear that some people out there are so fucking stupid that Darwinian ideas of natural selection are in need of revision.
Thanks to Tim Worstall for spotting this piece of lunacy.
For some light relief amid the gloom:
Fresh from his decidedly mixed record as the governor of California (which he pronounces “Calliwornia”), Arnold Schwarzenegger has an Austrian museum in his honour. This must make him feel every one of his 60-something years.
Odd bunch, the Austrians.
“It’s a sincere question: What have been the truly innovative, groundbreaking or even unconventional big public policy ideas to come out of this administration? Are there any? Because from where I sit, it simply looks like Obama takes existing, conventional, liberal ideas – some of them very, very old – off the liberal pantry shelf and hawks them like it’s new inventory. Where’s the evidence that Obama’s “mastery” over public policy has translated itself into creative approaches? Not in the stimulus from what I can tell. Maybe there’s something impressive to tout in ObamaCare, but Obama didn’t actually have much to do with the crafting of ObamaCare – a fact Wilson acknowledges. Was his genius to be found in shovelling cash into Solyndra and other embarrassing white elephants? Was he the guiding intellect behind a green jobs program that has produced dozens of jobs in places where it was supposed to create thousands?
And if he’s such a genius about public policy, why did it take him so long to discover that there’s no such thing as “shovel ready jobs”? You don’t have to be a Jedi Master of public policy to have known that.”
– Jonah Goldberg, over at the National Review’s Corner blog. I think the same question might be put to pretty much any of the major political figures of our time.
“Why did Steve Jobs do so much of his innovating in computers? Well, obviously, because that’s what got his juices going. But it’s also the case that, because it was a virtually non-existent industry until he came along, it’s about the one area of American life that hasn’t been regulated into sclerosis by the statist behemoth. So Apple and other companies were free to be as corporate as they wanted, and we’re the better off for it. The stunted, inarticulate spawn of America’s educrat monopoly want a world of fewer corporations and lots more government. If their “demands” for a $20 minimum wage and a trillion dollars of spending in “ecological restoration” and all the rest are ever met, there will be a massive expansion of state monopoly power. Would you like to get your iPhone from the DMV? That’s your “American Autumn”: an America that constrains the next Steve Jobs but bigs up Van Jones. Underneath the familiar props of radical chic that hasn’t been either radical or chic in half a century, the zombie youth of the Big Sloth movement are a paradox too ludicrous even for the malign alumni of a desultory half-decade of Complacency Studies: They’re anarchists for Big Government. Do it for the children, the Democrats like to say. They’re the children we did it for, and, if this is the best they can do, they’re done for.”
– Mark Steyn
On the subject of Steve Jobs, here is – to my pleasant surprise – an excellent and insightful piece by BBC correspondent Justin Webb. Good for him.
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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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