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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The historian and libertarian writer, Robert Higgs. is most upset that some Americans had celebrated when Osama bin Laden was killed by US special forces a few days ago:
“The caretakers who comfort the sick and dying are often great. The priests and friends who revive the will to live in those who have lost hope are great. The entrepreneurs who establish successful businesses that better satisfy consumer demands for faster communication, safer travel, fresher food, and countless other goods and services are great. The scientists and inventors who peer deeper into the nature of the universe and devise technologies to accomplish humane, heretofore impossible feats are great. The artists who elevate the souls of those who hear their music and view their paintings are great.”
“But mere killing is never great, and those who carry out the killings are not great, either. No matter how much one may believe that people must sometimes commit homicide in defense of themselves and the defenseless, the killing itself is always to be deeply regretted. To take delight in killings, as so many Americans seem to have done in the past day or so, marks a person as a savage at heart. Human beings have the capacity to be better than savages. Oh that more of them would employ that capacity.”
I agree utterly with the first paragraph. We should celebrate goodness more than we do. Absolutely right. But come on. I really have had it with the moral posturing of people who wax indignant about their countrymen feeling pleased because an evil man has been killed. When an evil person, in a confrontation such as occurred a few days ago, is killed, then why should not the admittedly rough justice of what happened be marked by a certain degree of grim satisfaction? I don’t imagine for a moment that anyone who voiced satisfaction at OBL’s death is under the illusion that this can possibly put right the evil that was done on 9/11. There are times, however, when grim satisfaction at what happened to OBL is not only the understandable reaction, but the just one.
It interests me how some on the almost pacifist wing of the libertarian movement – if I can call it that these days – have reacted to the demise of this man. After all, such folk often complained that “neoconservatives” who supported the overthrow of Saddam or the Taliban, say, were going beyond just retribution in response to the 9/11 attacks. So what I would ask of Higgs, and for that matter, would-be POTUS Ron Paul, is what exactly do they suggest should have happened in the case of OBL, had by any chance a pristine, moral libertarian regime have managed to find him and track him down? File a lawsuit? Suggest he surrenders to the nearest police station where he can be read his Miranda rights? That was not going to happen: the most probable outcome for a person such as this would be a messy arrest, and the charade of a trial and lifetime jail term/execution, or a firefight. Welcome to reality.
Higgs finishes with this:
“Glory to the USA, glory to its hired killers, glory above all to its heroic Great Leader. The whole spectacle is profoundly disgusting. Yet we can see that many Americans have enthusiastically fallen for this trick, dancing in the streets in celebration of a man’s death in faraway Pakistan. Such unseemly behavior is not the stuff of which true greatness is made.”
“Unseemly”. Oh get over yourselves.
Here are some more thoughts over at Pajamas TV. I particularly enjoyed Bill Whittle’s comments. I share his take.
Brisbane, Australia. January 2010. 
Batam, Indonesia. January 2010.
Singapore. January 2010.
Hanoi, Vietnam. February 2010.
Malacca, Malaysia. February 2010.
Dubai, United Arab Emirates. February 2010.
Valença do Minho, Portugal, March 2010.
Baiona, Spain. March 2010.
Rijeka, Croatia. March 2010.
Rzeszów, Poland. April 2010.
Lviv, Ukraine. April 2010.
Paris, France. May 2010.
Salamanca, Spain. May 2010.
Sierra Nevada, Spain. June 2010.
Constanta, Romania. July 2010.
Tiraspol, Transnistria. August 2010.
Bender, Dniester Valley security zone. August 2010.
Chisinau, Moldova. August 2010.
Düsseldorf, Germany. September 2010.
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. October 2010.
Vung Tau, Vietnam. October 2010.
Luang Prabang, Laos. October 2010.
Bangkok, Thailand. October 2010.
Metz, France. November 2010.
Bad Wimpfen, Germany. November 2010.
Luxembourg City. November 2010.
Namur, Belgium. November 2010.
Plovdiv, Bulgaria. December 2010.
Skopje, Macedonia. December 2010.
Pristina, Kosovo. December 2010.
Kotor, Montenegro. December 2010.
Dubrovnik, Croatia. December 2010.
Belgrade, Serbia. December 2010.
Budapest, Hungary. December 2010.
Here.
Scroll right out, then right in. Rotate. Wonder.
Hat tip: Photon Courier
It seems almost unbelievably crass that attempts to take down Julian Assange should revolve around such a patently obvious ploy as concocting ‘sexual assault‘ charges against him.
It reminds me of some other oh so obvious black bag operations, i.e. the patently absurd planted media articles to link Saddam (a secular socialist) to Al Qaeda (Islamists) in the run up to the allied attack on Iraq.
I have grave misgiving about Wikileaks releasing operational military information but the fact the governments of the world are all baying for his blood and starting to cooperate with operations to discredit him speaks volumes about the damage he has done to the leviathan state everywhere… as was always his intention…and for that Assange has already assured himself a very special place in history. I suspect people will be talking about him long after the current crop of political leaders have been consigned to the mundane sections of historical record.
John Crace of the Guardian writes about someone totally cool.
Max Hardberger makes his living by stealing back stolen cargo ships, beating pirates at their own game from Haiti to Russia.
In 2012 there will be a US presidential election using a new distribution of the electoral college. This will use the population data of the current US census. After last night’s elections, there has been a dramatic change in what happens if the Democrat and Republican candidates end up with a tie (for example 269 votes each).
Short answer is that, assuming the politicians stick to their party, the Republicans win the presidency, but the Senate would pick a Democrat for Vice President. Details at my election blog.
[Update: correction made from comments, thanks Lone Ranger!]
This gave me a bit of a laugh:
“Vampire Diaries” star Ian Somerhalder, an outspoken critic of the BP oil spill in the Gulf, appeared at Thursday’s Washington Post Live conference on energy policy in the nation’s capital. The actor, who was “chill” about speaking in front of members of both houses of Congress, fit in so well in his suit and tie that some wondered about possible future political aspirations down the road.
No, I had never heard of Ian Somerhalder before either… and that was not what made me giggle… it was one of the comments on this article:
It is just wonderful that being an actor gives you such profound insight into the world that politicians actually want hear what you have to say in person.
Certainly when I ponder energy policy or any of the other difficult issues, the first thing that comes to mind is “Now I wonder what Ian Somerhalder’s take on that is?”
I really wish that instead of grinding that economics MA I had gone to acting school as maybe people in DC might actually decide to ask me what I think about energy policy or the economics crisis. Oh well.
– Bell Curve
Hehehe.
Byron remarks in his Journals that Berne is “the district famous for cheese, liberty, property and no taxes.” He took liberty quite seriously. And also cheese.
The problem is that hipsters are nothing like their namesake predecessors who attempted to operate outside convention with distinct agenda of cultural and social change. Nothing about the modern hipster is anti-anything. Rather, hipsters now are a manifestation of late capitalism run amok, forever feeding itself on the shininess of the Now: an impatient, forgetful mob taught to discard their products as quickly as they adopt them. They are not a cultural movement, but a generation of pure consumers. If capitalism were to really be altered in any way, the hipster as we know it would lose its raison d’etre.
And I thought hipsters were knickers that came up to your hips. Now I know better. Chap in the Guardian says that because this clothes company called American Apparel went bust it just goes to show what he always said about capitalism.
Death spirals of a co-opted public relentlessly co-opting itself, knowing acceptance of our generation’s role in the capitalist meta-narrative, knickers losing their raison d’etre… I tells ‘ee, one of these nights we’ll all be murthered in our beds.
Over at Instapundit (and at various other places), Glenn Reynolds has recently spent a lot of time discussing the question of whether Higher Education (and particularly Higher Education in the US) is essentially yet another debt fueled bubble in the process of popping. His reader Peter Galamga recently said the following, implicitely condemning quite a few fields of study and the academic departments associated with them
I think the days of spending the equivalent of a mortgage on one of the many two-word degrees (the second word is usually “Studies”) are coming to a close.
Although the second word might often be “Studies”, I think “usually” is too strong. In particular, one should also be extremely suspicious of courses and fields where the second word is “Science”. These are very seldom worthwhile, and are even less often actually science. “Biology” is good. “Plant Science” is bad. “Statistics” is good. “Political Science”, less so. “Meteorology” and possibly even “Climatology” is likely good. “Climate Science”, I will leave to you.
That said, I think things are much more likely to be okay of the second word is “sciences”. In particular, I can think of one or two truly formidable “Natural Sciences” programs. Does anyone else have any thoughts on this?
I just did a posting about iScream at my personal blog, iScream being a type of ice cream which I tasted earlier this evening when I dined at Chateau Perry. And then I thought, why confine the news of this delicious dessert to such a tiny demographic? The whole world should be told about this superb dining experience.
I guess one reason why people make things like this, concentrating entirely on making them tasty rather than making stuff that tastes like cardboard, and spending all their time, money and tender loving care on a lot of ridiculous and expensive advertising, is that word of whatever it is will now spread far and wide at no cost, provided the product tastes good. In my opinion, this iScream ice cream tastes wonderful, and word of it will surely spread fast. I suspect that “iScream” may prove to be a rather silly name, but better a silly name for superbly tasty ice cream than superbly named frozen mediocrity.
The website is here, but is not that informative about iScream ice cream. So if you live in or near London, or if you are ever in London, why not visit the Artisan du Chocolat shop in Lower Sloane Street, just to the south of Sloane Square, where the above supply of iScream ice cream was purchased.
I’m told their chocolate is very good too.
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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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