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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It was extraordinary to see the convention chairman, Mayor Villaraigosa, try to ram through those platform changes yesterday. And succeed in doing so. But dishonestly. Bewildered, he kept having the delegates vote again.
I was reminded of the European Union. Years ago, some countries were given the opportunity to vote on EU membership. When the people said no, the EU made them vote again, until they got it “right.” Remember?
Repeatedly, about half the convention voted for the platform changes, and about half voted against. Then Villaraigosa declared — willy-nilly — that the yes votes were two-thirds of the convention!
That’s what the people were booing about, I think. Maybe they were booing God and Jerusalem tangentially. It suits Republican politics to say they were booing God and Jerusalem (a lovely combination, by the way!) — and heaven knows I want the Republicans to win more than anyone else in the country can possibly do. But I think the delegates were mainly booing the rank dishonesty of the process.
–Jay Nordlinger
The Danish and Irish repeated referenda were about the Maastricht and Lisbon treaties respectively, not EU membership. But the analogy holds – only I don’t think that the EU has fiddled the count as yet.
“I don’t think there are any Liberal Democrats who have anything other than admiration for Ken and the way he works.”
– an ‘aide to Mr. Clegg‘. Can you think of anything more damning?
On July 1 next year, Croatia becomes the 28th member of the European Union, and under the terms of the Treaty of Maastricht this new, proud sovereign state – not yet two decades old – must accept the entire corpus of EU law; and she must place her neck in the noose of the single currency. Unlike Britain or Denmark, the Croats have no opt-out. They are now legally obliged to give up the kuna for the euro, and I say, don’t do it, folks. It is not only a mistake. To submit to the euro would be a stunning refusal to learn the grim lessons of recent Balkan history
– Boris Johnson.
Blimey, I can hardly believe I just quoted Mr. Toad. But whilst I share BJ’s sentiments on this, knowing Croatia reasonably well, I suspect there was less opposition to this than one might have expected due to the indigenous Croatian political class being such a dismal collection of pond scum and turds who floated to the top. I think the average Croatian could not see how shifting power away from these wankers could possibly make things worse. And of course they are entirely wrong on that score, as they will eventually discover.
Profiling whole populations instead of monitoring individual suspects is a sinister step in any society. It’s dangerous enough at national level, but on a Europe-wide scale the idea becomes positively chilling.
– Shami Chakrabarti
The major problem which the medical profession in the most advanced sectors of the galaxy had to tackle – after cures had been found for all the major diseases, and instant repair systems had been invented for all physical injuries and disablements except some of the more advanced forms of death – was that of employment. Planets full of bronzed, healthy, clean-limbed individuals merrily prancing through their lives meant that the only doctors still in business were the psychiatrists – simply because no one had discovered a cure for the universe as a whole, or rather, the only one that did exist had been abolished by the medical doctors. Then it was noticed, that like most forms of medical treatment, total cures had a lot of unpleasant side effects. Boredom, listlessness, lack of – well anything very much, and with these conditions came the realisation that nothing turned, say, a slightly talented musician, into a towering genius faster than the problem of encroaching deafness. And nothing turned a perfectly normal, healthy individual into a great political or military leader better than irreversible brain damage. Suddenly everything changed. Previously best-selling books such as ’How I Survived an Hour With a Sprained Finger’ were swept away in a flood of titles such as ’How I Scaled the North Face of the Megaperna With a Perfectly Healthy Finger But Everything Else Sprained, Broken, or Bitten Off by a Pack of Mad Yaks’. And so doctors were back in business – recreating all the diseases and injuries they had abolished – in popular, easy-to-use forms. Thus, given the right and instantly available types of disability, even something as simple as turning on the Three-D T.V. could become a major challenge. And when all the programs on all the channels actually were made by actors with cleft-palettes, speaking lines by dyslexic writers, filmed by blind cameramen, instead of merely seeming like that, it somehow made the whole thing more worthwhile.
– Douglas Adams. The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. (Episode 11 of the original radio series. This was apparently a bit too wild a riff to make it into the subsequent book adaptations).
I’m glad people are getting so much pleasure out of the Paralympics and I don’t wish to knock either the competitors or disabled people generally. But there’s a bubble of sanctimoniousness surrounding the event and its media coverage which definitely needed popping – and I salute Frankie Boyle for being fearless enough to do it. Brave outspoken souls like him are our final bulwark against the kind of cant and sanctimoniousness and sentimentality which first began to rot our national character in those grisly days after the death of Diana.
– James Delingpole
Not so long ago, politicians in both Britain and America were preparing for a political realignment. Labour was readying itself not just for defeat but annihilation, and the biggest surprise on election night was how many of its MPs were left still standing. Obama’s 2008 victory was accompanied by hubristic talk of a new Democrat era – but Republicans were back to take control of the House of Representatives two years later. The global debt crisis has created problems too big for any government, Left or Right, to solve easily. As a result, incumbents everywhere are vulnerable – and politics is becoming thrillingly unpredictable.
– Fraser Nelson, who apparently has only just noticed which lizard get elected for being the lesser evil does not actually matter all that much when the choice is between getting fucked by Lizard A or buggered by Lizard B.
“The next four days were a period torn out of the world’s usual context, like a breathing spell with a sweep of clean air piercing mankind’s lethargic suffocation. For thirty years or longer, the newspapers had featured nothing but disasters, catastrophes, betrayals, the shrinking stature of men, the sordid mess of a collapsing civilisation; their voice had become a long, sustained whine, the megaphone of failure, like the sound of an oriental bazaar where leprous beggars, of spirit or matter, compete for attention by displaying their sores. Now, for once, the newspapers were announcing a human achievement, were reporting on a human triumph, were reminding us that man still exists and functions as a man.”
– Ayn Rand, from her essay, “Apollo 11”, taken from The Voice of Reason, page 167.
Neil Armstrong, gone, but never to be forgotten.
Here is a nice documentary about Armstrong which nicely captured his love of flying and science.
What if we have reached a point where the scale and scope of government have become absurdly large? What you would observe is a growing gap between the theories used to justify government expansion and its practical impact. You would observe the cost of education and health care rising, without commensurate benefits. You would observe stimulus programs that increase employment according to computer models but not in reality. You would observe crony capitalism. You would observe budgets distorted by public-sector unions. You would observe fraudulent accounting that shifts costs for pensions onto future generations.
– Arnold Kling
“What irritates me about France today is how the taste for work, for effort, has been completely lost.”
– Bertrand Meunier, who recently agreed to move to London from France to take a job at private equity firm CVC Capital Partners. He is one of many such people who are leaving that country to come to the UK in the wake of new, heavy taxes imposed by the recently elected socialist government in Paris. In the relative sense, London is marginally less ghastly than Paris, tax-wise. If you are a French person looking to work at a school for Gallic expats’ children in London, that looks like a growing business to be in.
I was surprised to discover today (unless I have been more than usually let down by my internet searching “skills”) that this, by Douglas Adams, has never been mentioned here at Samizdata before:
“On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people.”
“Odd,” said Arthur, “I thought you said it was a democracy.”
“I did,” said Ford. “It is.”
“So,” said Arthur, hoping he wasn’t sounding ridiculously obtuse, “why don’t the people get rid of the lizards?”
“It honestly doesn’t occur to them,” said Ford. “They’ve all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they’ve voted in more or less approximates to the government they want.”
“You mean they actually vote for the lizards?”
“Oh yes,” said Ford with a shrug, “of course.”
“But,” said Arthur, going for the big one again, “why?”
“Because if they didn’t vote for a lizard,” said Ford, “the wrong lizard might get in.”
That’s from So Long And Thanks For All The Fish. In the place I found it on the www (see the link above), it does not say on what page.
I was reminded about this snatch of dialogue by a recent episode of the BBC Radio 4 show Quote Unquote. A lady participant said she thought Douglas Adams very wise and very funny, this quote in particular. I post it here as a corrective to today’s SQotD, below, in which Paul Ryan says something good, thereby proving himself to be a more likeable lizard than nasty lizard Obama and his lizard gang.
But, alert readers will note that this is a classic example of a piece of writing that will have everyone nodding, but each thinking his own thing. It’s like if you say you favour “common sense”, “principled government”, or “democracy“. Each person listening to you agrees. Each has his own distinct idea about what each phrase means, in ways that often wildly contradict the ideas in the heads of his nodding neighbours. All agree, that these are fine things. Far fewer actually do agree about anything of substance.
For some, reading the Adams quote above, the lizards in charge of us are too capitalist inclined, for others they are insufficiently capitalist inclined. Some want the lizards to be keener on policy X, others curse the lizards for being insufficiently opposed to policy X. All agree only in being unsatisfied with the rule of the lizards, and that the lizards are indeed lizards.
Which is one reason why the lizards usually survive and thrive. We, their victims, can so very rarely agree amongst ourselves about what species, or indeed if any species, ought to replace them.
Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and the government doesn’t define what happiness is. You do.
– Paul Ryan, quoted in this report.
What do our American commenters make of this guy?
He seems to make a lot of good noises, which I think is a hell of a lot better than no good noises. Put it this way, if America did not now vote for these good noises, that would really be a disaster, I 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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