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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From David Tebbutt:
This is the promise: “The Habitat JAM will gather your input and add it to thousands of others to identify actionable ideas for the Vancouver World Urban Forum agenda and influence the Forum’s content. It will start conversations and build new networks that bring enormous potential to global problem solving.”
It sounds more like a threat to me. At best, manipulated bullshit. Problem solving is a fine thing, but the fewer conversations and networks devoted to “global” problem solving, the better, I would say. This is, I think, because “global” bundles together lots of difficulties into one huge impossibility, which you then blame on global capitalism. But the way to actually solve problems is to do what actual capitalists actually do, which is break the problems up into solluble particles.
Still, “actionable” means that someone will at least be able to sue these people, yes? No. Non-responsibility for resulting chaos is of the essence of gatherings like this.
If you thought that going to the gym allowed you to burn off that stress and get away from the office, think again. A new hi-tech gym means you can type away on a keyboard and do an aerobic workout at the same time. Not quite sure this is going to work when it comes to pumping the weights, though.
I have just finished reading James Bartholomew’s fine book, The Welfare State We’re In, which lays out, in tightly argued detail and a welter of colourful character sketches, the disaster wrought by state welfare in Britain. One of his chapters deals with the state’s actions in the area of pensions, now a red-hot controversial area for politicians not just in Britain, but in much of the industrialised world where populations are greying and birthrates falling.
Today, it appears that Britain’s finance minister, Gordon Brown, may have pre-emptively stiffed a report, due out next week, from the Pension Commission panel. The Commission is thought to be advocating measures such as tackling the disincentives to saving caused by means-testing, and in raising the state pension age to 67 or more.
Whatever happens, Bartholomew’s diagnosis of our ills is a powerful one and lays out the brutal fact that our political class, if judged by the same laws as applied to financial firms like insurers, banks or fund managers, would be indicted for fraud on an epic scale. It makes one weep to think of the opportunity that was lost in the destruction of Britain’s fast-growing private savings culture prior to the First World War.
I can also strongly recommend Bartholomew’s blog.
I have long gotten a laugh from Dilbert, the socially inept engineer comic created by Scott Adams. Usually, Dilbert is harmless, but occasionally he causes real damage. Last Sunday’s cartoon, which features Dilbert’s mother in an excessive shopping adventure that ends with organ harvesting struck me as rather amusing, but according to Scott Adams’ blog, dozens of people failed to see the humour in it:
Recently I killed thousands more people. I don’t have exact numbers yet. The problem stems from my comic that ran on 11-20-05, implying that retail stores might harvest organs from bad customers and sell them on eBay. I’ve received dozens of letters (long ones!) from very angry people who assure me that the Dilbert comic will reduce the number of organ donors. The concern is that people will think their parts will end up on eBay and so they won’t be inspired to donate.
This would only have an impact on exceptionally dumb potential organ donors. But as you know, that’s a large block of the general population. Now I have to wonder how many people are smart enough to read an entire Dilbert comic and still dumb enough to think that the first person on the scene of an accident might be there just to harvest organs for eBay. It can’t be more than 1%. Let’s see, we estimate 150 million people read Dilbert, so 1% would be 1.5 million. And only 10% of them might have donated an organ anyway, so I’m probably killing 150,000 people.
It’s times like this when “oops” doesn’t seem sufficient.
I bet you did not know that cartoonists could be so dangerous. If you ever meet Scott Adams, approach with extreme caution.
I have devoured pretty much most of John Le Carre’s spy stories, such as The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, A Small Town in Germany and Smiley’s People. His novels have a chilly, grittily believable quality that stands in contrast to the sophisticated romps of Ian Fleming (Who is actually a pretty good read, as Anthony Burgess once said). More recently, Le Carre, bereft of a Cold War to provide his theme, has turned his attention in a different direction. He has turned it towards the supposed evil of global capitalism and big drug firms.
The Constant Gardener, a film which hammers the allegedly rapacious activities of drug companies, has now been turned into a film starring the British actor Ralph Fiennes (whom I once saw live giving a somewhat histrionic performance in London in the Ibsen play, Brand). The Social Affairs Blog, has a fine demolition job of the book and film here by UK academic Kenneth Minogue. Minogue’s treatment of the film is brutal.
Now I can see why, as pointed out on this blog concerning the firm Pfizer, some drug companies get a deserved hammering. But what I don’t quite understand is the sheer venom directed at drug firms in general by people who presumably must realise that developing and researching drugs can be highly expensive. If drug firms cannot be sure that their products won’t be instantly copied by other manufacturers, who can be sure that drugs to combat AIDSand other killers would make it to the marketplace? The issue of intellectual property rights does of course remain a very tricky issue among libertarians, but do the opponents of any such property rights imagine that we can or should leave drug development to the State, given the experience of our own Soviet model of national health care? It seems as if the attacks on drug firms stems from a desire to seize the hard work and graft of others because one has a “right” to curative drugs.
But if, as Le Carre and others contend, we should give drugs to the poor of the Third World for nothing, the bill for this could be enormous. I don’t really like the idea that the wealth creating capabilities of people should be held in partial ransom by the open-ended needs of billions of other people.
On the subject of AIDS, it is always worth reading Andrew Sullivan, who has HIV, on why he loves drug companies.
Somebody with a political axe to grind, or someone who has literally bet their life:
When it comes to the future of Iraq, there is a deep disconnect between those who have firsthand knowledge of the situation — Iraqis and U.S. soldiers serving in Iraq — and those whose impressions are shaped by doomsday press coverage and the imperatives of domestic politics.
The ones with a political axe to grind (and the uninformed who follow their lead) think Iraq is a lost cause or a mistake:
A large majority of the American public is convinced that the liberation of Iraq was a mistake, while a smaller but growing number thinks that we are losing and that we need to pull out soon. Those sentiments are echoed by finger-in-the-wind politicians, including many — such as John Kerry, Harry Reid, John Edwards, John Murtha and Bill Clinton — who supported the invasion.
Those with firsthand knowledge and a stake in the matter believe the contrary:
American soldiers are also much more optimistic than American civilians. The Pew Research Center and the Council on Foreign Relations just released a survey of American elites that found that 64% of military officers are confident that we will succeed in establishing a stable democracy in Iraq. The comparable figures for journalists and academics are 33% and 27%, respectively. Even more impressive than the Pew poll is the evidence of how our service members are voting with their feet. Although both the Army and the Marine Corps are having trouble attracting fresh recruits — no surprise, given the state of public opinion regarding Iraq — reenlistment rates continue to exceed expectations. Veterans are expressing their confidence in the war effort by signing up to continue fighting.
I have long believed that, whatever its flaws, the Iraqi campaign is on the road to strategic success. Figuring out who is winning requires that you ask a deceptively simple question: which side is making better progress toward their strategic objectives?
I think the answer is very clear – the US and its allies are making progress toward their strategic objectives, and their Islamist/Baathist enemies are not.
We have removed three potential WMD players (Iraq, Pakistan, Libya) from the scene as a direct or second-order consequence of the Iraqi campaign. We have removed one of the major terror-supporting states (the Saddamite regime) from the picture. We are introducing by far the most democratically accountable government into the Mideast (other than Israel), and are destabilizing the long-term prospects for neighboring dictators who, coincidentally, sponsor terror to one degree or another. We have forced the Islamists to fight in the Mideast, and as a consequence are eroding their support as they do what they do, which is attack civilians. We have badly disrupted international terrorist networks.
As for the Islamists, well, what ground have they gained toward their stated goals of a pan-Arab caliphate, the eradication of Israel, the acquisition of WMDs, or the destabilization of the West?
I don’t see any real gains on their side, and I see real progress on ours. Sure, progress has come at a cost, but only the most naive (or those with ulterior motives) would believe that we could neuter the Islamist threat without any missteps or losses.
Those on the front lines think we are winning a fight worth fighting. It is those in the perfumed salons who don’t think we are winning, and who don’t think the game is worth the candle. I know who I believe.
Samizdata’s informal motto is “guns ‘n’ girls”, but in this post you get neither. Instead you get a picture taken in Brussels of a fine, hand-rolled cigar and an American flag:
The man is Richard Miniter and the photo comes from this interview in The Brussels Journal under the title “America Is Winning the War on Terror, Says Expert”.
In Spain, when Barcelona play Real Madrid, there is more then just three points at stake. And when Barcelona go to the Bernabeu and win, there is a lot of significance attached to it.
That is what they did on the weekend; Phil Ball looks at the history and the implications.
The most startling fact about Saturday’s game was not so much the two wonderful goals scored by Ronaldinho but rather the fact that after the Brazilian’s second and Barça’s third, several sections of the Bernabéu began to applaud him, and by implication, the whole team. Florentino Pérez looked on from the Director’s box in stony silence.
Madrid experts have been speculating all Sunday on this one, but the last living memory that any journalist has of the Madrid supporters applauding the eternal enemy was back in 1983 when Maradona ran Real’s defence dizzy in the clásico of that year. Was this a sign of Madrid’s sporting supporters, or was it just their way of protecting themselves psychologically?
Read the whole thing, as they say.
One of the concerns appearing on the radar is the impact of a flu pandemic upon Africa, where a rudimentary infrastructure for health is combined with the largest number of individuals with HIV and AIDs. A common mistake is to view this latter group as the most vulnerable to a flu pandemic, with a potentially catastrophic death rate.
Recent comments by Dr. Robert Webster, at an avian-influenza conference, organised by the Council for Foreign Relations, in New York, theorised that HIV positive patients and those suffering from cancer could act as incubators for the virus, leading to more virulent strains. However, there is evidence to support the view that immunologically compromised individuals will not facilitate the spread of the pandemic:
Stephen Wolinsky, chief of the infectious diseases division at the Feinberg School of Medicine, concurred that prolonged shedding of the virus was a definite problem but referred to a study published earlier this week that stated that immunodeficiency may in fact be a benefit in the face of avian influenza.
The study, published in the journal Respiratory Research, indicated that the young and healthy may be those most seriously affected by avian influenza, as the body’s immuno-response was to produce a storm of cytokines that can lead to respiratory difficulties.
Wolinsky opined that, for Africa, the lack of access to doctors and hospitals may prove to be a greater concern in the fight against avian influenza than the continent’s HIV/AIDS epidemic.
This region has been identified as a potential outbreak region for the pandemic. Farming practices that bring farmers into close proximity with poultry, are compounded by non-existent public health schemes and a large proportion of the population suffering from ill-health and malnutrition.
The H5N1 virus overstimulates the immune system, and many of its powerful effects are caused by what medical expert call a “cytokine storm”, after the immune molecules excited by the disease.
It was the cytokine storm that overwhelmed so many victims of the 1918 flu pandemic. Aids patients may be spared that fate.
But equally possible, with their immune defences down, they could succumb easily to the disease.
“In that situation,” said Laurie Garrett, “vast populations of HIV positive people could be obliterated by the pandemic flu.”
Laurie Garrett, senior fellow for global health at the Council of Foreign Relations, was identifying the worst case scenario.
A few weeks ago I linked to a speech given by the head of a private schools organisation, in which said individual fretted about the decline in the teaching of certain subjects such as physics and foreign languages. Responses were interesting. One or two commenters thought the system is pretty good. (Yes, seriously). One fellow even claimed to be “genuinely bowled over” by how good it was. More common responses were on the lines that in a free market, if there is a shortage of folk with engineering or linguistic abilities, then sooner or later supply would come through, if not from the UK’s own workforce, then from overseas forms of supply. Up to a point I agree. As a free marketeer, it would be perverse for me to bleat about “shortages” or X and Y and then not realise that one person’s shortage is another person’s entrepreneurial opportunity.
The difficulty, of course, is that we don’t have a fully free market system of education in this country, but one in which the incentive impact of price signals and salary levels gets blunted by a predominantly state-run system, with its national programmes, bureaucracies and state-mandated certificates and qualifications. This means that if there is a shortage of say, physics teachers, it may take a while for the shortage to be made up. Learning physics to a high standard can take even the brightest students quite a while. And if the supply of teachers in certain fields drops off, it can take several years to make up the gap easily, though modern technology possibly can help disseminate information more effectively than the chalk-and-blackboard approach of the past.
If, on the other hand, the scarcity of physics teachers changes slowly, then a more market-driven schooling system can react to that more nimbly. People who work in industry but who may want a less stressful life might be interested in teaching science part-time, for example. Among the greying populations of the industrialised world, there might be a potentially big pool of people who might like to teach the young but on a part-time basis.
A story here points to continued worries about what is happening with science education in this country, especially in the field of physics. I am not of course saying that the existing system can be made better by tweaking a few courses here and there. A move towards a genuine market in education is what is required over the long term.
For those who think of schooling in a post-Prussian statist mindset, you can blow out some collectivist cobwebs here and also here
In response to overwhelming popular demand (Julian Taylor can be a bit overwhelming sometimes) here is the text of the Marie Antoinette International Dead Liberty Award for the year 2005, which has been awarded by the Libertarian Alliance to Robert Gabriel Mugabe, and which I featured yesterday in one of these photographs.
Click on this:
I hope you (Julian Taylor) can read that okay, and that it need not be typed in, again.
So, since we are on the subject of Mugabe, how are things in Zimbabwe these days? Well, this story says quite a lot:
Harare, Zimbabwe, 11/17 – A magistrates court in Zimbabwe Thursday dropped corruption charges against President Robert Mugabe`s nephew, two weeks after his high profile arrest on suspicion of graft involving billions of dollars.
Leo Mugabe and his wife Veronica were arrested on charges of illegally selling flour on the local market and exporting it to Mozambique.
Trade in wheat and flour, both of which are in short supply here, is controlled and exports are banned to preserve stocks for the local market.
No evidence, according to the magistrate. I do not suppose that lack of evidence is usually much of a problem, in Zimbabwe nowadays. But this case must have been rather different.
I wonder how Robert Mugabe himself feels about this. I do not assume that he will automatically side with his nephew. As I wrote here, a while ago, I was briefly acquainted with another relative of his, and I can report that the Mugabe family is not the proverbial big happy one. They do not all stick together. They quarrel. And Robert Mugabe is easily stubborn enough and self-righteously cruel enough to throw a relative to the wolves, if he decided that this was the right thing for him to do, just as he has decided that wrecking Zimbabwe is the right thing for him to do and will stubbornly continue with that, until death or ruin stops him.
In other words, this Libertarian Alliance prize will change nothing in Zimbabwe, nothing at all. But, future recipients of the award may perhaps be influenced by it.
Like Brian Micklethwait, I have been at the annual conference of the Libertarian Alliance , held at the National Liberal Club, a glorious Victorian building erected at a time when Britain’s ruling Liberal Party (formerly the Whigs) was genuinely liberal in the classical sense of that word. Among the topics to fuel the mind: libertarian approaches to the environment, a debate about whether limited-liability companies were a good thing; the contribution to libertarian thought of Ayn Rand and reflections on private enterprise and defence. An excellent collection of subjects.
As some regular readers will know, the founder and director of the L.A., Chris R. Tame, has been fighting cancer and made a great effort to be present throughout the entire conference. Anyone who knows and admires this clever, generous and tenacious man will not be surprised at his determination not only to set up this conference but also to set in train plans for future events. He received a surprise award celebrating his achievements on Saturday night’s banquet, and no-one deserved it more. Without Chris, it is probable that Britain’s present libertarian movement would not exist, and I don’t think I am writing out of turn in doubting whether Samizdata would be quite what it is now, either.
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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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