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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This morning I ran full tilt into a journalistic conflict of interest issue. I had to pull half of a story because my official position within an organization gave a subcontractor contractual clout. Their rules required a veto over publication of information on the event. The story items were neither earth-shaking nor of great import. Nonetheless, I was not allowed to use information I felt important to my article.
I feel it necessary to state this publicly as a matter of integrity. I do not claim that all blogs and bloggers should or must always do so. It is a matter of their individual choice. You, the reader, will place your trust accordingly.
I know such issues have been discussed here and there in both main stream and the practically main stream of major blogs. I certainly do not think there is any problem that most bloggers have real lives and work with real organizations doing real things. Or that bloggers make little or no pretence of being unbiased angels in white, pure mindless beings with no belief or ideals, capable of weighing ideas as the Egyptian God Ma’at weighed souls. We are not. We have no interest in being boring and unopinionated.
Here at Samizdata we attempt a reasonable level of professionalism in our writing and presentation. I am certain we do not always meet the full level of our aspirations, but we do indeed try. What we can promise is that our biases and conflicts are out on the table for all to see.
It has been said that the Internet, and specifically blogs, are to politics what Sam Colt’s Peacemaker was to the Wild West; an equalizer. That sentiment has apparently been taken to heart by the US Federal Election Commission because, like today’s gun prohibitionists, the FEC wants to take away your individual power and concentrate it in the hands of a chosen few.
A good background description of the bizarre reasons behind this power play can be found here, but basically it is an extension of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, a.k.a. the Incumbent Protection Act. Senators McCain and Feingold, authors of the Reform Act, claim this is not true. Do not be fooled. The FEC is under a Court Order to bring the Internet under Campaign control and MUST COMPLY. It will be done by mid-summer. Failure to abide by the FEC rules will carry some stiff penalties, the mere threat of which will be enough to keep most blogs out of the political arena.
There is, however, some hope. The Internet community is aware of what is going on, and a powerful group called Downsize DC has gotten involved in the fray. They have begun a strong grassroots effort and there is a bill pending in both houses of Congress now that would exempt the Net from the BCRA laws. The Online Freedom of Speech Act is only one line long and already has bipartisan support, albeit at a low level. If you are a US citizen, you can urge your representatives to sponsor the bill by using Downsize DC’s electronic lobbying tool. It only takes a couple minutes and, best of all, it is free – the way internet speech should be.
Ooooh..I am so excited! It will not be long now before I will be able to gorge myself on yet another body of incoherent babbling:
When the website huffingtonpost.com launches on May 9, it will eventually see contributions from Norman Mailer, David Mamet, Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton, Harold Evans, Tina Brown, Gwyneth Paltrow, and the woman who played Elaine in Seinfeld. They will offer a “round the clock commentary on our life and times”…
I don’t know about you, gentle reader, but I am positively aquiver with anticipation to discover what Diane Keaton has to say about my life and times. Yet, my enthusiasm is perhaps somewhat tempered by the inexplicable absence (thus far at any rate) of the great Professor Streisand.
I submit that huffingtonpost.com will prove to be a one-stop, on-line resource for all serious students of thespianomics (advanced module). For everyone else it should be a ‘target-rich environment’.
Enjoy!
It is better to be thought a fool than to
open one’s mouth and remove all doubt
– attributed to various folks
The Sun, a British tabloid newspaper more famous for what happens on page three than its news reporting, has an article on their website called Blogging for your votes written by Corinne Abrams. There are three pictures of young people representing the main parties and under each there is a link to view their ‘blogs’.
Click on one of the links and you get taken to a pop-up window rather like a non-interactive comment pop-up with a single scraggly bit of undated and unlinkable polemical text about their party and views… perhaps I am missing something (if so please set me right!) but that actually appears to be their “blog”!  
Is that really what The Sun thinks a blog is? Given the amount written about blogs in the media these days and the number of journalists who have their own blogs, to drop such a clanger seems extraordinary.
Today’s reason for light blogging is that the Samizdata editors are in Paris(!) attending a blogging conference Les Blogs. Blogging is making some waves in France and this conference is truly international, bloggers from 20 countries are present. We have met many a blogger we have known virtually and putting faces to blogs is always an interesting experience.
For those who are interested in the blog trends and biz, head over to the Big Blog Company blog for some furious blogging of the conference.
Our standing orders on Samizdata are to write not just about certain specific areas of thought and policy, but about what is on our minds. I take this as an invitation to stray beyond the obvious and beyond our core expertises, such as they are. Not everything here is even supposed to make complete sense.
In that spirit, let me tell you about two pieces of writing which, taken together, struck me as interesting. They are pretty interesting even separately, but together they get even more interesting. Anyway, see what you think.
The first piece of writing is a book called The Cradle of Thought, by Peter Hobson, who is an expert on autism, but not only on autism. Hobson’s subject matter is not just the particular form of unusual thought and experience called autism, but also the light that this and other abnormalities throw on the processes of normal human thought. (One of the best ways to understand how something is supposed to work is to examine what happens when something or someone damages it or in some way interrupts its smooth working.)
What comes across from this book is that thinking, of the sort that most of us do most of the time, is an intensely social thing. It starts not just with me thinking about that. It starts with me thinking about that by learning what you already think about that. What you (typically my mother) think(s) is the thing that gets me started with my thinking.
So, if I am the sort of me who is especially disposed not to pay attention to what you (my mum) are (is) thinking, that changes how I think, about everything. I may become very expert, by default, about things, but remain permanently baffled by people, and in particular by the notion that other people have a point of view of their own which I can tune into, and by the idea that other people are accordingly very different from other mere things.
This book seems to be quite well known and quite highly regarded, so there is no shortage of further verbiage to read about it should you feel the urge, now that you have heard a little of my point of view about it.
The other piece of writing was this article and related discussion, about dogs, and about the differences between dogs and such animals as wolves and foxes, which I got to via the ever interesting and stimulating Arts & Letters Daily. → Continue reading: Autism, dogs, etc.
The fine U.S. blogger and libertarian scholar, Tyler Cowen, who’s blog Marginal Revolution is well worth a visit (as if I did not have enough things to read, aarrgghh, Ed) has started a specialist blog devoted to tracking developments and medical research surrounding avian flu. Tyler is clearly worried about the spread of new and more powerful viruses and the threat this poses to the health to millions of people around the world.
Rather interesting, I think, that the Internet, which helps to spread ideas with the speed of a virus, is now spawning blogs which are devoted to actual, existing viruses.
Michael Totten has been putting some rather compelling articles up on his blog from Lebanon. That Michael, who is clearly a ‘glow in the dark American’, should wander into the ‘Hezbollahland’ section of Beirut with a camera suggests to me that he has some serious stones.
Make the strangely named ‘Spirit of America’ Lebanon blog part of your daily bloggage because it is extremely interesting stuff reported from the sharp end… and maybe even drop a dime or two into the plate to help him out.
My good friends who run the Big Blog Company do not like to use Samizdata to promote the Big Blog Company as much as they might, because this is not cool. It is not good blogging practice. But I am only doing this incidentally when I link to the latest posting on their blog. My main purpose is to promote myself, which I suppose is not all that cool either, but there you go.
Said I, here:
A new market is chaotic, and (and this is the point) ignorant. People do not, e.g., know how to spot cowboy operators, or bad products made in all sincerity but badly. Ignorance and foolishness abound, and so to start with, down goes the graph of achievement. . . .
And, back from her tBBC promotional trip to LA, Jackie D said, this very morning, this:
Unfortunately, I wasn’t making it up when I recounted to her how one PR flack we met in LA boasted of how his firm lies to big corporations and promises them good coverage on their “big traffic,” fake blog. The blog itself has been set up by the PR company for the express purpose of scamming companies into paying out substantial amounts of cash for positive postings on it. Looking at the blog, it seems to be authored by an anonymous nobody . . . who just so happens to pepper his commentary with glowing mentions of the PR company’s clients, and negative remarks about their competition.
That is a classic description of how a genuinely new market (as opposed to a made-to-sound-like-a-market governmental rearrangement of a non-market) starts out by working – i.e. not working.
Stay with it guys. In the long run, you will get rich. If you can still be there when the long run starts to run. Eventually all those corporations will start to really understand blogging, and to want help to do the real thing.
To continue my own quote:
. . . But then, if this really is a true market, things bottom out and start to improve and in the longer run the result is a market that is orders of magnitude better . . .
Or, to put it another way:
The Line of Beauty is the name of the Booker prize-winner, a book about gay sex, snorting coke and a Thatcher-worshipping MP who indulges with his secretary. The book is a good read, and I’d recommend it highly. But The Line of Beauty also the name of a new cultural blog, inspired by the book. It is early days yet for the blog, but it is already showing some promise, with snippets about graffiti, Sotheby’s, and a discussion of memoirs written by ‘ordinary’ people. Do check it out.
A journalist never reveals his sources – that is the stern injunction issued to any reporters. Reporters have even gone to jail in the past than reveal a source. Journalists who reveal sources are unlikely to be trusted again, and without trust, it is very hard for an ambitious correspondent to grab a great scoop. The problem for me, though, is how can one protect a “source” for a story if there is an allegation that the source stole an item for the story? How does one deal, for example, with alleged theft of industrial secrets? In my view theft trumps the right to keep a source private.
A test case in the United States is pitting three bloggers against Apple computer concerning their release of details about Apple products yet to be put on the market. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is acting for the three bloggers in this case.
Apple’s lawsuit accused anonymous people of stealing trade secrets about the Asteroid music product and leaking them to the PowerPage, Apple Insider and Think Secret websites.
All three are Apple fan sites that obsessively watch the iconic firm for information about future products.
Apple is notoriously secretive about upcoming products which gives any snippets of information about what it is working on all the more value.
The lawsuit to reveal the names of the leakers was filed against three individuals: Monish Bhatia, Jason O’Grady and someone else using the alias Kasper Jade – all of whom wrote for the Power Page and Apple Insider sites.
This case could remind us, rather sharply, that weblogs are as subject to the laws of libel and the rest as any part of MSM. Stay tuned.
Kudos to German media watch blog Davids Medienkritik for getting Stern magazine to change its text describing the Italian intelligence officer killed at a US military vehiclular checkpoint as having been ‘murdered’ by US soldiers.
The fact this powerful magazine reacted quickly to David’s sharply critical remarks shows that more and more of the mainstream media are now well aware of the blogosphere’s ability to shine an uncomfortable spotlight on such things.
Nice one, David!
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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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