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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This cheerful seasonal scene, complete with 9-foot inflatable Santa, is brought to you from the Beckham Salon, Crawford Street, W1. This small Arab hairdresser’s shop is normally merely a shrine (verging on homoerotic, to my eye) to the most carefully coiffed man in international soccer, and hangout for young men whose hair is almost as insanely tidy as their hero’s.
But this time of year it sprouts, with utter disregard for the cultural apartheid strangers suppose to operate in Marble Arch – and danger to low-flying aircraft – the most fabulously gaudy Christmas decorations.
Milton Friedman has died at the age of ninety four. Others will list the vast number of honours that he achieved in his life time and will speak of him as a husband, father and friend.
I remember Milton Friedman from my youth via the mainstream media, because he belonged to a time when it was still possible (although difficult) for a free market thinker to have large scale exposure in the mainstream media. I remember the interviews, I remember the television series (Free to Choose – and the book of the same name being in every bookshop and library in the land), and I remember the articles in Newsweek magazine.
Milton Friedman replaced Henry Hazlitt, but he was given an article only every two weeks (Hazlitt had a weekly spot), These days of course it would be almost unthinkable for a free market thinker to be given such space in a main stream magazine – and it is not really a question of modern free market folk being inferior writers to Professor Friedman (it is the message that is no longer tolerated, not a higher standard of writing that is demanded).
If ‘conservative’ voices are heard in the mainstream media it is more likely to be voices like that of President Bush who was speaking today (in Singapore) – the normal confusion of ‘freedom’ with ‘democracy’ and the normal promises of aid from the Western taxpayer to various governments in return for these governments ‘investing in people’ (“schools ‘n’ hospitals” and the rest of the standard speech).
Milton Friedman refused to meet President Bush, perhaps this was intolerant of him (for all I have written above President Bush is not a bad man and he means well), but Professor Friedman’s argument was that as he had tried for eight years (during the Reagan Administration) to explain the basic concepts of liberty to George Herbert Walker Bush, to no effect, he was not going to waste what little remained of his life talking to the son.
As for Milton Friedman’s message I (and many others) could argue over many matters. Were “right to work” statutes (i.e. bans on the closed shop) really bad things (as Professor Friedman believed) or were they a counter weight to pro-union laws (as some of us political folk believed)? Was the ‘negative income tax’ really a good way to save people from poverty, or would it lead to people not working if they could not find a good job? Were education vouchers a way of combining freedom in education with support for poor parents, or would they corrupt private schools?
The arguments were endless, but they (by all accounts) tended to be debates conducted in a good spirit – and Milton Friedman always at least held his own in debates (against anyone). → Continue reading: Milton Friedman RIP
The Classic Version
The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks he’s a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed. The grasshopper has no food or shelter so he dies out in the cold.
The Modern Version
The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks he’s a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away.
Come winter, the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while others are cold and starving. BBC, ITV and Sky show up to provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper next to video of the ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food. Britain is stunned by the sharp contrast. How can it be that, in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so?
Then a representative of the NAAGB (National Association of Green Bugs) shows up on ‘Newsnight’ and charges the ant with ‘green bias’, and makes the case that the grasshopper is the victim of 30 million years of greenism. Kermit the Frog appears on Oprah with the grasshopper, and everybody cries when he sings “It’s Not Easy Being Green”. Tony and Cherie Blair make a special guest appearance on the BBC Evening News to tell a concerned interviewer that they will do everything they can for the grasshopper who has been denied the prosperity he deserves by those who benefited unfairly during the Thatcher summers.
Gordon Brown exclaims in an interview with Jonathan Dimbleby that the ant has gotten rich off the back of the grasshopper, and calls for an immediate tax hike on the ant to make him pay his ‘fair share’. Finally, the EU drafts the ‘Economic Equity and Anti-Greenism Act’ retrospective to the beginning of the summer.
The ant is fined for failing to hire a proportionate number of green bugs and, having nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes, has his home is confiscated by the government. Cherie gets her old law firm to represent the grasshopper in a defamation suit against the ant, and the case is tried before a panel of judges that Tony appointed from a list of single-parent welfare moms who can only hear cases on Thursday’s between 1:30 and 3pm when there are no talk shows scheduled. The ant loses the case.
The story ends as we see the grasshopper finishing up the last bits of the ant’s food while the government house he is in, which just happens to be the ant’s old house, crumbles around him since he does not know how to maintain it. The ant has disappeared in the snow. And on the TV, which the grasshopper bought by selling most of the ant’s food, they are showing Tony Blair standing before a wildly applauding group of New Labourites announcing that a new era of ‘fairness’ has dawned in Britain
(original provenance unknown)
Lie and cheat. It is empty bureaucracy, and the people asking the questions do not care either:
[A]lthough I was born in Rawalpindi, in Pakistan, I used to say my ethnicity was Irish because I resented the question.
– Rear-Admiral Amjad Hussain, Royal Navy logistics chief, quoted in The Guardian
I have been experimenting with Firefox because of its superior ability to block annoying advertisements, something I was advised to do by a host of readers last month… but ever since upgrading to Firefox 2.0, I have been very grateful for its ability to ‘restore browsing sessions’ after a crash because I get five or six crashes per day, something I certainly did not get with Firefox 1.5 (or the Devil’s Browser IE 6, for that matter). Are many folks out there experiencing anything similar?
I have noticed that many writers, professional or otherwise, do not capitalise the word ‘Nazi’ in their work. I am aware that ‘Nazi’ was originally an acronym, however I believe its ubiquitous use in preference to ‘National Socialist’ has transformed ‘Nazi’ into a discrete word in the modern vernacular. According to the rules of punctuation, it should be capitalised. In fact, it should be capitalised regardless of whether it’s an acronym or not – ‘Nazi’ is a proper noun. So why is it that many writers fail to heed this rather simple rule? Is there some convention that stipulates an exception in the case of the word ‘Nazi’, because of its association with the terrible crimes of Hitler and his followers? Or is it an affectation of a group of writers, striving to express disgust at Nazism in every conceivable manner, withdrawing from it even the privilege of an introductory capital letter? Either/or, it strikes me as rather odd that people would ignore the rules of written English as part of an effort to display their disdain for an ideology. Do they see it as a linguistic equivalent of denying someone the Last Rites? How silly. What’s wrong with conveying disapproval in the manner most writers find useful; by, er, writing something disapproving?
In a centrally heated and climatically warming world, I have never been able to see much fun in fur. I certainly would not want to wear it – too much hassle and discomfort. However, it has been brought to my attention that a number of attractive models and actresses have revived the “I’d rather go naked than wear fur” protest campaign for PETA, and are posing naked for publicity photos. This has raised my interest in the topic considerably.
Please help them continue in this valuable charity work for as long as possible. Do not stop buying fur.
There is an interesting post on ‘Classical Values’ that people who share my view that we are indeed in a war of civilisations might want to see. I may not be a Christian or a Jew but I do know who my enemies are… and are not.
Sign me up for the Oriana Fallaci Society.
Today whilst at the fuel station, I had a rather one-sided encounter with a smug Toyota Prius-driving oaf. The guy was fuelling up his car and wearing the most ridiculous grin. I did not think my face conveyed any surprise at such an improbable expression, but it must have – as soon as he saw me glance at him, he said “it makes me laugh to think how much less I spend on fuel these days”. My instant response was “it makes me laugh to think that there are people who will pay $40,000 for a Toyota Corolla”. I lie – that’s what I instantly thought. To the oaf, I simply smiled and nodded – a technique I find useful and effective if I wish to limit interaction with a whole manner of people best avoided – from the vexatious to the unhinged. This time, however, I wish I’d spoken my mind, for taking smug Prius owners down a rung or two is surely the most worthy of pursuits.
I blame my parents – they raised me to be too polite.
AmazonBay by Sean Park is a short film about where technology and trends in financial markets get us in 2015. Fantastic. Literally.
Thanks to a brush with the financial services in my previous life, the film brought a rueful smile to my face. Especially the bit about assets and cashflows of government programmes being managed dynamically and in real time and with perfect liquidity and every financial instrument…
Heh. Watch the whole thing.
Link via Confused of Calcutta.
An alteration of my domestic arrangements is afoot, and that caused me to have to relocate a bookcase today, so to do this, I had to empty the case of its books. Deep in the depths, I came across a tattered dictionary.
Because I am the sort of idler that will do anything to avoid work, even to the extreme of reading a dictionary, I opened it. In faint pencil, the name ‘Jack Wickstein, Port Augusta, 1928’ was written. It had been my grandfather’s. I wonder if it was a gift. Those were different times when you would give a young man of 20 a dictionary. However because he’d spent much of his childhood interned on the family farm, he never got a complete education, and he was the sort of fellow that never stopped trying to improve himself. So maybe the dictionary was not so illogical a gift after all. In the wake of the Great War, Jack’s Father had issued a family edict that henceforth the family was to avoid looking or sounding German, and an excellent command of the English language was a good way to go about this.
The dictionary itself is rather odd. The first pages are a series of colour plates devoted to underwater sea life. Then a list of worthies who contributed to the articles in the dictionaries. The names mean nothing to me, but the Universities were, and are, the cream of New England learning. I read the Introduction. One passage sprang out at me.
Every word, every term in this Dictionary is standard; that is, classic, or, in other words, adapted for use by the best speakers and writers. None other has been admitted, consequently the work will commend itslef to not only those who want to keep abreast of the times, but to all those who wish to have a thorough working knowledge of the language in which they are constrained to express their thoughts, ideas, and requirements. This is the language spoken today by almost 200,000,000 of the human race. It is believed that it is destined to become the universal language of mankind, as it is spreading to the uttermost corners of the earth, and even supplanting other tongues in their native strongholds.
Thus wrote the editor, Joseph Devlin, in 1925. Eighty years into the future, and his optimism about the future of the English language seems, if anything, to have been restrained. However, it is also a sign of the times that it is rare, if not impossible, to see such rampant optimism about the future in print.
Oh well. Blogging about it will not get the chores done. Back to work I go…
According to this BBC news report, the Labour party spent £ 7,700 on Cherie Blair’s hair during the election campaign. Not my idea of value for money. Sure they won, but still…
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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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