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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First Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman, came on. Senator Lieberman, said that Republican John McCain was the best person on the struggle with radical Islam and national security issues generally, so he would be supporting him to become President of the United States – specifically by helping in the New Hampshire primary.
This was a big story as Joe Lieberman, is not only a long standing Democrat but was Democratic party candidate for President back in 2000, and ran for the Democrat nomination for President in 2004. However, both Senator Lieberman, and Senator McCain said that the political parties should work together to solve domestic problems. Which rather misses the point that people do not agree on what to do or not do – which is why they are different political parties in the first place.
Later Fred Thompson came on. He talked about the various things he had worked on in his days in the United States Senate and his lifelong conservative record, but he did not really attack anyone. When specifically asked why people should vote for him rather than Mike Huckabee, Fred Thompson did say that people should look at Governor Huckabee’s record and compare it with his.
This is no good at all – the Iowa Caucus is on January 3rd, it is bit late to still be relying on responsible voters doing research. Fred needed to say something like the following:
“I have a more conservative voting record than John McCain here are the stats….. and I have produced serious plans for a flat tax and for entitlement reform – he just talks about earmarks. And as for Mike Huckabee, he is a liar who claims to have cut taxes when in fact he had one of the worst records on tax and government spending of any Governor in the United States – an F grade from the Cato Institute”.
But it is not Fred Thompson’s nature to talk like that – which means….
Then in a first for Fox and Friends, Senator Hillary Clinton came on. It seems the death-to-Fox campaign is over, at least till after the election.
Senator Clinton informed the viewers that she would not only end the war in Iraq, but that she would also, if elected President, cure autism and cancer. On autism Senator Clinton stated that she had “worked for many years” on a cure and would get it done if elected President. And on cancer Senator Clinton told the story of how a lady suffering from cancer had come to one of her campaign events.
“All her hair had fallen out because of the treatment, but she had painted her head in my support – she had put all her faith in me, and when I am elected President I will not let her, or all the other people who place all their faith and dreams in me, down”.
No one on Fox and Friends seemed to regard Senator Clinton’s claims to be able to cure autism and cancer and to give everyone else all their hopes and dreams as in any way odd. I guess the Senator just meant that she would throw more taxpayers money at all these problems – but that is not what she actually said.
It was also mentioned on Fox and Friends that Newsweek had a lead story – this being that Mike Huckabee’s son had killed a dog in 1998.
So ended a few hours in the campaign.
If the thermometer on the Ron Paul Campaign fundraising graphic were real, it overheated and blew out the top of the glass last night. Their goal for this quarter, ending December 31st, was $12 million. As of noon here in Belfast, they have $12.6 million. The rate has been accelerating: if you watch for ten minutes you will see the number increase by thousands of dollars.
There has been grudging admission of his existence by the big name political news outlets, but they are hoping he will at some point ‘just go away’. That may not be the case. I do not think these people understand what is going on: Ron Paul’s campaign is as much about getting the ideas out as it is about getting elected. As long as there is money backing him, he will keep running, keep talking and keep growing our ranks.
Despite decades of work, the majority of the populace has no idea what libertarianism is about, and if they do, it is “aren’t they the bunch who want to legalize heroin?”. They do not understand the context because they have never really heard it. The strength of the Paul campaign shows there is a real strength to our philosophy. It shows a real yearning for a return to individualistic ideals. People want a government much restricted in size, one whose job is to defend our liberty and privacy rather than destroy it “for National Security Reasons”.
Amongst the other candidates there is really no one I much care for. I will admit that I still hold an “ANYONE but McCain” grudge. If he or Huckabee win at the convention, I might be voting for the Democrat. I do not find either Hillary or Obama as loathsome as I find those two.
Support for Ron Paul does not translate into support for any other Republican candidate. Quite the contrary. I am not now, nor have I ever been a member of the Republican Party. I and millions like me have either not voted or voted straight LP. if Ron is not the candidate we will simply revert to form. I really cannot imagine myself getting worked up about any of the other candidates. No, not even for Thompson. My questions to him would be: how many government departments will you call for the abolition of on your first day in office? Which ones are they? What is your target percentage for cutting the Federal government? 25%? 50%? More?
I much look forward to Ron and our people being at the Republican convention and injecting exactly that sort of small government rhetoric into the event. Our folk will not be present to watch balloons drop and see and be seen. They will be there to rock the boat: politely… but forcefully.
At least one pundit has claimed we now live in a ‘Momentucracy” where primary votes do not matter. The sense of ‘momentum’ and ‘inevitability’ which the candidate garners from big media is what settles the issue and causes the contenders to retire. There appears to be evidence of truth to his statement for much of the period from the seventies on. However… the internet may change that. In 1960 the televised debates revolutionized presidential politics. In the 2004 election the Dean Campaign showed how the internet might soon do the same. Few have been saying, as I am about to, that it might change the ground rules entirely. What will happen if backers of a candidate can bypass the drone of mass media against their candidate and for the Anointed One? No one believes the media any more, so given alternatives we just might find that politics gets a great deal more unpredictable and interesting in the coming years.
And, by the way… I love the sight of dollars rolling into the Paul campaign in the morning. It reminds me of… Liberty.
In the time it took me to write this article the number went up to $12.9 million…
A cup of coffee and a small bit of work… and now I see they have blown through $13M and are still climbing rapidly!
The $14 million mark has been passed as of 17:41 UTC
Over $16 million just after midnight UTC and there are no signs of slowing…
Quiet this morning since the US is just getting up. The counter spun up to $18.2 million whilst I slept…
This YouTube video on the Volokh Conspiracy shows a truly outrageous incident where a policeman in the USA tasers a man who was at no point threatening anyone and who was actually calmly walking away from the policeman. The longer CNN coverage gives more context and makes it more clear to me that this was a completely unjustified use of force.
Yet more proof no state should have a monopoly on the means of violence. The incident is astonishing and at least it does show the value to the public (and without doubt to honest decent policemen) of having all traffic stop incidents videoed.
Downsize DC has just reported on the introduction of an act to repeal the “Legal Tender” law. This is the law which requires Americans to accept the US dollar for “all debts public and private” regardless of whether they have contracted payment otherwise. According to Downsize DC:
Choice is good because it allows competition. Monopoly is bad because
it leads to price fixing. Monopoly control over what people use for
money provides the greatest price-fixing power of all, because it
impacts ALL of your economic transactions. The Fed can manipulate the
price of absolutely everything, by increasing the number of
circulating dollars (inflation), or by decreasing them (deflation).
This act opens wide the door to competing free market currencies, yet has little immediate or drastic impact. If people are happy with US dollars, they will simply continue to use them. Those that are unhappy with manipulations by the Fed or who simply prefer inflation hedged means of payment will be able to contractually specify their preferences.
Go here to ask your elected representatives to cosponsor HR 2756 and allow freedom of choice in money.
There is so much good news out there right now it is hard to know where to begin.
First off, Carla Howell and Michael Cloud have done it again. They have filed over 78,000 signatures for a ballot initiative to repeal the Massachusetts income tax, some 12,000 more than the requirement.
This is their second go. The first time the major media outlets in the state all but ignored them, other than an occasional hatchet job. Despite the virtual blackout, the measure got some 45% of the vote. This time around they are getting massive coverage right off the bat:
The Worcester Telegram and Gazette is owned by the Boston Globe –
which is owned by the New York Times.
The Worcester T & G is the third or fourth largest newspaper in Massachusetts.
After they ran the article on our END the Income Tax Ballot Initiative On December 3rd, they polled their readers on whether we should END the Massachusetts Income Tax.
A whopping 66% of their readers voted “Yes” – while only 34% voted “No.”
You can find out more here.
Yesterday I did a posting here about climate, but I hope I will be forgiven for another one today on the same general subject. This one is because, in connection with yesterday’s posting, a commenter copied and pasted this story from Canada, which can be summarised briefly as: Canada is going to have a very cold winter.
I was not surprised by this news, even though many Canadians perhaps are. This is because, ever since doing this posting here a month ago, the notion mentioned at the end of it as hardly more than an afterthought has stuck in my mind. Here is how that posting of a month ago, mostly about giant diggers, ended:
In further interesting environment-related speculations Bishop Hill …
Yes, that Bishop Hill again.
… reckons we may be due for a cold winter, on account of the sun taking a bit of a rest just now. Interesting. We shall see.
Maybe now we are seeing. Maybe. What impressed me about this prophecy, unlike so many others in the climate change rack … , er, field, is that this one had a time frame attached. It concerned this winter. This winter is going to be cold.
Since I am on the subject of cold weather, let me mention another prophecy, also of cold weather to come, also because of the behaviour of the sun, also reported in Canada. Take a look this piece from a few weeks back, about the work of a man called Rhodes Fairbridge. Fairbridge, we learn, explained what causes the sun to influence the earth’s climate in different ways at different times. It is all to do with the alignment of the planets, and consequently the degree to which the sun is close to or quite far from the centre of gravity of the solar system. No, I do not understand that very well either.
What interested me about the article was not that it made any particular sense to me. It did not, and I am in no position to pronounce on its scientific merit or content, which could very well be zero for all I know. No, what caught my attention was that there was, once again, a prediction being made, with some dates attached to it. → Continue reading: There are cold times just around the corner!
The deranged individual who forced his way into Hillary Clinton’s New Hampshire campaign office has given us all a wake up call. How much longer will we tolerate the situation where any lunatic can threaten innocent people?
After holding three people hostage for six hours, Leeland Eisenberg, 46, emerged from Clinton’s campaign office in Rochester in a white dress shirt and red tie with duct tape wound tightly around his waist over what he said was a bomb.
The message could not be more clear… ban duct tape now!
Do it for the children.
CNN people get paid a lot of money, and no one pays me anything to engage in media politics. Yet I could rig a debate much less crudely than they did. It would be easy – I would simply pick questions, from the thousands of suggestions, that would make the Republicans look bad. I would not pick Democrat activists to ask the questions, on the contrary I would pick Republicans or real independents. There is no need to present Democrats as Republicans or undecided people.
For example, on the Log Cabin (i.e. homosexual) Republican question – I would have picked a real Log Cabin Republican, not got an Obama supporter. Nor would I have got two John Edwards supporters in to pretend to be undecideds. And I certainly would not have got a person who is on two of Senator Clinton’s committees to ask a “when did you stop beating your wife” question (about why the evil Republican candidates did not think American men and women in uniform “were not professional enough to work with gays”) – and then given him a come back after the replies so that he could denounce the Republicans again.
It was just so crude, as were the “we did not know who these people were” lies afterwards. After all the “General” was not a random face on the internet – he had been carefully chosen and had been flown in. Why are the CNN people paid so much money, when then can not even rig a debate with any skill?
Only on the “gun control” stuff did they get close to doing the rigging game well. The people chosen to ask the questions were chosen because of their aggressive manner (which seems to have a been their real manner – i.e. they were not actors putting on a show). The subtext being “people who are against gun control are nasty”.
But the rest of the presentation was pathetic.
As for the candidates:
Mike Huckabee is supposed to have done really well. For example, he turned a how would you control government spending question into an attack on the IRS.
And Fred Thompson is supposed to have done really badly. For example he gave specific policy ideas on tax, social security and the rest of the entitlement programs.
I would turn the judgement of “really well” and “really badly” on its head – perhaps that explains why no one pays me to be involved in media politics.
Ron Paul is not just doing well at fundraising on this, his second run at the Presidency. He is raising enough to be a contender. I Just received this information from their campaign:
We are closing in on three important fundraising milestones for the fourth quarter:
– During the third quarter, Fred Thompson raised $9,750,821 to be used during the primary election cycle.
– Not counting money that he loaned to his own campaign, Mitt Romney raised $9,896,719.
– Rudy Giuliani finished with $10,258,019.
Ron Paul is currently at $9,708,791 for the fourth quarter.
We are within reach of passing Fred Thompson today! Will you help us storm past these fundraising totals over a month sooner than they did?
Please make your most generous donation: www.ronpaul2008.com/donate
And don’t forget to watch the live counter on our website as we meet these marks!?
I must admit I never in my wildest dreams expected the Ron Paul campaign to do this well. Do I dare to believe we really will have a libertarian still in the running come the Republican convention?
Ramesh Ponnuru scoffs at the notion that Ron Paul’s tilt at the White House has, supposedly, encouraged an upswelling of libertarian sentiment in parts of the Republican Party. My rough guess is that he has had a bit of a positive effect and has raised a lot of money over the internet, pretty fast. Some people try to dismiss Paul as a kook but their dismissals seem to amount to little more than smears of half-understood points, such as his championing of gold-backed money (I am not convinced the dollar should be tied to gold but it is not nearly as daft, when you think about it, as the idea that the world’s largest economy can be run by a Federal Reserve bank by an army of economic gods). Despite my own differences with his strict non-interventionist foreign policy, which, pace some libertarians, is not necessarily a logical outcome of the non-initiation of force principle in the face of major foreign threats, Paul is a breath of fresh air. He is no Ronald Reagan or even Barry Goldwater in terms of his name recognition factor or charisma – I bet hardly anyone in Britain outside a small group of political anoraks has heard of him, but his profile is pretty impressive.
Ponnuru points to Ron Paul’s own stance on abortion to prove that he is not quite the darling of the libertarian movement that some might claim. Rubbish: if Ponnuru has read any libertarian authors thoroughly, he would notice that libertarians can and do differ quite a bit on the issue. The issue of how one goes from the axiom of the right to life to the vexed question of when life begins is a difficult one, and I am not sure I am clear myself on this one. Ron Paul is against federal, ie, tax funds for abortion clinics. But that does not make him anti-abortion, it makes him anti-spending, at least on this issue.
Paul Marks has argued on this blog elsewhere that Ron Paul’s record on spending is not spotless – it is hard to think of any politician who is – but I think he is generally a positive influence on American politics.
The prospect of such a man in Britain’s Conservative Party reaching any sort of senior position at present is, of course, nil.
I long ago endorsed Ron Paul despite strong disagreements with his foreign policy. Now, with Iraq looking more and more like less and less of an issue for the next election, that disagreement is fading in importance.
Meanwhile my distaste for ‘security measures’ taken in the name of ‘defense of the homeland’ has reached a point of utter disgust. On the issues which matter to me there is probably not the light of day between a Clinton or a Guliani Presidency. Neither is likely to ask for congress to kill off ‘Real Id’. Neither is likely to put Presidential authority behind removal of even some of the more obnoxious sections of the un-Patriot Act or any of the other wildly misnamed acts of Congress.
Over my many years as a libertarian I have come to feel like someone alone in the wilderness. People who believe as I do simply do not get elected. I assumed that a Ron Paul run for the Republican Party slot would be the same, with the very positive upside that he would gain more publicity for the ideas of liberty and individualism than decades of efforts by thousands of dedicated libertarians.
I am beginning to wonder if I might have been wrong. I was rather pleasantly surprised to read that Ron is picking up more money and attention on the web than any other Republican hopeful. While this does not translate into as much attention off web as I would like to see, it is nonetheless a surprise. Ron is still very definitely in this race and it is beginning to look like he will still be in it come the Republican convention.
I would really look forward to that happening. I have not bothered to watch convention coverage in many years because the people running did not even vaguely represent me.
I could rub my hands with glee at Just imagining the horror in the eyes of media and politicos alike if someone were to stand on the podium at that convention and not just mouth words about Liberty and Individualism… but really mean them!
Republican Presidential Candidate Ron Paul seems to have attracted a lot of attention with his big fund-raising day, although Mark Steyn says that although he now has money his poll rating is still very low. If you don’t know what he looks and sounds like, watch him being interviewed by Jay Leno.
The most interesting thing I have encountered about Ron Paul is this, from Jonathan Wilde:
On the heels of the big fundraising day, I’ve noticed that a lot of people I know are declaring themselves Ron Paul supporters. Many of them are not just not libertarian. If anything, they’re big government advocates. They justify their support with vague statements like, “He’s shifting the landscape” or “The system needs to be shaken up”. I don’t think they have any idea what Paul actually stands for.
Maybe they will learn. I have long thought thought a way for libertarianism to spread will be when people get that it is a different sort of mischief they can make to the usual kind. This was surely the appeal of Marxism, while it had appeal. Now, the world is still full of Marxists but they keep quiet about it, and wrap it up as other things, like Greenery. Where’s the mischief in that? That won’t shake up the system. That is the system. But libertarianism is a kind of mischief making that dares to speak its name, and if done, would cause serious embarrassment to thousands of politicians and lobbyists and subsidy guzzlers.
Of course, much of Paul’s appeal is that he is mounting a non-left attack on US military involvement abroad. But if many are backing him because of that, they may also become acquainted with the notion that maybe seriously cutting back big government is something that a decent man could genuinely want to do. Paul wants to cut government spending on foreign wars, and rather than blowing what is ‘saved’ on schools and hospitals and other foolishnesses, he says: let the citizens keep their money.
I presume that Ron Paul has lots of domestic personal policy positions concerning how to get there from here, so to speak, as any serious political candidate must. I do know, because he said this to Leno, that he wants to phase out welfare addiction very gradually, rather than just cold turkey it, for example. But that makes sense (‘cold turkeying’ it might also make sense, I think, but what do I know?)
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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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