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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Yesterday I went down to the library in my hometown of Kettering, Northamptonshire.
There was a big display with a lot of ‘politically correct’ language – all about ‘sustainable development’ and other such. But when I worked out what it was all about it turned out to be the council’s plan for the Kettering area.
Exactly how many new houses, business enterprises and jobs there were to be was laid out (a bit like Gosplan from the old Soviet Union). The fact that it is impossible for some ‘plan’ to calculate the ‘correct’ level of all these things (something that Ludwig Von Mises pointed out in 1920) was ignored.
Nor was the possibility that government (in this case local government) should not provide all the roads, drainage, and other such that such developments demand. Of course the only way to judge if someone really thinks that a development is viable is to see whether they are willing to pay for everything (roads, drainage… and the maintenance of such things) themselves – if they are not it is a con.
In short the old unholy alliance between private developers and government (i.e. taxpayer) subsidies…even the Soviets did not have that. All in contradiction to the promises that the town and county councillors got elected on (i.e. that they would oppose such ‘development’.
The level of ‘research’ and ‘knowledge’ that the council has is shown by the picture of the building they choose to illustrate their plans for the centre of Kettering (presently, years after the present administration came to power, the ‘one way’ and road blockage system is still driving customers to other towns and divides the town into two parts, north and south, that are virtually cut off from each other) – the picture was of a building, and not even a very good building, that is miles outside of the centre of Kettering in south Kettering (a few hundred yards from my home).
Almost needless to say the whole display included a lot of words about the ‘environment’ (the environment that the developments would be built on I suppose).
It is a rerun of the trash collection scam. Lots of different coloured waste bins and a collection (of one or more of the coloured bins) only once every two weeks, rather than every week for one bin – all in the name of the “environment” (although all the carefully separated, on the pain of punishment, trash is then mixed together again because the council has no way of disposing of it separately). The whole scam costs a fortune and is a health hazard due to trash rotting for two weeks in bins – or being spread about when they get knocked over.
If attacked on any of the above local councillors will just blame national or European Union regulations and they may well be right, but I suspect that it is not a matter of where the government plan comes from, it is a matter of it being a government plan that is the problem.
Meanwhile the councilors concern themselves with another project. After wasting large amounts of taxpayer’s money on (daft) changes to the Town Hall, they now plan to waste millions on building a new Town Hall, or whatever politically correct name they come up with for it, someone miles out of town…I suppose they want to hide somewhere isolated so that angry people can not find them or the local government officers.
I have not mentioned what political party controls Kettering town council and Northamptonshire county council – but it does not really matter. The ‘Chief Executive’ (what we used to call the Town Clerk) and his deputy chief executives and other senior local government officers control everything – and they do so on the basis of various local and national regulations and policies.
Local councilors cannot even oppose these people as any written or verbal counter attack could be seen as ‘bringing the council into disrepute’ by the Local Government Standards Board – this body has hit councilors in other places for daring to speak against the administrators.
This is what it is like living in a ‘planned society’ like Britain, people who have something to lose do not tend to speak out.
Overconfident?
Governments are happily increasing their power everywhere by stoking fear of terrorists. Why risk undermining that by spilling over into loony implausibility?
Terrorism is the “biggest threat to all European nations,” Home Secretary John Reid has said as he discusses ways to boost security with five EU ministers.
– BBC
Utter tripe. Terrorism does kill, indubitably. That embarrasses governments that pretend to be perfect protectors.
Ignoring government self-image, it might be a serious enough threat to some people in some European states, to be worth some European governments spending a lot of treasure tackling it; and it might even be serious enough to merit changing the law to cope with it. I doubt both those prescriptions, and the latter more than the former, as regular readers will know. But they could conceivably be true.
However, let us review the facts against Mr Reid’s stronger assertion:
- Terrorism is NOT a threat to any European nation. No European nation state, and no identifiable national group in Europe is in danger of loss to terrorism endangering its identity or existence.
- Terrorism is NOT a threat to any Europen state. There are a handful of states in the world whose existence is from time to time endangered by terrorism. None of them is currently in Europe. The only very obvious example is Iraq. Colombia, Nepal, and others have come close recently, but no EU country has been in that position since the Greek civil war.
- To individual people and certain groups more than others, terrorism may present a threat, it is true. But that is not true of all European nations. The majority of EU countries have had no terrorist incidents whatsoever in at least a decade.
- Even in the few countries with significant terrorism in recent years (which really means France, Italy, Spain, Germany and the UK, if you extend ‘recent years’ to cover the last 20 or 30, which is a pretty generous estimate of the contemporary for a political phenomenon), actual casualties have been small. Hospital infection, food poisoning, non-political crime, bad driving… each presents a bigger risk to any of us. Terrorism is plainly not the biggest threat faced by people anywhere in Europe.
Witless hyperbole is the stock-in-trade of dictatorships propagandising their presumed-credulous servitors, in order to buff up their self-image. (Read any government-endorsed press story from an African or Mddle Eastern bullydom.) Dictatorships cannot bear to be embarrassed, and are embarrassed by terrorists, because they can never concede anything is outside their control. But in liberal states that sort of pretension to deity is supposed to be mocked from office. Which is Britain? Or is the question, which is Europe?
I wrote two posts for Biased BBC about the BBC’s reporting of President Bush’s “admission” that there were parallels between the present situation and Iraq and the Tet Offensive. The BBC, of course, is neither the only nor by any means the worst offender among the media organisations that have seized on this.
Those who think that a clueless idiot can get and keep the office of President of the United States may well be good children or pleasant neighbours but there is no need to take anything they say about politics seriously. Whatever criticisms one might justly make of Bush, one thing he cannot be is a simpleton. For all that there is a kind of truth behind it: Bush is a simple man. As I wrote here, precisely because he is a child of privilege “in important respects his values are more normal than is normal in his milieu.” Poor guy. Of course he had thought about the similarities to the Tet Offensive. Like some prince letting slip that there might be something to this Copernican system in front of his less enlightened bishops, he just forgot for a moment to keep one of the taboos that it is safer to observe when so many of the intermediaries between him and the populace are either ignoramuses or hostile.
He forgot that so many of them rejoice that the American media managed to turn that offensive, which General Giap viewed as a failure, into “proof” that the war could not be won. He forgot that so many of them view the conquest of Vietnam by a regime so detested by its own people that thousands of Boat People preferred the mercies of the open sea to enduring it any longer, and the deliverance of Cambodia into the hands of the democidal Khmer Rouge, to be their finest hour.
You know, thinking about it, his moment of forgetfulness might make a few people remember these things. It may not do him such harm after all.
Having given up trying to stay PM and handed over the kulturcampf to Mr Brown, St Anthony now wishes to save the world:
In his strongest warning yet on the environment, the prime minister will tell fellow EU leaders that the world faces “conflict and insecurity” unless it acts now. “We have a window of only 10-15 years to take the steps we need to avoid crossing catastrophic tipping points,” Mr Blair says, in a joint letter with his Dutch counterpart, Jan Peter Balkenende.
I am not interested for this purpose in whether he is right about ‘catastrophic tipping points’. It is entirely possible he is. It is interesting that this is certainly not from his own knowledge. And since actually no one knows enough about climate to say under what conditions, never mind when, a catastrophe, bifurcation, flip, transition… whatever you would like to call it… might occur, then the fact the firm limit of years is reported as as little as 7 in some places, and up to 25 elsewhere, should not worry us.
What should, is the contradiction between the millenarian rhetoric and the irrelevance in its own terms of the hair-shirt policy that we are being exhorted to adopt. If the quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere will cause catastrophe at some threshold level, then capping emissions from human activity merely postpones reaching the threshold. By not very much.
If things are that bad either: (1) We should find ways yet unknown to make global human greenhouse-gas emissions close to zero or net negative. (Sorry, no cooked food – except sun-baked and geyser-boiled – until we do.) Or (2) we should enjoy the party at the end of the world. But it seems those in charge do not know the difference between quantity and rate.
Now that is really scary. Reality I can cope with. I am aware I’m going to die, and probably suffer disease and loss first. That the course of my life will be determined not by biology, physics and economics, but by messianic imbeciles with no grasp of any of them, is harder to bear.
For me; the non-exclusive or: technofix plus fun.
For the Head Boy; “Repent, o ye sinners or burn in hell on earth! Go, and sin no more. (Than you did in 1990).”
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.
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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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