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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According to recent reports, Yasser Arafat is in a state of superposition. Palestinian and French sources state he is dead and alive at present. If true, this represents the greatest breakthrough in applied quantum physics of the still youthful 21st century.
Professor Unzer N.T. Katz, a Quantum Mechanic, told reporters: “This is the most amazing event in the history of Quantum Mechanics! We experimentalists have managed to superpose an electron here and there, or perhaps a few measly atoms… but to superpose an entire human being! The implications are staggering! They are beyond imagining!”
French doctors were unavailable for comment.
While idly surfing around the net thanks to the marvels of Google (what a wonderful thing Google is!) I had a look at a few stories about the worrying state of French cuisine, like this one.
I yield to no man in my love of French food, or indeed food generally. I love French food as much as I loathe the French political establishment. And it will surely be a tragedy of Napoleonic proportions if France, wedded to such economic absurdities as the 35-hour work week, were to drive many of its finest restaurants out of business or lead them to cut corners in their work. The irony, of course, is that if France does crush its wonderful restaurants through such nonsense, it will encourage the very fast-food big chains that the French intellectuals despise, since such chains have the economies of scale to shoulder red tape more easily than a small bistro. It would be a cruel irony indeed if MacDonalds spread its grip on the market thanks to French socialism. I guess the great French classical liberal economics writer Frederic Bastiat would have savoured the irony.
There is a silver lining to all this. Some of the best French cuisine is now being made in grey old London, which means I can indulge my tastebuds without making the trip across the Channel. The Law of Unintended Consequences strikes again.
I have been waiting for final results on the 2004 election at the county level before writing about them, but Brian beat me to it. The map at Freedom and Whisky is an early one with a number of ugly black holes for incomplete returns. Yesterday’s USAToday map is marked ‘final’ and has very little politicus incognito.
If you flip back and forth between the USAToday 2004 and 2000 Presidential election by county maps, you will see small but significant differences. The ‘Yankee’ vote is going more and more solidly Democrat. Counties north of New York City are becoming bedroom and retirement communities, a part of Greater Boston and Greater New York. New Hampshire in particular has been solidly colonized by New York City. Notice that almost all the State of New York went Republican and perhaps would have been carried by Bush but for the huge Democratic majority in New York City.
The rest of the country appears to show the Republican vote is growing in virtually all of the non-Urban counties. There is a significant decrease in blue-dominant areas in the non-New England States.
Also of interest is the Princeton map. While less dramatic, it is probably of more importance to an election campaign team as it shows much more clearly where the 2008 battle ground areas will be.
I would love to see this re-done as a pseudo-topographic map, and I’d love to see it for 2000 as well. That would give us a much improved view of long term trends. While blue usually does mean depth in such maps, that may annoy the more oversensitive amongst the bluish, so we will perhaps need both blue-deepest and red-deepest maps to avoid offending a victimized minority.
The smoking debate is, to me, too depressing for me to want to go on about it. This Telegraph leader does go on about it approximately as I would if I could force myself, so read that instead.
The Scots, in the Gadarene sense, are leading the way towards a total smoking ban.
Says the Telegraph:
Over-mighty politicians, in Scotland as in the rest of the country, need reminding that they are elected to do the will of the people, and not to cure our bad habits.
The problem with that being: what if that “will of the people” is, precisely, to cure a bad habit? Once again, we observe democracy being equated with niceness and sensibleness, something we regularly complain about here.
With luck, the same story as has occurred with devolution will play out with smoking. The Scots go crazy, it all blows up in their faces, and the English get the chance to learn from Scottish error. I hope so.
David Farrer reports on Scottish devolution disappointments, from which the North of England learned, and on how the Scottish smoking ban is working out.
Changing the subject, but to emphasise what a continuingly good read David’s Freedom and Whisky blog is, here are two political maps of North America, both very diverting in their very diverse ways.
Blogger, film scriptwriter and novelist Roger Simon notes that there have not been many sounds of disgust from his Hollywood backyard at the murder of Dutch film-maker, Theo Van Gogh (a descendant of the artist) on November 2nd.
I must say there has not been a huge amount of noise from our own British film-makers, documentary producers and big shot journalists, either. I get the distinct feeling that a lot of folk in the artistic community are simply scared or uninterested that a man who made a film about the treatment of women in Islamic culture was shot in broad daylight in Holland, that most laid-back of nations.
I find that there is something rather shabby about this silence. I hope to be proven wrong and that all those who have cause to value freedom of speech and the right to challenge certain ideas will speak out at the brutal murder of Mr Van Gogh.
Style is usually all that matters, when you have no control over the substance.
– Adriana Cronin, in conversation about French culture
In the leafy suburb of Clamart to the South-West of Paris, the rumor is breaking that Jacques Chirac’s second favourite Arab (after Saddam Hussein) is dead.
CNN reports that Yasser Arafat has passed away this afternoon after spending a week in a coma.
Meanwhile in the Ivory Coast, demonstrators are parading banners that exclaim:
“Chirac is an assassin” and “Chirac= worse than Bin Laden” [thanks to millena at les libertariens, the French Libertarian newsgroup]
I thought the rednecks were all in the red states of the USA? 😉
I agree with Virginia Postrel and Tim Worstall, and no doubt with plenty of others, that it is a nice giggle that 7-Eleven had the best on-the-day polling for that Presidential Election they had in the USA the other day. 7-Eleven coffee purchasers that day were asked to choose between Bush cups and Kerry cups, and it went Bush: just over 51; Kerry: just under 49, which was better than anyone else seems to have done on the day.
Is this the first time 7-Eleven have tried doing this? And, crucially, did they announce a rolling score throughout the day? If they do announce the score throughout the day (and I suggest that they should next time if they did not do it this time – see below), and if the news gets out big that they did well with their coffee cup polling this time around, the story will not end there, because the next step will be for political fanatics to drink gallons and gallons of 7-Eleven coffee on the day of the next election, in order to influence the 7-Eleven results. The fanatics will not, I think, necessarily buy coffee in the cups of their own team, because if their guy is reckoned to be well ahead, they might want to make the race seem closer than it is, to get all of their vote out and win bigger. Then again, they might drink gallons of their own guy’s cups of coffee, to demoralise the opposition vote, and to say to it: you have lost, there is no point in you voting. It depends on what time of day the various Karl Roves reckon their voters and the other guy’s voters will be voting.
If 7-Eleven do as I suggest, they will either (a) get the result spot on, again, or (b) get it totally wrong but sell an extra billion gallons of coffee. Win-win.
“Just imagine that instead of urging householders to barricade themselves inside their homes if a burglar attacks, a group of senior police officers were to write a joint signed letter to the Times saying that in such a case, fight the intruder, to the death if necessary. Imagine what impact this would have on the public debate about self defence and crime.”
Brian Micklethwait, speaking at a recent one of his regular Friday evening soirees.
Last month a British panel of the Great and Good issued a thumpingly big report on the state of Britain’s pensions system covering both the private and state networks of provision. In short, the report said that we are living longer, have fewer children, and hence pensions systems which were constructed in the middle of the last century are buckling under the strain. It is all now a fairly familiar story and likely to prove one of the most ticklish political domestic issues in Europe and north America for the next few years.
But consider this – if we are living longer and able to live healthier lives for longer, and this is causing certain strains to emerge in pension provision, then how do the doomongers square that with the claim that we face all manner of threats to our health? One can barely open the pages of a newspaper or turn on the television without being regaled about all the horrible risks out there, obesity being the latest issue, but by no means the last.
Well, for all our supposed problems, something wonderful has happened to the health of most people in modern industrial nations these past few decades. (Clues: modern medicine, drugs, decline of heavy manual labour, greater awareness of healthy diet, dangers of tobacco, etc). I appreciate that stating such a thing in today’s culture of gloom is unfashionable, even reckless, but there it is.
The long delayed assault on Fallujah is underway. Our troops have spent many months supplying the enemy with a target rich environment and it is about time we ended it.
There is some silver lining to the cloud. The months gave the new Iraqi government a chance to build its image within Iraq. It bought time for civilians in the town to get out or hunker down. It gave loads of time for every fruitcake from the Atlantic to the Pacific to make their way to Iraq and infiltrate Fallujah. They think they can win a great battle there, and I hope they keep believing it all the way until their very last breath.
You know these people are insane: noone but the terminally mentally deficient would want to be a part of an amateur effort to hold ground against the Marines.
I wonder if there might be a bit of Darwinian selection at work here.
PS: If we have any of the troops from that part of the world dropping by… good luck and good hunting.
Tonight at midnight I am to be on the Richard Bacon debate show on Radio 5 Live, arguing about censorship. My job, and that of my pro-censorship opponent, will be to poke a stick into the wasps nest that is the Radio 5 phoning-in community, thereby ‘involving’ lots of people. They hope. If no one calls, we will no doubt talk amongst ourselves, although if I know these people they will have done some preliminary poking already, and lined up some callers of appropriate extremity and craziness, for if we two official debaters let the side down by talking too sensibly.
Libertarianism, civil liberties, etc., is strictly stuff that they squeeze in when nothing real is happening (i.e. football). However, I take such chances when they are offered, and if they make it worth my while. They have promised me £80, which for me is not bad for an hour’s intermittent chit-chatting. Wish me luck.
I keep trying to get these radio shows to introduce me as a Samizdata blogger, instead of just as “from the Libertarian Alliance“, but they still do not understand about this, or perhaps fear that their listeners will not understand. I suppose the problem with writing for the internet is that, you know, anyone can do this and it is very easy so therefore it is of no importance. I mean, what on earth could ‘blogging’ possibly have to do with a debate about the official control of and suppression of information?
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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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