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 music business has fought tooth and nail against digitalisation in general and the internet in particular and I have long suspected that regardless of how it struggles, eventually Big Music will go the way of the buggy-whip industry, with music returning to its ‘craft’ roots and simply ceasing to be a big business, at least in the way that is currently understood, the mass market eventually giving way to a mass-of-niches.
I wonder if this is a sign that future has taken a step closer?
Sandi Thom, the unknown singer-songwriter who built up a huge following on the internet, went straight to No 1 with her debut single. The 24-year-old shot to fame after claims that her live performances in the basement of her home were being watched by more than 100,000 people via the web.
Regardless of sour grapes claims the viewing figures were inflated in this case, I wonder if the wave of the future has arrived?
The refrain that “environmentalism is the new religion” is common enough, and there is much truth in such a statement. Several years ago, when I was a confused, largely ignorant and idealistic socialist – thus environmentalist – someone (who was also partly responsible for my enlightenment) challenged me to consider the way I critically analyse the various doomsday statements environmentalists were and are prone to making. Even then, in a deep state of group-think, I had to admit to myself that the illiterate peasants of 16th century Europe probably responded to their priests’ exhortations in a similar way.
However, why is this? As a species, most of us are profoundly limited to our own tiny perspectives. For example, we look out over what is actually a gleaming Western city of unparalleled cleanliness, temporarily cloaked in off-coloured smoke caused by a transient climatic event known as a temperature inversion. This event gets us thinking. We think about how we live in only one of a great many cities. Many cities are bigger than ours and many cities are dirtier than ours. Our city is so ugly right now – imagine what effect this ugliness, multiplied across the world, is having on ‘the environment’. It looks bad here, and there must be a lot worse elsewhere. What is the cumulative effect of all this ugliness? It must be appalling. We are ruining our environment.
Of course, such considerations ignore the phenomenal machinations of the earth’s natural processes which dwarf our own so-called ‘footprint’. For all our technological advances, if humankind were to be deleted from the planet overnight, I believe our impact on the surface of the earth would be more or less completely erased within half a millennium – the blink of an eye in terms of this planet’s history. Our earth’s environment is durable because it’s been forged by billions of years of evolution. However, we humans only have an interest in our short lifespans. A priest tells you the marauding army that swept through your village, raped your wife and burnt your house is down to the fact that you have sinned by not obeying some political expedience which nevertheless failed to appear in the popularly-unread bible. An environmentalist tells you your dirty city – as evidenced by an unsightly, temporary smog or something similar – is destroying the earth, despite the fact that the science your environmentalist stakes their legitimacy on is less than kind to such a thesis. Both scenarios resonate with a huge number of individuals in their respective ages.
Humanity’s limited perspectives are a terrifying prospect, and today the most threatening manifestation of this can be found in the widespread acceptance of the environmentalist movement and its demands. We hear environmentalists claiming to act in the names of their unborn children and grandchildren, yet so many of the rest of us do not realise that if their demands were played out to a logical conclusion, the children of tomorrow would be considerably less comfortable; their future considerably less secure than at present.
And here I am, stumped by my own meagre perspective. I am an individual butting against the forces of vast armies who pressure and reassure each other into forwarding a creed I know will be ruinous for our species. They appear to be gaining a considerable amount of traction. How could I, an individual who firmly believes in the power of individuals, combat such a homogenous tide? Where to start, for starters. One thing I am sure of, however – the natural earth will go on, regardless of whether we decide to consign ourselves to misery and decline in our efforts to ensure that fact.
Virginia Postrel, who recently donated an organ herself, writes:
Expecting people to take risks and give up something of value without compensation strikes me as far more blatant exploitation than paying them. I don’t expect soldiers or police officers to work for free, and I don’t think we should base our entire organ donation system on the idea that everyone but the donor should get paid. Like all price controls, that creates a shortage – in this case, a deadly one.
Further:
The issue of lost wages is a significant one, especially since kidney patients and their friends and families are disproportionately likely to be of lower socioeconomic status. In many cases, people who might be willing to serve as living donors simply cannot take the chance of financial ruin posed by losing a few weeks of pay (and that’s assuming their understanding bosses would give them leave).
The National Kidney Foundation is shamefully, unbelievably trying to put a stop to any discussion of the use of market mechanisms to reduce the national organ shortage. They even wrote a letter to the AEI, urging them not to hold a debate on the matter.
Virginia has also written a column for Forbes (not available online for free, sadly) about how some prominent hospitals are actually refusing to do kidney transplants for people who have found their donors online or through other media. Hospitals which are denying patients legal, nonexperimental, life-saving surgery for ideological reasons include Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, which is affiliated with Harvard Medical School. On her blog, Virginia writes:
The transplant establishment is, unfortunately, all too accustomed to managing the shortage rather than expanding the supply of organs. Too many powerful “experts” consider a donor who is moved by a particular stranger’s story to be a generic “altruistic donor,” for whom one stranger should be exactly the same as another. By their lights, favoring someone you’ve read about over whoever’s first on the list is “unfair.”
If you have ever seen the benefits of online conversation, through blogs or journals or message boards or chat rooms, think about that. The human kindness extended to you by another individual in that context, according to these hospitals, is somehow tainted.
I thought things were bad enough with the creepazoids who want to violate every human’s civil liberties at birth by reversing non-consent to make organ donation an opt-out rather than opt-in personal decision (“You think your body belongs to you? Think again, buster. It’s just government inventory…”). This outright hostility from hospitals and the National Kidney Foundation towards methods which would resolve the shortage and save lives is downright evil.
(Cross-posted to JackieDanicki.com)
Most Americans it seems do not give a hoot about the World Cup starting in Germany next weekend. That is a shame, because they have a good team and a chance of making it through to the second round. They may not be the most talented team in the world but they are very good at making the most of what they have got.
That is in stark contrast to Australia, where it seems that despite not knowing much at all about soccer, the country is going over the top with enthusiasm with an over-inflated idea of the national team’s chances. Team USA has a hard group, but with Italy in turmoil, the way is open for an American ambush. They have the ability and nous to do so.
Much of the credit for that can be credited to their manager, Bruce Arena. The New York Times has done a interesting feature on him, and his team. You’ll have to be quick to read the full story given how quickly the NY Times shoves things behind its firewall, but here’s a taster… → Continue reading: Bruce Arena’s views on Truth, Justice and the American way of playing soccer
Jim Henson banged out these rather bizarre commercials – featuring a murdering psychopathic Kermit The Frog lookalike and a Cookie Monsteresque grump – before sharpening his act up and creating The Muppets.
See (a lot) more of the series here, and ponder why Wilkins Coffee is not a household name.
(Hat tip – Larvatus Prodeo)
In the latest police anti-terrorist ‘swoop’ in which a man was shot (though not killed this time), there now seems to be some question of whether or not initial reports of a chemical weapons ‘factory’ and ‘hazardous materials’ being found have any truth to them at all. Moreover the highly dubious sounding report yesterday indicating the man who was shot was actually shot not by police but by his own brother is being denied by the lawyers of the injured man.
However at this stage all the information coming out is from the two least reliable sources imaginable, namely the lawyers for the people arrested (i.e. people who are paid to lie on behalf of their clients) and the police (i.e. an institution with a track record of lying about the facts when they shoot someone). As a result it is probably best to wait a while before drawing too many conclusions about what really happened and whether or not the guys arrested are guilty of anything more than being Muslims.
Whilst I would be delighted if the anti-terrorist squad had broken up an Al-Qaeda cell in the UK, the bitter experience of the Jean de Menezes killing and subsequent criminal conspiracy to cover up the facts, not to mention the scandalous Harry Stanley killing, means that the police and entire structure within which they operate cannot be trusted to tell the truth, it is only clear physical evidence that can show us what to believe.
A huge contingent of police and MI5 officers descended on a London house overnight and arrested its occupants who are suspected of developing a chemical bomb to use in a terrorist attack. One suspect was shot in the shoulder during the raid.
Meanwhile in Toronto, Canada, twelve men have been arrested in a raid where the suspects were thought to be assembling an ammonium nitrate bomb, having allegedly assembled three tonnes of the stuff.
I had not heard about the Seattle Public Schools fiasco until I read about it on Natalie Solent’s blog. If, like me, you have not been keeping up with statist nonsense out of the Pacific North-West of the United States, the Seattle Public Schools administration defined cultural racism thusly:
Those aspects of society that overtly and covertly attribute value and normality to white people and Whiteness, and devalue, stereotype, and label people of color as “other”, different, less than, or render them invisible. Examples of these norms include defining white skin tones as nude or flesh colored, having a future time orientation, emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology, defining one form of English as standard, and identifying only Whites as great writers or composers…
Following much-merited riducule from bloggers and exposure in the media, the Seattle Public Schools district has beat a hasty retreat. However, we know that they will be back, with a similar sort of attempt to smear their political opponents.
Natalie Solent made the point:
The policy decision that “emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology” constituted racism came to my ear like a little echo of the draft European Constitution: an attempt to build in a left-wing position without going to the trouble of arguing for it. Under this definition pretty any student daring to defend Republican ideas could have been accused of racism. And that was the idea. It was all about power.
So anyone that subscribes to an individualist philosphy of any kind is clearly on notice; left-wing statists will continue to try to use intellectual gymnastics like this to try to silence Republicans, libertarians, Conservatives or anyone else opposed to their agenda. The racist smear is ideal for this.
Part of the point of Samizdata.net is to counteract nonsense like this. on the sidebar it says what we are about:
A blog for people with a critically rational individualist perspective. 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.
“developing the social individualist meta-context for the future” means, in part, creating an intellectual climate where nonsense like that peddled by the Seattle public schools board is treated with the laughable contempt that it deserves.
It is true that we have a long way to travel, but every day has its own task.
While reading about the Seattle Public Schools fiasco, I also spotted this op-ed by Andrew Coulson, who made a very good point about public education in general.
But this is still a free country. Thanks to our (ostensibly racist) regard for individual liberty, Seattle Public Schools board members and officials are free to adopt whatever definitions of racism they choose. It is inherently divisive, however, for an official government school system to promote one ideology over another.
Unfortunately, it is also unavoidable.
Whenever there is a single official school system for which everyone is compelled to pay, it results in endless battles over the content of that schooling. This pattern holds true across nations and across time. Think of our own recurrent battles over school prayer, the Pledge of Allegiance, the teaching of human origins, the selection and banning of textbooks and library books, dress codes, history standards, sex education, etc. Similar battles are fought over wearing Islamic headscarves in French public schools and over the National Curriculum in England.
There is an alternative: cultural détente through school choice.
Historically, societies have suffered far less conflict when families have been able to get the sort of education they deemed best for their own children without having to foist their preferences on their neighbors.
Some people fear that unfettered school choice would Balkanize our nation. Their concern is commendable but precisely backward. The chief source of education-related tensions is not diversity; it is compulsion. Why is there no cultural warfare over the diverse teachings of non-government schools? Because no one is forced to attend or pay for an independent school that violates their convictions.
Read the whole thing.
Tickets for the Ashes series of cricket Test matches in the Australian summer went on sale yesterday to unprecedented levels of demand. Interest in cricket contests between England and Australia, which have a long history (the first series of Test matches was in 1877) is at an all time high in the wake of England’s winning the 2005 series. The return contest in the Australian summer of 2006/07 has been eagerly awaited ever since.
The demand for tickets was expected to be strong, but Cricket Australia’s ticketing system was overwhelmed by the public’s response. I was not surprised by that.
As is now traditional, the travelling English support is likely to be tremendous. Even when English sporting teams have been uncompetitive, their travelling supporters have stuck by them; in 2006 England’s football and cricket teams are doing quite well and naturally England’s supporters want to be there for the good times. Thanks to the Internet and air travel, now they can be, and in greater numbers then ever.
This is not exactly welcomed by Australia’s cricket administrators. They fondly imagined that they could sell out their stadia to domestic audiences, rake in the cash, and wave the patriotic flag and all the usual sentimental blather. They forget that, for all its history, cricket is an entertainment, and a business. Cricket administrators sell entertainment in the form of television rights and seats at stadia.
And of course when you mismanage your pricing, one of two things happen. Either you don’t sell your tickets at all, or they become so valuable that profits can be made by reselling them. The latter is happening in this case. And Cricket Australia CEO is not happy about it:
Scalpers have also cashed in by immediately placing their buys on EBay for prices thousands of dollars more than their retail value. “Scalpers using EBay are a disgraceful insult to normal, loyal cricket fans who should have access to these tickets at face value,” James Sutherland, Cricket Australia’s CEO, said. Organisers have told people purchasing black market tickets to beware and say they have asked experts about tracking the passes.
Scalping on this scale indicates that there’s a severe underestimation of the financial value of the tickets. It’s a bit rich, also, to see an implied threat against purchasers of EBay tickets as well. Once Cricket Australia has sold the tickets, they are the property of whoever owns them, and the owner has the natural right to use them, sell them on EBay, or use them as Christmas decorations if they so wish.
It is disappointing, but not entirely surprising, that the CEO of a private commercial organisation such as Cricket Australia does not know, or understand, the basics of property rights.
Not long ago I did a posting here about material progress, as illuminated by a book about the past which described a time before many of our modern comforts had been devised. A commenter commented, as at least one commenter always will during discussions of this sort: dentistry!
He was right of course. And it so happens that I have been reading another work of history, by Charles Spencer, this time about the Battle of Blenheim, in which the primitive dentistry of earlier times gets a particularly memorable mention.
The Battle of Blenheim was fought in 1704 between a coalition of allies under the command of the Duke of Marlborough and various French armies of Louis XIV. Louis XIV is of course the villain of the story, who gets his just comeuppance at Blenheim. However, it turns out that finding all his grand plans of European conquest thwarted by a supreme commander of genius, who, in the words of Sir Edward Creasy, “never fought a battle that he did not win, and never besieged a place that he did not take”, was not Louis XIV’s only bit of bad luck. We learn, from an early paragraph in Blenheim (pp. 20-21 of my paperback edition), that Louis had another huge misfortune to contend with towards the end of his life:
In the autumn of 1685, Louis developed an agonising and persistent toothache, and his doctors decided to extract the offending molar. However, they were ignorant of the importance of post-operative hygiene, and infection set in: the king’s gums, jawbone and sinuses became dangerously inflamed. A committee of nervous physicians concluded that drastic measures were called for. Louis underwent a truly terrible ordeal: they removed all the teeth from the top layer of his mouth, then punctured his palate and broke his jaw. This was all completed without anaesthetic, the king being fully awake throughout this procedure. The most powerful man in Western Europe was helpless before the primitive medical knowledge of his time. At least the wounds were kept clean on this occasion – cauterised with red-hot coals.
I almost feel sorry for the man. But having got this sad story out of the way, Spencer then goes on to describe what Louis XIV’s soldiers did to the people of the United Dutch Provinces – genocide, basically, to all of them that they could get their murdering hands on – and any sympathy you may feel for this abominable man immediately disappears.
But the point about dentistry remains. The average citizen of an average country now enjoys vastly less painful and more knowedgeable dental care than even the grandest of kings had to endure in earlier times.
Never knock progress.
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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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