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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Regular commenter here Nick M takes a wack at Vernon Bogdanor:
Progress occurs when free people do things. It just happens Boggy. It is retarded when retards like you try and gerrymander it. In 1900 the fastest growing economy on the planet was Russia’s. Look at the plight of the place now? There is nothing “progressive” about being progressive.
I was going to put that up as a Samizdata quote of the day, but I reckon the feline enumerator has his sneer quotes around the wrong “progressive” there. Still, good stuff, albeit sweary.
Talking of which, I do wonder about this swear-blogging thing. The bad news is that respectable bloggers who might give particular (swear-)blog postings of merit lots of new readers are put off by the swearing from linking to such postings. (Telegraph Blogger Alex Singleton recently told me exactly this.) On the other hand, a lot of people are very angry just now, not just, you know, in a state of respectful disagreement with the powers that, for the time being, be. Such angry persons deserve voices around which to rally, voices which communicate their feelings rather than just their thoughts.
Swear-blogging may also mean that, by assembling all the angry ones in a cursing, seething internet mob, in a way that completely alienates our present version of Polite Society, the angry ones will achieve a far greater degree of tactical surprise come the storming of the Winter Palace, or whatever will be the equivalent event or events during the next few years. Polite Society just won’t see it coming, because it simply cannot now bear to look. It will consequently swing in far greater numbers from lamp-posts (or again, whatever will turn out to be the modern equivalent) than would otherwise have happened. Which just might be a rather fucking good thing.
“If you have a mortgage and are celebrating record low repayments, then enjoy it for now. Ask what the consequences will be for your household budget of interest rates of 10 per cent or higher, which will be needed to tame the rising prices that will result from this mad experiment. But there is another great British consensus emerging around the idea. “It is essential,” say analysts. “No other option,” sighs many a fiscal conservative. “Everyone” is in favour of it, we’re told. I have just about had enough of “everyone”. It was “everyone” – most economists, politicians, etc – who thought that the bubble would never burst. They were wrong then, and are now. “
Iain Martin, on the Bank of England’s descent into monetary madness. Milton Friedman must be spinning in his grave.
“What did you do during the recession, Daddy? I installed solar panels and wind turbines. If only Franklin Roosevelt had thought to put millions of Americans to work during the Depression doing make-work jobs that were gee-whiz futuristic…. Oh, that’s right. He did. And it didn’t work then, either. But this time is different, you know.”
– Nick Gillespie, at Reason’s Hit & Run blog.
“The idea that everyone is entitled to his opinion is one of those truisms so often repeated that it now goes without saying. Like many truisms, however, it is false. It is also usually irrelevant. Let us suppose that Jill disputes Jack’s opinion that free trade causes poverty in the Third World. Jack may defend his opinion by producing evidence connecting trade and poverty but he cannot help his case by insisting that he is entitled to his opinion. How could that show that free trade causes poverty in the Third World? The entitlement would be relevant only if it guaranteed the truth of your opinions. But it can’t do that, because it is an entitlement supposedly enjoyed by everybody. And people disagree. Jack and Jill are both entitled to their contradictory opinions about trade and poverty, but they can’t both be right. So insisting that you are entitled to your opinion cannot possibly give you any proper advantage in a debate.”
– Jamie Whyte.
“It is noteworthy that in all the glaring headlines and TV news media’s Pecksniffian commentary about Bernard Madoff’s $50 billion scam and now R. Allen Stanford’s multi-billion dollar gold brick, not one word has been heard about the federal government’s own ongoing confidence scheme. The recent “bailouts” of banks, mortgage companies and automakers, together with the $787 billion “stimulus” legislation and the $75 billion home mortgage “rescue” plan signed by President Barack Obama last week, share the same attributes and methodology as Madoff’s and Stanford’s, and differ from them only in scale. Compared to Congress, the U.S. Treasury, the Federal Reserve, and the myriad perpetuated entitlements such as Medicare, Social Security, the Federal Employees Retirement System, confidence men Madoff and Stanford are mere small-time grifters.”
– Edward Cline.
He’s right. Ponzi schemes and much public sector pension/benefits systems are more or less identical. I guess the caveat is that with Mr Madoff and others, they were allegedly claiming, falsely, to be running funded schemes with actual investments in real assets. But the broad point is valid.
There are no jack boots here, that’s too obvious, perhaps at some later point more overt force if there is too much “selfish” foot dragging by you or me, though the powers and aggression of the government’s already-existing “force” is sufficiently threatening to anyone who might resist. Make no mistake about that. The speech (2/24) by Obama was a seemingly soft yet determined Declaration of War against free exchange, against the natural and beneficial chaos of the myriad of human transactions (spiritual and economic – which cannot be rationally or logically separated by the way!). He is simply doing that which popular mainstream philosophy and pop culture point to and in effect “authorize.”
– ‘Mister Integrity‘
“Whenever someone complains that libertarians are just pie-in-the-sky utopian (or distopian) intellectuals, just ask them again about the real world consequences of the War on Drugs, and see who gets all pie-in-the-sky right quick”.
Randy Barnett.
Mr Barnett clearly did not get the memo from former UK prime minister Tony Blair that all that talk about liberty was so 19th Century, dahling.
Love doesn’t scale.
– Eric S. Raymond (spotted yesterday and discussed by Joshua Herring)
A propos of my earlier post on what recent legislation we should try to repeal in order to reclaim our lost civil liberties, I was struck by the thought that it might be easier to simply repeal every piece of legislation introduced since 1997.
– Bishop Hill
Did politicians rumble the trade? Did governments, or international forums or symposiums, provide the sharp instrument? Did academic research and expertise expose the dodgy product? Did statutory regulators apply the pin? No, the free market wised up and pricked this bubble. Politicians and finance ministers (if they had had the power) would have tried to keep it inflated. The market puffed itself up, and then, without intervention – despite intervention – the market let itself down. The speed with which this has happened has been awful, but however inconvenient for many or catastrophic for a few, correction is not a failure of the market, but a success.
– Matthew Parris
I just picked this out as a potential SQOTD:
Political professionals have little time for activist true believers and their pesky principles. Freedom of speech is one of those fundamental principles in a free democracy. It requires that you especially defend the rights of those with whom you disagree. Guido has gone to the trouble of watching the Fitna video, it contains no call to violence, in fact it condemns violence.
In the past and at great cost diplomatically, a Conservative government defended Salman Rushdie’s freedom of speech. It is therefore profoundly disappointing that the Tories have chosen to be officially agnostic about Geert Wilders. The decontamination strategy has turned into moral cowardice.
However, follow that last link and you will learn that the Conservative Party, in the person of Chris Grayling, may be retreating, a bit, from its former public position of craven retreat, so the Conservative bit of this story is not over yet. Yes, ban Wilders, says Grayling, but ban lots of others also. The Conservatives may well split on this, and I for one do not give a damn.
Two further quick thoughts:
First, I find all this elaborate condemnation of Geert Wilders by the Right-On tendency rather nauseating. We abominate what he says, but free speech is sacred and therefore he should be allowed in rather than being given the oxygen of publicity, but if he has broken the law then, blah blah blah, he should not be allowed in. This seemed to be the default position on Question Time last night, which I semi-watched. Usually there is only one but in these kind of weasel statements, but in this case there have often been two buts, with the second but being the but that craps all over everything before it, including whatever less ignoble turds emerged from the first but. But according to Guido, Wilders has not broken the law. And what Wilders says is that Islam is a huge problem because it preaches violence to those who do not submit to it. Which it does. Read the Koran, like this guy did. It is a vile piece of writing. People who grumble and splutter about statements like that are either Muslims or cowards or both. They just do not want to have to think about it because if this is true, which it is, it is all just too depressing.
Second: democracy. What we are witnessing here is democracy, not some perversion of it. If enough voters threaten violence, then the state will cave in, and nothing like fifty percent is required. Half a percent threatening to dig up pavements or set fire to things is more than enough, provided another five or ten percent, sprinkled around all those marginal or potentially marginal constituencies, are willing to back, defend, not condemn, such threats with their votes. Votes, in other words, are violence. I fondly remember an ancient black and white movie telling of how, towards the beginning of the nineteenth century, the plebs of Britain got votes. A key moment was when a brick came crashing through the window of a room where some political toffs were discussing it all. Either we get this organised, they told each other, in other words either we have more democracy, or the bricks will keep on coming. I am still for democracy, for the usual Churchill reason of it being better than the alternatives, but it is messy.
Personally, I am grateful to Geert Wilders, and even a little bit grateful to whichever coven of scumbag politicians it was who banned him from coming here. Some life has consequently been breathed into an argument which, while being just as important as ever, looked like it was becoming, what with all these Credit Crunch dramas, a bit passé.
“We are ruled by people who have achieved the remarkable distinction of being both dull and frivolous.”
Theodore Dalrymple. The problem is the idea that we need “rulers” at all.
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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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