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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There will be much muttering in their beards in the caves of Tora Bora. There will be much gnashing of teeth and gnawing of livers in the ghettos of the Democratic National Committee.
A new front has opened in the struggle for freedom.
Age 25, single, 5 foot 11 inches: the new Miss America describes herself as “a Republican” and says that she will use her influence to explain America’s involvement in Iraq. Miss Shandi Finnessey is a statuesque blonde from St Louis, Missouri and replaces last year’s winner from Massachusetts. [Thanks to Pejmanesque.com for the link.]
Note: Missouri voted Republican last presidential election. Any bets this time?
I am about to be on Talk Sport Radio, at about 1 am tomorrow morning, they said. I have just done an interview about President Bush’s crackdown on porn, with a guy called Duncan Barkes. I tried to make sense, and probably made some sense. The purpose of this post is to tell you this, not to spend the next three quarters of an hour telling you what I think about it all.
But I will summarise it:
Duncan Barkes: Should porn be illegal?
Me: No.
Often libertarians (and pro freedom folk in general) cite writers who are not libertarians at all – a good example being the number of times I have heard the name of Tom Paine being cited as a great defender of freedom (Tom Paine the ardent welfare statist and defender of confiscatory taxes on landowners, who [like so many of his kind] used the words “freedom” and “liberty” endlessly).
However, sometimes libertarians (and other folk) will cite a something that is a great work – but a work that is full of danger for the reader.
Such a work is Jose Ortega Y Gasset‘s Revolt of the Masses. This is great work and such people as M.J. Oakeshott and F.A. Hayek were right to praise it – particularly for the examination of the origin and nature of the “mass man” that one finds within the work and for its examination of the importance of the mass man in the modern world.
Few people (thankfully) read a great work and assume that all the opinions in it must be true, but a lot of people read what they (rightly) consider a great work and assume that the factual information in it must be true.
This was the danger I was reminded of when I recently reread this work – I came upon very many errors of fact. I do not know whether I was too ignorant to recognise these errors when I read this work as a child, or whether my memory has so far decayed that I can not remember reading the errors – but be that as it may, my purpose here is to warn readers to trust no piece of information they find in this work. → Continue reading: The Revolt of the Masses
Dave Barry links to this:
Phil Henry said he went to Helen Ellis Hospital in Tarpon Springs and was admitted for abdominal pain. A few days into his stay, his I-V malfunctioned causing his right arm to swell.
“On Tuesday night my right arm started hurting. I rung for a nurse. I didn’t get anyone and my arm got swollen up about the size of two golf balls and started bleeding,” Henry said.
After ringing for a nurse several times, he decided to take matters into his own hands.
“I took my urinal can and threw it out in the hallway, still got nobody. I hollered two or three times. Nobody came so I picked up the telephone and dialed 911.”
He said he told the dispatcher his name, where he was and described the problem with the I-V.
He then asked the dispatcher to call the hospital.
“Then I got a nurse. After that they took good care of me.”
Warning to British people: Do not try this with the NHS.
Via b3ta.com, I came across a nice piece of White Rose Relevant graphics, here.
Since I don’t know what the policy is here about pictures, and in any case do not have picture posting privileges, but since b3ta.com is such a Niagara of pictorial diversions, here today and gone tomorrow, I nailed down the relevant image here, amidst appropriately educational commentary.
“Money grabbing gits!” is what b3ta said. Would that our money was the only thing in danger here.
In many ways I would not get so put out by the machinations of the French political class if they were just more upfront about what motivates them. If they just came out and said “we could not care less about the fact the Iraqi people are ruled by a mass murderous tyrant, we are just interested in protecting our economic sweetheart deals”, I would still think that was appalling, but at least one could hardly help but admire their brazen pursuit of self-interest at the expense of others. What is another 20 years of Ba’athism when a sweet below-market oil deal is at stake? No (Ba’athist) blood for (French) oil, please?
But no, Dominique de Villepin and Jaques Chirac actually have the bare faced effrontery to claim the moral high ground when anyone with a passing knowledge of French economics and a ‘who’s who’ of French interests has been able to see what is really going on from day one. It is a measure of the web of corruption that lies over the French media and chattering classes that ‘The Big Lie’ is accepted so widely in France. Perhaps Colin Powell should have just responded to one of de Villepin ambushes in the UN during the lead up to the recent Gulf War by simply reading out a list of the names of the great and good in France and their interests in Iraq, without further comment.
Not that the French political class are alone of course, not by any means… they are just the most cynically sanctimonious about it.
There is a fuss going on in the USA over something called Air America Radio, a pro-Democrat talk-radio project. The shows have been taken off the air in Chicago and Los Angeles last week amidst a row over payments arrears.
This review published before the furore of Air America Radio is from Press Action, a bunch of US libertarians of the leftist sort. It had me in stitches.
It seems that the predominently white radio presenters have shoved off the air the black presenters in New York, when the majority of the audience is black. As a result the cricket scores and news from the Caribbean are being shunted off to slots between midnight and 5am, to the dismay of many Jamaican listeners.
Also one show involved the presenter screaming and ranting at Ralph Nader, who promptly dubbed the radio station “Hot Air America Radio”. Great job of unifying the comrades, Comrade.
I also noted that the Press Action crowd would elect Noam Chomsky for president on their site poll. The funny bit is that Bush gets 13 per cent and Kerry gets 19 per cent. If Bush gets 13 per cent of the goofy left vote, I must call my bookie.
As I recall, Air America was the name of a CIA spook job in South East Asia during the Viewnam War. Anyone thinking what I’m thinking?
The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue.
– Mao Tse Tung
The recent offer of truces by both Al Quaeda and Muqtada al Sadr’s followers in Iraq suggests an incompetence for guerrilla warfare, or that they are losing.
There are two dangers in the weeks ahead. The first is that since the 1960s, a different sort of guerrilla warfare has emerged, which consists of sacrificing cannon-fodder until your opponent can no longer morally take it.
The first historical case of this that I can find comes from the First World War, on the second day of the Battle of Loos. It was an accident. Ten thousand British troops were lined up in ten ranks and marched slowly across muddy open terrain with range markers placed by the Germans. The German machine gunners simply mowed down rank after rank of the British, without taking any casualties themselves. The British came up to the barbed wire that was supposed to have been cut by the artillery bombardment, only it had not been. None of the British troops was equipped with wire cutters (this bit has not changed). So groups of British soldiers ran up and down the barbed wire looking for a way through. The result was virtually 100 per cent casualties on the British side.
Now it is not true that this battle left the Germans unscathed. About a dozen German machine gunners were so traumatised by the massacre that they suffered nervous breakdowns and needed to be hospitalized (the British would have shot them for cowardice).
Since the Vietnam War, it has become a deliberate tactic of the weaker combattant to make a point of losing hundreds or thousands of casualties in the belief that the West does not have the stomach for slaughtering poorly armed enemies. To return to the Mao quote, now is the time to press even more firmly with military force: “enemy tires, we attack”. Failure to do so merely confuses by-standers who consider compassion to be effeminate weakness, and encourages the enemy.
The second threat is the ‘compromise’ with the UN. Letting the UN organise the hand-over of power to an Iraqi government (which will surely be different from the one the US wants) is rather like inviting the USSR to decide who governs Germany and Japan in 1945. Except that the USSR was an ally.
A History of the American People
Paul Johnson
HarperCollins, 1998
The Myth of the Robber Barons
Burton W. Folsom, Jr.
Young American Foundation, 1991 (3rd edition 1993)
Paul Johnson’s A History of the American People is a long (814 pages + notes and index, but no separate bibliography) but extremely well-structured book, so well-sustained that it is almost a page-turner. The author is openly partisan – i.e., holding to what was, by and large, the American consensus until the end of the Eisenhower era – and he opens his history by confessing its writing to have been a labour of love. There is no nonsense about starting it any earlier than the arrival of the first English-speaking settlers in 1580. Not being able to make a comparison with any other complete history of the US, I have to judge it in absolute terms.
The book is divided into eight parts, on chronological lines; there are no separate sections for the arts, sciences, social trends, or the like; all are integrated into the narrative, as are also the personalities, thumbnail biographical sketches and moral and political judgments. A painter himself, the author has much to say about US landscape painters of whom I had never even heard; perhaps significantly, Warhol, Pollock and Lichtenstein (to name those that come to my mind) are not even mentioned. → Continue reading: American history – the long and the short of it
Here is what Sullivan says, in today’s Sunday Times:
Bin Laden offered a truce. Who offers truces? People who are losing the battle.
Just what I was thinking.
I can not find anything else along similar lines here.
Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion
– Seen used as a signature on a games forum
We agonize a lot here about Islamic fundamentalism. But what can be done about it?
There are many reasons why Islamism of the most belligerent sort now stalks the earth, but one of them is that in many parts of the world, if you want an education, your only choice now is often either an education presided over by Islamic fundamentalists, or no education at all.
It is this problem which a group of businessmen in Pakistan have set out to remedy. With financial help from people of Pakistani descent who are living it Britain, they have established The Citizens’ Foundation, and there was an article about the work of TCF in the Times Magazine yesterday by Joanna Pitman.
Quote:
The six of them – all highly successful top-level managers – met in August 1995 and began to think seriously about the problems. They addressed poverty, health, intolerance, population, education, water and sanitation, and concluded that the solution to all these issues was education. In Pakistan, education remains desperately, stupidly low on the list of government priorities. The state schooling system, riddled with corruption, has been either non-existent or on the point of collapse for many years. The result is a massive intellectual deficit: out of a total population of 145 million, the country has 28 million children entirely unschooled and 41 per cent of adult men and 70 per cent of adult women illiterate. Ironically, in some areas, the first parents queueing to send their children to TCP schools rum out to be government schoolteachers.
The six businessmen decided to set up a corporate-style charitable organisation to build and run schools offering high-quality education to both girls and boys in the poorest areas of the country. Within four months, the ground had been broken to construct the first five schools, paid for out of the pockets of the founders, and by May 1996 all five were operational. Only once the schools had been running successfully for a year did TCF begin to expand – not through advertising or asking for funds, but simply by taking people to see the reality and letting them spread the word.
Its target is to build 1,000 primary a secondary schools by 2010, which will cater for 350-400,000 children at a time, offering them a high-quality, secular education that is the envy of most government schools and comparable to the country’s elite private schools. “We want these children to compete with our own children,” says Saleem, whose four teenage children are being educated at the best Pakistani private school and at the American School.
I have been unable to locate this article either here or anywhere else (although if someone can correct that, please do), and so have taken the liberty of scanning it all into my Education Blog, where you can now read the whole thing. If you do that, you will not, I believe, regard your time as having been wasted.
This project strikes me as an example of all kinds of good things, but in particular of the benefits that can come to a poor country when people from it are able to go and live in richer countries, and are then able to do something about the depressing circumstances from which they thought at first only of escaping.
In general, I believe that if Islam ever does get past confrontation and accommodates itself amicably into humanity as a whole, the Islamic diaspora will be an important part of this process.
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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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