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]
One of the more dispiriting processes I regularly notice in confrontations between Good and Evil is when Evil concedes that it has done something evil, and Good promptly turns round, in the spirit of fair play, and concedes something else evil. It’s like Good is a football team, and when it goes one-nil up, it feels that the fair thing to do is to give the other fellows a goal. To make a game of it. Or something.
So, for instance, if Evil concedes that, I don’t know, “socialism hasn’t turned out very well in practice”, Good, in a burst of bonhomie and generosity and brotherhood-of-manliness, concedes that socialism was a nice idea “in theory”.
No it wasn’t. An idea that turns out badly in practice is a bad idea. Especially if the badness was a predictable and predicted consequence of that bad idea.
Often, in circumstances like these, Evil even asks for an equalising goal.
Evil offers a pairing of ideas – good twinned with evil, like socks emerging from the laundrette – as a package: “I’ll concede that socialism has turned out badly in practice if you concede that socialism is a nice theory.”
The proper way to behave, if you are Good, and go one-nil up in an argument, is to press for a two-nil lead.
The proper response to going one-nil up in the above argument about the practice and theory of socialism is to say: “Socialism has indeed turned out badly in practice. Now, about this evil notion of yours that socialism is a nice theory. Let’s talk about that. And let’s you admit that you are wrong about that also. We told you you were wrong from the start, and we were right that you were wrong. We predicted that socialism would turn out badly in practice, on account of it being a bad theory. You pressed on. You were wrong. In theory as well as in practice.”
Like I say, press for two-nil.
So, all hail to Mark Meckler. (And further hail to Instapundit for linking to the story, today, and earlier.)
Meckler, arriving in New York and learning that he must not carry a gun, handed his gun over to the New York goons. (That much, he was willing to concede.) The goons promptly arrested him, for carrying the gun up to the point where he stopped carrying it, or something.
Faced with a determined Meckler, and a huge outcry of rage and contempt from the forces of Good, the New York goons have dropped their evil charges. One-nil to Meckler. But Meckler is now being subjected to another evil injustice. The goons still have his gun, and are refusing to return it.
Instead of thanking the goons for being so nice about not arresting him any more, Meckler now wants his gun back. Quite right. New York goons, give the man his gun back! (This is now an international campaign. I am international and I now say this.)
Saying “now give me back my gun” is not only the good thing for Good Mr Meckler to do; it is also excellent tactics. He is now one-nil up. He faces the chance to score another goal, and go two-nil up against the forces of Evil. He is now pressing to do just that.
Quite right. When you have argumentative momentum, against a team that is saying (or in this case also doing) not just one bad thing but many bad things, use it. Thereby keep it, and build it.
When the New York goons do hand back Meckler’s gun, if they ever do (and actually, even if they don’t), the proper next response, from all of us who have now rallied around Meckler, is: “Now, about all these other gun-carrying people, against whom you have not dropped the charges, and whose guns you have not returned …” Three-nil. Four-nil. Five-nil …
If the New York goons don’t hand back Meckler’s gun, perhaps because they sense that if they do, Meckler’s team will then get more momentum, then the New York goons will be digging their heels in in an argument that they will hate but which the Meckler team will relish.
Also good. Shame about the stolen gun, but also good.
Now and again, when the subject of environmental alarmism comes up, someone – such as the likes of me – might wonder when, or whether, a mainstream, high-profile politician in an important country will get up and stick it to the Green lobby. For perhaps obvious economic reasons, given its vast natural resources, Canada seems to be the country where this is starting to seriously happen. Consider this report (Reuters):
On the eve of public hearings into a proposed oil pipeline from Alberta’s tar sands to the Pacific Coast, the Canadian government lashed out on Monday at what it said were foreign-funded radical groups opposing the project. The comments by Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver were another sign of the pressures mounting against Enbridge Inc’s proposed C$5.5 billion ($5.4 billion) Northern Gateway pipeline. Canada’s right-leaning Conservative government, which says the pipeline would help diversify energy exports away from the United States and more towards Asia, says activists are clogging up the regulatory process.
There’s more:
“Unfortunately, there are environmental and other radical groups that would seek to block this opportunity to diversify our trade,” Oliver said in a statement. “These groups threaten to hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda … They use funding from foreign special interest groups to undermine Canada’s national economic interest.” Ottawa and the oil industry are particularly interested in Northern Gateway after Washington delayed a decision on approving TransCanada Corp’s Keystone XL pipeline, which would transport oil sands crude from Alberta to Texas.
Of course, it goes without saying that the UK government is a million miles from this sort of rhetoric, with the partial exception to how ministers sometimes try to push aside environmental concerns that are raised about various transport or other projects. In these cases, though, there are legitimate private property rights issues as stake (such as the use of compulsory purchase powers to make way for something like a high-speed rail link). And as for AGW alarmism in particular, there is yet no sign of a major political figure realising how many votes might be won in confronting this.
This video makes for hilarious – if frustrating – viewing. Leading Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum ludicrously posits that left-wingers in America are massive advocates for too much freedom…and cites this as a problem.
[L]eave it to far-right, fundamentally religious Christians to come full circle, meeting up with commies—in true East meets West fashion—to declare that America is not really about the pursuit of happiness, and that freedom really means freedom to be responsible and subservient to the values dictated to you by on high (or Santorum, his Congregation and extended brethren).
If Santorum and his ilk keep forcing me to agree with left-wingers – in this case, that Santorum is pure evil – it is going to be a very, very long election year.
A very interesting night, and a fairly inconclusive one unless you were in the bottom tier. There is no clear front runner in the Republican camp and one can essentially look at it as three candidates with roughly a quarter of the votes each… and all the rest divvying up the few leftover scraps in the remaining quarter. The fact that we have two top tier candidates in the race who are not that progressive guy from Massachusetts is perhaps the most important outcome of the night.
The outcome is good in another way: with any kind of luck we could end up with a libertarian sitting in the catbird seat in a brokered convention, assuming of course that he does not surprise us all and win it. I do not think many libertarians are expecting that. The concept of winning is a thing to be slowly approached and gotten used to for most of us. So I will not make any assumptions of grandeur. I will only say we have a good shot at a situation where we have a libertarian in the GOP with substantial power at the convention. He will be able to push them our way and at the same time we have an excellent candidate in the LP itself pushing them from the outside. This should have the GOP strategists wondering how to attract voters from our ranks.
The answer to that question is really simple: drop the Big Statism. Make the repeal of the entirety of Obamacare a priority; and for damn sure stop this mandate talk. If you want even a sidewise glance from us, just drop it and pretend you never even thought about it. Individual Mandate is a poison pill for the GOP and the sooner they realise it, the better off we all will be.
PS: You may have noticed that I have gone MSM journalists one better: I wrote this entire Iowa article without mentioning ANY of the candidate names. Those pikers can only manage to ignore one.
Romney may have just lost the election for the Republicans. If he is going to stand behind Individual Mandate, then why not vote for a real socialist? Why not just let someone who walks the walk drive things to their disastrous conclusion rather than allowing the left to point to a ‘conservative’ and blame the failures of socialism on him?
If it is a given that Romney will be the Republican candidate, then come next fall I will vote for Republicans in the House and Senate and Obama for President in hopes that libertarian, tea party and conservative types can dominate the Legislative Branch and fight the Executive Branch every step of the way. If Romney were in, they would have to at least give a show of support for ‘their’ President. Let us shoot for total war between the branches of government as our best option for preserving liberty.
The government which governs least is best… even if it is because they are too busy fighting amongst themselves to govern at all.
“One of the more unexpected things I discovered as CEO of a pharmaceutical company was that I had to think as much or more about the federal government than I did about our competition. I had known on an intellectual level that government was involved in the private sector in a great many ways, but it was only when I was actually in business that I felt the full impact.”
Donald Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, page 253. He is describing his time in the private sector during the late 70s and 80s, and emerges as quite a firebrand for supply-side economics (he got to know Arthur Laffer).
Whatever you think of Rummy as a defense secretary (under the Ford and George W. Bush administrations), he comes across as a formidable man of US public and commercial life.
Here is something that I wrote about the FDA and associated drug regulation issues a while ago here.
As I head to London’s Heathrow Airport en route to Malta for the holidays, I see this item during a spot of web-surfing. It is a piece by Gerard Baker, in the Wall Street Journal. Baker has spent a fair while in the US, and clearly, he’s been infected:
“But I discovered football when I first came to New York in the late 1980s and my prejudices melted away. It was the era of New York Giants greatness and I was hooked instantly: Lawrence Taylor, Phil Simms, Mark Bavaro, Jeff Hostetler. Yes, I did just say Jeff Hostetler. That should tell you how hooked I was.”
“In its energy and complexity, football captures the spirit of America better than any other cultural creation on this continent, and I don’t mean because it features long breaks in which advertisers get to sell beer and treatments for erectile dysfunction. It sits at the intersection of pioneering aggression and impossibly complex strategic planning. It is a collision of Hobbes and Locke; violent, primal force tempered by the most complex set of rules, regulations, procedures and systems ever conceived in an athletic framework. Soccer is called the beautiful game. But football is chess, played with real pieces that try to knock each other’s brains out. It doesn’t get any more beautiful than that.”
I must say that “soccer”, at least in how it is played these days in the English Premiership, tests my loyalty due to the real and alleged antics of the players as much as anything. Further afield, I am still spellbound by such players as Barcelona’s residing genius, Lionel Messi, but in general, I am not as much interested in soccer as I used to be. As a result of my general soccer fatigue, I have become more interested in following rugby union and cricket (it helps that England is playing good cricket at the moment; not so the rugby guys). As for American football, I have never really watched it much (I went to a game in Texas in 2004 but that was about it).
As for other sports and events, I can admire the courage and physical endurance of those taking part, such as horse racing jockeys, Tour de France cyclists and the downhill skiers. I can admire a gladiatorial game of tennis between such giants as Federer and Nadal, or, for that matter, watch nervously as a great golfer slugs it out on the greens against a rival. And non-PC though it is, a great boxing match can hold me in its thrall. For me, there are a whole group of sports that I like, and for different reasons. I like watching certain motor sports, but that is more a “spectacle” where the whole event – scenery, noise, colour and adrenalin – come together (as in Le Mans, which I attended this year with a bunch of friends).
We haven’t here done a Kim Jong Il is dead posting until now, probably because what else is there to say besides Kim Jong Il is dead? A new Kim Jong has been installed. Un. From Il, to Un. In English it sounds like going from sick to nothing. North Korea, presently terrible, will either get a bit better, or a bit worse, or a lot worse, or stay much the same. Or, if it gets really lucky, a lot better! Will paid North Korea watchers, experts in North Korean things, do any better than that? I doubt it.
I have called Kim Jong Il Kim Jong Il. Others call him Kim Jong-Il with a hyphen, or Kim Jong-il, with a small i for il. Until today I never knew of this confusion. Blog and learn.
My favourite of the Kim Jong Il is dead postings that I have seen so far is this one, at Mick Hartley’s blog, which features the very last Kim Jong Il picture: King Jong Il looking at toilet paper.
I wrote all that last night, but Mick Hartley now has another Kim Jong Il is dead posting up, in which he quotes somebody called Simon Winchester saying this:
India’s attempt to go it alone failed. So, it seems, has Burma’s. Perhaps inevitably, North Korea’s attempt appears to be tottering. But seeing how South Korea has turned out – its Koreanness utterly submerged in neon, hip-hop and every imaginable American influence, a romantic can allow himself a small measure of melancholy: North Korea, for all its faults, is undeniably still Korea, a place uniquely representative of an ancient and rather remarkable Asian culture. And that, in a world otherwise rendered so bland, is perhaps no bad thing.
Or then again, perhaps … not. No bad thing? Competition for commenters: concoct morally disgusting sentences which begin with “For all its faults …”. You’ll struggle to top that one. These obscene ravings are currently behind the Times pay wall, hence no link, although Hartley does supply one.
Says Hartley:
Better a starving slave state, it seems, than this ghastly modern Americanised culture.
Conservative romanticism raised to a truly idiotic level.
Commenter Martin Adamson adds:
And it’s not even remotely true on its own terms. The architecture of Pyongyang is Moscow 1952. The mass displays are China 1964. Painting is Soviet Academy 1936. Music is Gang of Four Operas 1974. Dress is Bucharest 1988 etc etc.
Assuming this is the Simon Winchester in question, it seems that:
Simon Winchester is a best-selling British author living in Massachusetts and New York City.
Heartfelt apologies from Britain to Massachusetts and New York City. Apparently American culture is itself sufficiently un-Americanised for Winchester to find it livable in. Winchester has a new book out, which looks rather creepy. Let’s all not buy it.
This morning I started work on my next book for HarperCollins. Thanks to the sales of Obama: The Greatest President in the History of Everything, I was asked to write another book. This one will be on my solutions for all the problems facing America. Hopefully it will start a movement when it comes out with me as leader.
Earlier in the same posting Frank J quotes (admiringly) from and links to a piece (by him) about how, if cars were invented only now instead of when they were invented, we wouldn’t be allowed to drive them. Funny, and probably true.
USA cricket captain Steve Massiah has been arrested, and then had his travelling restricted. Why?
According to the arrest warrant, a copy of which is with ESPNcricinfo, Massiah and two other men conspired “to execute a scheme and artifice to defraud a financial institution”, listed as Countrywide Home Loans, “and to obtain moneys, funds, credits, assets, securities, or other property owned by and under the custody and control of such financial institution, by means of materially false and fraudulent pretenses, representations and promises.”
Quite right. People can’t be allowed to swindle financial institutions by means of materially false and fraudulent pretenses, representations and promises. To be allowed to behave like that, you should be running a financial institution yourself.
Whilst reading a discussion on the state of Social Security I noticed some conceptual errors, which if not corrected, could lead to very bad results.
Social Security is not a welfare program. It is not a wealth redistribution program. It was created in FDR’s time as a one size fits all retirement fund. Every working person is forced to pay a percentage of their income into it so that upon retirement, they will continue to live in a life style similar to the one they had before retirement. At the time this idea was sold to the public, pure redistributive Socialism and welfare simply were not acceptable ideas in polite society.
If someone from a conservative view point puts forth an argument that applying a means test is a way to save Social Security, a way to turn it into a ‘social safety net’, they are buying into a deadly shift in the ground rules of the argument. Once you agree your pay out from Social Security need not reflect your pay in, you have left the field of play. You have handed the game over to the Socialists and made Social Security a welfare program. It becomes yet another redistribution program ‘for the poor’.
No one should fall into that trap. Social Security is an alternate to private retirement savings plans. It was created out of a mind set that said individuals are not adult enough to save for their own retirements. It was created out of a mind set that said private entities could not be trusted to hold such investments and pay them back as promised.
The terms of the discussion we should be taking part in is that not only are these statements false, they are disastrously, blatantly false. When a private program fails, some number of people are indeed harmed. When the time comes to pay the piper on the Government program, millions upon millions of people will be screwed out of their retirement savings.
We can also make the argument that politics has allowed the entirety of Social Security to become an enterprise so flawed that if similar actions occurred in a private company, they would be decried as criminal offences. Individuals carrying out such schemes would be compared to Bernie Madoff. They would be worse than Bernie: by comparison he ruined the lives of a very small number of Americans, not many tens of millions. Social Security proves yet again that the government is incapable of running pretty much anything. If you want a disaster, let the politicians run it.
When the collapse finally arrives and the Ponzi scheme can go no further; when the taxpayer can no long bail out a failed scheme and hide the criminal nature of it all, I very much hope thousands are indicted for the crime. Every person who served in Congress and the Senate who voted to raid the program or undermined the T-Bills on which it rests and every bureaucrat who ever worked for the Social Security Administration who went along with the fraud deserves a long prison sentence.
We need to give poor Bernie some company after all, and he can learn how it is done by the real Pro’s.
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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