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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I guess this is an issue that will not register much outside of this little damp island of the UK, but there has been a small media flurry of interest over the amazing quiz-answering skills of a young woman, Gail Trimble, on the BBC show University Challenge. She has had the outrageous nerve of being very good at answering the questions, and worse, she smiles a bit on camera when she gets the answer correct – which is most of the time. For this, she has been variously attacked for being “smug” etc. It makes me wonder why those who are offended by signs of intelligence bother to watch the programme in the first place. Surely fare such as Celebrity Big Brother might be more their style. They are welcome to it.
As humans, we surely have evolved as creatures to feel pride and happiness in accomplishment. The first human probably grinned when he figured out how to shape the perfect flint arrowhead. Pride, and showing happiness at cracking a problem, overcoming an obstacle or winning a prize is not just right, it is natural to any person of healthy self respect. Pride is the reward one gets for achieving something of value. Smugness or arrogance are unfair charges to make in this sense. Of course, there is a lot more to life than being able to store lots of facts and figures in one’s head and answer correctly to a bumptious quizmaster such as Jeremy Paxman, but I find the attacks on this pleasant young lady to suggest a lack of comfort with intellectual accomplishment that is rampant in parts of our culture. In fact, those who wished that the lady could look stony-faced or even miserable are showing a level of aggression, even hatred, for accomplishment. And that I think speaks to a neurotic condition that the abusers of this woman might like to reflect on.
And then again, I will openly confess to having a weakness for brunettes with brains and a cultivated voice. I see the young lady has a few male admirers on the web. Good for her.
It is tempting to imagine that a cause is so important to Mankind, so essential, that only a total idiot could object to coercing one’s fellows into paying for said cause. And when it comes to science funding, even the most seemingly rational people fall prey to the notion that only wicked, selfish people, or religious nutters, could object to this funding. Take a recent article by Steven Mirsky, who writes for Scientific American:
“You’re not supposed to kick a guy when he’s down. Of course, in reality, when he’s down is the perfect time to kick him. He’s closer to your feet, for one thing. But the particular kicking I have in mind should be thought of as tough love. These kicks at the freshly defeated McCain-Palin ticket, as I write in early November, are an attempt to knock some sense back into the group of my fellow Americans who seem determined to ignore or even denigrate valuable scientific research because it’s something outside the realm of Joe the Plumber’s daily activities.”
Ah yes, Joe the Plumber, the man who achieved prominence by asking The Community Organiser about the latter’s plans to seize wealth from productive folk and “spread it around”. What Mr Mirsky goes on to do is mock the comments of the McCain/Palin team who had mocked examples of high tax funding of various projects they think were silly or wasteful. Mr Mirsky gets very shirty about this, regarding the projects as obviously beneficial, and only an old fart like McCain and his crazy VP running mate could disagree.
The rest of the article lays out examples of how certain projects that Mr Mirsky thinks are useful were mocked by the GOP, and by extension, other know-nothings more concerned about protecting their wallets. But Mr Mirsky misses a rather large point. Which is that even if a science project is valuable, the question of value is meaningless unless one asks: of value to whom and in the eyes of whom? What Mr Mirsky want to do is to sustitute his judgement of what is right to spend money on for that of others spending their own money. No doubt he fears that without tax funding, financial support for science will dry up – a very dubious assumption, to put it mildly.
Timothy Sandefur – who is on a roll at the moment – has a collection of essays taking on the argument that science funding has to be, or should be, done at the expense of taxpayers. I urge regulars here who are interested to read all of Tim’s pieces. They are the most comprehensive demolition job on such arguments that I have read for some time.
The trouble with people who do not think much in terms of principles, but who just take a sort of techno-managerialist view of public affairs, is that they cannot see why the great unwashed should object to paying for biotech research, or space flight, etc. And as I mentioned the other day, with the world of the arts, it is the same. It is just assumed by some folk that because a painting by Titian or Andy Warhol is marvellous, that the taxpayer should consider his duty to pay for it. The danger in such cases is when the expenditures are relatively small compared to the total size of public spending: the temptation is to shrug one’s shoulders and wonder why making a fuss is necessary. Well, if we cannot take an axe to the supposedly more “benign” aspects of public spending, it will never be possible to make the broader philosophical case for reducing the state significantly.
As a side observation, the sneering, more-in-sorrow-than-anger tone of Mr Mirsky puts me in mind of Thomas Sowell’s recent superb attack on that sort of mindset, in his book, The Vision of The Anointed.
Here is a website that is obviously produced by people very, very angry about what they see as the one-sided coverage of Mr Obama in his recent victorious campaign. You do not have to buy into conspiracy theories to be alarmed at the fawning press coverage that Mr Obama received during the campaign. As for the treatment of the McCain/Palin ticket, while I am certainly no great fan of either, the hysteria over Mrs Palin’s personal life or supposed wing-nuttery over religion seemed totally out of proportion.
In the end, we get the media we do because the underlying philosophical assumptions of the public at large are reflected by it and at the same time, those assumptions are held by the media outlets themselves. It pains me to say it but in many respects, the US is now closer to the social-democratic, corporatist model of Europe than many in the US will want to admit. There will, I hope, be a backlash, but whether that backlash is a particularly libertarian one is not something I am very confident about at this point.
Thanks to fellow contributor Paul Marks to alerting me to this website.
“Whenever someone complains that libertarians are just pie-in-the-sky utopian (or distopian) intellectuals, just ask them again about the real world consequences of the War on Drugs, and see who gets all pie-in-the-sky right quick”.
Randy Barnett.
Mr Barnett clearly did not get the memo from former UK prime minister Tony Blair that all that talk about liberty was so 19th Century, dahling.
Yesterday, while I was cleaning my flat (you asking for a medal, Ed?), I had the TV on in the background and it was running a series of programmes via the Horizon team at the BBC about various natural disasters, such as earthquakes, killer giant waves and tsunamis. In the latter case, the programme speculated that if there was a volcanic eruption in one of the islands in the group known as the Canaries, off the African coast, that it would trigger a huge slide of rock into the ocean, therby causing a massive wave, which would then run left across to the Eastern seaboard of North America, probably parts of the Caribbean also, annihilating all in its path. New York, Balimore, Miami, etc would be obliterated.
This guy is not terribly convinced by the thesis. But suppose for a second that the direst predictions are accurate. Part of the theory is that the eruption will be so violent because of the enormous pressure that is building up inside the active volcano. So a question that occured to me was why doesn’t a team of geologists and engineers try to bore several large holes in the side of the volcano and let some of the pent-up magma come out, in a fairly controlled way?
I am not a scientist so feel free to mock this idea, but it occurs to me that given all the facts presented, this sort of idea might be a goer. I’d be interested to know what people think. There might be other techical “fixes” that spring to mind.
This looks like a film worth seeing for anyone who values the bravery and steadfastness of the American soldier, as I do and as should any Briton. (Full disclosure: I am related to several people serving in the US military). Kevin Bacon is a fine actor and well chosen for the lead part.
I see that the former BBC presenter of a programme about gardens and gardening, Monty Don, has recently argued that we should aim to be self-sufficient in food. The trouble with such calls for self-sufficiency is that the unit in which such activity should occur is not spelled out. Does Mr Don think trade should be confined to within Britain, or within a region of it, or a village? Has this character no idea of how starvation frequently accompanied those societies cut off from the benefits of trade? Has he no notion of the benefits of trade, division of labour, regional specialisation, etc?
Of course I have nothing against owners of land looking to grow their own food if they want – how could I? But of course I doubt that Mr Don or other self-sufficiency types want to adopt such a grass-roots policy, to excuse the pun. I grow most of my own herbs, for instance. People have at times brewed their own beer to avoid the insipid stuff on sale in the shops, and as a result, this encouraged the “micro-brewery” movement in the US and elsewhere. But that is an example of enterprise at its best. The trouble with Mr Don, I suspect, is that his approach tends to be accompanied by calls to restrict imports, and the like. I remember once watching a programme in which Mr Don went to Cuba, and presented a remarkably uncritical, almost fawning eulogy to the wonders of Cuban home-grown food. He is quoted gushingly by some Cuban website here. Ugh.
Talking of bad ideas, it does appear that Naomi Klein’s argument that crises provide fok with an “excuse” to “impose” free markets seems to have been rather turned over. In fact, the current crisis seems to have provided politicians and their media supporters with a great excuse to bash free markets, trade and entrepreneurship. It may be that eventually, of course, the disastrous consequences of interventionism will cause a reaction back towards free markets, in which case Klein will be correct, but not in a way she realises.
David Boaz has a good article on this issue.
All those folk who voted for The Community Organiser in the hope that he would lift some of the allegedly more questionable measures enacted by the previous administration to deal with terrorism are likely to be disappointed, at least if this report is accurate.
Shutting down Gitmo is just a stunt if all that happens is that terror suspects and other folk rounded up in the Middle East etc are locked up indefinitely in a different place. If people like Andrew Sullivan, who have hammered the institution of Gitmo, try to make excuses for this by arguing that such detention is somehow “different”, they deserve to be treated with contempt.
Bishop Hill comes up with a list of the legislation that an incoming UK government should get rid of to restore some of the civil liberties lost over the past decade or so. As he accepts, this is probably only scratching the surface of the issue, but still. The sheer quanity of the legislation that has been brought in, and its scope, is pretty startling even to a grizzled veteran of chronicling such outrages.
Maybe the simple solution is to repeal all the acts in one go.
This is on my Amazon wish-list. I love the mad, over-the-top style of the late Terry Thomas and from a young age, was delighted by his crazy turns of phrase, his hilarious demeanor and wonderful portrayal of the upper class cad. I must say that every time I am unfortunate enough to see Gordon Brown, The Community Organiser or Sarkozy on the television, it is hard not to shout out in true TT style: “What an absolute shower!”
Where did the expression “absolute shower” come from, by the way?
One of the best journalists out there, Claudia Rosett, responds to the dimwit assertion in parts of the MSM that “We are all socialists now”. Quite. I would also be happy to see someone write denying that “we” are all Keynesians now, by the way. Who is supposed to be the “we” is never quite explained. It is just assumed by the issuers of such pronouncements that all those in positions of power and influence have signed on to a particular world view.
Rosett, as I remember, did great work in helping to expose that sink of corruption and double-dealing that was the Oil For Food Program of the United Nations, yet another reason for shutting down that organisation.
Taking a break from the financial tsunami and idiotic politicians, here are some wonderful infra-red photos. (Via David Thompson).
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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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