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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“Churchill, who was prone to the black dog of depression, went to bed on the night of the 5th of June 1944 with a heavy heart. Gloomily he told his wife, Clementine, that by the time they awoke in the morning many tens of thousands of young men he had sent across the Channel might lie dead on the beaches of Normandy. In Alanbrooke’s diaries (he was the finest of the WWII diarists) it is clear how heavily he felt the weight of responsibility throughout his time as a commander in France in 1940, and subsequently as CIGS. Yet neither Alanbrooke nor Churchill felt the need to go in front of the cameras and explain how troubled they were by all the pressure. Even long afterwards it wouldn’t have occurred to either for a split second that this would be a good idea or remotely appropriate.”
– Iain Martin, commenting on the recent performance of Mr Blair’s former spinmeister on the TV. He makes a good point, I think.
“When I hear the word “holistic” I reach for my BAR and don’t worry about the safety.”
– Regular Samizdata commenter NickM, over at his CountingCats redoubt. He’s talking about Prince Charles. Of course, if Charles wants to revert to an age of Divine Right, witchburnings, absence of notions of individual rights, logic, science and so forth, then maybe he should remove himself to a place more congenial to his outlook.
Ballet by elephants.
– Mike Carlson, commentating for BBC1 TV during the first quarter of Super Bowl XLIV, describes the Indianapolis Colts offence as they run in the first touchdown. 10-0 Colts at the end of the first quarter.
A North Korean is on average six inches shorter than a South Korean.
– Christopher Hitchens writes about A Nation of Racist Dwarfs
Given that we think, as most of us seem to do, that the production of such goods as cars, vacuum cleaners, and frozen vegetables should take place in a regime of market competition, why do so many among us nevertheless agree that it makes sense to exclude the production of money from these same forces? Why must the production of money be entrusted to a monopoly called the central bank?
– My thanks to Jerzy Strzelecki for drawing my attention to this mises.org piece by him, written when the recent banking tumult was at its most tumultuous, entitled The School of Salamanca Saw This Coming. Quite brief and well worth a read. You don’t have to believe in God to understand phrases like “usurpations of God’s knowledge”.
“When one studies the history of money one cannot help wondering why people should have put up for so long with governments exercising an exclusive power over 2,000 years that was regularly used to exploit and defraud them.”
F.A. Hayek, Denationalisation of Money: The Argument Refined. Page 33. Published by the Institute of Economic Affairs and Ludwig Von Mises Institute. The book is quite challenging and complex in some of its arguments, but I find the broad thrust of it – that competition is good for currencies as it is for other aspects of economic life, to be unanswerable.
The Channel Four report on the issue can be seen here on their internet TV viewer (which ought to be called the FourPlayer, but is regrettably known as Channel4OD). Their report is clearly from a green perspective, but does at least cheer us all up with a snippet from the Hide the Decline video.
Choice quote from Bob Ward “if you are less than transparent then people think you might be hiding something”. To which one is tempted to respond that if you say you are hiding something, people might also conclude that you are hiding something. Like a decline for example.
– Bishop Hill stays right on top of the ongoing Climategate story. If you have not already done so, order your copy now of the Bishop’s recently published book, The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science.
Before Christmas, the Bishop (aka Andrew Montford) talked with me over the phone. Be warned that there are some seriously annoying clicks right at the start of this, but after a couple of minutes they go away and the remaining half an hour or so is okay. That caveat aside, listen to that here.
I see that today’s Samizdata quote of the day spot for today has already been taken. By me, but taken. Had it not been, I might instead have offered this:
The main argument now, increasingly, is between those who view the state as an enabler and those who view it as, at best, a sometimes necessary irritant. To employ a massively oversimplified analogy, statists seem to think that the state should act as captain, coach, physio, kitman, ballboy, PR department, groundsman, ticketing department, FIFA representative, the guy with the half time oranges, agent, translator, WAG, turnstile operator, matchday police, the guy selling the big flags outside the ground and the guy confiscating the big flags on the way into the ground. Libertarians just want a guy with a fucking whistle.
As I often have (or at any rate want) to remind people when I shove up an SQOTD, the fact that I think whatever it is to be a snappy bit of prose doesn’t necessarily mean that I completely agree with it, even as I usually reckon it to have its heart in the right place.
A complaint about the above quote, for instance, is that it omits to mention the most obviously foolish of all state activities, which is that states now routinely insist on striding onto the pitch and trying to play, like that embarrassing games teacher played by Brian Glover in the movie Kes, even as (like Brian Glover) they continue to be the ref.
I recently heard President Obama say on my television that the job of President is (I quote from memory as best I can) “making decisions and helping people”. President Obama thinks that he should be both the referee and a player, in other words. And since he cannot possibly help everyone in the USA, he ends up playing for one side (helping only some people) against the other side (at other people’s expense), and his refereeing gets bent out of shape to reflect his competitive preferences.
Presidents shouldn’t be helping. They should be maintaining and defending the circumstances within which people can help themselves.
The fascinating thing about this response is that it demonstrates that Cameron, whose only claim to fame is that he is a politician, isn’t even very good at politics.
– Richard North describes Conservative Party leader David Cameron’s stonewalling response to suggestions that he might want to rethink his attitude towards the climate change debate
We should not forget, here in the UK, that dislike of the state-financed broadcasting network of the BBC has been going on for some time. Here is Kingsley Amis, the author and lecturer, writing in 1984:
“In television, as in other departments of national life, the consumer, the customer, the purchaser, is faced wiith a semi-benign semi-conspiracy to foist on him what is thought to be good for him, what other people consider he ought to have, instead of what he naturally prefers. In short, the public is brought education when it wants entertainment.”
The point, however, is that the focus on entertainment has arguably increased since the late Mr Amis wrote those words back in the era of Mrs Thatcher. As a consequence, the paternalistic intentions of the creators of the BBC have been frustrated to a remarkable degree. When Amis commented on the BBC, he at least was part of a country in which it was assumed that the BBC’s controllers felt that they had some sort of mission to educate and inform – not that this justified coercive funding even then. But the paternalism was at least fairly blatant. Now even that sense of mission appears to be more evident in the breach rather than the observance. The contradictions posed by the BBC’s funding model are unendurable.
The quote is taken from The Amis Collection, page 257, published in 1990. I am not sure if the book is still in print.
“Being tried by 12 good men and true sounds brilliant but if, God forbid, you were to find yourself in the dock charged with a crime you did not commit, would you want to be tried by 11 dinner ladies and Trigger from Only Fools and Horses? Or Wayne Rooney? Or Piers Morgan? Speaking personally, I’d far rather plead my case in front of nothing but a judge. I know that some are a bit doddery, and that many live in houses with no central heating, but most are more astute than the alternative: 11 lunching ladies and Benny from Crossroads.”
– Jeremy Clarkson
Read on, and he nevertheless defends trial by jury, despite his rather bracing opinions of our fellow men and women. For our non-UK readers, I should explain that Wayne Rooney is a footballer, Trigger is a character from a comedy show, Piers Morgan is a journalist and arsehole, and Benny is also a character from a forgettable soap opera. I hope this information proves informative and enlightening.
In Scott Brown we have an irresponsible, homophobic, racist, reactionary, ex-nude model, teabagging supporter of violence against woman.
– Keith Olbermann, MSNBC host.
To which Mark Steyn responded, under the heading “Homophobic Nude Teabaggers on the March”:
That’s certainly why I’m supporting him. But who knew there were so many of us?
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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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