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 have noticed that quite a few libertarian-minded folk, including the late, great science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein, have been interested in exploring the ramifications of extended human life spans.
After all, if you believe in the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, then I suppose it is a natural concomitant to be interested in pushing the envelopes of life as far back as possible. Why bother to settle for three-score years and ten? And of course the demise of religious belief among many in the West – though not elsewhere – has given a certain poignant edge to the avoidance of death for as long as possible.
Extending life spans has all kinds of economic, cultural and philosophical implications. If people know they have a much greater chance of living longer than their parents, it could effect career choices, child-rearing, and behaviour patterns in the broadest sense. Extending life spans may make people more cautious and risk-averse in some ways, perhaps accentuating the current vogue for pursuit of the healthy life and increasing pressure on practises like smoking and alcohol consumption. It may also encourage positive behaviours, encouraging people to think more about the long-term effects of their actions. If you know there is a good chance of your making it to 150 years old, it may tend to affect the way you behave now.
There is a long and interesting article on CNN full of details about new scientific advances. I don’t necessarily accept all its conclusions but it has plenty of food for thought on this fascinating topic.
Here’s a random thought – intellectuals with good ideas and boundless curiosity often outlive their peers. Hayek made it to 90, Milton Friedman has just enjoyed his 91st trip round the sun and Karl Popper also made it past 90. Maybe Samizdata should launch a range of health products with the slogan – liberty for a longer life!
Aaron Barschak, the loon who thought it was amusing to dress up as bin Laden and gatecrash a fancy dress party hosted by the Royals, has not been able to draw in the crowds at the Edinburgh arts festival this year, according to this report.
The gag is definitely on him. Here’s hoping he crawls under a rock where he came from. Sorry to be killjoy, but dressing up as terrorist is not my idea of a joke.
Veteran Labour MP, fierce opponent of the European Union and one of the more congenial politicians, Austin Mitchell, has his own blog. Mitchell is a pretty outspoken MP, and though his mixed-economy Keynsian economic views are hopelessly wrong-headed and out of date, he is one of the more independent minded MPs in our rather colourless political landscape.
I had a brief look at his blog and it should be good to read, though Austin had better be prepared for how fellow bloggers will be ready and willing to ‘fact-check his ass’ at a moment’s notice.
Come on you Tory MPs, get a blog!
One of the few drama series worth watching over at the BBC (sharp intake of breath!) is the programme Spooks, which purports to show how M15, Britain’s secret service, operates. A short while ago, an episode featured how the various operatives dealt with radical Islamic terrorism.
What interested me was the very fact that such a controversial topic would be aired by the BBC at all. The series tended to start off with a decidedly politically-correct slant, so broaching the topic of Islamo-fascist terror was quite brave. Makes me wonder how the script-writers were able to get this episode on screen.
Well, as this story shows, the episide triggered a number of complaints, claiming the programme was racially stereotyped. But then it is a bit difficult to do a programme about spies taking on the likes of al-Quaeda and it not to encounter such an issue, I would have thought.
More broadly, though, this got me thinking about how television and movie dramas have handled issues like this over the years. In the early James Bond movies, for example, the bad guys were either Russians or former Smersh agents, but as the series progressed and got ever more silly during the Roger Moore era, the villains became less ‘political’, no doubt to avoid the kind of complaints that Spooks has encountered.
There have always been a few interesting exceptions, though. Some of the Tom Clancy books adapted for film touched on issues like Northern Ireland, although often not very convincingly.
Do I detect a change in trend? The American series “24”, for example, makes no bones about enormously contentious issues. I think people want a bit more hard-edged realism in their dramas, and if that means upsetting some people, so be it.
However, I am not sure whether 007 will be staging his next adventure in Bagdhad any time soon.
You don’t have to hold an anti-interventionist stance regarding Iraq to feel mighty queasy about this story in the Washington Post, which covers a case where the U.S. Army seized the family of an Iraqi officer, threatening to hold the family until the person concerned co-operated with the Army’s requests.
Lovely. If the coalition wants to hand propaganda material on a plate to those who would have preferred Saddam to remain in charge than that we should have liberated that country, then this sort of thing is just ideal.
I hope the persons responsible are dealt with harshly for this.
And I don’t want lots of comments about how “Pearce has turned into a peacnik idiot yada-yada”. Kidnapping is wrong. Period.
Blogger Jim Henley of Unqualified Offerings looks into the issue of American football teams whose names have sparked controversy, such as teams calling themselves the Redskins, and so on. Now I don’t want to enter the swamps of that particular controversy, which Jim negotiates with customary dexterity. No what struck me is this – why don’t European sports teams have such names at all?
For example, consider the Premiership football (soccer to you barbarians in the colonies) league. The teams are called Manchester United, Liverpool FC, Tottenham Hotspur, etc. Not many references to ethnic groups there (though of course football does have its ethnic issues, as any Glasgow Rangers or Celtic fan would point out). The nomaclature of football is pretty tame, even while the makeup of the teams and the fans is not.
Look elsewhere. English cricket teams are named after counties of England. All very staid. Of course when you go outside the field of professional sports, it can get a bit more interesting. I occasionally play cricket for a side called The Pretenders. (My favourite cricket team was called The Corridor of Uncertainty!). But at the professional level at least, British teams sound about as exciting as a German movie without the subtitles.
Why are our teams sporting such dull names compared to our American cousins? I need enlightenment on this subject.
Angelina Jolie, curvaceous star of the latest movie based on mega-hit computer game, Tomb Raider, reckons that the busty, heavily-armed heroine is a role model for women. Hmmm. An interesting thought. Croft knows how to handle guns, is mighty tough in a fight, and is rather easy on the eye (as Ms Jolie assuredly is). The ultimate libertarian heroine, perhaps?
A feature of popular culture in these past few years has been the ascent of the kick-ass female movie/tv star. Think of Buffy, for example; the character Trinity in the Matrix films, or the ladies on Charlies’ Angels. I think the whole thing got started with the likes of Honor Blackman and Diana Rigg in the old Avengers television series, and in some of the better James Bond movies.
One thing all these women have in common is that they are a million miles away from the ‘victim culture’. Nothing passive or helpless about them. It seems that popular culture is diverging increasingly from the political and legal realm. On the one hand, you have superheroes and heroines on the Big Screen. On the other, you have twerps suing fast-food joints for ‘making’ them fat.
I wonder what explains this divide?
I have been enjoying the television documentary of the American war of Independence shown over on the BBC (yes, that pinko channel!), presented by military historian Richard Holmes.
Bestriding around the countryside, Holmes is excellent. He even looks the part with his bearing and military moustache – you could imagine him in an army officer’s uniform circa 1940.
During his trip Holmes asked some locals on a bus travelling near Charleston about what the war meant to them. One elderly lady gave an articulate take, arguing about the issues of taxation, representation and liberty. And then he spoke to a young guy, probably in his early 20s, who came out with this gem. I paraphrase slightly:
Well, it was all about rich folks, who just did not want to pay their taxes. If it hadn’t been for them, we’d be British, and enjoy (!) socialised medicine.
So there you have it. Some of the younger American generation wish that George Washington had lost so that all Americans could use the National Health Service.
Don’t know whether to laugh or cry, really.
Dale Amon on these pages rightly notes the anniversary of the Moon landings of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. Well, it seems that another Armstrong is pushing back the boundaries of the possible on a slightly lower-altitude setting, in the current Tour de France.
Yes, I know, and before any churlish types feel the urge to carp, cycling is not exactly the most visually exciting sport around. But anyone who has actually taken part in competitive cycling, or seen, as I have, such folk shoot past on a French mountain pass, can only gasp in astonishment at what Lance Armstrong has achieved.
And being nice to the French, there can be few doubts that the Tour is one of the most physically demanding sports events known to Man.
Mind you, the next time I go to France, I am taking the autoroute.
Formula One motor racing has suffered from becoming increasingly dull as a spectacle in recent years. There seems to be less overtaking. The cars often look silly with their gaudy advertising and don’t have the aesthetic grace of old. Partly, I think, this perception of dullness is down to the increasingly safe nature of the sport. It is a terrible thing for folk to admit, but it is now much more difficult for a motor racer to get killed than during the heyday of Fangio and Jim Clark (arguably the two greatest drivers ever). I have actually driven around the old Nurburgring circuit in the Rhineland area of Germany – the track that nearly killed Nikki Lauda back in the mid-1970s. I was driving in a regular saloon car with my Dad and got out, shaking and trembling after negotiating the twists and turns of the track. How a driver could have thrown one of those massive old Auto-Unions or Mercedes around such a track and emerge unscathed is a miracle. No wonder the Germans rebuilt this fearsome track into something much safer
So maybe the loon who chose to walk on to the circuit at Britain’s Silverstone track on Sunday was trying to inject an element of raw danger back into the sport. It was very lucky – and also a tribute to the bravery of the one of the track marshalls, that no-one got killed.
What was this twit thinking? No doubt the usual wailers from the nanny state brigade will start demanding all kinds of fresh controls and restrictions. And I have no doubt that our flat-earth chums from the anti-globalista movement will have motor racing in their cross-hairs eventually. All those gas-guzzling fast cars with their C02 emissions, ugh!
Last evening I attended a seminar hosted by the Conservative Party group, cChange on the issue of civil partnerships. Civil partnerships are being advocated by the present Labour government as a way of enabling gay and lesbian couples to legally formalise their relationships in a number of ways, allowing them to take advantage of some, if not all, of the advantages now accruing to married heterosexuals.
I am not going to rehearse all the various arguments in favour or against such a move. Suffice to say that, unless some overwhelming public interest or danger can be shown to exist, the burden of proof should rest on the shoulders of those who would ban any adult – important qualification – wishing to enter into a lifetime commitment with any other person (s). (Yep, that includes polygamy, in case you are asking).
A number of other bloggers much more qualified than I, such as British ex-pat Andrew Sullivan and the group blog at the Volokh Conspiracy have argued as to why gay marriage, for instance, would be entirely consistent with a broadly socially conservative worldview. Sullivan points out that allowing gay men – like himself – to marry would probably reduce, not raise, male promiscuity and actually strengthen the bonds of civil society, including heterosexual marriage.
Last night’s seminar was interesting for several reasons. Arguing for civil partnerships was Conservative MP for Buckingham, John Bercow. Arguing against was Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips. I was pretty impressed by the quality of arguments on both sides. Bercow gave a broadly libertarian argument, one based on the idea that although ‘traditional’ marriage was a Good Thing, there was nothing so fragile about it that enabling non-straights to marry would send the world spinning out of control. → Continue reading: Civil unions
It is getting mighty hot around here. For the last few days I have been saying a silent prayer to the inventor of modern office air conditioning. Without such technology, it is hard to imagine how much of our present-day economy could work at the pace it does. Large parts of the southern U.S., for example, as well as financial hubs like Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Frankfurt would be unworkable.
Come to think of it, air-conditioning is probably one of the most economically significant inventions of our time. It may even be more important than the internet, though I may be shot for even suggesting this.
Meanwhile, this report has some sizzling stats on how hot it is getting. I am a bit of a skeptic on the issue of the Greenhouse Effect, and naturally suspicious of the Green agenda thereon, but it is easy to see how this theory gains traction in such sweltering conditions as we have at the moment.
Right, time for an ice-cream.
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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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