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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Last Monday morning I did what I think was probably my best recorded conversation yet, with a man named Leon Louw. Here is the conversation we had, and here is the publication that Leon Louw was talking about. I recommend both with enthusiasm. Here is my bloggage about it all. Anyone even slightly interested in what distinguishes successful governments from failing governments, nice countries from nasty ones, will profit from following at least one of those links.
A few days before that, I did another recorded conversation, about the Libertarian Alliance and its workings, with Tim Evans, (pictured on the right here), who is now its President. Bloggage about that from me here.
And then last Tuesday, I had another of the regular conversations I have with Antoine Clarke about elections and related matters around the world, this time about the recent US midterms.
These conversations, especially the one with Leon Louw, have stirred me into setting up another of these things, with someone I have long wanted to talk with in this way, namely Samizdata’s own Perry de Havilland. I have just spoken on the phone with Perry and he has no objections to me flagging this up beforehand here nor to me asking the Samizdata commentariat if they have any questions that they would particularly like me to put to Perry. I do not promise to use every such suggestion, but all suggestions that do materialise will be considered.
This conversation will be happening this coming Saturday afternoon. Perry and I will be talking about what Perry did before Samizdata, what made him start it, about what it has been like doing it for the last five years, and about what effects it may or may not have had, during that time and in the future. That kind of thing.
I am going to start whatever preparatory reading I manage to do here.
There are quite a few fans of Sean Gabb who read this blog, so they might like to be told, if they have not been already, that Sean will be on 18 Doughty Street TV this evening between 9 and 10pm, discussing libertarianism. Sean is a fluent and experienced media performer and should be well worth seeing and hearing.
Here is a picture of him that I took last weekend, hatching who knows what plots with fellow Libertarian Alliance supremo Dr Tim Evans, at the LA’s Conference in the resplendent National Liberal Club.
Captions anyone? Mine goes: “One day all this will be ours! Ours I tell you!”
I was on 18 Doughty Street intertelly last night, and I really enjoyed myself, not least because Iain Dale, presiding, also seemed satisfied with the efforts of me and my fellow late night chatterers. I was also on 18 Doughty Street on only its second night in action, and it was a mild relief to get asked back. That is the only compliment that really matters after you’ve been on something.
Many intriguing things got alluded to, but the basic message I want to put across here, now, is that, basically, 18 Doughty Street is doing very well. When I was first on, there was a palpable air of panic, with people saying things like “I can only do one thing at a time” through clenched teeth and with that terrifying evenness that people do just before they explode. This time, things were working more smoothly. Which is just what you would expect. → Continue reading: 18 Doughty Street TV is doing very well
I normally have to get into my office in London’s docklands financial centre of Canary Wharf at some ungodly hour in the morning, so I rarely get the chance to browse the news headlines on television or radio before rushing off for the Tube. But laid low with a nasty headcold this morning, I watched the BBC Breakfast television show for about 30 minutes. This is what I saw:
Item: The local council in Richmond, west London, is proposing to slap heavy parking taxes on people who own cars that are deemed ecologically incorrect (SUVs, etc). The programme interviewed a few bedraggled locals moaning about this, a retired TV personality who said it was a jolly good idea, and left it at that.
Item: A group of MPs want to ban sale of fireworks to ordinary citizens because loud bangs emitted by such things frighten animals and the elderly. We had a brief “debate” in the studio between a puritanical MP and an elderly lady who said what a shame it would be if fireworks were banned. No clear defence was made of the right for law-abiding people to have their fun. The safety-trumps-liberty issue was taken as a given.
Item: The pop star Madonna, who is trying to adopt a baby boy from the African nation of Malawi, has spoken of her anguish about this bureaucracy involved on the Opra Winfrey TV show in the US. This was deemed to be a news item worthy of the BBC’s attention.
Item: recycling of baby’s diapers.
Item: Litigation continues between ITN, the British television network, and the US authorities, over the death of ITN veteran broadcaster Terry Lloyd in Iraq about three years ago.
Item: BBC business journalist discusses how to avoid back injuries in the workplace. It is taken as given that companies must be forced to spend more money to ensure their staff are comfortable.
Now I think a trend is at work here. Many of the “news” items are pretty minor stuff, compared to the ongoing crackup in the Middle East, etc. They are relatively minor stories, what I would call “consumer journalism” stuff that typically used to be confined to daytime television and the dumber ends of the tabloid press. Maybe the producers figure that viewers are unable to digest anything more substantial at 7 in the morning and maybe they are right (but radio news and current affairs seems to have more gravitas, or at least it used to). However, the choice of subjects also reflect the current liberal/left intelligentsia’s obsession with bossing us around in order to protect the environment; they reflect a distinct strain of neo-puritanism (such as Richmond’s persecution of owners of big cars and bashing of fireworks), and an assumption that the child custody arrangements of a person, even a famous one like Madonna, are any of the State’s business.
Bring on Guy Fawke’s Night, is all I can say.
The occasions where I am prepared to wade in on the side of a bunch of a civil servants are as rare as hen’s teeth but this one is truly no contest:
THE Ministry of Defence has banned Britain’s biggest commercial news broadcaster from frontline access to the nation’s forces, The Times has learnt.
In an unprecedented move that risks accusations of censorship, the Government has withdrawn co-operation from ITV News in warzones after accusing it of inaccurate and intrusive reports about the fate of wounded soldiers…
“As bad a hatchet-job as I’ve seen in years. Cheap shots all over the place, no context, no reasonable explanation…”
In other words, the standard operating procedure of the MSM. The stink is now so bad that it is finally getting in to some very lofty nostrils.
My friend Russ Willey has written the London Gazetteer, a brilliant book which explores all of the lesser known nooks and crannies of this city. Russ is a life-long obsessive about ‘Hidden London‘, and if ever someone was born to write a book like this, he was.
On October 12, Will Self wrote the following in his Evening Standard column:
HOW COULD THEY FORGET TOKYNGTON?
IT IS with sadness that I censure the London Gazetteer. This handylooking tome was sent to me by its publisher, Chambers. It claims to be “An A-Z guide to the famous and hidden quarters of Britain’s capital”. However, the very first quarter I looked up, Tokyngton, wasn’t in it.
I myself have never actually been to Tokyngton but I’ve often noted its peculiar name while perusing my bog-ordinary A-Z map. Now it’s been so unjustly neglected by Chambers I feel an almost insuperable urge to travel to what a website describes as “the most populated part of Harrow”, albeit in the medieval era. The “farm of the sons of Toca” was first mentioned in 1171, so it seems rather shabby that it doesn’t make it into Chambers’s Gazetteer 900-odd years later.
Except that, er, Tokyngton is actually right there in the book, and fills nearly half a page between the entries for Three Mills and Tollington. Perhaps Will Self is alphabetically-challenged, but you would think he and an editor would have double-checked this claim before slamming a book whose success depends on being viewed as comprehensive and authoritative. Having had the error pointed out, no correction has been issued by Self or the Evening Standard.
Sadly, it is not likely that as many people will read any correction as have read the original, prominent damning column – even if Self does the right thing and makes the correction in his next column.
I have just done a posting on my personal blog about Sierra Leone, where a British Army friend of mine is now working. He is back in London just now, and passed on some photos of Sierra Leone that he and one of his friends had taken, and I picked out my favourites to put on my blog.
They illustrate an idea I have had for a while now that maybe one of the nice little things that digital photography, in combination with the internet, will do for the world is to present to it a slightly more balanced notion of what life in Africa is like just now. On rich country TV we only ever get slaughter and catastrophe from Africa, because only slaughter and catastrophe is news. But now, in addition to superbly photographed famine and mayhem, we get less well photographed … well, just stuff. Photos that a generation ago would (a) have been far less numerous, and would (b) have merely languished in the photo albums of a certain sort of expat, are now being displayed to the anyone in the world who cares to glance at them.
I do not claim that the slaughter and catastrophe is not happening. Sierra Leone itself had a horrific civil war less than a decade ago. “Worse than you can possibly imagine”, my friend said. But now, touch wood, things are going better.
Mobile phones have been a particular success, apparently, mostly because regular landline phones, such as rich countries have long had, have been such an abject failure, but perhaps also because mobiles enable Africans to cooperate much more effectively while still not having to commit to something days in advance. My friend says that Africans, just as Western stereotypes have always said, at any rate the Africans in Sierra Leone, are still very bad at doing this.
That is a mobile phone top-up and recharging booth. Mobile phone companies are now making lots of money in Africa. Good for them.
While reading the October 14th issue of New Scientist I came across the following statement in an article titled “Nuke test sends shock waves round the world”:
It may even have been only half a kiloton – the same explosive power as the terrorist bomb in Oklahoma City in 1995
Do you see something wrong with this sentence? → Continue reading: New Scientist Innumeracy
I wish these guys all the very best of luck in breaking the lock of the mainstream media on broadcast television in Britain and political coverage in particular. I am not sure if this outfit is going to feature a lot in my viewing habits, though. Given that I have to look at current affairs news quite a bit as part of my day job in London’s financial centre, I actually deliberately avoid too much of the same when I get home, preferring to read a book, go to the gym, see a movie or just hang out with my lovely wife. But for the political trainspotters out there, this sort of venture should be a boon.
My only carp at this stage is why choose such a dull name? Maybe there is some sort of perverse appeal about it.
As I type these words, Britain’s Channel 4 is airing a major piece of breath-taking propoganda.
This two-hour prime-time ‘documentary’ is called ‘The Doomsday Code’ and purports to be a ciritical examination of the violent, apocolyptic, end-of-the-world ideology of (wait for it)…American Christians!
The story so far:
- American Christians and Israelis are conspiring to bring about a global nuclear holocaust and this is why they are attacking Islam
- Americans are deliberately causing global warming as a part of their monstrous plot to realise ‘End Times’
- The only hope for mankind lies with the UN but its effectiveness is being undermined by the “corrosive hostility” of the fundamentalist Christian Americans
I cannot find any specific programme website to which to link but there is a link to the website of the production company which is somehwat illuminating:
The Doomsday Code is produced by Fozia Khan and directed by James Quinn. It was commissioned by Aaquil Ahmed, Commissioning Editor for History, Science, Religion and Arts at Channel 4.
It is still broadcasting and has now moved on to Africa which, allegedly, is proving to be a fertile recruiting ground for the insanely violent American Evangelicals who are (among other things) doing their best to facilitate the spread of AIDS in accordance with the Book of Revelation.
I am not making this up.
Robert Bidinotto has an interesting article up discussing the admission in the Washington Post that their reporting on the matter of former CIA agent Valerie Plame and former US ambassador Joe Wilson was completely wrong.
Buried in this editorial is the fact with the most far-reaching implications: that Joe Wilson falsely claimed that he had “debunked” White House charges that Saddam had been trying to buy uranium in Niger. It turns out that Saddam had been trying to buy uranium, so that Iraq could build nuclear weapons.
Thus, it turns out that the White House stands vindicated on one of its key arguments for going to war against Saddam: that this thug and his regime were actively pursuing a WMD program. So…where are all the headlines about this? Except for this editorial admission by the Post (which implies that the newspaper had been taken in, rather than played a key roll in disseminating the lies), where are the media mea culpas, retractions, and apologies for many months of false, anti-Bush “conspiracy” stories? Don’t hold your breath.
I must confess when I quickly zipped through the specific WaPo article mentioned earlier today, I paid more attention to the Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson aspects of this saga and not really pick up on what I now realise was the ‘bombshell’ aspect to all of this: it seems that Saddam really was shopping for uranium in Niger.
Interesting.
Please read this article. I will leave you to your own conclusions.
(h/t: Tim Blair)
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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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