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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“Traditionally, a bank is a means by which old people with capital lend to young people with ideas. But the advanced democracies with their mountains of sovereign debt are in effect old people who’ve blown through their capital and are all out of ideas looking for young people flush enough to bail them out. And the idea that it might be time for the spendthrift geezers to change their ways butts up against their indestructible moral vanity. Last year, President Sarkozy said that the G20 summit provided “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to give capitalism a conscience.” European capitalism may have a conscience. It’s not clear it has a pulse. And, actually, when you’re burning Greek bank clerks to death in defence of your benefits, your “conscience” isn’t much in evidence, either.”
– Mark Steyn, writing about Greece and the ongoing train-crash of the European welfare state model.
And to think that a little over a 100 years ago, passports were almost unknown until an international assembly of governments decided to impose them. There’s just no stopping a bad idea whose time has come. Not without a guillotine, anyway.
– Commenter ‘tehag‘
I was about to stick this up as a(n) SQotD, but I see that there already is one. Never mind, here it is anyway:
Belief in magic and faith in spells runs strong in political Washington. The New Republic’s print edition describes the reaction of the Administration on “April 14, 2009 as Barack Obama’s standing in the polls was beginning to slip”. Obama was looking for a phrase to bring back the love, “something that would evoke comparisons to Theodore Roosevelt’s Square Deal, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.”
Obama had hit on the phrase the New Foundation. He tried it out with Presidential historians at a private dinner in the White House. Doris Kearns Goodwin nixed it. She said it sounded “like a woman’s girdle”. Goodwin was right. But it underscores the complete vacuity of a public policy built on wordsmithing. The administration was trying on words like a courtier at Versailles might try on a hat or a dress thinking it would make a difference.
Not that there is anything wrong with hats or dresses or deckchairs. The only thing wrong is imagining that rearranging these articles on the deck of the Titanic will keep it afloat. There’s something crazy about that, something pathetically crazy.
That’s Richard Fernandez reflecting on the declining esteem in which President Obama is now held, abroad and at home.
Two thoughts. First, I’d have put a comma where it says “hats or dresses or deckchairs”, to make it “hats or dresses, or deckchairs”. There is a slight change of gear there, which, I would say, needs a bit of punctuational acknowledgement.
But second, more seriously, is Obama’s present nosedive in esteem, well described by Fernandez, irreversible? Having just watched our own former Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, damn near levelling out from what looked like a nosedive towards total catastrophe for himself and for his party, and achieving a very decent, under the circumstances, crash landing that nearly saved both. Brown only lost by an extraordinarily narrow margin, given how things had looked only a few months earlier, and his main opponent, from having looked a winner by a mile, had to make do with leading a mere coalition. Seemingly doomed politicians – inevitable losers, to use the word that Fernandez also uses – can make comebacks. Can Obama? Can this Titanic yet be kept afloat?
One thing that might improve matters for President Obama is that just now (or so it looks to me from over here) even the one party media who got Obama elected are now criticising him, a bit, partly for real, but partly in order that their next burst of slavish support for him will look honest instead of slavish.
On the other hand, if what happened here with Gordon Brown is anything to go by, Obama’s saviours will not be his media cheerleaders, or for that matter his own speechwriters, but his leading opponents, who will somehow contrive to look as clueless as he now looks.
In most every election, 80% of blacks vote Democratic – the perceived party of free stuff – rather than for the party that ended slavery.
– Rachel Marsden
The British government want to sign up to the Schengen Agreement… but they want the police state parts of it without the free movement of people parts of it
– Guy Herbert
The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern: every class is unfit to govern.
– John Dalberg-Acton
The American media has used up its credibility on vanity projects. AGW was the primary one over the last few years, but the biggest vanity project of theirs was Obama. He’s been elected, and no one in America really has any illusions, on either side of the aisle, that he was “the media’s candidate.” The problem that they face is that they are now tied to him, and he’s sinking fast. Turns out, despite how many times they claimed it wasn’t true or didn’t matter, that he’s inexperienced, indecisive and lacks any sort of guiding principle. They spent all the credibility they had with the American people over the last 15 years or so, and ramped that spending way up to get Obama elected. They are now broke, incredible, and paying the price. Fox News is the only one that didn’t waste its credibility capital on this (and have learned to horde it viciously after being under credibility attack by the others since its birth) and is now thriving because of it. Even leftists in America are now turning to Fox more than the rest of the media when they need hard news, like in a crisis or attack situation. The media wasted the reputation they built up since WW2 on tawdry baubles like AGW and Obama, and now no one trusts them. That’s the state of the US media.
– Samizdata commenter “Phelps”, writing about this.
“Befitting his ideology, Krugman has only one policy to propose, regardless of topic: Transfer more resources from the discipline and dynamism of markets to the inefficiency and cronyism of government. Government-run health care. Government-controlled banks. Government bailouts. High taxes. High spending. Krugman wants it all, just like in Europe (which, in 2008, he called “the comeback continent”). And Krugman has no problems denying economic science and current events to advocate it.”
– Fred Douglass, on the NYT columnist and supposed Harvard economist. For what it is worth, I have never taken Krugman all that seriously since he became a hired attack dog for the Dems. A pity, since some of his writings on trade, for example, are excellent.
For all of the talk about a fourth branch of government, calling to account corruption on both sides of the aisle, and informing the people’s decisions with transcendent objectivity, the media has always been a bullhorn for specific biases. The virgin media of our youth did not exist, and it should not exist. As with every other facet of life in a free society, it is only competition that creates progress and openness. In media, this means diverse views and diverse sources, calling not only corrupt politicians into account, but each other as well.
– Jeremy D. Boreing
Any politician who first stirs up love amongst you is trying to steal something from you.
– Tom Smith
“The regard for the laws of nations, or for those rules which independent states profess or pretend to think themselves bound to observe in their dealings with one another, is often very little more than mere pretence and profession. From the smallest interest, upon the slightest provocation, we see those rules every day either evaded or directly violated without shame or remorse. Each nation foresees, or imagines it foresees, its own subjugation in the increasing power and aggrandisement of any of its neighbours; and the mean principle of national prejudice is often founded upon the noble one of the love of our own country.”
Adam Smith, taken from “The Wisdom of Adam Smith, A Collection of His Most Incisive And Eloquent Observations, Edited by Benjamin A Rogge, page 173.
We can confirm that eight of the nine people quoted on the website at the time either worked for the Identity and Passport Service (IPS), the Home Office or another government department or agency.
– A spokesman from the Identity and Passport Service (IPS) of the Home Office, in answer to a Freedom of Information request from Phil Booth of No2ID, asking how many of the people quoted on an IPS website expressing enthusiasm for the wonderfulness of their ID cards did in fact work for the government.
Actually, this was not a direct response to the FOI request, but was only admitted after the good Mr Booth demanded an internal review from the IPS after they answered the question with several lengthy paragraphs of content free bureaucrat babble the first time. Details thanks to The Register here.
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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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