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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Just what I was thinking:
So with one word, Obama both offended the British and made himself a laughingstock with the Latin Americans.
John Hinderaker said it, and Instapundit has just linked to it. The one word being “Maldives” for “Malvinas”. Causing this much derision and contempt with just the one word is indeed quite an achievement. I’m betting the Maldiveans are not that impressed either.
The British media, the BBC in particular, mostly treat Obama, still, as some kind of Holy Sage, whose every word is Truth and whose every enemy is Evil and Stupid. How could any American with brain cells in the plural possibly object to “free health care”?
In the BBC’s parallel universe, only the previous President was capable of gaffes on this globe-spanning scale. But can anyone think of a GWB jnr gaffe that is any gaffer, as it were, than this “Maldives” clanger? Thought: they should call Obama “The Gaffer”.
It will be very interesting to see what the BBC now makes of this, if anything.
The Daily Telegraph’s Jonathan Gilbert describes this error as uncharacteristic, saying that this was the kind of thing Bush did do, but Obama doesn’t. Hinderaker says different:
When did Mr. Bush ever display such geographic ignorance?
Anyone? I can’t remember anything from Bush that was this doltish. Comically non-existent new words, yes. But blunders like this on matters of diplomatic significance? Not that I can remember. But then I never did think Bush was an idiot, and preferred to listen to what he said rather than dwell on the errors he sometimes committed while saying it.
(I don’t think Obama is a complete idiot either. He was, after all, clever enough to get the Presidency, in defiance of the wishes of the Clinton clan. And clever enough then to use it to do real damage to most Americans’ idea of what America is, even if not as much as he might have managed, had he been even cleverer.)
Our own Perry de Havilland wants Obama to win. He reckons the Republican chap with be a Cameronian disaster, who will, by talking free markets but by doing business as usual, will ensure that our side gets blamed for all the ordure that has yet to hurtle towards the fan.
This sort of equal opportunities offensiveness from Obama makes it that much harder for Perry to get his way.
“The current rate of exchange is around $1.50 to the pound. When I tell my American friends that anyone earning the equivalent of $66,900 a year in Britain pays income tax at 40 per cent, they don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Any American politician who suggested such a thing would be vaporised before he could make his first TV advert. Even Mr Obama, the most Left-wing president in a generation, would think it outrageous. In fact, he said last week, in a keynote flog-the-rich speech, that no one earning less than $250,000 a year (the majority of Americans, as he put it) should have his taxes raised. He presumably would not adopt the Cameron-Clegg-Miliband definition of “the wealthy” to mean anybody earning a bit more than the average. Just as a matter of interest, he also stated last week that one exemption that he would not tamper with was the tax relief on charitable giving. Even for a Left-wing president, that would be going too far.”
– Janet Daley
[I]t’s simply no longer the case that killing a few people on board a plane could lead to a hijacking. Never again will a terrorist be able to breach the cockpit simply with a box cutter or a knife. The cockpit doors have been reinforced, and passengers, flight crews and air marshals would intervene.
– Kip Hawley Oh, well done! That only took 10 years.
A retired securocrat would like us to understand a fact that was plainly apparent by noon on September 11th, 2001. A fact that the isolated and terrified passengers of Flight 93 worked out and demonstrated for themselves. In the meantime countless millions of people have been inconvenienced and humiliated in the name of security. And since countless billions have been spent on the pointless bullying, there is now a public superstition and pointless bullying lobby that makes it certain the article will make no difference.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a queue to be groped by a truculent imbecile, to no purpose but your subordination – forever.
The thing I learned from the Beaconsfield by-election was that wars make Prime Ministers popular.
– Tony Blair, quoted by Max Hastings in a BBC television programme this evening about the Falklands War and its impact upon subsequent British military policy. The by-election in question happened during that war, and was a landslide victory for Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives, and Tony Blair’s only electoral reverse.
This is the truth of the Wizengamot: Many are nobles, many are wealthy magnates of business, a few came by their status in other ways. Some of them are stupid. Most are shrewd in the realms of business and politics, but their shrewdness is circumscribed. Almost none have walked the path of a powerful wizard. They have not read through ancient books, scrutinized old scrolls, searching for truths too powerful to walk openly and disguised in conundrums, hunting for true magic among a hundred fantastic fairy tales. When they are not looking at a contract of debt, they abandon what shrewdness they possess and relax with some comfortable nonsense. […] They know […] that a powerful wizard must learn to distinguish the truth among a hundred plausible lies. But it has not occurred to them that they might do the same.
– Eliezer Yudkowsky, in chapter 81 of the brilliant fan-fiction Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, on how those who wield political power are too caught up in their power games to take the time to obtain real knowlege. (For “powerful wizard” I read engineer, hacker, scientist, mathematician, Austrian economist, Samizdatista, etc.)
Have any of us mentioned here that Friedrich Hayek died exactly twenty years plus one week ago, i.e. on Friday March 23rd 1992? I believe not.
Sam Bowman, in a posting on March 23rd 2012, ensured that the ASI Blog was responsible for no such omission. He marked the occasion with a couple of Hayek quotes, from The Constitution of Liberty.
I particularly liked the second one:
It is because freedom means the renunciation of direct control of individual efforts that a free society can make use of so much more knowledge than the mind of the wisest ruler could comprehend.
One of the contrasts in the contemporary world that I keep banging on about here is how different the designing and making of high tech gadgetry (which still benefits – and almost miraculously so – from exactly the sort of dispersed knowledge and dispersed intelligence that Hayek was talking about) is from the management of the world’s financial system (the higher reaches of which are notorious for depending on the good judgement of a tiny few supposedly wise but actually all too fallible political appointees).
As Sam Bowman said, a week ago:
Hayek died twenty years ago today. His profound insights into economics and social philosophy might be more important than ever.
Indeed they might.
Two weeks before the next election, turn off all coal-fired power stations and give the American public a good hard look at their long bleak future.
– commenter “old44” (March 28 5.14am) on a posting at WUWT entitled New EPA rule will block all new coal-electric generation
Last year, physicists discovered that red wine can turn certain materials into superconductors. Now they’ve found that Beaujolais works best and think they know why.
– The Physics arXiv Blog (with thanks to the ever alert Instapundit – how does he keep doing it?)
The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave . . . Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death.
– Patrick Henry, March 23, 1775, at the second of the Virginia Conventions.
The full speech is available here It’s not long so, as Glenn Reynolds would say, “read the whole thing.”
“The religious factions that are growing throughout our land are not using their religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to force government leaders into following their position 100 percent. If you disagree with these religious groups on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a loss of money or votes or both. I’m frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in ‘A,’ ‘B,’ ‘C’ and ‘D.’ Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me? And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of ‘conservatism.'”
– Barry Goldwater, as quoted by the blog, Unforeseen Contingencies. He is talking in relation to the absurd Rick Santorum. The Republican Party has, in my view, paid a high price for not heeding Goldwater on this issue. I sometimes wonder if a similar thing could ever happen in Britain with the Tories. I think it is, hopefully, unlikely, although the spirit of old puritanism does stalk the land in different guises, some of them not, on the face of it, remotely religious as traditionally understood.
It’s funny, BTW, how the Left are against rich white immigration, and the “Right” are against poor brown immigration – they do have something in common, don’t they.
– serial commenter Alisa
“Yelling “fire” in a crowded theater is a terrible thing to do — unless there’s a fire.”
Thomas Dolan, Barron’s. He was writing about a wonderful financial market practice – sometimes legal, sometimes not – known as “naked short-selling”. His article explains what that means. I got interested after getting a DVD in the mail, called The Wall Street Conspiracy, that reckons that this practice was responsible for destroying many an honest business. Sounds a bit like Michael Moore, but I will give it a view to see if it stacks up or is a pile of crap. One quick thought: the idea of selling something you don’t own or haven’t even borrowed yet does sound awfully close to outright fraud, like insuring a house against fire if you don’t even own the house. Or like fractional reserve banking……….Aaarrgggghhh…
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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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