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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Today, it is May 1, the day when we celebrate the greatest thing to benefit the living standards, opportunities and happiness of ordinary working people – capitalism.
I could wax lyrical, cite lots of clever books and such like, but I thought this item, via Reuters, surely says it all.
Shares of the bordello enterprise, which hired Hollywood Madam Heidi Fleiss to spice up its stock listing and touts itself as a recession-proof, five-star hotel, doubled on their first day of trading on Thursday.
About 1.4 million shares of the company — called The Daily Planet — changed hands.
“Obviously the price is going to go up. It’s sex…and everyone knows sex is a smart investment,” Fleiss told reporters just before the shares started trading.
God bless capitalism!
I came across this article, via Jim Henley, and the piece does raise some uncomfortable – to put it mildly – questions about how advocates of the recent Iraq war should feel if it turns out that Bush and Blair told untruths (perish the thought) about the existence and scale of WMDs in Iraq.
If Bush, Powell and the Rest lied deliberately to us to boost the case for war, then that is baaaaaad news, in my view. For starters, pro-war folk like me who took the stance we did on proactive self defence will feel betrayed. We have been made to look like twerps. Yes, I know that you might argue that we should not have been so naive in the first place (ever trust a politician?), but the WMD threat seemed to be pretty genuine, if only because of what happened under Saddam’s rule these past two decades or more. And of course the onus was on him, not us, to comply with the terms laid down by United Nations weapons inspectors. He didn’t as even Hans Blix’s report made clear shortly before hostilities commenced. Even so, the feeling of betrayal will be immense if turns out that Bush and Blair seriously exaggerated the evidence.
Which may suggest that our whole approach to self defence needs a major rethink. It suggests to me that the CIA and other intelligence services in the west require a massive overhaul, if not outright abolition. I haven’t seen any examples in the media of such folk getting the sack. Far too many of them have been allowed to stay in their cushy jobs despite manifestly screwing up. If it turns out that they gave false info to gin up the case for war, that is very bad.
And in case any warbloggers’ blood pressure is rising dangerously about the above two paragraphs, no, I am of course thrilled we stiffed the Ba’ath regime in Iraq, but forgive me, that wasn’t the original reason why we committed blood and treasure to deal with Saddam.
Nice article in Wired on how playing video games is helping youngsters to think better, therby overcoming the obstacles put in their way by our dumbed-down education system. Hmm. Food for thought. Any, this screed by James Paul Gee perhaps suggests that homeschooling parents should ensure their children play certain types of game as a key element of the learning process. I must say I never thought that Doom or Grand Theft Auto as agents of learning, but the world is a strange place.
I liked this paragraph:
We don’t often think about videogames as relevant to education reform, but maybe we should. Game designers don’t often think of themselves as learning theorists. Maybe they should. Kids often say it doesn’t feel like learning when they’re gaming – they’re much too focused on playing. If kids were to say that about a science lesson, our country’s education problems would be solved.
In other words, all those kids out playing computer games are no cause for concern. They are our next Edisons, Feynmans and Bill Gateses.
Okay, enough about Iraq. Something even more unpleasant – the sheer din experienced these days while shopping. I am not talking about the noise caused by the clack of shoes on a floor, or the natural bustle of a busy marketplace. This is all part of the deal and can often create a buzz which is almost pleasant. No – and I sense this is my old age creeping in – what gets on my nerves is the loud pop music din which seems to be a standard feature of shops these days.
Example. At lunchtime today your humble scribe went to a shop in central London to get a new mobile phone. Okay, the staff were no more surly, badly dressed or inarticulate than most, but that was not the problem. The problem was that it was if I had strayed into a particularly bad nightclub by mistake. I could hardly hear myself think as I went through the options of a mobile phone deal. Craziness.
My grouches besides, what motivates the owners of shops to blast out music like this? Is there some philosophy which has worked through the shopping world in the UK – I cannot vouch for other nations – which says that the more loud music we have, the more we will buy? I don’t honestly know about that, but for me, the sheer loudness of some of the music played these days often encourages me to leave a building as soon as possible. I guess I am not the only person to feel this way. Maybe some shrewd shopping entrepreneur could steal a march on his rivals by setting up calm, music-free shops.
If anyone reading this actually works in the retail business and can explain the current fashion for piping loud music in shops, your comments would be most welcome.
The Christian Science Monitor, which is not exactly a regular read for yours truly, says it has further documents alleging that Labour MP and all-round jackass George Galloway was on the take from the late unlamented Iraqi regime. Well – we shall see.
A point strikes me – is a man’s views about certain issues automatically more suspect if he has been receiving cash payments? It is sometimes claimed, for example by anti-smoking fanatics, that the views of libertarians on the smoking issue are invalid if they have, for example, been working for a big tobacco firm like BAT or Philip Morris. But surely we need to focus on the validity of the views themselves, and not whether they were given by people receiving money.
Ultimately, whether Galloway did or did not receive payments will not substantially alter my views of him. Even if he had not received a single penny from Saddam, I still regard Galloway as a vile individual for his shameless defence of Saddam’s regime over many years. In some ways, if he held his views for free and was truly sincere, it almost makes it worse.
Well, the hunt is still on for possible instruments of Mass Death in Iraq, and so far, from what I have seen and read, not a great deal has yet been found.
Should advocates of military action to deal with this possible menace like yours truly be now eating vast amounts of humble pie, agree that non-interventionists like Jim Henley were correct all along? Well, not quite.
For starters, it hardly needs to be pointed out that one cannot fight or not fight wars on the basis of 20/20 hindsight. Nothing that Saddam did over the past 12 years, including his devious treatment of UN weapons inspectors, led one to think that simply keeping Hans Blix and co in situ for another year or so would suffice. And I think that Saddam’s past record, such as his gassing of Iraqi villagers, made me doubt he was either deterrable or that he could be made to bend to the will of the arms inspectors.
However (gulp) I am beginning to detect among some pro-war types a clear shift in their stance. We have, so it appears, shifted from the “war is justified to rid Iraq of WMDs and then getting to terrorists” stance to a “Let’s bring peace and democracy to Iraq”. The first stance can be clearly based on self defence, which as a libertarian I have no quarrel with, though interpretation is the hard part. The latter stance, though, however idealistic and admirable as an ideal, smacks of hubristic social engineering.
The folk at the U.S. techie magazine Wired have been celebrating 10 years of existence. On the whole I have enjoyed reading that publication, notwithstanding its occasional teenage-like cockiness, obsession with fashion and suchlike. On the whole I regard their particular northern Californian brand of breezy optimism to be a tonic compared to a lot of doom and gloom stuff that comes our way. They are also consistent defenders of privacy and exude a pretty strong libertarian cultural vibe, though many of their authors could not be classed as out and out libertarians.
In the April edition, Wired got two authors, Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall to write about the need for the U.S. government to launch a $100 billion venture on getting the country linked up to hydrogen power in order to wean Americans off their addiction to oil. A lot of reasons are given, many of them pretty obvious, such as reducing reliance on oil from the instable Middle East and reducing carbon dioxide emissions because of the so-called Greenhouse effect.
Their article contains a lot of impressive facts and figures as well as calls to embark on a hydrogen project with the same fervour that JFK asked Americans to put a man on the Moon. But that is my problem with this article, as it applies just as much to Britain as it does to the U.S.A. Surely, do we really want vast amounts of taxpayers’ money spent encouraging big energy firms to move into this technology, when that is bound to provide endless opportunities for pork-barrel politics, and the like? And while it was a magnificent achievement, putting men on the Moon came at a vast cost and the bloated bureacracy of NASA is surely a warning of what can happen with such projects, as Rand Simberg has pointed out many times before.
Ultimately, if the price of oil rises to a level which means sharp entrepreneurs think hydrogen-powered energy solutions make sense, it will happen. After all, the oil industry got started in the late 19th century without a vast government-led project. The best thing governments can do in this area is like pretty much everywhere else – GET OUT OF THE GODDAM WAY!
The recent war in Iraq has of course thrown up many examples of actors and actresses, many of them from Hollywood, who have taken a stand against war. What is interesting is that there appears, according to David Skinner in the Weekly Standard to be a divide in public life between the acting and sports communities, if one can use such a collectivist catch-all term like “community” (yes, I am aware there are nuances here). For example, while “documentary” producer and all-round blowhard leftist (I refuse to be polite) Michael Moore denounces Bush and the war, golfing god Tiger Woods (one of my heroes) takes a diametrically opposite stance, saluting the bravery of American soldiers on his personal website.
What is going on here? For example, I don’t really know what British sportsmen and women like Manchester United’s David Beckham or English cricket captain Nasser Hussein think about such things, although Hussein’s recent decision not to play against Zimbabwe during the World Cup attests to a moral fibre not usually seen among the thespian community. And I admired the fact that Beckham, apparently, asked for the Stars and Stripes to be laid in the mddle of Old Trafford, Manchester United’s home ground, at the start of a match just after 9/11. Skinner reckons that sportsfolk, unlike actors and actresses, have to deal in reality of a sort that makes them better suited to taking a view on issues like war.
I particularly liked this paragraph:
As competitors who directly face opponents, athletes may have less trouble accepting the probability of enmity between nations. They become famous over the strenuous opposition of other people. Their professional lives are in fact defined by antagonism and opposition. They have to individually dominate other players, and help their teams dominate other teams.
While with actors, he says:
when show-business types triumph, victory comes on a wave of public admiration that can make it seem like they were just elected the public’s favorite human being. If competition is the watchword of sports, adoration and acclaim are the watchwords of show business. This kind of career makes for a weak political education as one grapples to understand why a president would take actions certain to make him unpopular in important parts of Europe and elsewhere.
I think he is definitely on to something. Maybe libertarians should forget about ever trying to network in the artistic community and get on the golf course instead.
More evidence, as published by Reuters today (and not in its “oddly enough” pages) is coming out that Saddam’s Iraq was a key supporter of Islamic terror. Looks pretty damning to me.
Come on peaceniks, please tell us this is all a CIA-inspired plot.
A legal fight is being waged by a gentleman to avoid having to pay the detestable British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) licence fee. I honestly do not fancy the chances of a successful outcome to this fight, but good luck to anyone, I say, in taking on the BBC.
The BBC, as has been pointed out on this blog many times before and elsewhere by the likes of Andrew Sullivan, is able to get away with its grotesque bias in reporting on current events, its gloom-ridden soap operas and ghastly “sitcoms” because it is able to shrug off the bracing winds of consumer choice and competition. The BBC does actually have good people working in it (trust me on this). But unless and until the licence fee is consigned to the ash heap of history, expect no serious improvement from that organisation.
I always thought it was one of Margaret Thatcher’s greatest missed opportunities that she did not privatize the BBC.
It has been a regular refrain from the anti-interventionists that there was no real connection between 9/11 and Saddam and that by overthrowing the Iraqi regime, we were diverting valuable resources from the war on terror.
Well, that theory has taken a lot of hits, judging by this story.
In fact, by deposing thuggish regimes such as the unlamented one in Iraq, it makes it easier, by far, for intelligence services of the West to unearth valuable information about terrorists and their whereabouts. Or course in their hearts the peaceniks knew this all along, but no doubt they are now vexed about Iraqis nabbing air-conditioning units from Ba’ath Party headquarters.
Surely Britain’s Paula Radcliffe, who broke her own record by running the London Marathon in just two hours, 15 minutes and 25 seconds must rank as one of the greatest sportsfolk ever.
I watched quite a few of the runners grinding their agonising way along parts of the marathon course on a sun-dappled Sunday afternoon. It was hard not to be swept up in a general feel-good atmosphere. One of my favourite moments was seeing a bunch of guys running while carrying a small rubber boat from the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI), an entirely voluntary charity which is an excellent example of how free men and women can, without the guiding hand of the State, provide such useful services, often at great danger to themselves. Way to go lads!
Of course, in my view anyone who runs in a marathon on a warm afternoon is clearly in need of having their heads examined. What did Man invent Ferraris and Porsches for, for chrissakes?
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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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