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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Very interesting appraisal of Bill Clinton. I confess I loathe the man and his wife, who strike me as distilling the worst elements of their generation and of the New Ruling Class in America into two near-sociopathic personalities.
Also apropos Clinton and the current President, one of the mysteries of their terms:
The mystery of Clinton is that he was an essentially conservative president — perhaps the most conservative Democrat in the White House since Grover Cleveland — and yet he was loathed by conservatives… I’m not sure I can explain it either — any more than I can explain why George W. Bush has inspired such antipathy from the Al Franken wing of the Democratic Party even while so abjectly pandering to them with his Medicare expansion, No Child Left Behind Act, campaign finance reform and budget-busting spending increases. Here’s Dubya expanding the Great Society, and yet he gets accused of dismantling the New Deal. Go figure” — columnist Max Boot, writing in the Los Angeles Times. (link not provided due to odious registration process, which pissed me off).
Clinton (despite his tax increase and failed nationalization of health care) has a domestic policy legacy that most Republicans would be proud of, and Bush’s domestic policy has been largely scripted to satisfy his Democratic opponents. Yet both are vilified by the very people whose policy positions they advanced. Something to ponder.
Of course, neither has done much to increase liberty within the four corners of the US of A.
Canada’s Conservative Party has some new blood. Belinda Stronach recently left a $10 million/year job as CEO of international auto parts manufacturer Magna International. Belinda is 38, single, brilliant, gorgeous, an experienced senior manager and capitalist to her DNA base pairs.
Some other Conservative Party members expect she will be a part of any Conservative government elected in Canada and eventually be Prime Minister.
From the look of things, Canadian Conservatives are on the winning side of history.
Christopher Hitchens has a fantastically (in a good way) written review of Moore’s latest creation Fahrenheit 9/11. This is my favourite bit:
To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of “dissenting” bravery.
Hitchens extracts from the turgid and self-righteous on-screen heap of non-sense six points that he then proceeds to fisk with brisk ruthlessness they deserve. Read the whole thing as they say…
It seems astonishing that the state still gets involve with the content of TV programming in the USA. I expect this sort of crap in Britain and Europe, but in the USA?
The U.S. Senate on Tuesday approved a measure to crack down on indecency on radio and television by sharply raising fines. The Senate also took steps to rein in the growth of U.S. media companies by invalidating new, more relaxed ownership rules.
Can anyone tell me, do these absurd rules in the USA also apply to other non-terrestrial broadcast media companies, such as cable and satellite TV or even internet ‘radio’?
The folks in Iowa have got their market up and running for the 2004 Presidential election. Each contract pays a dollar; as of yesterday, you can spend just over 58 cents on a Bush contract, and around 43 cents on a Kerry contract. As you can see, the futures market is bullish for Bush (hmm, there’s a slogan in there somewhere, possibly with an R rated logo) as compared to the opinion polls (right hand column, scroll down a little for a summary/average of current polling – very handy for the political junky).
The Iowa market is worth keeping an eye on – over the last several elections, it has half the forecast error of the opinion polls.
Update: For those hankering to put their money where there mouth is, and perhaps fleece a few rubes, the main page for the Iowa Electronic Futures Market is here. Sadly, there is a $500 cap on positions.
President Ronald Reagan has just passed away about an hour ago.
One of the few politicians that went into politics because they believed in something. This was a president who in his inaugural address in 1981 said:
Government is not the solution, it’s the problem.
He will also be remembered as the Vanquisher of Soviet Communism, whatever the revisionists of all flavours may say.
Rest in peace.
Update: For more information here. Some notable quotations from Reagan here.
In case anyone was wondering why the Republican Party is known as “the stupid party,” it turns out that the Bushies, those erstwhile evil geniuses, have scheduled themselves to nominate W as the Republican candidate after the deadline set by several states for placing a nominee on the ballot.
Sadly, every state but one has scrambled to accomodate these patent screw-up. Now, I can understand Republican state legislatures amending their statutes in this circumstance, but why on earth would anyone expect the Democrats in Illinois to do so?
I dunno about you, but I was bored stiff. I was driving home from work when it came on the radio, and I damn near dozed off and drove into a light pole.
Sure, the delivery was that kind of Rotary Club tumpty-tump that we have come to expect from W, but really, substance aside, couldn’t the text have been a lot better? This is just mediocre writing, the kind of dull crap that I expect from a third-rate consulting firm, not from what should be the pinnacle of any writer’s career.
In this particular war, in which all the meaningful battles are being fought between the ears of Iraqis, Americans, and a handful of other nationalities, having such an ineffective communications team on our side is probably worth at least an armored division to the Islamonutters.
I put up one pissy blog post about how there is no hope for liberty in the American political arena, and next thing you know I see this:
A group of libertarian-minded Republicans in Congress is blocking President Bush’s effort to strengthen domestic counterterrorism laws and reauthorize the USA Patriot Act, which the president has made one of his top domestic priorities this year.
Kind of a good news/bad news thing. Good that there is some opposition to the Patriot Act, which is odious in a number of ways, bad that Bush has made extending it his top domestic priority this year. Legislation is apparently gaining ground that would rein in some of the worst bits of the Patriot Act, although apparently Bush has threatened to veto anything of the sort. I should note that the lead paragraph above is a little misleading; Democrats are carrying more than their fair share of the load on this front.
Bush, who has not vetoed a single bill in his entire Presidency (a record, I believe), would single out a bill protecting civil liberties for veto. I happen to think that, from a broad strategic perspective, the Bush administration has gotten a lot right in the current war. However, they seem to be doing everything they can on the domestic front to encourage me to stay home in November.
One casts far and wide for any ray of hope in current domestic American politics. The Bush campaign is depressingly, although perhaps wisely, silent on any of the quasi-libertarian Republican issues – gun control, deregulation, privatization of Social Security, tax cuts. As for the Bush record, well, if the rhetoric is depressing (he stated he would sign an extension of the moronic assault weapon ban), the reality is even worse, in the form of a spending binge beyond all precedent or belief. I note the sole exception of Bush’s rather anemic and backloaded tax cut, much of which is self-repealing.
The Democrats, predictably, are even worse. Their only real complaints concerning current domestic policy are fiscal – that spending wasn’t increased even more, and that taxes weren’t raised to pay for all that spending. Sure, you can catch the occasional Dem kvetching about such issues as tort reform or environmental deregulation, but those are dogs that are notable because they are not barking. There is no tort reform, there is no lightening of the regulatory burden. Democratic joke candidate Kerry floats the occasional trial balloon concerning a targeted corporate tax cut or Social Security privatization, but you know that is only so Senator Flippy can say he was for them before he was against them.
There is, in short, no evidence to be found in either major party that limited government and individual freedom (aside from the freedom to have an abortion, of course) have any place in the modern US of A. If it wasn’t for the fact that the best thing that could happen to the libertarian movement in the US would be to launch the entire current Libertarian Party into the sun, I would vote Libertarian. As it is, one simply despairs of advancing the libertarian agenda in current US politics.
I am still out on the road, sitting in the Westin St Francis in San Francisco watching a bit of news after several long, long backstage work days at the JPMorgan Technology and Telecoms investors conference. I’ve a lovely view out over the bay from here on the 24th floor.
But that is not why I sat down to write this brief item. According to Fox News an airline flight from LA to DC (still in the air) is being watched closely by US security. There has been little detail on what is up.
Feel free to add any news you hear about the situation.
An interesting question for those concerned about creating a more free society is how such a society, be it a model of constitutional, limited, minimal government, or even an anarchist one, would actually defend itself from attack. What sort of practical ways would such societies employ, and would such societies require armies, navies, air forces and the like?
It seems pretty fair to me to assume that outside some sort of pacifist utopia, any such model requires defence and people with the skills and willpower to serve as soldiers, pilots and the like. That is why in the absence of the draft, which libertarians rightly abhor, we need people who can volunteer to serve in the armed forces, giving up the comforts of home. That is not sentimental military-speak, but hard reality.
Hard reality is something of a stranger to the author of this diatribe, full of twisted logic, presumptiousness and lies against the late American soldier and former NFL star, Pat Tillman.
I will not bother to fisk the piece. The illogicality of it is so glaring, its vile intent so obvious, that a line by line response would merely insult the intelligence of this blog’s readership. Suffice to say that a man gave up the promise of a fat paycheck and the comforts of a loving family to go and join the army, knowing that in so doing he might be called upon to fight in situations those moral perfectionists in our academic world would find abhorrent.
Whether one agrees with the war against Saddam and the Taliban or not, on a broader point, it seems obvious to me that we will need people willing, like Pat Tillman, to defend us. This is a point that about which a “chickenhawk” like me who is too old to serve in the forces any more is only too painfully aware.
Remember the name of the woman who wrote this shabby article. As the years go by no doubt she will continue to enjoy the benefits of a world made rich by a model of free enterprise she hates, and defended by “macho” men she despises. But I will not forget. This sorry excuse for a human being has not just traduced the memory of a very brave and good man; she has done so against all those who believed they were fighting to defend the freedoms we enjoy.
(Please post comments on the Daily Collegiate website I linked to. They deserve to hear what you think).
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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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