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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Christopher Hitchens recently mentioned a small, if telling example, of how Hillary Clinton fibbed about how she got her first name. It is a small detail, not the sort of thing to necessarily cause my blood pressure to rise dangerously, but it is revealing about what sort of character she is. Rather like Tony Blair claiming to have seen Newcastle FC legend Jackie Milburn, when that would have been an impossible feat, given Blair’s age when he made the claim.
These little details, they get noticed.
It was a bit of a shock to read, in my old local newspaper, that F-15 fighter/bomber aircraft used by the US Airforce are suffering quite so much from wear and tear. They are currently based at RAF Lakenheath, west Suffolk.
At one stage, East Anglia, the flat bit of the UK, was rather like a gigantic airfield with more than 100 airfields for British and American fighters, bombers, recon aircraft and transportation. Even after WW2, when the Liberators, Flying Fortresses, Mustangs and Thunderbolts no longer buzzed around, the area played host to the jets of the Cold War era. It was a common experience on my parent’s farm to be walking around and suddenly, at about 100ft above the ground, a pair of Jaguar jets or an American A-10 “tankbuster” would come over (the latter was eerily quiet, and had an enormous 30mm cannon mounted in the nose). Now it is almost all gone. In a silly sort of way I rather miss the din of jet aircraft. But then, we won the Cold War. It is never a mistake to remind ourselves of that fact.
Check out this Bloomberg headline. No doubt one of the editors thought this was nicely “ironic”, etc, and I get their point. Even so, I fail to see why a Vegas stripper or waiter is not as able to judge the wisdom of where to put nuclear waste as say, Hillary Clinton.
The Daily Telegraph asks:
“Just what do chalet girls get up to?”
I have been skiing several times and judging by the partying I er, saw (honest, guv), quite a good deal. As for the chaps, well…
For, despite the warnings of the accursed health and safety apparatchiks, who enjoy nothing more than closing paths of self-discovery, the human spirit will not be tamed. That is the important lesson of Hillary’s life, a lesson that is worth passing on to children growing up in a world where everything must be measured and known.
– Michael Henderson, talking about the late Sir Edmund Hillary, who died last week:
Although I like a lot of its articles, I have to say I got irritated with some of the intellectual flabbiness of Reason magazine a few months ago and my subscription lapsed. I am also trying to save a bit of money and realise that I have rather lot of subscriptions as it is. The magazine spends too much of its time desperately trying to make libertarianism cool and funky by devoting so much stuff to drugs etc, for my liking; but I do check out its website and I enjoy reading its writers such as Brian Doherty. But something of its old hard edge has gone. Maybe I am just becoming an old git (I am sure readers will agree).
It appears one of its former editors, Virginia Postrel, is none too impressed by the judgement of some the magazine’s writers. This has to hurt:
I do fault my friends at Reason, who are much cooler than I’ll ever be and who, scornful of the earnestness that takes politics seriously, apparently didn’t do their homework before embracing Paul as the latest indicator of libertarian cachet. For starters, they might have asked my old boss Bob Poole about Ron Paul; I remember a board member complaining about Paul’s newsletters back in the early ’90s. Besides, people as cosmopolitan as Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch should be able to detect something awry in Paul’s populist appeals. (Note that by “cosmopolitan” I do not mean “Jewish.” I mean cosmopolitan.) I suspect they did but decided it was more useful to spin things their way than to take Paul’s record and ideas seriously. As for Andrew Sullivan, his political infatuations are not his strong point as a commentator.
The line right at the end about Sullivan is a devastating put-down for being so polite.
This has been out a while and is now available in paperback so quite a lot of eminent historians have already gushed, justifiably, about this outstanding account of the religious turmoil that seized much of western, central and southern Europe between 1500 and 1700. Diarmaid MacCulloch, a senior Oxford academic, has written what I would chalk up as one of the best-ever accounts of this period. He is ruthlessly fair-minded and sympathetic, fighting the urge to make simplistic points (although there is a dry sense of humour throughout). He makes it clear that the Reformation should emphatically not be confused with liberalism; Luther, Calvin and Knox may have inadvertently set in train some of the moves that have led to a more individualistic society but that was not their primary purpose. And although he is justifiably scathing about the horrors of the Inquisition in Catholic Spain and elsewhere, he points out, for example, that the mania for witch-burning occured both in Protestant and Catholic lands (in my own native East Anglia, the witch-hunting obsessions of the 17th Century led to a lot of brutality, for example).
This is the sort of book I wished I could have read while reading history as an under-graduate. It goes without saying that it has relevance for our own time in figuring out what to make of Islamic fundamentalism, among other things.
How odd it is that we in the West seem to have only two ways of thinking about politics – either supreme cynicism or supreme credulousness.
– David Aranovich, who is not entirely impressed by the Barack Obama phenomenon. Count me in on that.
I have quite liked the music of Joe Jackson but I did not realise he had such sound views on things like personal liberty. Check out his site.
Imagine telling somebody twenty years ago that by 2007, it would be illegal to smoke in a pub or bus shelter or your own vehicle or that there would be £80 fines for dropping cigarette butts, or that the words “tequila slammer” would be illegal or the government would mandate what angle a drinker’s head in an advertisement may be tipped at, or that it would be illegal to criticise religions or homosexuality, or rewire your own house, or that having sex after a few drinks would be classed as rape or that the State would be confiscating children for being overweight. Imagine telling them the government would be contemplating ration cards for fuel and even foods, that every citizen would be required to carry an ID card filled with private information which could be withdrawn at the state’s whim. They’d have thought you a paranoid loon.
– Samizdata commenter Ian B. We do not have to imagine these things any more, alas. The only problem with his quote is that he omitted to mention assault on jury trials, Habeas Corpus, double-jeopardy…
In some of the recent understandable moans about the sheer awfulness of Britain’s state-controlled rail network – please don’t try and tell me it has much to do with laissez faire capitalism – several commentators have complained about the dearth of people entering the fields of engineering. Jeff Randall in today’s Daily Telegraph does so. Various reasons are given for this lack of talent: the education system, an anti-science, anti-technology culture, etc. While some of these factors have a part to play in this, I do not think these explanations get to the core of the issue. If railway engineers do not earn large salaries and the job is not seen to be worth the hassle compared with say, becoming a hedge fund manager in London’s West End, it is not a surprise to see what will happen. If or when the remuneration for being a new Brunel rivals or even exceeds that of being a Goldman Sachs derivatives dealer, we will get more engineers, and of higher quality. It is that simple.
Or maybe one problem is that railways, perhaps because of the problems now facing the UK industry, are seen as just plain dull. As Randall says, confessing to being a railway engineer may not always be a great move at a dinner party, or for that matter, on a hot date. I am not sure how one changes that.
A smaller state in Victorian terms isn’t on the cards. The electorate would take flight at such talk. What the electorate is after, however, is a redrawing of the state’s boundaries. There is no fall in demand for collective services like health and education but voters are seeking two clear advances in their freedom from such a redrawing exercise. The first is to gain greater freedom from a centrally run ration book-type state service where there is a set menu, often a single item, that has to be consumed at a certain time. The second demand is for taxpayers to use their own money to run their own services.
– Frank Field, Labour MP. He is probably right, but once people get into this habit of choosing to live their lives as they please, who knows where it may end up.
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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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