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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On Thursday night, Porter’s Dining Saloon in northwest Washington played host to a symposium titled: “Did Bloggers Tip the Election?” The event, sponsored by the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University, drew over a hundred participants (crammed into a woefully under-ventilated room no larger than my living room.) Fortunately, I was able to infiltrate this event on behalf of Samizdata and report on the proceedings.
The panelists were (in rough order from ideological left to right): Henry Farrell, who contributes to the group blog Crooked Timber; Matthew Yglesias, who writes for The American Prospect, and contributes to both the TAPPED blog and his own blog; Ana Marie Cox, the inimitable Wonkette; Daniel Drezner, professor of political science at the University of Chicago whose blog, by an astonishing cosmic coincidence, is also called Daniel Drezner; and Nick Gillespie, editor of Reason. Drezner and Farrell were invited because they jointly authored this piece on the role of blogs in foreign policy; Yglesias was a last-minute replacement for his TAP colleague Michael Tomasky.
To answer the question posed by the title of the symposium, Nick Gillespie put it the most succinctly: “no, of course not, I think we can all agree!” All the panelists agreed, however, that the 2004 election had done more to blur the distinctions between alternative and mainstream media than it did to pit the two as adversaries.
The panel discussed at length the blogosphere’s role in Rathergate / Memogate. Yglesias dissented from the others on this issue, arguing that the Bush administration certainly would have defended itself against the charges raised in the forged memo, even if the blogosphere hadn’t attacked the documents. “It’s not like they were going after someone vulnerable with no defense network — this was the President of the United States,” Yglesias intoned. “He knows his own war record, and that something just wasn’t right about that story.” Cox suggested that if CBS had acted “more like bloggers” in putting the story out with feelers, asking for help in authenticating the documents instead of dogmatically asserting them as authentic, they could have avoided the scandal (she added that she did not believe CBS or any other news organization would behave this way.)
Other highlights: Drezner spoke at some length about his recent appearance on ABC news, in which he defended the blogosphere for posting exit poll numbers on election day. Finally, Ms. Cox may have delivered the most memorable line of the night: when asked whether the blogosphere was guilty of propogating bizarre conspiracy theories, she observed that blogs were about as likely to debunk conspiracies as promote them, “most famously the Mystery Bulge Scandal; you know, the one about President Bush in the debates, not the more recent Mystery Bulge of Dick Cheney. Besides,” she added, “evryone knows that Bush gets the alien transmissions through the fillings in his teeth, not through the bulge on his back.”
(photo coming soon!)
I yield to no-one in my enthusiasm for space flight and in my admiration for men like this guy who are now so magnificently pioneering it, but I yield to anyone who challenges me on the technicalities of it. However, I do wish myself to challenge this man (thanks to Instapundit for linkage to this argument). Alexander Tabarrok, in a recent TCS article questioning the immediately future of space tourism, put, among other things, this question:
The space shuttle has a slightly better record of safety – it was destroyed in two of 113 flights. There are lots of millionaires willing to spend one or two million dollars for a flight into space but how many will risk a two to five percent chance of death?
I would not have noticed this very rhetorical question had Rand Simberg not also singled it out, so particular thanks to him also.
As I say, I know next to nothing of how quickly the costs of space travel are going to plummet (other than that they will plummet, just as Simberg says) as more people want to get in on it, but one thing I do know is that if those are now the death odds you face, the queue is going, contrary to what Alexander Tabarrok says with his question, to be a very long one.
Tabarrok has a very limited idea, it seems to me, of what a millionaire is these days. Presumably when he typed in his question, he had in mind a rigidly rational calculator of odds, sitting at his dull desk, wearing a dull suit, fully 42 and more than usually plain for his age, who spends his entire life looking at boring safety graphs (Tabarrok features a boring safety graph at the bottom of his piece) and who never so much as sets a foot on a water ski, let alone anything at all seriously risky. But what of the millionaires of a more fun loving and risk friendly disposition? Has he never met any of those?
Above all, what of the millionaire sons of the world’s now really quite numerous billionaires? This is a notoriously risk embracing group. These people are famous for taking hair-raising risks, if only to impress all the girls they so like to chase after. They cannot out-earn dad, but they can at list out-stunt him. The now highly established (and now insufferably safe) sport of motor racing owes its entire existence to a couple of generations of nineteen thirties and nineteen fifties (they spent the nineteen forties killing each other) young tearaways with more money than sense, or to put it another way, with a bit of imagination when it came to spending money. What on earth makes Tabarrok think that death odds of a mere five per cent a pop would put off young men of that sort, and what makes him think that the world is not now massively fuller of such wacky racer types than in was in the nineteen thirties? One in twenty are the kind of odds that will actually make the queue longer. They certainly will not shorten it much.
Hell, a one in twenty chance of a quick and glorious death (already, I would surmise, far more dignified and far cheaper than a long spell of Alzheimer’s), but a nineteen out of twenty chance of one of the great Bragging Rights of the early twenty first century, would be enough to entice me into space, if only I could afford the ticket.
Tabarrok’s headline is a similarly timid pseudo-question: “Is space tourism ready for take-off?” Damn right it is.
I am about to rush off to a dinner date, but there is still time for me to say that, if Instapundit and all his linkages, and all their linkages are anything to go by (look at the links in the first comment at roger l. simon), some really interesting things seem to be happening in North Korea.
If things are going as well as they just might be, then, good. Very good.
If this is all premature, not to say nonsense, then my apologies. It at least looks as if the North Koreans may soon get to eat a little better.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has begun collecting digital fingerprints and pictures of visitors at three major U.S. land border crossings. Kimberly Weissman, spokeswoman for the DHS’s US-VISIT Program said:
We are testing this at these three locations before we roll out the technology at the top-50 land border entry points.
As part of the pilot, fingerprint readers and digital cameras will be used on the southern U.S. border at Douglas, Ariz., and Laredo, Texas, and on the northern border at Port Huron, Mich. Less than 5 percent of the more than 100 million border crossings currently require that the visitors be documented, Weissman said. The other crossings are typically visitors with a Border Crossing Card, which allows people to travel within 25 miles of the border for a period of 30 days.
By the end of the year, the Department of Homeland Security plans to have digital cameras and fingerprint technology in use at the 50 busiest land crossings, which account for the vast majority of traffic across the U.S. border, Weissman said. There are 165 land-border crossings in total. When completed, the US-VISIT program will record the comings and goings of every foreign visitor and let U.S. homeland security officials know when people have overstayed their visas.
Reading several pages of interesting reports and discussion on the BBC’s website about Somalia, I wonder:
Is Sudan a better country to live in than Somalia?
Do refugees travel between the two countries (probably via Ethiopia) and which is the better place to live?
How would Somalia score on a human rights questionnaire? Compared with say North Korea. I think of the official line from the worker’s paradise about homosexual rights: “There is no homosexuality in the Republic of Korea, it is a bourgeois disease.”
How obstructive are Somali warlords of international trade compared with say, the EU’s regulatory of tariff restrictions on agriculture? Is it easier and cheaper for a Kenyan farmer to sell food to Somalia than to Sudan or Spain?
I also note that multiple currencies are operating in Somalia, with US dollars, private currencies and old banknotes being exchanged in markets. Are Somalis really so much more intelligent than Europeans who had to be protected from currency choice?
The BBC reporter makes the mistake of comparing Somalia today with Holland Park in London today (except that some types of crime are probably more frequent in Holland Park). He is appalled that guns are for sale and that the entry fees finance qat instead of state schools and state hospitals. I think it is much more interesting to compare Somalia today with neighbouring countries today. On the face of it anarchy seems a lot like Robert A Heinlein’s depiction in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Ken Macleod’s The Star Fraction and The Stone Canal. Despite my quibbles with the BBC on this issue, full marks for going to Somalia eyes wide open, if not quite minds wide open.
Certain words, over time, have devolved from specific context to generic insult. ‘Fascist’ used to refer to a certain socioeconomic system involving nationalism and state control of industry; ‘racist’ used to denote a person who believed that his ethnic group deserved some privileges that other groups did not. In modern parlance, however, almost anything can be ‘racist’ or ‘fascist’; go to any protest or peace rally and you will hear that the war in Iraq is ‘racist’, that opponents of a Palestinian state are ‘fascist’, and so on. These words now mean “something I disagree with or wish to belittle” instead of their original connotations.
I am sad to report that we are in danger of losing another word into this sinkhole: pornography.
Full disclosure: I am as guilty of this as anyone; I wrote a piece back in January talking about financial pornography. But abuse of this word has become widespread. WordSpy.com, a site that tracks the use of buzzwords in pop culture, has listings for “debt porn” (lurid tales of people bankrupted by credit card abuse), “eco-porn” (corporate shareholder reports that rave about the company’s environmental record), “domestic porn” (Martha Stewart-eque magazines) and “investment porn” (fawning profiles of fund managers who ‘beat the market’ without regard to the fact that someone had to be above average.)
But now we may have witnessed the ultimate: sparing no rhetorical excess, the Center for Science in the Public Interest has denounced Hardee’s new Monster ThickBurger, a concoction that contains 2/3 lb of beef, four slices of bacon, three slices of a cheese-like substance and mayonnaise, as ‘food porn‘.
Of course, CSPI and its founder, Michael Jacobson, are not interested merely in educating the public that gargantuan fast-food hamburgers are unhealthful. CSPI has advocated the taxation of meats, dairy products, and sodas, among other things. The website CSPIscam.com has extensive documentary of CSPI’s various forms of activism: junk science, junk litigation and intimidation.
CSPI founder Michael Jacobson, according to the ActivistCash.com website,
… will not tolerate any of his employees eating “bad” foods. CSPI’s in-house eating policy is so puritanical that Jacobson once planned to permanently remove the office coffee machine — until one-third of his 60 staffers threatened to quit.
I guess in that sense, though, fast food is a lot like porn: it is the same group of neo-puritan busybodies who oppose both.
Samizdata: now a porn site?
Another enforced absence from regular blogging can be explained (if not necessarily forgiven) by my currently being in Northern California on business.
Yes, here I am in downtown Monterey, seated at a table in ‘Bay Books’ internet cafe on the corner of Alvarado and Franklin.
While the climate is most agreeable, I must just say that this is not at all what I was expecting to find in ‘George Bush’s Amerikkka’. I have been here for very nearly a week now and I have not stumbled across a single Gulag. Perhaps they are all very well hidden. And if there are any Fascist Death Squads operating in the area, then the report of their rifles are being drowned out by the barking of the seals in Monterey Bay.
In fact, the only visibly disturbing characteristics of this place are a few too many ageing hippies and a zealous crusade against smokers. There are, however, compensations. It is mid-November and I can walk about in shirtsleeves during the day.
I cannot honestly say that I am enjoying myself but that is only because I have such a busy work schedule. I can say that I look forward to coming back here again.
I will be returning to Blighty early next week whereupon normal service will resume.
I hear the term “Anglosphere” as meaning that there is some community of the English-speaking nations on either side of the Atlantic Ocean. But when I come across this site, I feel like I am living in a foreign country to Americans.
Trying to list all the reasons why Adopt a Sniper is definitely not an English website would take hours. And that is a shame.
[via Instapundit]
I have to say I got a totally different impression from yesterday’s blog event from Brian. The point that came across was that we needed to move beyond the hype – for example that blogs make politics more important to people’s lives and therefore all MPs should be given taxpayer money to blog. I once heard someone claim that blogs were great because they allow everyone’s views to count equally. But they do not. While the printing press permitted those with sufficient funds to vanity publish their thoughts, it did not enable worthless books to get read. With blogs, you have to write good content and build up a readership who come back because they like it. The blogosphere is a meritocracy.
It is precisely the virtue of the blogosphere that blogs act as a filter. Boring, uninteresting blogs do not get read. That’s a feature, not a bug.
When you cut away the hype, you see real uses of the technology. William Heath, one of the speakers, talks about how blogs really can help bring fresh thinking to policy problems. He spoke on how his blog Ideal Government has enabled dozens of diverse thinkers on government IT – including users and geeks, as well as purchasers – to share what they think about how government IT could be made to work better. That is a real use of blog technology to improve communication. It has been presented to and read by the government’s Chief Information Officer.
Stephen Pollard talked of how blogs are not replacing the existing media, but they are serving an important role in fact checking. His own blog is very popular, which I would suggest helps his ‘brand’ stand out further among newspaper columnists, and it also lets him talk about things he wouldn’t be able to sell an article on.
So the seminar’s theme was not that blogs are no big deal, but that we need to move away from the hype and look at real end uses of the technology. There has been too much sloppy thinking about blogs in the past, often by those who desperately want politics to count more. As Perry de Havilland said, blogs tend to be more anti-establishment, having severely tarnished the likes of CBS News’s Dan Rather in the US, and tend to open authority to more scrutiny than in the past. Blogs are starting, however, to be used as important tools, especially by those with views to express. As I pointed out at the event, the ASI gets a fair few media calls as a result of topical pieces that have been posted on its blog. So it answers a need to be able to publish quickly a position on something and get noticed by the mainstream media, by government departments and politicians and so on. Let’s forget the hype and look at where it does useful tasks.
Last night I attended this event, about Blogs, Democracy, etc.
The atmosphere radiating from the panel of speakers was odd. They all had in common that they were concerned above all not to get too enthusiastic about blogging. One sensed that both the dot.com boom and the current enthusiasm for blogging that radiates from sad little blogging enthusiasts like me had affected them far too deeply for their own good. To me they sounded like people saying in, say, 1550, that all this hype about the impact that printing was destined to have was all rather overdone. → Continue reading: Democracy and the blogosphere? No big deal
The Republican party is normally presented by the media and academia as the anti Welfare State party – the ‘liberal’ (i.e. statist) establishment denounce the Republicans as the party of cuts in government spending and wicked deregulation.
And yet when the Republicans win an election, most libertarians are not very pleased. Of course we are happy to see the media people upset or the academics in despair, but we do not really expect the Republicans to roll back the entitlement programs or slash and burn the mass of regulations. The reason for this, many libertarians tell themselves, is that Republicans are no good – they talk the language of freedom, but when put to the test they fail the voters who supported them.
However, there is another point of view and this is that most voters (including many people who vote Republican) just do not support liberty and would turn against the Republicans if they ever seriously tried to roll back government. → Continue reading: Why we should not expect to much from the Republicans: Or the lessons of 1936
I snapped this outside the Victoria Street (London SW1) branch of Sainsbury’s on Monday evening. It’s too dark to see much of the bloke actually selling those Evening Standards, but his message is clear.
Sainsbury’s has been taking a bit of a beating at the hands of Tesco just lately. But this is bad news for Tesco.
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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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