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]
|
There is a lot of debate as to whether the FSF’s “free software” or the OSI’s “open source” is the better term. But I don’t think either fully describes the idea, or why it’s a good thing in this context. I prefer something like “open development”, because the point isn’t simply that you or I can read the code – I’m not much of a coder, and most people aren’t at all – it’s that as a result, the development of that code takes place in public. (It’s worth emphasizing, because although it appears obvious when put plainly like that, it’s not always immediately apparent to anyone who hasn’t been involved.) Even if the leaders of a particular project were to have closed-doors talks with some governmental agency, the code they produce will be seen and examined by all. Nothing is impossible, but this makes the sort of collusion we’ve seen between Microsoft and the NSA extremely difficult to pull off.
Hardware, as Shuttleworth points out, could still be a problem. Open drivers help, but the chips themselves could be doing nasty things that we don’t know about. Open hardware is the next frontier.
– Sam Duncan
“I keep telling you fellows I don’t like to do this sort of thing. I can think of nothing more boring, for the American public, than to have to sit in their living rooms for a whole half hour looking at my face on their television screens… I don’t think the people want to be listening to a Roosevelt, sounding as if he were one of the Apostles, or the partisan yipping of a Truman.”
– Former President Eisenhower, via PowerLine. That whole paragraph is deadly.
It is hard to imagine a less narcissistic POTUS than “Ike”. It is often the way with those who have boasted genuine achievements. As for the current occupant of the White House…
The other thing that really got me thinking was seeing the sort of people that would appear on television, proselyting about the coming tragedy that it would imminently become too late to prevent. Whether from charities, pressure groups or the UN, I knew I had heard their strident and political use of language, and their determination to be part of the Great Crusade to Save the World before. These were the CND campaigners, class war agitators and useful fools for communism in a new guise. I suddenly realised that after the end of the Cold War, rather than slinking off in embarrassed fashion to do something useful, they had latched onto a new cause. The suggested remedies I heard them espouse were always socialist in approach, requiring the installation of supra-national bodies, always taking a top-down approach and furiously spending other peoples’ money. They were clearly eager participants in an endless bureaucratic jamboree.
Now don’t get me wrong: a scientific theory is correct or not regardless of who supports it. But recognising the most vocal proponents of CAGW for what they were set alarm bells ringing, and made me want to investigate further…
– Jonathan Abbott writes on WUWT about his personal path to C(atastrophic) A(nthropogenic) G(lobal) W(arming) skepticism.
Aside from the slightly odd word “proselyting” … snap.
A few commenters here have expressed boredom about this whole climate thing, and a lot of people certainly are very bored indeed with the climate alarmists. But when you consider how much power and money are still being diverted into arrangements based on climate alarmism being true, by people for whom the science still seems to be settled like it was 1999, it would surely be a big mistake to stop discussing these matters now. This would be the equivalent, during the Cold War (an earlier huge argument to which Abbott rightly compares the climate debate), of reading someone like Von Mises explaining in about 1950 that communism is economically irrational and hence in the long run doomed, and saying, right, we can forget about that then. Communism still had many decades of damage to do. And it didn’t just fall. It was also pushed. Climate alarmism is the same now. The damage it will do has, arguably, only just begun. Just how much damage climate alarmism ends up doing depends on how much it continues to be challenged.
Commerce is real. … Aid is just a stop-gap. Commerce, entrepreneurial capitalism, takes more people out of poverty than aid, of course we know that.
– Bono
Madsen Pirie concurs.
There you have left-wing hypocrisy in a nutshell. When a government official like New York mayor Michael Bloomberg tries to reduce the public consumption of sugary beverages with a tax that makes the drinks more expensive, he’s a public health hero. But when it’s a profit-generating company that stands accused of increasing beverage costs, it’s a greedy manipulative Wall Street blood-sucker.
– Ira Stoll
Companies have no broad “duties” if you believe in private sector, and in a civil society based on voluntary relationships. That means if I set up a firm, with capital of mine or entrusted to me by others with their consent, then apart from not breaking rules about force, fraud, etc, there is nothing else one is required to do. Professor Milton Friedman has this all understood years ago. The proper response to calls for “corporate social responsibility” is “fuck off”.
– Johnathan Pearce
[O]rdinary businessmen appear to tend to be less difficult to deceive – perhaps because they are such busy people, and tend to make the mistake that people are motivated by money so are knocked sideways by people who are motivated by POWER
– Paul Marks, below.
Much like the good folks over at Samizdata I had no interest in commenting on the recent trial of Mr George Zimmerman for the killing of Mr Trayvon Martin – not in my fields of interest and I knew nothing about it. However following the jury decision to find Mr Zimmerman innocent it turns out that a lot of my friends are psychic and know that Mr Zimmerman deliberately went out of his way to murder mr Martin due to his colour. Now sadly these friends weren’t able to make their unique skills available to the court, but I would suggest that they need to get themselves a super hero identity as their skills are vitally needed. Until they do that all we have is the rule of law where a person is innocent until proven guilty by a jury of their peers having heard all of the available evidence (and I believe the same applies across the pond where the trial took place). Now I’ve not heard yet anyone claiming it was a mistrial or that evidence was withheld or tampered with, I’ve not even heard anyone claiming that the law was at fault – at least not amongst my amazing psychic friends.
– Anonymong
We are contemplating sanctions for misbehaviour in the healthcare and banking sectors; why not in the energy policy sector?
– Professor Michael J. Kelly, “Prince Philip Professor of Technology”, University of Cambridge, in a letter to the Times yesterday, putting Britain’s energy decision-makers right down where they belong, alongside central bankers, bankers, NHS malpractitioners, etc.. The Times is behind a pay wall, but Bishop Hill picked up on this, and has the whole (quite short) letter.
Intertwined with government hubris is shameless incompetence. This is demonstrated regularly on CSPAN, though it is often appreciated only by people who know the details of the often plausible sounding pontifications from the floor of the house and senate. But when you think about it, who could possibly know what one really needs to know in order to make sound decisions about the massive pile of things Congress attempts to control.
– Nicholas J. Johnson
I’d have more faith in an offer of protection from the Mafia (if I paid) than Mr Cameron’s referendum. The cavets are, broadly, if he wins a majority, and if he renegotiates membership terms with the EU, then he’ll put his new deal to a referendum. If the EU declines to negotiate, a condition precedent fails, no referendum. I might as well offer you a buggy ride at my local country show, if a Bull agrees to wear a saddle, and if it agrees to tow you.
– Samizdata commenter Mr. Ed, who may or may not be a horse of course.
Underneath the contempt for UKIP lies a careless assumption by the antiseptic metropolitan elite that their condescension is universally shared — that these beery coves with fag ash down their golf-club ties are demographic dinosaurs in a Britain ever more diverse, more Muslim, more lesbian, more transgendered. But the Britain to which UKIP speaks resonates beyond the 19th hole. It was not just that the party won an unprecedented number of seats in May’s elections, but that they achieved more second-place finishes than anybody else. Beyond the leafy suburbs and stockbroker counties, in parts of Britain where the traditional working class has been hung out to dry by Labour in pursuit of more fashionable demographics, UKIP has significant appeal.
– Mark Steyn
|
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.
|
