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]
|
It seems the NO2ID campaign is starting to build up some momentum. We are not just nerds and rabble-rousers any more. We are nerds, rabble-rousers and comedians.
Yes, it is time for a comedy benefit. When 10 of the sharpest acts from the London stand-up circuit turn out on a Sunday night to support a two-year-old pressure-group, you feel we might just be getting somewhere…
By numbering everybody and everything, the world is going to be a better place? Unless you’re a bureaucrat, that’s a laughable idea. So why not laugh at it? That’s what we intend to do at the Hackney Empire on the evening of October 1st.
Those of you in other parts of the world will just have to content yourselves with sending money to help save what remains of British liberty… but if you are handy for London, please come along. You can even book online (£12.50 a seat) by clicking the jolly banner:
News is coming through of a coup in Thailand. Good blogs to check out include 2Bangkok.com and BangkokPundit. Thailand has a historical tradition of army takeovers, but it has not had one for fifteen years or so. A disappointing setback to what I have been told is a quite delightful country.
On the pipe again!
I can’t wait to get back on the pipe again.
I’ve got some mushrooms for my friends
But I just can’t wait to get back on the pipe again.
On the surface the story that veteran country singer Willie Nelson has been arrested for marijuana possession is nothing more then a bit of comic relief. Especially when you read that his sister Bobbie was arrested as well. One visualises these people, well into their 70’s in age, sitting round the camp fire, having a puff, tripping out on a few pharmaceutical mushrooms, and polishing their ‘geriatrics for grass’ buttons.
It is all rather ludicrous. However, even though I care little for country music and even less for marijuana, my own feeling is, well, good on them; people that get to their ‘Golden Years’ are entitled to as much enjoyment in life as the rest of us, after all.
However, we are not talking about your everyday geriatrics here. This is not your Aunt Mabel pottering around her back yard, but a popular entertainer who has a history of political causes behind him, and is by no means inactive in politics even at this late stage of his career.
Before the bust, the Farm Aid founder and his band were in his native Texas to headline Saturday’s Austin City Limits Music Festival. Nelson gave an interview there in which he urged politicians to scrap criminal penalties for pot possession.
Those sentiments echoed the platform of his pal Friedman, a singer-songwriter turned politician who’s mounting an independent bid for Texas governor and has called on the decriminalization of marijuana to help clear clogged state prisons of nonviolent offenders. Nelson has actively supported Friedman’s candidacy, hosting a $1,000-per-plate fundraising dinner and signing a petition to get Friedman on the ballot.
“The hundred times that Kinky and I have talked during his campaign – we talked about energy, health, biodiesel, immigration, war – and the pot thing has never come up. Of course, I felt always that I knew where Kinky stood on that, and he knew where I stood, but I also knew that it was very risky to bring that out politically, but what’s Kinky got to lose?” Nelson said.
Louisiana police will deny that they are in any way trying to ‘send a message’ but in their latest arrest of the country music legend, they have done nothing but highlight the utter uselessness of drug laws. That these laws are useless is as well known as the fact that the sky is blue and the sun rises in the east. Yet to get anywhere in reforming them, Nelson has to throw what prestige he has behind an oddball candidate like ‘Kinky’ Friedman.
What is wrong with this picture?
Dealing with Islamicism is rather like playing chess with an opponent who randomly moves pieces about the board in the sure trust that a deity will confound his opponent.
– Julian Taylor’s friend, a comment on No tolerance for intolerance
Interesting article here on what might be in store for Cuba as and when Fidel Castro finally dies. My hope, probably naive, is that that country finally gets a break and enjoys the fruits of free enterprise. One thing that makes me annoyed is whenever I hear of affluent Western travellers go on about how they dream of going to Cuba before it “gets spoiled by U.S.-led development”. Yes, I am sure all those crumbling houses in Hanava, all those ancient 1950s cars and cute old guys with no teeth look so, you know, authentic in contrast to the frightfully ghastly prosperity of Miami or for that matter, Hong Kong.
Like a good friend of mine, I am only going to Cuba when or if it becomes a shameless hotbet of capitalist vigour and not one minute before.
Mr H. Benn (the ‘Overseas Development’ minister) has announced that the British government will withhold £50 million (US$ 94 million) of taxpayers money that it was to pay to the World Bank to be lent out to ‘Third World’ governments.
Mr Benn said this was protest against the World Bank’s policy of demanding free trade and privatization in return for loans. Actually the World Bank does not do that very much any more. These days it normally just demands that a loan (for example) for education actually be spent on education – rather than go in corruption.
However, I still think the government was right to withhold the money (and not because I am against free trade or privatization – or think that the same economic principles can produce good results in one country and bad results in another, as a weird editorial in the Daily Telegraph claimed), but because I do not believe that taxpayers money should be taken by the government and given to the World Bank.
The World Bank should not exist (and nor should the IMF). If ‘Third World’ governments want state education (or some other folly) they should pay for it themselves – as they will have to after the loan money runs out anyway. All the loan achieves is to give them a debt to pay back on top of the future state education (or whatever) bill.
Presenter of Seven Man Made Wonders on BBC 2 television on Thursday 14th of September.
“After the collapse of the Roman Empire, the old Pagan Roman ways were pitted against the new Christian ways of the invading Angles and Saxons”.
Interesting to see licence fee (i.e. the BBC tax) money going on ‘educational’ stuff like this. I suppose they never heard of the Emperor Constantine.
Today is probably the day. Anousheh Anseri, as I reported some weeks ago, will within hours become the first woman to have paid her own way into orbit. She and her entire family are an example to us all of what value immigrants bring to America. As a family, they have already secured a place in the American history books right up there with Lindbergh and the other great names of American aviation. They are the ones responsible for Peter Diamandis’ dream, the X-Prize, coming to fruition. If, as I believe is now a certainty, America forges ahead in commercial human space flight, it is the Anseri’s and Peter whom we should all thank.
I am incredibly happy for this woman and I pray I might one day follow on the trail she is personally forging for us all.
Godspeed Anousheh!
If you are interested in learning more about what sort of person Anousheh is, read this interview. I think you will like her.
Additional: You can follow her flight here.
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.
Roy Hattersley, in a short piece in the Guardian today commenting on this story, illustrates how the fundamental difference between Old Labour and New Labour, is not in their attitude to governance. It is the willingness of the former to express themselves clearly, and their angry confusion at the rhetorical deformations that New Labour uses to lead the public by the nose:
How likely is it that a mother who (whatever her motives) insisted on her son having unhealthy food will be either willing or able to ensure that he is educated at the right school or treated at the best hospital? The Rotherham sausage makes the government’s “choice agenda” look rather overdone.
What Lord Hattersley does not get is that the government is equally contemptuous of people’s ability to make ‘the right’ choices for themselves and their families. That is precisely why the Rotherham sausage smuggling is taking place. Government has removed choices that it does not approve of from the school menu. The ‘choice agenda’ is a three card trick. The method is misdirection; the effect is dirigiste.
Freedom, secularism, and rationality are not only Western values. Much of East Asia, eastern Europe, and Latin America are at various stages of embracing them. An alliance against jihadism could be very broad indeed. The Islamists themselves say that “all unbelievers are one people”. Might as well take them up on it.
– ‘Infidel’ commenting on Classical Values
The Pope Benedict XVI knew very well what he was doing quoting Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologu. Once more, with feeling…
Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.
The BBC’s correspondent in Rome, David Willey, suggests that Pope Benedict may have not understood the potential implications of his remarks. I beg to differ. The Vatican spends a fair amount of time and effort on other religions, both as part of its institutions and as a continuation of ecumenism so dear to John Paul II. I therefore doubt that Pope Benedict would be oblivious to the Muslim ‘sensitivities’. I suspect he understands rather well how modern victimhood assists Muslims in the West. In short, he has done a great service to the public debate about Islam, such as it is, by holding a mirror to those whose only response is to strike at it violently.
I am disappointed that the public figures defending him cannot do better than saying his speech was misunderstood (re German Chancellor Angela Merkel). Catholic Church for all its vilification throughout the ages, some of it deserved and a lot of it not, is the last remaining Western institution that holds values to be above public opinion(s). One of the values that the Church has paid dearly for acquiring and upholding is the understanding that spreading the faith through violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul…
Interestingly Pope Benedict’s lecture was about faith and reason. It was based around one of the central beliefs of Catholicism – that God is knowable through reason. His intention was to broaden our concept of reason and its application… not contrary to the scientific nature of Western philosophy but as a matter of rational and practical approach to the cultural and social problems that the West faces.
A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures.
I do not mean to exonerate the Pope from being ‘subversive’ of Islam as there is a bit in his lecture that I find more central to the debate than the infamous quote from 14th century:
But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality.
This is a far more damning statement than the one that caused all the commotion. There is not much tolerance these days in the Vatican for intolerance and, gasp, lack of reason.
|
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.
|
Recent Comments