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.
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As several commenters like to point out here, the UK parliament, having shed so many powers and transferred them to Brussels, is now more like a branch office of a large company, in which the great majority of the powers are exercised from the centre. The branch office staff may try to kid themselves that they are important, and voters in national elections may take the view that they are wielding meaningful power by voting, but the truth is that they are not.
Also, the workload of politicians as serious legislators has seriously declined. They are essentially implementing laws that have been, to a great extent, decided by someone else. So it makes sense, perhaps, to cull the number of MPs and cut their pay to reflect their diminished status.
I should have linked to this before, but Tory MP Peter Lilley has argued for precisely this: cutting MP’s salaries to reflect their weaker powers. Mr Lilley is a reminder that at least some MPs really get what has happened. As I occasionally point out, as MPs become more pointless, their behaviour, perks and corruption become less tolerable. Lilley’s proposal may not come to anything, but it is a meme worth spreading: these people are unimportant, and should be remunerated accordingly.
In an ideal universe, MPs would not be paid by the taxpayer at all, of course. We can always dream.
I watched Iron Man a few days ago and thoroughly enjoyed it. Downey is excellent, as are the rest of the cast. And how can you not like a film that starts off with a bunch of US soldiers driving along in a truck listening to AC/DC?
One thing I noticed is that Audi must have wangled some kind of product placement thing: all the main cars that feature are Audis. One of two aspects do not quite work and the physics of the energy system that powers the suit is not something I am fit to judge, but it seems a bit far-fetched. But what the heck.
Jim Henley, a comics buff, has a good review of the film. Mind you, I still have not entirely forgiven Jim for sliming Mark Steyn over the recent Canadian free speech kerfuffle a few months ago. Not his finest hour.
“I’m not sure what is more sickeningly ironic to hear at a food summit – the thoughts of a brutal tyrant such as Robert Mugabe or a would-be genocidal murderer such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Tough call.”
– Stephen Pollard
I am interested in this story as I am one of many people for whom the hopefully sunnier weather of summer is accompanied by the irritation of hayfever. I do not suffer from it as badly as when I was a child but it is still unpleasant sometimes. I once played in a cricket match and my symptoms – streaming eyes and sneezing – got so bad that I could hardly continue to play the game.
Anyway, it may be soon be possible to significantly nail the problem with a vaccine.
The other day I referred to a PJ O’Rourke gag which made the crack about a guy marrying Angelina Jolie for her brains (as opposed to her looks). Thinking about it, it was actually not a very good joke, even though it did not imply that Jolie was unintelligent, far from it. Anyway, it turns out that she is indeed smart and has a fair amount of guts as well:
“The pregnant mother of four told the U.K.’s Daily Mail that she owns guns similar to the ones she used in “Tomb Raider.” Jolie and partner Brad Pitt are not against having weapons in their house for security reasons, she says.”
“If anybody comes into my home and tries to hurt my kids, I’ve no problem shooting them,” she said.
Jolie, 32, has starred as a heat-packing vixen in several action movies – two “Tomb Raider” films, “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” and the upcoming futuristic thriller, “Wanted.”
“I can handle myself,” she said. “There’s a side to me that people know is humanitarian, and there’s a side to me that’s a mommy. But there’s also the side that likes to get down and dirty and run and jump around and fire guns.”
If the NRA wants a replacement for its former figurehead, Charlton Heston, they could do a lot worse than Ms Jolie.
Do readers have any other examples of Hollywood/other actors and actresses who have come out in favour of self defence like this? There must be some, surely.
Ask anyone under a certain age as to whom Bo Diddley was, and you will get a blank stare. But for the generation that grew up listening to the likes of the Rolling Stones – heavily influenced by Bo, as well as Chuck Berry – they will definitely know. As an early 40-something, I grew up in a very different era but I also had heard of the guy and was encouraged to listen to a few of his tunes by an old friend. He’s great. I particularly like the tune, “Roadrunner” – ideal fodder for the car stereo, blasting at full volume while you are driving a convertible with the hood down and driving fast.
Sadly, the maestro died a few days ago. Those hipsters at the Reason Hit & Run blog have put up a nice set of links to music of the master. He will be greatly missed.
Here’s an album of some of his greatest hits.
Andrew Sullivan, who supports Barack Obama despite the latter’s Big Government views and the former’s alleged hatred of said, comes up with a defence of Obama’s recent resignation from his church, of which Obama has been a member for over two decades:
The glee with which some have pounced on Obama’s decision to quit TUCC strikes me as unbecoming to anyone who takes faith seriously.
Maybe the “glee” has to do with the way that the rather sanctimonious Mr Obama has, to coin a popular phrase, thrown his old church under a bus lest his membership of a church involving the likes of nutjob Jeremiah Wright damage his run at the White House. Naturally, Sullivan, whose defence of Obama gets daily more desperate, will not countenance the idea. Let’s just ask ourselves whether he would be so obliging about say, a Republican candidate that had been a member of a church taking a “Christianist” (ie, traditional Christian) view of things like gay marriage, for instance. Well, to quote the late Enoch Powell, to ask the question is to know the answer.
Some time ago a commenter on this site pointed out that Sullivan is no longer honest about his political views and motivations, not even with himself.
In case anyone asks, I support gay marriage. The state should be out of the business of regulating marriage between adults, period.
As the UK administration implodes, the sort of idiotic ideas that might once have been swept aside by a pliant media can be now guaranteed to get wide coverage. The Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, is obviously determined that Mr Brown’s fall from grace is swift and brutal. Oh but the voters are going to like this:
Islamic extremists could escape prosecution and instead receive therapy and counselling under new Government plans to “deradicalise” religious fanatics.
The Home Office is to announce an extra £12.5 million to support new initiatives to try to stop extremism spreading.
What, so being an Islamist is like being an alcoholic or crack addict. I am not sure how Muslims will react to the idea that the more extreme representatives of their faith are somehow mentally ill. In a way, the therapy culture undermines what ought to be the most important message of all: that we are rational, responsible beings, with free will, able to take the consequences of our behaviour. Islam means “submission”: to challenge that viewpoint does not involve putting some hate-filled fuckwit on a couch, but by advocating the values of reason and freedom without apology.
The idea that our tax pounds should be used in some daft attempt to “cure” Islamic fanatics is frankly laughable. It also shows how profoundly unserious this government is about the problem. What next, therapy for “extreme” Christians, Jews, atheists, Communists, Fascists, Jedi Knights (okay, that was meant as a joke), Jehovah’s Witnesses?
When Islamic extremists are caught for offences of violence or plotting terror, the correct object of public spending should be on things like these instead.
Here is a long and quite good article at the Wall Street Journal about the recent ban on consumption of alcohol on London’s underground metro system. The ban is one of the first measures of the new London mayor, Boris Johnson. On Saturday, with the clock ticking away before the ban came into force from 1 June, large numbers of young people – they seemed to be mostly a bunch of young students – were openly drinking, some playing lots of music, and generally whooping it up on the Tube. Yours truly and Mrs P. forgot all about the ban and so we got a bit of a shock when, on the Circle line, our cabin was full of these raucous, and already extremely drunk, folk. They seemed pretty good natured although I was already betting that the end would end in arrests. It did. Walking by High Street Kensington Tube station later on, I could hear the PA system blare out the message that the station was being closed. In the end, 17 people were arrested for crimes including assault.
I guess this proves Boris’s point for him. Some liberal-minded folk might claim that his ban on drinking on the Tube is nanny statism, not what one would expect from the fun-loving newspaper columnist, former MP and bon viveur. Mind you, defending the right of people to drink and get slammed on the Tube late at night is not the sort of freedom I am particularly inclined to go over the top for. It is not an obvious assault on private property rights as was, say, the banning of smoking in pubs and restaurants. The Tube, after all, receives tax funds and is not a completely private entity. If it were, then the owners could of course decide the matter. They might even ban it anyway to protect the bulk of people who find it possible to travel from A to B without holding a can of beer.
Whether the ban can be properly enforced or not is another matter. I expect a raging trade in small, easy-to-conceal hipflasks.
If a Mafia don forced you and your neighbours to pay him protection and he later had the brass neck to claim that you were getting great value for money instead of the services offered by free marketeers, I think you would, humble reader, suspect a bit of a flaw in the logic. Well, that flaw appears to be lost on the author of a piece that carries the headline, “Why Jonathan Ross is worth the money”. For people who have been blessed with ignorance as to whom Ross is, he is a foul-mouthed, extremely well paid late-night chatshow host and movie pundit who, among other recent glittering performances, told the US actress Gwyneth Paltrow and mother of two children that he’d like to f**k her. Classy.
Excerpt:
The most important thing is that in everything the BBC does, the trust is looking for it to demonstrate as often as possible an understanding that it must justify the licence fee by striving constantly to deliver the highest standards and programmes that stand out from the crowd.
The public values talented performers – but expects, rightly, that it will get the best possible value when paying for them.
The author of this piece forgets that value is in the eye of the beholder. If I think that I get value for money for shopping in Tesco’s, Sainsbury’s or Walmart, that is my judgement, made on the basis of my choice, for specific goods that I happen to buy. If one of those supermarket chains demanded that I pay them a flat fee every year regardless of whether I shopped there or not, and claimed that its services/goods were “great value for money”, and employed loutish staff, I think I might be a tad unimpressed by that logic.
The only way to know if the BBC offers value for money is to let customers pay for it out of their own free will. Everything else is special pleading.
Via the Boing Boing website – is this superb picture. Enjoy.
“Happily, we were indestructible. We didn’t need seat belts, airbags, smoke detectors, bottled water or the Heimlich manoeuvre. We didn’t require child safety caps on our medicines. We didn’t need helmets when we rode our bikes or pads for our knees and elbows when we went skating. We knew without being reminding that bleach was not a refreshing drink and that gasoline when exposed to a match had a tendency to combust. We didn’t have to worry about what we ate because nearly all foods were good for us: sugar gave us energy, red meat made us strong, ice cream gave us healthy bones, coffee kept us alert and purring productively.”
– Bill Bryson, The Live and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, page 106.
I adore this book.
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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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