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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A literary work, whether it be fiction or non-fiction, a brief essay or a lengthy treatise, should be composed with constant attention to the underlying theme of the work, summarised if possible in one sentence. I have borne this precept in mind. The message that integrates the text of this biography is that one man, relying on reason, and daring to stand alone, can make a difference in the world.
– The last paragraph of the preface of Dare To Stand Alone, Bryan Niblett’s biography of nineteenth century atheist, republican, birth control advocate and radical individualist, Charles Bradlaugh. Niblett spoke eloquently about Bradlaugh last night in London, at the most recent of Christian Michel’s 6/20 evenings.
It’s hard to escape the conclusion that Emma Jay grossly misled Delingpole as to the nature of the programme.
It does occur to me though that in the internet age, this kind of thing, while remaining possible, will be hard to sustain in the long run. Anyone who is ever approached by Ms Jay can immediately put her name into Google and discover that she cannot be taken at her word. In the internet age a TV producer or journalist stands or falls on their integrity.
Emma Jay’s looks to be gone, as does that of Rupert Murray, the guy who dissembled his way into Monckton’s confidence. I wonder what these question marks over their trustworthiness will do for their career prospects.
– Bishop Hill, in a posting entitled Integrity in the internet age reflects on the lack of integrity that was involved in the making of two recent BBC attempts to drive a stake into the climate sceptics. The thing about Bishop Hill is that he does not make such judgements lightly. He does not indulge in thoughtless abuse, and constantly posts little homilies discouraging it among his commenters. If he says you lack integrity, the chances are, overwhelmingly, that you do.
Presumably, many will want to defend these deceptions as being beneficial in the same way as has been claimed on behalf of whoever it was who revealed all those Climategate emails. But the fact remains that if you are dealing with either of the two above mentioned people, you should not trust them to tell you the truth about what sort of progamme they are really making. Their cover is now, as Bishop Hill says, blown.
“OK, for years, people who claim to be my intellectual betters on foreign policy (and pretty much everything else), and particularly about the Middle East, have been telling me that the root cause of the problems in the Middle East is the “occupation” of disputed territories in the West Bank and Gaza, and that we won’t be able to make any progress without solving that issue. It is what motivates Arab anger, and animates their protests. Well, surely if this is the case, with all of the apparent anger and ongoing revolt in Cairo, we should be seeing many reports on the ground of protesters with angry signs against the Zionist entity, right? Or have I just missed them somehow?”
– Rand Simberg.
And that is called paying the Dane-geld; but we’ve proved it again and again, that if once you have paid him the Dane-geld you never get rid of the Dane.
– Rudyard Kipling
The government can take away my freedom, but if they take away my internet porn, they’re going down
– @arabist
Mainly, I prefer to use Python
– Rob Fisher
“The moon shot has long been a favorite trope of politicians plugging for new government programs, right up there with the Marshall Plan. It was a wondrous achievement, but it presented a relatively discrete engineering problem. If only reforming education, a complex task involving the crooked timber of humanity here on earth, were as straightforward.”
– Rich Lowry, giving his less than joyous take on the State of the Union address by The One.
How about adding some math lessons to plot statistically the chance of an Arab suicide bomber and a gay socialist vegetarian pacifist wearing a Che Guevara tee shirt and no sense of irony all ending up on the same bus in London?
Sigh…Math was never that much fun in my school days.
State education is beyond parody.
– Perry de Havilland commenting here
“In the bubbled, hypocritical mind of some in Hollywood, the only reason Gervais crossed a line is because he went after them. Had he been as relentless in ripping apart Sarah Palin, her young children, Jesus Christ, or George W. Bush, today the comedian would be celebrated as “edgy” and “courageous” — because only in Hollywood is throwing red meat to a hard-left crowd considered “edgy” and “courageous.” But Gervais didn’t do that. Instead, he trained his satirical fire on Hollywood Power and today there’s serious talk about whether or not the comedian will be brought back to the Golden Globes next year as host.”
John Nolte, at the Big Hollywood blog.
I think he has a strong point in his praise of Ricky Gervais’s performance, but I have a slight reservation. Imagine if Gervais had said such insulting things about showbiz people that Mr Nolte holds dear, or causes he supports. I doubt we would get such applause. And I also note that in the Daily Mail newspaper yesterday (I quote from reading the print edition), the writer, Quentin Letts, raves on about Gervais’s rudeness as if it was a barnstorming example of high wit. No it wasn’t. I cannot imagine your average Daily Mail reader enjoying say, an attack by an American comedian on the Royal family, for example.
The sad truth is that yes, Hollywood is full of self-regarding jerks who deserve all they get. But that does not make gratuitous rudeness somehow clever, as far as I can see, and I don’t see how we are going to get better movies as a result. And this does all rather cement the idea in American’s minds that many Brits are little more than hooligans. (I’d like to know what Stateside commenters think of how this all comes across.)
Talking of good movies, has anyone yet seen The King’s Speech?
“So 2011 is the year of the “beneficial crisis”, when the EU will try to exploit short-term economic hardship in order to eliminate the powers of national governments and to create a new pan-European political structure. If it succeeds, it may go on to become a great world power. If it fails, it will start to revert to a collection of nation states.”
– Peter Oborne
He makes a persuasive argument that as far as the architects of the EU superstate were concerned, the sort of crises we are living through – such as the Irish/Greek debt problems – are not problems for the eurozone, they are actually very useful stepping stones towards creating their own new version of the Holy Roman Empire, except that unlike the HRE, the new state will be one run on corporatist, heavily regulated, lines.
I know, my friends, that you are concerned about corporate power. So am I. So are many of my free-market economist colleagues. We simply believe, and we think history is on our side, that the best check against corporate power is the competitve marketplace and the power of the consumer dollar (framed, of course, by legal prohibitions on force and fraud). Competition plays mean, nasty corporations off against each other in a contest to serve us. Yes, they still have power, but its negative effects are lessened. It is when corporations can use the state to rig the rules in their favor that the negative effects of their power become magnified, precisely because it has the force of the state behind it. The current mess shows this as well as anything ever has, once you realize just what a large role the state played. If you really want to reduce the power of corporations, don’t give them access to the state by expanding the state’s regulatory powers. That’s precisely what they want, as the current battle over the $700 billion booty amply demonstrates.
This is why so many of us committed to free markets oppose the bailout. It is yet another example of the long history of the private sector attempting to enrich itself via the state. When it does so, there are no benefits to the rest of us, unlike what happens when firms try to get rich in a competitive market. Moreover, these same firms benefited enormously from the regulatory interventions they supported and that harmed so many of us. The eventual bursting of the bubble and their subsequent losses are, to many of us, their just desserts for rigging the game and eventually getting caught. To reward them again for their rigging of the game is not just morally unconscionable, it is very bad econonmic policy, given that it sends a message to other would-be riggers that they too will get rewarded for wreaking havoc on the US economy. There will be short-term pain if we don’t bailout these firms, but that is the hangover price we pay for 15 years or more of binge lending. The proposed bailout cannot prevent the pain of the hangover; it can only conceal it by shifting and dispersing it among the taxpayers and an economy weakened by the borrowing, taxing, and/or inflation needed to pay for that $700 billion. Better we should take our short-term pain straight up and clean out the mistakes of our binge and then get back to the business of free markets without creating an unchecked Executive branch monstrosity trying to “save” those who profited most from the binge and harming innocent taxpayers in the process.
What I ask of you my friends on the left is to not only continue to work with us to oppose this or any similar bailout, but to consider carefully whether you really want to entrust the same entity who is the predominant cause of this crisis with the power to attempt to cure it. New regulatory powers may look like the solution, but that’s what people said when the CRA was passed, or when Fannie and Freddie were given new mandates. And the very firms who are going to be regulated will be first in line to determine how those regulations get written and enforced. You can bet which way that game is going to get rigged.
I know you are tempted to think that the problems with these regulations are the fault of the individuals doing the regulating. If only, you think, Obama can win and we can clean out the corrupt Republicans and put ethical, well-meaning folks in place. Think again. For one thing, almost every government intervention at the root of this crisis took place with a Democratic president or a Democratic-controlled Congress in place. Even when the Republicans controlled Congress, President Clinton worked around it to change the rules to allow Fannie and Freddie into the higher-risk loan market. My point here is not to pin the blame for the current crisis on the Democrats. That blame goes around equally. My point is that hoping that having the “right people” in power will avoid these problems is both naive and historically blind. As much as corporate interests were relevant, they were aided and abetted, if unintentionally, by well-meaning attempts by basically good people to do good things.The problem is that there were a large number of undesirable unintended consequences, most of which were predictable and predicted. It doesn’t matter which party is captaining the ship: regulations come with unintended consequences and will always tend to be captured by the private interests with the most at stake. And history is full of cases where those with a moral or ideological agenda find themselves in political fellowship with those whose material interests are on the line, even if the two groups are usually on opposite sides.
– Professor Steven G. Horwitz, writing in late September 2008, in a piece entitled An Open Letter to my Friends on the Left. This evening, Horwitz will be giving a talk at the Institute of Economic Affairs in London, entitled An Austrian Perspective on the Great Recession 2008-2009.
“It might be more appropriate if the Sveriges Riksbank would end the Economics Nobel Prize as a failure: strictly, it isn’t a true Nobel at all; it was not part of Alfred Nobel’s legacy, but a much later add-on to pander to the economics profession’s vain pretensions of scientific respectability. If we judge a science by the hallmark of predictability, then the predictions of economists are no better than those of ancient Roman augurs or modern taxi drivers; alternatively, we can judge by its contribution to “scientific” knowledge, in which case the contribution that modern financial economics has made makes us wonder if the agricultural alchemist Lysenko shouldn’t have got a Nobel himself; or we can judge it by contribution to the welfare of society at large, in which case the undermining of the capitalist system, the repeated disasters of the past 20 years, the immiseration of millions of innocent workers and savers, and the trillion dollar losses of recent years surely speak for themselves.”
– Alchemists of Loss – How Modern Finance and Government Intervention Crashed the Financial System, by Kevin Dowd and Martin Hutchison. First published in 2010. Page 86.
Now having read it, I cannot recommend this book too strongly. Some of the discussion about modern financial theory – and its baleful consequences – is quite complex, but the authors write with a verve and eye for drama that makes this a very readable book. In my view, it is the best study of what has happened, and more importantly, spells out in practical, thoughtful ways as to what should be done.
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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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