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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Jesse Walker has a nice piece in Reason magazine about whether U.S. state agencies like the FCC should ban cinemas from trying to jam calls to mobile phones. Seems a pretty clear-cut case to me – so long as the jamming is made clear to customers before they buy a ticket, then the cinemas, if they are commercial entities and privately owned, are entitled to do this. Cinemas that are privately owned can set whatever rules on the behaviour of customers that they like, including telling them, on pain of expulsion, to turn mobiles off or to silent, to observe minimal standards of dress code, and whatever.
In my own cinema-going experience in Britain and the United States, I have hardly ever been inconvenienced by mobile users, although I may have been lucky. Once, in a stifling hot cinema in Chelsea, I sat next to a rather annoying French couple, one of whom insisted on phoning her friends several times and who finally shut up after another customer told them to do so. Most people seem to get the message to turn the things off or to silent mode.
I guess what this story tells us is how people are almost surgically attached to their phones (one day that may literally be true, perhaps in a few decades time). I have occasionally gone out from my flat without a mobile phone and felt almost naked without it, but also experienced a certain freedom of being out of reach for an hour or so. It is almost as if I have forgotten what it is like not to be contactable instantly via these machines.
A final etiquette point is that I notice people are often less punctual for meetings sometimes because there is this assumption in the back of folks’ minds that they can just “phone ahead” and say that they are going to be late. Before mobiles existed, if people did not keep an appointment, it did not happen. Perhaps one side effect of mobile phones then is to make us less rigorous in sticking to a schedule. It is not a good or bad thing, but that seems to be the pattern.
It appears my faint optimism of yesterday was misplaced. The House of Lords has agreed a compromise on ID cards which means they will go ahead. This Reuters report makes it clear that the cards are the most ambitious such cards to be attempted in terms of the data to which they draw access.
They will prove a costly and oppressive fiasco. Perhaps that is Blair’s main legacy.
The House of Lords, Britain’s upper chamber in Parliament, has thrown out government proposals on identity cards in the UK.
If anyone needed any doubt on the likely disaster that ID cards would prove to be, read this by Henry Porter. Even those inclined to roll their eyes at our libertarian worries might get the jitters about the details of Porter’s article, even if only a part of what he says is true.
The fight is not over yet.
Entrepreneurs are the leading men of capitalism, the venturesome protagonists who move the plot forward. But economic theory gives them few if any lines to read.
The Economist.
I think that the economics profession is showing a bit more interest in entrepreneurship, at least since the 1980s. The “Austrian” school that gave us the likes of von Mises, Ludwig Lachmann and Israel Kirzner, for instance, puts the entrepreneur pretty much front and centre of the economic picture. For sheer gusto in defending the entrepreneur, there is still to this day no better advocate in my view than George Gilder.
The UK’s Channel 4 news channel tends, in my experience, to cover the news with a fairly obvious leftist slant, so it was quite a surprise this evening to watch the programme’s longish report about what is going on in Venezuela, focussing on the activities of President Chavez and his increasingly dictatorial leanings.
I have a very rough-and-ready theory, which holds that countries blessed with vast natural resources are, in some senses, cursed. Venezuela is one of the world’s top oil producers and at a time when crude is trading at the present high levels, it means that a demagogue like Chavez can buy favours with selected groups for quite a while. A country not so blessed — such as Hong Kong say — has to live on its free market wits. In some cases an oil-rich place — such as Dubai, which I mentioned a while ago — is led by folk with the wit to develop its economy with a mind on what will happen when the black gold runs out.
This blog does not seem to like Chavez very much. As and when his government falls, it will not be a pleasant process.
The new film, V for Vendetta, based on the British comic strip (like so many movies are these days), is an absolute crackerjack of a production, in my view. I watched it last night, having already acquired an outline of what the plot is about from scanning comics over the years, but unlike some transfers from comic to the screen, this film works very well.
It is set in a Britain about 20 or so years from now, a Britain governed by a regime obsessed by managing the citizenry for their own good (sounds familiar), hooked on propoganda and the management of expectations (ditto), scornful of history and traditions (see above), deeply corrupt (recognise anything?) and also quick to resort to violence. Against this is a masked character modelling himself on Guy Fawkes, a character who, in the early 17th Century, attempted to blow up the Houses of Parliament.
And that is what exactly is the aim of the character “V” in this film. Now, in an age of justifiable fears about terrorism, my first instinct was to recoil at the plot, but in fact if you read this film on a certain level, it is great propoganda against overmighty, corrupt authority, and a celebration of freedom, rather than the sort of totalitarian agenda espoused by the likes of radical Islamists in our own day. It may not be an explicitly libertarian film, but it is unquestionably an anti-authortarian one.
Also, any film that contains the following line has to be a must-see for Samizdata regulars:
“People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.”
Not bad, not bad at all.
UPDATE: Objectivist writer Bob Bidinotto, a man who is a fine judge of films, dissents from my positive take on the movie, at least as far as this comment suggests. I agree that this is a flawed film – some of its points are a bit silly – but its overall message is about the need to keep vigilant against the abuse of power, something that a citizen living in a country framed by Jefferson, Madison and Adams would surely understand. Remember, the Founding Fathers were all thought of as subversive pains in the ass in their day. → Continue reading: A fine film
One of my least favourite UK firms is Capita (unaffectionately known as Crapita in some parts), a firm that provides the systems that help run things like the BBC television licence (boo!) and the London Congestion charge (qualified hiss), and which may, perhaps, be involved in operating a proposed national ID card (that would qualify for hurricane force boos all round). Well, in the light of such observations, this is rather interesting, is it not?
The chairman of Capita Group, a services company with government contracts, resigned on Thursday following publicity over a 1-million-pound loan he made to the Labour Party
It is important to remember that businesses like Capita are hardly paragons of capitalist virtue, in my opinion. Capita makes money from things like the licence fee, which essentially extorts money from people who own a TV set, even if they do not watch BBC programmes. If I were an ethical investment fund manager, I would refuse to own its stock on principle.
By the way, the idea of naming and shaming businesses, politicians and individuals involved with intrusive businesses like Capita was mentioned on Samizdata last summer. It will be interesting to see what else happens in the loans-for-peerages affair.
No wonder Blair looked miserable on Budget day yesterday.
Fans of the great Stanley Kubrick satire, Dr Strangelove, will struggle to suppress a wry smile over this story:
Fluoride in drinking water – long controversial in the United States when it is deliberately added to strengthen teeth – can damage bones and teeth, and federal standards fail to guard against this, the National Academy of Sciences reported on Wednesday.
The vast majority of Americans – including those whose water supply has fluoride added — drink water that is well below the limit for fluoride levels set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
Maybe all that stuff about flouride in the water being a crazy Commie plot may not have been so nuts after all. On the other hand…
“The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom is courage”.
Pericles’ Funeral Oration (431 BC)
This quotation was always attached to emails many of us used to get from Dr. Chris R. Tame, Libertarian Alliance founder, who died earlier this week. I find it a highly appropriate quotation.
This does not look good for ol’ big ears, does it?
A “cash-for-favours” row threatening Prime Minister Tony Blair has sent his approval rating to its lowest level since he come to power in 1997, according to a poll published on Sunday. The controversy erupted this month when it was disclosed that several wealthy businessmen were nominated for seats in the House of Lords after lending large sums of money to the Labour Party
It is becoming harder and harder to figure out the difference between Blair and the sort of operators who held sway in the Prime Ministerial offices of Italy, Japan and parts of Latin America for much of the last 100 years.
I repeat what I said a couple of days back: I predict Blair will be out of Downing Street in 12 months from now. This stuff is starting to pile on him with increasing weight.
“This film cost $31 million. With that kind of money I could have invaded some country.”
Clint Eastwood. I wonder what particular country he had in mind.
Andrew Sullivan:
It strikes me that people with a secure sense of their own faith are often the least liable to get upset by parodies or comedies about it. Religions may deal in divine truths, but they are run by human beings. And the combination is often funny. True believers know that; and don’t care when they’re made fun of. Insecure believers – and they often need fundamentalism to keep their own souls untroubled by doubt – are the touchiest.
I am writing this in the wee island of Malta, a country which has one of the largest church attendances per head of any country in the world, from what I understand. (The Maltese have churches with the same frequency as golf courses in Florida). And yet the good-natured folk of this island strike me as taking pretty much the sort of robust attitude to their faith as Sully mentions. (Why are you blogging and not on the beach, Ed?)
And interestingly, his point applies just as forcefully to other, non-religious beliefs too. Humour can be a weapon but it is also a shield.
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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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