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]
|
I came out of hospital yesterday. La Belle Dame is in America making money (one of us has to) so Dave picked me up and steered me home. I live quite close to the Chelsea & Westminster and needed some air to clear my head so we walked back. I felt surprisingly well considering I have been under a general anaesthetic and had quite a few squishy bits from inside lopped off me. In fact I felt amazingly well.
The journey back home was interesting. The colours were so very bright and someone seems to have turned up the contrast. Sometimes when I looked closely as the things written on the back of people’s tee-shirts whilst walking down King’s Road, the words seemed to suddenly zoom away from me towards some vanishing point.
Getting home and having a nice shower was a transcendent experience but the thing that really kept me captivated was the way the water fell down, coming from hundreds of feet above my head and travelling downwards towards the gleaming ceramic floor perhaps three yards below. I could feel the vibration of the water spiralling down the plughole and the strange flute-like sound it made.
I looked forward to getting some good food as being chopped up had not dented my appetite and the hospital food was moderately dreadful. When it came time to eat, for some reason Dave would not let me near the hot stove. The smell of bacon was almost erotic.
Dave and I work together and I had been struck by some really good creative ideas whilst pacing back and forth in the ward the night before last, waiting for the frigging painkillers to actually do something. The ideas kept pouring out of me and Dave just absorbed them like the 185 IQ colossus he is. For a while at least.
But then I noticed that I was having to force the ideas out through clenched teeth and they kept bouncing off Dave’s head rather than going in. To make matters worse although the bacon surrendered to me willingly, the sausages were staring at me with ill concealed contempt. I stabbed a couple to death as punishment and gave the rest to Dave.
Today I find the internet in front of me and deep throbbing pains from within. Be prepared from some bad tempered blogging over the next few days when I can drag my fingers to the mouse. Tramadol, Co-Codamol and Diclofenac are pallid impostors. Sister Morphine is a fickle lover and she would not come home with me.
There are some similarities in the USA and UK with the convergence of practical politics into a ‘radical centre’ of regulatory big government statists, whose ‘left’ and ‘right’ labels are rather like those of Coke and Pepsi… sure there are differences, but in the end they are still selling sweet brown fizzy drinks… or selling a vision of state in which the mainstream ‘right’, be it Dave Cameron or George W. Bush, are not talking about shrinking the state (even a bit) and freeing the individual (or even the community) but rather just increasing the pace of regulation a bit slower and in different places than the ‘left’.
Similarly the mainstream ‘left’ like Tony Blair or Al Gore are not selling wholesale paleo-socialist nationalisation of businesses as they did in the past, because they, like the mainstream ‘right’, now follow a more (technically) fascist economic model in which property can be ‘private’ but control of it is contingent upon being in accord with national political objectives and permission from some local political authority.
The ‘left’ and ‘right’ use different metaphors, different cultural references, different symbolism, but in truth they are selling much the same product. They put huge effort into fetishising their product differentiation precisely because there is so little difference in their core beliefs. In the USA, even the issue of self-defence and opposition to victim disarmament is less than solid with the Republicans than it once was as Bush made is clear he was ‘flexible’ regarding anti-gun legislation and needed hard lobbying to not renew the so-called ‘assault rifle’ ban (i.e. semi-automatic rifles which look ‘scary’). Put simply, all mainstream political parties (at the moment) are statist centrists, neither in favour of overt nationalisation nor of individual autonomy, regardless of their sales schpiel.
Why this is true is not hard to glean. Professional politicians are people who have the psychological disposition to both meddle in other people’s lives and to use force to have their views imposed. They are people who value having power over others above all else and the more aspects of society that are subject to political direction, the more important politicians become regardless of their hue.
So the natural order of things, if you are a person who makes their living out of being a politician, is to work to extend the state into more and more areas of life because the state is what you have influence over, thereby making yourself more important to ever more people. → Continue reading: The folly of always voting for the lesser evil
David Cameron is at home and he is as horny as hell:
David Cameron will today unveil radical plans to harness the power of the internet by reaching out to a blogging generation that is disaffected and disconnected from mainstream politics.
At the heart of the initiative, which is designed to make the Tories one of the most technologically progressive parties in Europe, is “webcameron” – a website for video blogs by their leader. Mr Cameron will provide regular clips with him speaking direct to camera, as well as written blogs and podcasts.
Dave ‘Boy’ Cameron is in his bedroom and he wants to play. He is ready to fulfill all your fantasies. Anything goes. Features include:
- Tory leader undresses in his bedroom, reveals 7″ uncut
- Anonymous access
- Free registration
- Live sex chat
- The 3 ‘G’s – Girls, Guys and Goats!
- Meet hot and sexy Tory singles for erotic chat and more
- Cheapest cam rates on the web
So join now for hot, horny, sexy live action with Tory leader. Everything turns him on. Whatever you like, he is into.
…declared my recently-returned father, after enthusing over many aspects of Russia’s cultural heritage and before waxing lyrical about the beauty of its landscape. He opined that the country appears to be in a sort of collective malaise; birth rates have declined markedly, with terminated pregnancies outnumbering their full-term counterparts significantly. The population is shrinking and the remainder are scared out of their wits – Dad surmised the latter opinion from his observation that Russian churches appear to be the most highly maintained, furnished and adorned buildings in Russia.
Of course, the fact that Russia is facing a profound demography-related meltdown is unlikely to be news for the average Samizdata reader. One of the more renowned articles written about the deep population crisis facing the modern Russian state was penned by Mark Steyn. It makes for interesting, if not always absolutely convincing, reading. In a piece of analysis that I think is dead wrong, Steyn, citing the precedent of the sale of Russia’s North American territories to the United States, asserts that a depopulated Russia will soon enough have its resource-rich Siberian hinterland snatched from it by an envious (and greatly more populous) China – so it may as well benefit from the inevitable and sell Siberia to Beijing. I suspect that if the Russians possessed as plentiful a supply of nuclear-tipped ICBMs in 1867 as they do now, Alaska would still be known as ‘Russian America’ in the Anglophonic world. Tom Clancy-esque Chinese plots against Siberia aside, Steyn is right to be gloomy about Russia’s future prospects; whilst her formidable nuclear deterrent should guarantee her borders, it will not secure her birthrate. The Economist recently published an article detailing the depressing facts regarding modern Russia’s population. Russia’s birthrate is dangerously low, but still comparable to a number of European nations (which certainly does not auger well for them, either). However, the real catastrophe is found in Russia’s soaring death rate:
At less than 59, male life expectancy has collapsed in a way otherwise found only in sub-Saharan Africa. It is around five years lower than it was 40 years ago, and 13 years lower than that of Russian women—one of the biggest gaps in the world.
The article goes on to detail a host of lifestyle-induced afflictions and misfortunes that kill Russians off at uniquely high rates, resulting in unparalleled population contraction.
For those concerned with curtailing the influence of government, it is worth pondering how much of the blame for this utter catastrophe can be laid at the feet of Russia’s previous political arrangements, ending 1991. Not all, but I suspect an awful lot. Admittedly, most of the health issues responsible for the abysmally low male life expectancy are related to alcoholism, and vodka was around a long time before 1917. However, the Soviets showed they understood the power of hard liquor as political lubricant on a massive scale in Mongolia in the 1970s, when the dissemination of previously rare vodka ensured growing discontent was muted by an alcoholic fog that continues to blight the lives of countless Mongolians today. I find it difficult to believe that vodka was not widely distributed for similar purposes throughout the duration of the Soviet Union. → Continue reading: “Russia is fucked”
I dislike ‘push’ advertising, no, I hate ‘push’ advertising and go out of my way to avoid products advertised in ways that annoy me, the sort that tries to shove what you are doing aside and force their goddamn product in your face… and a prime example is those web banners advertising animated ‘similes’ that play audible intensely annoying sounds as you are browsing, shouting “Say something! What?” at you. My usual response is to rather pointlessly yell “Piss off!” at my monitor.
I regularly and quixotically write to websites running these accursed advertisements and tell them I will never return as long as they run audible advertisements. One site did agree they were unacceptably intrusive but sadly a couple weeks on they are still running the damn things. Does anyone know of some way to turn off unsolicited sounds in Internet Explorer so I do not have these moronic things inflicted on me when I arrive on some site?
The Pope Benedict XVI knew very well what he was doing quoting Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologu. Once more, with feeling…
Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.
The BBC’s correspondent in Rome, David Willey, suggests that Pope Benedict may have not understood the potential implications of his remarks. I beg to differ. The Vatican spends a fair amount of time and effort on other religions, both as part of its institutions and as a continuation of ecumenism so dear to John Paul II. I therefore doubt that Pope Benedict would be oblivious to the Muslim ‘sensitivities’. I suspect he understands rather well how modern victimhood assists Muslims in the West. In short, he has done a great service to the public debate about Islam, such as it is, by holding a mirror to those whose only response is to strike at it violently.
I am disappointed that the public figures defending him cannot do better than saying his speech was misunderstood (re German Chancellor Angela Merkel). Catholic Church for all its vilification throughout the ages, some of it deserved and a lot of it not, is the last remaining Western institution that holds values to be above public opinion(s). One of the values that the Church has paid dearly for acquiring and upholding is the understanding that spreading the faith through violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul…
Interestingly Pope Benedict’s lecture was about faith and reason. It was based around one of the central beliefs of Catholicism – that God is knowable through reason. His intention was to broaden our concept of reason and its application… not contrary to the scientific nature of Western philosophy but as a matter of rational and practical approach to the cultural and social problems that the West faces.
A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures.
I do not mean to exonerate the Pope from being ‘subversive’ of Islam as there is a bit in his lecture that I find more central to the debate than the infamous quote from 14th century:
But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality.
This is a far more damning statement than the one that caused all the commotion. There is not much tolerance these days in the Vatican for intolerance and, gasp, lack of reason.
Earlier tonight, whilst browsing in a shop, I was listening to a song playing on the radio that I have not heard for years. It is an appallingly bad, drivellous, sappy love tune with a disco beat called Lady (Hear Me Tonight) by one-hit-wonder group Modjo. What makes this song so utterly shit are the lyrics – they were surely written by a computer or perhaps someone who does not speak English. I’m going to reproduce them now, so if you intend to read on, make sure you have a bucket within easy reach. Consider yourself warned:
Lady/Hear me tonight/’Cos my feeling/Is just so right/As we dance/By the moonlight/Can’t you see/You’re my delight/Lady/I just feel like/I won’t get you/Out of my mind/I feel loved/For the first time/And I know that it’s true/I can tell by the look in your eyes
Is this the worst song ever written? I think it a strong contender for that title, but I would like to see some differing opinion from the worldly and wise that congregate here. Therefore, inspired as I am by Johnathan’s recent vox pop and Perry’s determination to position Samizdata as a YouGov competitor, I petition you, dear reader, to leave your nominations for worst song lyrics (with a sample of the horror) in comments.
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s national current affairs flagship, the 7.30 Report, ran an interesting piece on Peak Oil theory, which was surprisingly contrarian considering the ABC’s traditional biases (think BBC protégé). The most common manifestation of Peak Oil theory – a belief that at some point soon oil production will peak and then decline, causing spiralling oil prices and a world of chaos – has long been a favourite of environmentalists, leftists and the perpetually gloomy. However, of late Peak Oil’s slip is showing to such an extent that even an organisation like the ABC cannot deny it is distinctly iffy. I would go further; it’s demonstrably false. Mark Nolan, ExxonMobil Australia’s Chief Executive controversially stated earlier this week that
According to the US Geological Survey, the earth currently has more than three trillion barrels of conventional recoverable oil resources. So far, we have produced one trillion of that.
When an oil company representative talks like that, one tends to believe him – oil companies have a natural interest in maintaining a perception of scarcity to maintain upward pressure on the price of crude.
And he’s referring to known oil reserves. Thanks to woeful underinvestment in exploration by – and equally woeful management of – many of the world’s true oil majors, the state owned National Oil Companies (subscriber-only article, sorry), we may have knowledge of just the tip of the iceberg.
Considering the pace of development of alternative energy sources, the famous quote from former Saudi oil minister Sheikh Zaki Yamani that “the Stone Age did not end for lack of stone, and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil.” is looking more prophetic than ever. Peak Oil chaos? Stuff and nonsense.
Sometimes you read something that you have every reason to believe was written by a sane, intelligent and logical person, and you are shocked. Shocked at how incredibly twisted this sane, intelligent and logical person’s perspective could be regarding one singular subject their pen encountered. Tim Blair points out such an example. To quote the estimable Mr Blair’s post:
Graeme Blundell’s review of The Falling Man includes a curious claim:
In an extraordinary act of national media self-censorship, several days after the photograph appeared, it vanished. Papers across the US defended themselves against charges of invading a dying man’s privacy and turning tragedy into pornography. The photograph became impermissible. There was a deeply held belief the deaths of the jumpers weren’t proper, indeed that they were cowardly. [JW – Blair’s emphasis, not mine] The images that came to symbolise the day were of helmeted heroic rescuers working in the rubble and the jumpers disappeared to the shameful websites that traffic in autopsy photos and videotapes of executions.
The commenters at Tim’s site rightfully voiced their disgust at such a sentiment. I could not help but marvel at the sheer ignorance betrayed by the author’s reading of events, too. I quite confidently assert, with no supporting evidence, that not one media outlet in the Western world even briefly pondered cowardice as a motive of those wretched jumpers. The fact that Blundell so egregiously detects this wildly inaccurate perception as a “deeply held belief” amongst many suggests to me that this is his own delusion, which is where the ignorance part introduces itself. When trapped out on a stricken building’s precipice – with intolerable heat and the promise of excruciating pain at one’s back and cool, open air at one’s front – people do jump. I cannot possibly know or understand what would be running through a desperate victim’s mind at a time like that, but I would guess that a very basic, elemental survival mechanism – buried deep in our ancient animal instincts and wholly unencumbered by conscious and cerebral rationality – might well be invoked. Step back into a hellish inferno and certain death. Step forward into benevolent – tragically fleetingly benevolent – open air and possible survival. Only one profoundly ignorant of the human condition would mistake the latter choice as an act of cowardice.
On a lighter note; since I have mentioned Tim Blair here, I may as well press an unrelated fact. The man is right up there with the very wittiest writers in the blogosphere. In the middle of a gadfly-esque post confronting the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s marketing of a book published by them (the book is also written by an ABC science broadcaster) – whereby Blair contrasts a strident and hyperbole-ridden stance towards the rather wacky and more-or-less harmless Intelligent Design movement with the ABC’s generally sheepish reaction to the world’s most dangerous religious phenomena – we stumble across Exhibit A:
I’m not religious, so I don’t have a God in this fight
Brilliant.
Right, I am taking a break from scribbling about the iniquities of inheritance tax, dumb airline security and so forth to link to this terrific article by Ed Brayton about golfing phenomenon and American icon, Tiger Woods. Even if you do not give a two-foot putt about the game, this article is a fine study of the sheer force of will that has propelled a man to become the master of his sporting world:
I have to admit to being absolutely fascinated by Tiger Woods. I’ve followed his career closely, despite doubting him initially. I remember watching the press conference when he announced that he was leaving Stanford and turning pro. I particularly remember watching Phil Knight, CEO of Nike, talk about the $40 million contract they had signed with Woods, and I remember laughing out loud and ridiculing Knight when he said that Tiger Woods would transcend the game of golf the way Michael Jordan and Muhammad Ali transcended their sports.
No way, I said; not a chance. No matter how good he is, no matter how much he dominates the sport, golf will never be anywhere near as popular as basketball or boxing and that will limit his fame and his standing in relation to the rest of the sports world. Golf is too much an exclusive sport, too tied in with the rich and the well born to have the kind of universal appeal that other sports have. And it’s solitary, one man by himself, with no defense to be played and no one on one competition to fuel rivalries. Yeah, I’m glad I didn’t put any money on that prediction.
Brayton’s blog, Despatches from the Culture Wars, is definitely worth a regular visit, too.
It seems that academia is in league with the legal profession and the growing army of largely pointless psychologists and ‘counselors’ who treat the myriad of syndromes which we are told plague society.
Blackberry email devices can be so addictive that owners may need to be weaned off them with treatment similar to that given to drug users, experts warned today. They said the palmtop gadgets, which have been nicknamed ‘crackberries’ because users quickly become hooked on them, could be seriously damaging to mental health.
…and what is quite literally the ‘money quote’…
[She] added: ‘Employers provide programmes to help workers with chemical or substance addictions. ‘Addiction to technology can be equally damaging to a worker’s mental health’.
It is not hard to see where this is going. Owning a Blackberry can be pathologised into ‘Information and Communication technology (ICT) addition’ and clearly any company not providing professional help for ICT addiction could well be negligent (i.e liable to be sued) for ignoring work related harm caused to employees.
Academics love pathologising things as that leads to grants for ‘further study’, psychologists love it because they can make a fortune as ‘counselors’ treating the afflicted, lawyers love it when academics pathologise something as that means a company can be sued for causing someone to ‘catch’ a ‘recognised syndrome’, and of course politicians love it because that means clearly there is something here that must be regulated and perhaps even taxed more to discourage it.
But what is the solution if your Blackberry is messing with your mind? Turn the fucking thing off when you go home. Sorted. My bill for your therapy session is in the post.
“If Israel uses its military decisively to wipe out Hezbollah, such an action will simply create a whole new generation of terrorists.”
Someone close to me recently lectured me on this fact. It appears to makes sense prima facie, but such an enlightened-sounding utterance falls apart as an empty truism with the addition of a little perspective. The Middle Eastern conflict must be viewed from a long-term angle, whilst attempting to countenance the ramifications of the alternative tactic mentioned. Those who might be attracted to the deceivingly pacific fog shrouding the above statement would benefit from realising that by strategically not responding in kind to a belligerent act by zealots like Hezbollah is no silver bullet to the problems of the Middle East; on the contrary, such a strategy may well carry consequences that could ultimately be unthinkably awful.
A powerful expression of the quote I provided above can be found in Steven Spielberg’s recent movie, Munich. The moral of that tale is identical to the one pronounced by my close relative; if one hunts down and kills those who planned and carried out the kidnapping-murders of the Israeli athletes at those fateful Games, all one does is inspire a new and more brutal generation to rise up in its place and start spreading increased chaos.
In response to this assertion, I ask; was this same generation not destined to pollute the earth with their hatred and intolerance in one form or another? Israel, by its relatively frequent, um, non-diplomatic actions, may well have inspired many, many Muslims to embark on violent jihad over the course of its existence. However, if Israel left – for example – the horrors of the Munich Olympic Games unanswered, it is perfectly conceivable that the people who reacted to Israel’s subsequent blatant retaliatory assassination programme by joining Islamic militant movements would readily join the same sorts of organisations (or even Arab state militaries) when inspired and emboldened by a flaccid Israeli reaction to a travesty of this kind, or perhaps an aura of weakness created by such a profound act of Israeli inertia in the face of this sort of crime. Long and rambling sentence, sorry. Considering that the existence of Israel is an anathema to so many Middle-Eastern Muslims, Israeli inaction and the perception of Israeli weakness is plausibly just as strong an inspiration to take up arms against the relatively tiny Jewish state as a hail of super-potent Star of David-marked precision-guided missiles.
The overarching problem – and this extends beyond Israel and into the international arena – is Islam and its unique propensity, amongst the major religions, towards radicalism. It seems more than likely that Israel will defeat Hezbollah in the future, however I have no doubt that some other radical Islamic organisation will fill any breach left expeditiously. If radical Islam’s nature is hydra-like, as those urging Israeli restraint imply from the above quote (and I believe they are correct), chopping off the heads of the hydra when they appear until the organism is exhausted through struggle or circumstance seems a perfectly logical grand strategy for the enormously durable West to pursue over the decades.
The ideal that lasting peace could reign in the Middle East if Israel would simply act passively towards its aggressors when she comes under attack is delusional nonsense. Israel is (again) biblical territory in Huntingdon’s oft-quoted, prescient – and surely by now undeniable – Clash of Civilizations, and ultimately the conflict between the liberal West and conservative Islam is a fiendishly complicated, opaque and unpredictable game of strategy that will be played out over many, many years. Every move in this game has the potential to yield both highly predictable and confoundingly unpredictable consequences. It is predictable that when Israel neutralizes an external threat using its military, a certain kind of person will be motivated to fight this force. Conversely and equally predictably, if Israel fails to respond adequately to an external threat, the enduring pan-Arab desire to drive the Israelis into the sea will stir in the heart of the same sort of person, provoking a similar outcome. I fear Israel, due to its location, will suffer negative long-term consequences emanating from the actions of the armed belligerati of conservative Islam, regardless of whatever strategy Israel chooses (ranging from rank appeasement to overwhelming military retaliation) to deal with blows bestowed by these aggressors, for that is the nature of the consolidated foe. Hence, Israel needs long-term support from the Western world. Israel may not be a liberal place itself in many ways, but in many ways it is the (somewhat unlikely) vanguard of liberalism.
|
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.
|
