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 just in:
A boss who gives each of his staff a turkey every Christmas had the shock of his life when the Inland Revenue hit him with a £6,000 tax bill.
Turkeys are “benefits in kind” apparently, which they are now getting very hot on. Another of those stealth taxes, in other words.
This time there was a happy ending, because he complained and they changed their minds. Christmas turkeys are trivial, they said, perhaps after thinking about the publicity angle.
Good luck next year mate, and a Merry Christmas to all our readers.
The following is taken from a list of authors names as published in the British Library Catalogue:
Florence A Bagelhole
Ole Bagger
Ludwig Von Baldass
Willy Bang
Juana Bignozzi
Petr Bitsilli
Jaime Bleeda
Don Bolognese
Wallop Brabazon
Knud Bugge
Hieronymus Cock
Ellsworth Prouty Conkle
Lettice May Crump
Dee Day
Roger A Destroyer
Arsen Diklic
Herman Dirk van Dodeweerd
Kersi D Doodha
Gottfried Egg
Bernt Eggen
Gordon Bandy Enders
Otto Flake
Mercedes Formica
Vladimir Fuka
Gergeley Gergeley
Biserka Grabar
Romulus Guga
Frederick Stuft Hammer
Odd Bang Hansen
O Heck
Jup Kastrati
Per Klang
Hieronimus Knicker
Bent Koch
Jacques Olle Laprune
Moses E Lard
F Leflufly
Manfred Lurker
Agogo Mago
Pilgrim Mangles
Santiago Nudelman
Henricus Pisart
Antwerp Pratt
Willem Quackelbeen
Fritz Rotter
Flora Schmulz
Johann Von Schmuck
I M Sick
Count Jacques de Silly
Negley Teeters
Wade Toole
Matilda Wrench
I am reliably informed that these names have been checked and that these people do indeed exist.
[My thanks to Dr Chris Tame for posting this to the Libertarian Alliance Forum]
Well, not quite. The Royal family’s horrible little dogs have been fighting each other to the death, is all. Not for cash bets, which would be much more exciting, if less hilarious: just because that’s what animals sometimes do if you let them. Sometimes animals kill people too. We sentimentalise them at our peril.
We British folk, especially the upper classes, have long been renowned for our perverse attachments to four-legged creatures over normal human beings. Personally, I can’t see the point. They can’t think, they cost money, you have to clean them, take them for walks, pay vet’s fees, if you go away for a couple of months they destroy the house and/or die and make a mess, and all this for nothing other than the proximity of a creature that can’t do anything except perform basic bodily functions. Why? On second thoughts, don’t tell me: I don’t care.
What I do care about is people getting attacked by other people’s vicious animals in public places. Why this crime which Anne was found guilty of last time only merited a £500 fine, I have no idea. But there’s a definite poetic justice to this seasonal next chapter of the story, in my view.
Jokes about pets, life and Christmas, anyone…?
Neither Instapundit nor I stop for a little thing like Christmas, and he links to this piece by Jay Rosen, which quotes Frank Rich saying this, which I think is rather smart:
Rather than compare Dr. Dean to McGovern or Goldwater, it may make more sense to recall Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy. It was not until F.D.R.’s fireside chats on radio in 1933 that a medium in mass use for years became a political force. J.F.K. did the same for television, not only by vanquishing the camera-challenged Richard Nixon during the 1960 debates but by replacing the Eisenhower White House’s prerecorded TV news conferences (which could be cleaned up with editing) with live broadcasts. Until Kennedy proved otherwise, most of Washington’s wise men thought, as The New York Times columnist James Reston wrote in 1961, that a spontaneous televised press conference was “the goofiest idea since the Hula Hoop.”
And Frank Rich saying this also:
The condescending reaction to the Dean insurgency by television’s political correspondents can be reminiscent of that hilarious party scene in the movie “Singin’ in the Rain,” where Hollywood’s silent-era elite greets the advent of talkies with dismissive bafflement. “The Internet has yet to mature as a political tool,” intoned Carl Cameron of Fox News last summer as he reported that the runner-up group to Dean supporters on the meetup.com site was witches.
I like that. It’ll be extremely interesting to see what happens to the Dean campaign. That all suggests that it may do rather well. However, I saw a tiny glimpse of Dean on TV last night, on a BBC Newsnight report of his efforts, and both the BBC reporter and Dean’s performance suggested to me that he’s a crazed demagogue and that when he comes flapping out of the caves of the internet into the cold light of those “impromptu televised press conferences” that JFK started all those years ago, he’ll crash and burn very quickly. But like I say, it’ll be interesting to see.
Even if Dean himself has (metaphor switch warning force six) flown on the wings of the internet too close to the sun of real politics, he has certainly done a lot to give political credibility to the internet, blogs etc. And sadly, what that means is that there will soon be a zillion blogs out there, but that they won’t be linking to the likes of this blog; they’ll be linking to each other. I am about to be an even smaller fish in an even bigger pond. You can feel the word ‘blog’ and ‘blogger’ (the BBC also made much of Salam Pax) becoming something that everyone will soon understand and have an opinion about and which about half of everyone will have to have, like ‘website’ before it. Respectable political opinion has stopped ignoring the political impact of the internet and has switched to worrying about it.
“Weimarization” is the word I am hearing, although I can’t recall where. The idea is that the internet is empowering the extremes. But that’s only because the non-extremes aren’t using it, and that’s surely about to change. Indeed, I keep thinking that this ‘the internet is predominantly conservative and libertarian’ vibe is about to roll over and die. And in terms of sheer square yardage of verbiage, it probably already has. If we continue in any way to ‘dominate’, it will be (a) because our ideas and arguments are better, not because we merely proclaim more of them, and (b) because to the liberal left, a media system not biased in their favour – not owned or captured by them – feels like it’s biased against them, even if all that’s really happening is that anyone can now say what they want and read what they want.
That of course being one – and I speak as a libertarian rather than as a conservative now – of our ideas.
By the way, who exactly is Frank Rich?
I’ve just got off the phone with my mother, who included in among all the family chat some grumbles about this year’s Christmas stamps. She prefers more obviously Christmassy imagery, and she said the people at her local Post Office didn’t much care for them either. What are they? – she said. I’d heard distant grumblings about these stamps, and had seen the one with the ice twiddling around a tree because presumably that was the one which people were particularly grumbling about. Controversial blah blah. But I hadn’t seen all of them, or given any of them any thought until my mother mentioned them.
I should guess that there is a sort of ideological agenda here, in the form of a non-agenda. They avoid anything very Christian. Like most readers of this blog I should guess, I utterly despise the notion that Christian Christmas stuff should be set aside in order not to upset Muslim stroke atheists. (a) No sane Muslim stroke atheist could possibly be upset. (b) If insane Muslim stroke atheists are upset, to hell with them.
Nevertheless, and perhaps because I am myself a devout atheist, I actually quite like these particular stamps, although I do agree that the ice twiddle one is rather silly. I especially like the ice star. But I’m guessing others might prefer something more along these lines.
Will you join me in a special Christmas prayer? “Oh Lord, please spare us from the Olympics“:
London will be unable to host the Olympics in 2012 unless the Prime Minister gives the go-ahead within the next few weeks for a £1bn rail link, the capital’s Mayor, Ken Livingstone, says.
Don’t do it, Tony. Just keep those Treasury purse strings tightly drawn and, with a bit of luck, the organisers of the whole foul jamboree will look for another city to infest.
No sane person could possibly want the Olympic carnival let loose on London. It is the equivalent of begging the government to add a zero or two to everybody’s tax bills for a decade or more. Quite aside from the gargantuan cost of hosting the wretched thing, we will also have to endure blanket security measures that render every resident under virtual house arrest and months and months of laboured ‘anti-drug’ messages on every medium imaginable. And, given the times we live in, the whole chabang will be saturated with enough stomach-churning PC mummery to induce a vomitting fit.
And for what? So that we can assailed with wall-to-wall, 24/7 coverage of a bunch of physical education students from Uzbekistan competing in a culturally-sensitive, enviromentally-friendly, non-judgemental, compassionate, caring, 1500m peace-march. Feh!
I do not want the sodding Olympics. Not in 2012. Not ever.
All going well, on December 25 at 2:45 am GMT, The Beagle 2 lander will touch down on the Isidis Planitia impact crater on the surface of Mars. This lander, which has a planned six month mission on the Martian surface, was developed and built in Britain and forms part of the European Space Agency’s Mars Express mission, from which Beagle separated on December 19. Mars Express will be inserted into Mars orbit at 3:00 am GMT on December 25 for a planned mission of between one and two years.
A mockup of the Beagle 2 lander at Sandy Quarry, Bedfordshire. (All rights reserved Beagle 2).
All going well, Beagle will be followed by two identical American landers that are scheduled to land in January. These two Mars Exploration Landers will have wheels and will be fully mobile when they arrive, being able to travel distances of up to 40 metres per day. (Everything important is self-contained in the Rover, and the rest of the lander is just a delivery vehicle). Spirit will land in the Gusev Crater on January 4 at 4:35 am GMT on January 4, and Opportunity will land on Meridiani Planum on January 25 at 5:05 am GMT. If all three missions land successfully, we should be getting back lots of interesting data on the red planet.
Projection of the Mars Exploration Rover leaving the lander shell. (Copyright NASA/JPL).
If all are successful (about which there is a caveat that I will get to in a moment) these will be the fourth, fifth and sixth successful lander missions to arrive on Mars, after Viking 1 and Viking 2 in 1976 and Mars Pathfinder in 1997. (I am excluding the Soviet Mars 3 mission from 1971 which transmitted data for only 20 seconds after an apparently successful landing).
All three missions will use the landing method pioneered by Mars Pathfinder in 1997. → Continue reading: A very exciting year for planetary exploration
I lunched today with our Great Leader Perry, and one of the things he mentioned was how he doesn’t care for ploughing through the collected works of the Great Philosophers (something to do with preferring simply to find out “the truth”), and prefers instead to read … and I can’t remember the exact phrase he used, but the one I use in such circumstances is ‘Bluffers Guide’. I share Perry’s tastes in this matter. However, like him, I do want to know approximately what these people did say.
I was thus particularly pleased to encounter this posting, by Friedrich Blowhard. It is number three in a series of postings he has done about Friedrich Nietzsche. (Something tells me that there may not be many more in this series of potted guides.) But since Friedrich B starts Nietzsche posting number three with a brief summary of postings number one and two, I reckon that means we can skip postings one and two and just read three.
There is a definite air of challenge in what Friedrich B says to the likes of us, especially in these paragraphs:
But by his example in putting forward the Over-man as the ‘meaning of the earth’ (whether you agree with him or find this ludicrous) Nietzsche makes it clear how intellectually flaccid it is to argue for or against, say, a social policy on the basis of abstractions like ‘liberty,’ ‘justice,’ and ‘fairness.’ I have nothing against such concepts, but clearly they are pretty vague and toothless in the absence of an explicit goal or a stated purpose. I mean, who really thinks they are here on earth to pursue perfect liberty, perfect justice or perfect fairness as ends in themselves? Aren’t liberty, justice and fairness valuable only as means to some end? But can we really be surprised that the average American ends up living a life of ‘mindless consumerism’ when he or she can’t state a social goal more profound than ‘eliminating injustice’?
But I share Nietzsche’s skepticism about how long an era that remains agnostic about any higher or supreme goal can stave off the hunger pangs of meaning. As evidence of this, I would point to the rise of movements like sociobiology, and perhaps the aesthetic theories like those of Christopher Alexander. Although Sociobiology, for example, is too shy to come right out and admit that it nurtures such an ur-goal in its bosom, I think it is clearly implied: that we should live so as to maximize the odds that our descendants will survive and thrive. And since our biological ‘nature’ is the only possible basis for profound human ‘meaning,’ we must come to terms with it, if only in order to survive long enough to accomplish our goal.
These philosophies seem to me to the first signs of what I would term the emergence of post-nihilistic ‘meaning,’ but I doubt they will be the last. I look forward to seeing others arise as well. Let me announce my formula: Nihilism is dead.
Heh. Nice little joke that. But after that laugh dies away, I am left with the definite feeling that I am being got at.
My problem is that I think that the Nietzsche described by Friedrich (Blowhard), who identifies the twentieth century as the time when God died and the God gap got filled by a succession of philosophical/political catastrophes, is pretty much correct. However, I am also part of the God is Dead tendency myself. In the words of Michael Caine in The Last Valley (a movie which, it so happens, Perry and I share a taste for): “There is no God! It’s a legend!” My sentiments exactly. And if you combine that with “You can’t get an ought from an is!”, you get that pretty much all ‘meanings’ you get nowadays are actually meaningless, other than the ones I make for myself.
Okay, well that’s something for you all to think about. If your tastes are more in the direction of cool gadgets, Perry also allowed me to take a photograph of this.
Ok, socialists, answer me this! What exactly is the point of your stupid idiot religion? I thought it was all about stealing money off the rich to give to the poor, you know, the old Robbing Hood theme. That’s why I used to support it.
But under ‘New’ Labour, it seems the spirit of the that filthy old capitalist miser, Scrooge, is alive and well and inhabiting the numskull mind of Dawn Primarolo, that overpaid chauffeur-driven socialist bigwig, who never misses a five-star cooked meal, or a round of Christmas drinks, down in the oak-panelled warmth of Her Majesty’s Treasury.
Just in time for Christmas, it seems Red Dawn is going to claw back some welfare benefits from the poorest in society, in order to get Gordon’s borrowing down a bit, so he can continue subsidising wealthy Guardian Readers with tax credits, to fund their post-Christmas skiing holidays in France.
Not quite why I was prepared to man the barricades with a copy of ‘Militant’ and a pair of unnecessary NHS spectacles to make me look more credible.
You socialists, and anyone else who votes for ‘New’ Labour, ought to be ashamed of yourselves. You and your party are beyond the pale, ‘stealing’ off the very poorest in society, particularly at this time of year. Shame on you. All of you. You disgust me.
That it demonstrates the total corrupt hypocrisy of welfare state socialism is of course obvious, perhaps even to those of you wearing pink-tinted NHS spectacles. But how can you continue living with yourselves and supporting these sleek self-pampered crooks in the New Labour executive when you hear news like this? Or maybe you’d prefer to bury your heads in the sand when hearing news like this? I know I would if I was still with you. I succeeded in this cowardly behaviour for years, much as you’re probably doing right now.
Consider this, though. Maybe this kind of rank hypocrisy is inevitable because socialism doesn’t work. I know, it’s a real mind-bender isn’t it? Maybe it’s even time you woke up and came over to join us on the light side? Consider it as a New Year’s resolution.
You’re all welcome, anytime, by the way. You just have to drop hypocrisy off at the door.
My day has been deranged by the discovery, which I made at about 4 pm, that Simon Schama’s televised History of Britain has been shown and is still being shown continuously on UK History (one of the free digital channels) throughout the day, from 7 am until 1 am tomorrow morning. I’ve been dipping into it ever since I found out about this, having only caught bits of it when it was on one of the bigger channels first time around.
Most of the historical personalities mentioned by Schama were reasonably familiar to me. I know who Elizabeth I was, and when. I know who Thomas Cromwell, Tom Paine, William Wordsworth were, approximately speaking. But one name, in the the episode about the Victorian age, was entirely new to me: Mary Seacole:
Mary Seacole, the “black Florence Nightingale” was once one of the best-known women in England. She was a Caribbean doctress who had travelled widely, and was able to put her skills to good use in the Crimean War. Denied the opportunity to work with Nightingale, she travelled there on her own to minister to wounded British soldiers. Thousands of them remembered her with gratitude and affection.
That’s her. That’s definitely who Schama was talking about. Denied an official nursing position, she simply went out to the Crimea on her own initiative, and got to work, feeding the soldiers before they went into action in the ‘hotel’ she somehow contrived to have built (I think that’s what Schama said), and then prowling the battlefield searching out the wounded and feeding them and caring for them, and even curing them with her West Indian remedies, which, said Schama, saved many a life, as the word “doctress” certainly suggests.
I’m guessing that knowing about Mary Seacole is probably a generation thing. I am of the generation that learned dates and maps and chaps, but which made no great effort to search out worthy people other than White Male worthies for deserved – and I dare say sometimes undeserved – celebration. So I’m guessing that Mary Seacole is now an increasingly well known figure among younger people with any curiosity about Britain’s past. But I’d never heard of her. Thanks to Simon Schama and the UK History channel, now I have.
And thank you also to the Internet, and in particular to Google (apparently some are complaining about Google – for its sinfulness in wanting to make money). All I had to go on was how the name sounded, but soon, up came the magic words: “did you mean Mary Seacole?” and the means were in front of my to satisfy any curiosity I might feel about this remarkable woman.
Clearly an off day here at Samizdata. So maybe today is the day for a question which I found via b3ta.com. This is a question that has always troubled me, ever since I first encountered the problem.
Warning. If you do not like questions about toilets, and in particular about how disgusting they can be when they are being really, really disgusting, then stop reading now. I mean it. This is not a nice posting. This is a crappy posting. But the way I see it, after the previous posting, I have nothing left to lose, dignity-wise.
Okay, here it is:
German toilets are quite extraordinary. Other European toilets – well, the ones that aren’t merely holes in the floor – work much like their North American cousins. They are shaped a little differently, but the basic principle is the same: the excrement either lands directly in the water or it slides down a steep slope into the water, before being flushed away. Simple, effective and clean. See?
There then follows a picture of a North American cousin type toilet. But now, and this is your last chance to stop reading this if your disgustingness threshold is low, comes this basic and most troubling fact:
Not so the German toilet.
Last chance. Okay, you asked for it.
The excrement lands on a bone-dry horizontal shelf, mere inches beneath one’s posterior. Repeated flushings are required to slide the ordure off the shelf into a small water-filled hole, from which it hopefully disappears. See?
And then there’s a picture of that, in section, as we ex-architecture students say.
And the rest of the piece can be boiled down to a one word summary: Why? What on earth, on the sun, and on all the other planets in circulation around the sun, is the point of this arrangement? Why do they do this???
The Samizdata commentariat has a growing reputation in the blogosphere for its combination of intellectual scrupulousness, technical savvy, and for its general ability to see the larger picture, to sense what are the important things in life and what are not. So people, let’s get this thing understood, and if necessary dealt with. Either we establish once and for all that there is a good reason for this apparently senseless, not to say plague inviting arrangement, and that it really does have a good reason, and then tell the world about it, or we establish that there is no good reason for this arrangement and we set in motion the (if the latter is the case) long over-due process of putting a stop to it.
The internet is a powerful thing, with a global reach. Time to use the its powers for good once again.
At a Samizdata social event in London last night, it was discovered that not one but two Samizdatistas were carrying around copies of Virginia Postrel’s The Substance of Style, and circulating them around to other people present. We don’t describe ourselves as overcaffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees for nothing. (Caffeine may not have quite been the drug of choice last night, however, although there was certainly some consumed). This is particularly impressive given that there is no British edition of the book and we had both separately sought out the American edition. British Amazon is excellent at stocking a wide range of American editions, shipping them quickly, and only charging local delivery charges in the UK though.
 Brian Micklethwait and Michael Jennings have substance, but do they have style?
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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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