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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This is quite a little story, and with my libertarian stirrer hat on I say that the more it gets around the better, because the more it will draw attention to the existence of the libertarian journal Liberty, and of the libertarian movement generally. And when a little story gets written about in the New York Times, I guess that makes it not such a little story:
ALPINE, Tex., Feb. 16 — The first indication that Dr. Larry J. Sechrest’s neighbors and students had read his article titled “A Strange Little Town in Texas” was when he began receiving death threats and obscene phone calls and his house was vandalized.
The article by Dr. Sechrest, an economics professor at Sul Ross State University, was published in the January issue of Liberty, a small libertarian magazine with a circulation of about 10,000 and only two local subscribers, one of whom is Dr. Sechrest. But it was weeks before people heard about it in remote Alpine, which is three hours from the closest Barnes & Noble, in Midland, Tex.
The article lauded the beauty of West Texas, the pleasant climate, the friendliness and tolerance of the locals. But Dr. Sechrest, who has a Ph.D. in business administration from the University of Texas, also contended that “the students at Sul Ross, and more generally, the long-term residents of the entire area, are appallingly ignorant, irrational, anti-intellectual, and, well, … just plain stupid.”
Well, death threats and obscene phone calls does sound pretty plain stupid to me, so although Sechrest may regret his candour, he has nothing to apologise for.
Sadly, Liberty seems to be one of those paper publications which is reluctant to give all its writings away on the Internet until several years have passed (which you can understand), so the actual article by Larry Secrest that caused all the fuss is not linkable to. But in addition addition to the NYT piece linked to above, there’s also this from the Desert-Mountain Times:
Sechrest said he regretted publishing parts of the article that have caused such a strong reaction in the community.
“I thought there were two libertarians in the community,” he said. “If that’s true, I thought, ‘Who will ever see it’ – it never crossed my mind it would cause such an uproar. If I knew the reaction it would cause, would I have done it? Of course not.”
Ah, but the libertarian movement is bigger and more pervasive than you think!
The New York Times piece ends on a positive note:
Last week Dr. Sechrest said he had begun to receive more positive e-mail and phone calls. He noted in particular an e-mail message from a former student.
“As I read your article I found myself laughing out loud and saying things like ‘amen’ and ‘true,’ ” the former student wrote. “At the same time I felt somewhat guilty because it really did offend people I really care about. There’s no denying these are legitimate concerns. The lack of interest in anything beyond Brewster County lines also baffled me.”
The student added, “It is my sincere hope that all involved can extract what is true and good from your article, and get over the rest.”
The message was signed, “A former clod.”
Maybe getting a not unsympathetic write-up in the New York Times will stir Alpine into being less cloddish, and Sul Ross State University into improving its standards. It certainly sounds as if that could be the longer term outcome. Maybe Sechrest has done the whole area a favour, in other words. If he has, it would not be the first time in human history that criticism was met first with anger, but then with a resolve by the people criticised to do better in the future.
For a wonderful account of the BBC’s world famous dispassion and impartiality, check this out.
Some views are more welcome than others it seems.
According to yesterday’s Observer the HMS Beagle, the ship on which Charles Darwin sailed to the Galapagos Islands and around the world (and which later visited northern Australia, which ultimately led to Australia’s northernmost city being named after one of the greatest of all scientists) has been possibly located at the bottom of a marsh in Essex. There are no records as to where the ship was taken after being sold for scrap in 1870, but some historical detective work by Robert Prescott, a marine archaeologist from St Andrews University, followed by a radar survey appears to have tracked it down.
Given that this is the vessel onboard which one of the greatest of all scientific revolutions began, it would be wonderful if this ship could be raised out of the marsh and put in a museum somewhere, or perhaps it could be turned into a museum. Thematically it would be perfect in the Science Museum in Kensington, but I suspect that the 90 ft brig would be a little big for the building. And while it would presumably be possible to transport it up the Thames on some other vessel, transporting it through Chelsea to Kensington might be a little bit of a nuisance. So perhaps the Maritime Museum in Greenwich would be a better bet.
(Link via slashdot).
So what’s the difference between socialism and conservatism? Judging by the spitting and hissing of the Labour Party’s Douglas Alexander, in conversation this morning with Shadow Chancellor Oliver Letwin, it’s about £20 billion pounds. This is the vile slash-and-burn difference between the amount Mr Letwin says he can trim off the government’s future spending plans, and the amount the Labour Party are aiming to trim off the government’s own spending plans, at least according to a leaked internal government sponsored plan, from Sir Peter Gershon.
This trimming of £20 billion pounds is going to require immediate and severe cuts to skoolznozpitals, say Mr Alexander. Tish, says Mr Letwin, we’re simply going to grow public spending just ever so slightly slower than you are. Which as a British taxpayer, I found particularly reassuring this morning, while stuck on the M4 motorway trying to get onto the M25. → Continue reading: Dancing on the head of a pin
“It’s not the age, it’s the mileage.”
Like so many other bloggers have done, I could not resist generating a map of the places I have visited (though I feel India and Bahrain are a cheat because it was only changing airplanes)…
PS:
The sound Christopher Booker of his notebook in the Sunday Telegraph asks the age-old questions – What do we pay taxes for?
He then proceeds with a list of ‘mundane’ examples of people being charged for things done to them by government agencies such as HM Customs, the Home Office immigration department. He points out that the old principle that government is funded by taxpayers to carry out its duties seems to be breaking down in all directions. Well, it has taken him a while to notice but better late than never.
My reader concluded: “Presumably we can expect the same ‘user must pay’ principle to be applied to the cost of providing the health service, policing, prisons, libraries and state benefits.”
But the question remains, what then do we pay our taxes for? (Until the day, of course, when the Inland Revenue charges us a fee for reading our tax forms and taking our money.)
The answer is obvious – the taxes are necessary to support disabled black lesbian single mothers living in council estates…
This news has been around bits of the blogosphere but it is still shocking enough to write about a week later.
When linguist Sibel Dinez Edmonds showed up for her first day of work at the FBI, a week after the 9-11 attacks, she expected to find a somber atmosphere. Instead, she was offered cookies filled with dates from party bowls set out in the room where other Middle Eastern linguists with top-secret security clearance translate terror-related communications.
She knew the dessert is customarily served in the Middle East at weddings, births and other celebrations, and asked what the happy occasion was. To her shock, she was told the Arab linguists were celebrating the terrorist attacks on America, as if they were some joyous event. Right in front of her supervisor, one translator cheered:
“It’s about time they got a taste of what they’ve been giving the Middle East.”
It gets worse.
When Edmonds reported the incident and other breaches in security, mistranslations and potential espionage by Middle Eastern colleagues she was fired “without specified cause”. Edmonds’s supervisor, “a naturalized U.S. citizen from Beirut” reportedly told his employees to take long breaks, to slow down translations, and to simply say no to those field agents calling us to beg for speedy translations so that they could go on with their investigations and interrogations of those they had detained.
The FBI, which like the army suffers from a severe shortage of Arabic translators, instated a bureau-wide Muslim-sensitivity training program after 9-11. Edmonds is said to have detailed these allegations further in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee last month. Edmonds wrote Justice’s Inspector General Glenn A. Fine in a Jan. 5 letter.
I have alleged, and the FBI has confirmed (to Senate investigators), that there are in fact such persons in the language department.
I do not know whether these allegations are true, but I have no reason to doubt their validity. I have no problem believing that a government agency swamped with bureaucracy and with departmental biases can foster such shocking behaviour within its ranks. An allegded shortage of arabic translators seems to have opened floodgates to greedy and hostile behaviour of the Middle Eastern linguists in residence whose allegiances cannot be doubted.
Any chance of a more appropriate ‘sensitivity training’? Once more, without feeling…
There are two reasons why I could not possibly let this one pass by without comment.
First, while the free market argument against anti-smoking laws (such matters should be decided by means of individual choice and the exercise of property rights) are both meritorious and rational, nowhere near enough attention is actually paid to questioning the decades-long propoganda war against tobacco. Far too many people have now accepted as fact that inhaling tobacco smoke is a uniquely dangerous activity.
However, it is my view that, while smoking tobacco is not entirely risk-free, the dangers of doing so have been grossly exaggerated.
It has taken some time (these things usually do) but now some people are prepared to start challenging this taboo:
As for smoking bans in “public places”, there are three reasons why they’re unjustified. First, pubs and clubs are actually private property. Second, bars don’t have to be smoky any more, with the air-cleaning technology available. But most importantly: no danger from “second-hand smoke” has ever been proven. Unlike most journalists, politicians and, regrettably, doctors, I’ve gone through all of the more than 40 studies. Only a few show any risk, and it’s statistically insignificant. There are higher risks from drinking milk, using mouthwash and keeping pet birds. I swear I’m not making this up! People who use this sort of “junk science” to stigmatise smokers and to nag and bully us out of our pleasures should be bloody well ashamed of themselves.
So they should. Regrettably, they appear to be all too bloody well pleased with themselves.
Secondly, the above broadside was angrily discharged by Joe Jackson, the Grammy Award-winning British singer and recording artist and that makes it doubly significant. Like everybody else I have grown weary of members of the entertainment industry seeking more attention than they could ever possibly deserve with some conformist, fashionable claptrap about ‘saving the planet’ or similar bunkum. So it is encouraging to note that not everyone in that industry has lost the capacity for critical thought.
My warmest congratulations to Joe Jackson. Twice!
[My thanks to Kevin McFarlane who posted this link to the Libertarian Alliance Forum.]
Last year saw a further rise in anti-semitic incidents in the United Kingdom. Both Muslim fundamentalists and the far right were involved in a more assertive and targeted campaign against prominent Jewish citizens. This indicates that anti-semitism in Britain is conforming to the European pattern, established on the continent in the first years of this century, without a strong response from many governments.
Whilst disagreeing with pundits who view this phenomenon as a cultural shift towards dhimmitude and Eurabia in that Europeans recognise and accommodate the superiority of Islam, there is no doubt that the issue of Palestine and the actions of Muslim fundamentalists has provided a lodestar for more traditional anti-semites. To this can be added a countervailing bias in the media that has promoted a discourse where all terrorist casualties in Israel are unfortunate and where all Palestinian deaths are victims. This has also stimulated a Manichaean view of the conflict with goodies and baddies, a framework that its supporters consider is the defining stupidity of those they oppose. As a consequence, the view of Israel and of Judaism in general has merged, and an unsympathetic span of views with shared arguments has arisen that shades from dislike of Israel to out and out anti-semitism. → Continue reading: British Anti-Semitism
We Brians must stick together, so here is a plug for this campaign by Brian Whiley (linked to by b3ta.com) to replace either Greg Dyke or That Bloke From The City as BBC DG or BBC Chairman, whichever.
What was Gilligan’s crime? That, early in the morning – at a time when nobody except insomniacs and farmers would be listening – a bleary-eyed journalist embellished a report that, in all honesty, probably needed it. My first duty would be to defend to the last BBC journalists from a Government that feels the need to hound reporters whose only error has been to make a boring story a little more interesting by inventing conversations that never took place.
I particularly like the promotional products peddled on this website, which downplay the “Whiley” aspect of the situation in a way that will surely meet with widespread approval here.
Ed Driscoll wrote a piece about evolving guitar technology in Friday’s installment of TechCentralStation, and after searching desperately for any thinly-veiled excuse to write about it, I stumbled across an angle.
With a lot of manufactured goods, their production tends to get ‘outsourced’ to the third world because (1) eventually everyone figures out how to do it and (2) capital markets can finance production almost anywhere on the globe. The only thing more predictable than this evolution is that politicians will never stop whining about it.
One trend that Driscoll does not pick up on is that this is also happening with guitars. Just as American streets are filling up with Korean-made autos (more Korean cars are sold here than German cars) the American guitar shops are filling up with Korean-made (and now Chinese-made) guitars. The Korean manufacturer Samick now accounts for almost half of the world’s guitar production. Even Gibson, best known for its estimable and pricey Les Paul (see photo below) is offering high value from its Epiphone series guitars (which Samick builds for them in Korea.)
If you have ever picked up a surviving ‘bargain’ guitar of the ’60s in a pawnshop or a secondhand guitar store — a Harmony, Kay, Eko, etc. — you would likely find cut-rate construction, weak intonation, mediocre playability and thin-sounding pickups. But today’s ‘bargain’ brands offer workmanship and playability that sometimes give the premium brands a run for their money. Danelectro, for example, makes hip, great-sounding guitars that are easy to play and can be had for about US$200.
To give you an idea as to how far this trend has already gone, I personally own a $40 guitar. I was ordering the Line 6 Guitar Port (the guitar-to-PC interface that Driscoll mentions in the article) when I discovered that the vendor was offering the device a la carte for $160 or packaged with an electric guitar for $200. My curiosity got the best of me – how bad can this $40 guitar be? – and I ordered the package deal. And you know what? The cheapo guitar is terrific. It does not hold its tune as well as my main Gibson, but it is easy to play and sounds good to boot.
Driscoll is right that we are not going to see a lot of major innovations in electric guitars anytime soon, in large part because the players themselves are somewhat resistant to change. (Even the most avant-garde noisemakers tend to prefer traditional guitar designs.) What we are seeing instead is global capitalism commoditizing electric guitars and making quality instruments more affordable than ever for a generation of young players.
The sustain, listen to it!
Now see here all you bloody smoking bastards. They have just about had enough of you and your pathetic, juvenile, surly insolence. Why can’t you seem to get it through your amazingly thick skulls that this sort of thing just is not on?
They have tried to be reasonable. They have tried to be understanding. But, oh no, that wasn’t good enough for you, was it? Well, here’s a news flash for you, chummy: the party is over. Their patience is at an end. The ‘good cop’ routine has not worked, so its time to send in the ‘bad cops’. Yes, that’s right. The gloves are finally coming off:
Pictures of diseased organs and rotting teeth could feature on cigarette packets under new government plans.
Similar pictures appear in Canada, Thailand, Brazil and Singapore – now a public consultation will be held on whether to introduce them in the UK.
“We need to continue with fresh, hard-hitting ideas, providing more information that will help smokers quit,” Health Secretary John Reid said.
And if that does not force you to quit, well, then they are just going to have to break out the Celine Dion records and play them on a loop until you damn well come to your senses.
Don’t make them do it!
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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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