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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I cannot speak for other of course but, as far as I am concerned, if you’re not making enemies then you are not trying hard enough. Conciliation is for wimps.
With this is mind I must commend the blogosphere (well, certain sections of it anyway) for their admirable efforts as enemies are, indeed, beginning to nail their colours to the mast.
Case in point here is a certain Bill Thompson who wants the world to know that, while he loves blogging, he is very worried by actual bloggers:
Yet the blogeoisie and their acolytes dismiss ‘journalism’ and those who practice it, arguing that the direct reporting of events is the only thing needed. As Dave Winer says: ‘The typical news article consists of quotes from interviews and a little bit of connective stuff and some facts, or whatever. Mostly it’s quotes from people. If I can get the quotes with no middleman in between – what exactly did CNN add to all the pictures?’
This isn’t about not liking blogs. It’s about not liking unaccountable concentrations of influence, about believing it is still true that ‘the first duty of the press is to obtain the earliest and most correct intelligence of events of the time and instantly, by disclosing them, to make them the common property of the nation’ – and about noting that ‘most correct’ does not mean ‘what the blog says’.
Mr.Thompson names a few names in his diatribe (but rudely fails to mention the Samizdata) and ruminates darkly about ‘economic libertarians’ and their ‘voo-doo’. Looks like the large preponderance of libertarians in the blogosphere has not gone unnoticed in places where we sincerely hoped we would be noticed.
Given that Mr.Thompson appears to be a acolyte of the BBC/Guardian Axis, his animus is hardly surprising. Indeed, it is welcome. We cannot honestly argue that we have even reached base camp until we are well and truly getting up the noses of people like him.
And getting up his nose we most certainly are. Mr.Thompson makes not even a faint attempt at concealing his haughty indignation that this gathering moss-ball of independent voices does not include any (trumpet fanfare, please) ‘PROPER JOURNALISTS’. Yet, lacking in some such official stamp of professional approval, we spout off like men and women possessed, filling cyberspace with our dangerously ‘un-approved’ ideas.
I am going to hazard a guess that Mr.Thompson doesn’t quite get it. Perhaps it is simply beyond his ken that it is exactly his brand of arthritic leftist orthodoxy that we are aiming to disassemble. Or perhaps he does get it. Maybe he can see that the writing on the blogs is, as far as he an his ilk are concerned, the writing on the wall. Hence his complaint of us being ‘unaccountable’. To whom or what does he expect us to account to? The government? The BBC? A committee of appointed poo-bahs? Or ‘the people’, that abstract, meaningless totem on behalf of which guardianistas like Mr.Thompson love to crusade but which is, in fact, a euphamism for a committee of appointed poo-bahs?
It matters not. What matters is that Mr.Thompson is seething with resentment. He doesn’t like us and thinks we are far too wrong and far too influential. Good. All that says to me is that we are doing something right and that we must keep on doing it.
[My thanks to Steve Chapman for the link.]
British academic communists suffer from ideology, which is a brain virus. It takes every natural, logical and honest thought and turns it into a version of itself. So everything becomes political. A person is either good (communist) or bad (capitalist), poor and trodden-upon (good), white and privileged (bad) and so on. American communists, however, live in an intellectual and informational vacuum. So they make it up as they go, creating the most marvelous conspiracy theories as they go along.
– An insightful observation by a friend of Gabriel Syme…
Yeah, yeah, yeah, but it’s this or nothing. Seriously, there’s been nothing here for nearly twenty four hours, so I’m going to write about Tesco moisturised and elasticated No Fuss 2 in 1 anti-dandruff shampoo and conditioner, because it’s a subject I feel strongly about. (Sorry, I can find a link to the Tesco enterprise as a whole, but no direct link to any information about this particular product.)
For the last few decades I’ve always assumed that shampoo, by its nature, is something that can’t be entirely convenient. Does the lid hold the shampoo in tightly? If so, it will be a bother opening it, by unscrewing it or by otherwise gouging it open, and that means you’ll tend to keep it open, and that means that it loses its moisture and gets stuck at the bottom of the container, and you have to hold it upside down for about a minute, waiting for it to appear, or perhaps dilute it, which risks diluting it too much and turning it into an uncontrollable liquid rather than a semi-controllable sludge (no disrespect intended). Then, once it has appeared, I assumed it to be a law of nature that not all of it would end up in my hair, but that some of it would assemble itself just outside the hole in the container from which it had emerged, where it would dry out and perhaps block the hole. Which is why I probably should keep the container shut, by screwing it shut again, or by forcing the lid back on. (Remember, a lid that is easy to force short is a lid that can easily fall open again, and that defeats the purpose of the thing.) But that’s so much bother that I can seldom be bothered.
Actually, the procedure I eventually got around to using was to put the lid back on, but to keep the container upside down so that I didn’t have to wait for it to journey laboriously to the exit every time.
I hope this is making sense.
So, let’s take those two adjectives that I apply (for they do not appear on the container) to the latest Tesco shampoo (and conditioner) one at a time. Moisturised, and elasticated. → Continue reading: Tesco moisturised and elasticated No Fuss 2 in 1 anti-dandruff shampoo and conditioner
Well it seems to be kick-Mugabe-until-he’s-down time here at Samizdata, and I’d like now to add my little thousand Zimbabwe dollars‘ worth of additional reportage. There’s nothing to link to, because I found out what follows for myself.
A few years ago I and two other persons were cooperating on a project of mutual concern to us. One of my colleagues, the boss of the enterprise, was and still is a good friend of mine. The other, a black lady friend of my friend, I’d not met before. But her face seemed familiar as soon as I met her. Who was it? Some film star? Then … bingo. Robert Mugabe. She was the spitting image of Robert Mugabe.
Mugabe wasn’t her name. She had an English married name and had been in England for the last twenty years or so. So far as I knew, there could be a whole tribe of Mugabe lookalikes out there, and maybe she and he were not in any direct way connected or related. But it turned out, I can’t remember how, that she was Robert Mugabe’s niece. She was in no way responsible for or in involved in the present horrors being suffered by Zimbabwe. She had a life of her own in England. She was also a most likeable, attractive and decent person. But she was also very – how shall I put it? – determined. Once she was set on a course of thought or action, that was it, that was what she was going to think and to do, no matter what.
Such determination as hers can be a virtue in all kinds of circumstances, and I’m sure that many times in her life it was. Wherever events are too uncertain and too fluid for comfort, an individual who knows exactly what he or she is doing and who sticks to it can be a great blessing. Such people can radiate security and safety and certainty like the rays of the sun, especially if what they have decided upon is good in other ways also, but often just because it is at least certain.
But in other circumstances such determination can be a real problem. In the project the three of us were working on, it became a serious liability, for the simple reason that what she had decided upon was wrong – not wicked wrong, you understand, just foolish and mistaken wrong. No matter how much trouble her determination to do things her way and in no other way seemed to the two of us to be causing, and in defiance of the expert guidance we were all getting, she never deviated from – as we and those experts all saw it – folly. That she might be mistaken simply never entered her head. She did things her way and that was it. Nothing could stop her short of overwhelming force, in the form of the refusal of her colleagues to work with her any longer, which is eventually what we had to inflict upon her. At which point she remained convinced that she was the only one in step. She was genuinely baffled at the foolishness of the world in failing to see the wisdom of or to fit in with her preferred methods.
If Uncle Robert Mugabe is anything like Niece Never-you-mind, then any plan for sorting out Zimbabwe that is in any way dependent upon Mugabe coming around to seeing even tiny glimpses of the many errors of his ways is doomed, utterly doomed.
This thought occurred to me as soon as I became acquainted with the Niece and learned who she was, so to speak. Her Uncle has since done nothing to change my understanding of his character. I’m open to persuasion, of course, in the face of evidence to the contrary, but I now believe that he isn’t. Only overwhelming force is going to stop this man.
Death, for example. That would do the trick, whether by natural or artificial causes. An invading army, that would be good. But such things as economic sanctions or condemnation from the Commonwealth, or any other diplomatic attempts at persuasion that are at all diplomatic – forget it.
Just before our server shut down (which was actually a ‘false flag’ attack by Mossad and the CIA acting under direct orders from the Bush Nazi regime in collaboration with a secret cabal of oil bankers working in cahoots with their Zionist paymasters) one of our readers, Simon Austin sent me this reminiscence of childhood in ages now gone by:
According to today’s regulators and bureaucrats, those of us who were kids in the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s probably shouldn’t have survived, because…
Our baby cots were covered with brightly coloured lead-based paint which was promptly chewed and licked.
We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, or latches on doors or cabinets and it was fine to play with pans.
When we rode our bikes, we wore no helmets, just flip flops and fluorescent’ clackers’ on our wheels.
As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags. Riding in the passenger seat was a treat.
We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle – tasted the same.
We ate dripping sandwiches, bread and butter pudding and drank Fizzy pop with sugar in it, but we were never overweight because we were always outside playing.
We shared one drink with four friends, from one bottle or can and no one actually died from this.
We would spend hours building go-carts out of scraps and then went top speed down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into stinging nettles a few times, we learned to solve the problem.
We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back before it got dark. No one was able to reach us all day and no one minded.
We did not have Playstations or X-Boxes, no video games at all. No 99 channels on TV, no videotape movies, no surround sound, no mobile phones, no personal computers, no Internet chat rooms. We had friends. We went outside and found them.
We played elastics and street rounders, and sometimes that ball really hurt.
We fell out of trees, got cut and broke bones and teeth, and there were no lawsuits. They were accidents. We learnt not to do the same thing again.
We had fights, punched each other hard and got black and blue – we learned to get over it.
We walked to friend’s homes.
We made up games with sticks and tennis balls and ate live stuff, and although we were told it would happen, we did not have very many eyes out, nor did the live stuff live inside us forever.
We rode bikes in packs of 7 and wore our coats by only the hood.
Our actions were our own. Consequences were expected.
The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke a law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law. Imagine that!
This generation has produced some of the best risk-takers and problem solvers and inventors, ever. The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas. We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all.
And you’re one of them. Congratulations!
Pass this on to others who have had the luck to grow up as real kids, before lawyers and government regulated our lives, for our own good.
→ Continue reading: Childhood’s End
On the BBC they’ve just finished listing Britain’s hundred “best loved” novels, as voted for by viewers. Harry Potter figures prominently, all of them so far being in the hundred, and I’m now watching some rather disdainful literary experts mulling it over. (Germaine Greer has just described the works of Tolkein as “nazi tosh”.)
Last time I was listening out for such things, I picked up a lot of official literary disapproval for the Harry Potter phenomenon. That at any rate is what I said on my education blog, while describing my god-daughter’s extraordinary powers of concentration when confronted by HP number 4. Somebody called Cameron agreed, and I think his comment deserves a wider readership than it will ever get at its original destination.
What had the most influence on my decision to finally cave in and read the series was the fact that literary critics and others who see no shame in the “intellectual” label were so nastily (sometimes politely) negative in their reviews.
Reading the reviews of the first book carefully, I noticed that the criticisms were both uniform and vague. The writing style was sniffed at, the characters lacked nuance and subtlety, as did the overall plot, which had the temerity to be about something as crass and silly as a “good” boy fighting an “evil” villain. In other words, it was a children’s book, which fact really, really seems to confuse Smart People.
Of course, I was delighted to read it. It smacked of the same kind of kid-growing-up flavor as Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain series.
My own enjoyment of the books aside, what I see in the whole Harry Potter argument is simply more proof of an argument made recently by best-selling author Orson Scott Card about Tolkien’s books; to wit: Serious “LitCrits” hate the Lord of the Rings because the public loves LoR. This is because the public is still quite unashamed to enjoy stories while the LitCrits had that trait wrenched, I mean, trained out of them in the universities. For the serious student of Great Literature, stories are for the uneducated; real intellectuals deal with what stories mean.
Except that the literature that is most loved by the greatest percentage of, well, people who like reading is the kind of literature that defies the very methods of interpretation and intellectual gymnastics that Intellectuals enjoy so much. [how’s THAT for a sentence?]
It is a control issue. Speaking as a current English Literature major (hey – I won my college’s “Best Writing About Literature” award last year – I’m a bona-fide Smart Guy), what I’ve come to see is that the people who really hate the “Potter” books (and I know you are not one of them, so this does not apply to you) hate them because they can’t control how people read them – the unwashed have embraced scripture that the priests didn’t write, and, OH, how this bugs your average professor(!).
Think about it: Every last “ism” an Eng Lit major has to study is the product of some wind bag who couldn’t stand that people weren’t seeing the same things in literature that he or she was seeing.
And, furthermore . . .
Good heavens! I apologize for going on a rant.
Apology accepted. That was obviously a first draft as well as a final version, and as such pretty good stuff, I say.
“This week it cost me 2,750 dollars to airmail a letter to Britain containing three A4 sheets of paper.”
– Jan Raath in yesterday’s Times reporting from what remains of Zimbabwe
Last night, on Have I Got News For You, a British TV comedy quiz show held in high regard, one of the regulars, Ian Hislop, who also edits Private Eye (but who presumably pays rather less attention to the Private Eye home page), launched a spectacular attack on the European Union and on the idea of Britain being any part of it. The gist of it was that Europe was being dealt a new constitution by a man (Giscard d’Estaing) who would be in prison if he were British. “It’s as if Jeffrey Archer was in charge of Europe.”
Left wing comedian Mark Steel tried to take the sting out of the attack by implying that Hislop was attacking all French people. (“And how about those bloody Italians, crooks all of them, …” etc.) He played the xenophobia card, in other words. But Hislop wasn’t attacking all French people and saying they were all crooks, just Giscard, and, in general, the kind of people who become French Presidents. He steam-rollered right over Steel, not least because this is Hislop’s home turf and both he and Steel knew it.
I can’t remember much of the wording of the attack, and I don’t have it on tape. But in any case, it was the ferocity and the protracted nature of it that was astonishing, rather than the details. Everyone else looked rather embarrassed. Ian, easy boy, you can’t say this kind of thing on TV, BBCTV, BBC comedy TV, said their faces (but not their mouths). But he just raged on regardless.
To Americans who may doubt the significance of all this, Hislop is a much loved figure in Britain. For years now, he and Paul Merton have been swapping gags and banter on HIGNFY, and whenever Hislop has been on the receiving end, he has taken it like a good sport. As editor of Private Eye, Hislop has been involved in savaging many dishonest and unpopular public figures – Jeffrey Archer being only one of many, and unlike politicians, he is considered honest. Whether this is true is beside the point I’m making; the point is, he’s a considerable British personality. So when he lays into the EU as a racket run by racketeers in a manner fit to bust, that has got to count for something, public-opinion-wise.
You had the feeling that Hislop has been waiting for the right moment to throw all his chips onto the table and make his anti-EU pitch, and if that’s right then it is very interesting that he reckons now to be the moment.
One other thing. I say that I don’t have this on tape. By this evening, assuming all goes well, I will have it on tape, because the show is being repeated tonight on BBC2 TV tonight, at 10.05 pm.
While I am on the subject of Mugabe, it is worth illustrating what he and his warped, psychotic ideology have actually done to the former Rhodesia.
We bandy around words like ‘tyrant’ and ‘dictator’ and ‘undemocratic’ but there comes a point when these words, in isolation, no longer have the power to move in the way they should. Altogether more moving, nay profoundly upsetting, is this graphic description from the UK Times of what African marxism is actually doing to this particular corner of Africa:
Zimbabwe is a country rich in resources and with great potential. It used to have a well-oiled infrastructure that even South Africa, with its far bigger economy, envied. It was robust enough to withstand the first two decades of President Mugabe’s rule but it has now reached the point of collapse. An advanced society is returning to the primitive.
It may be too late to reverse or even halt this process now. The damage has been done and, once again, the world is going to be assailed with a stark object lesson in the consequences of state kleptocracy and forced collectivisation. And, once again, those lessons will be rudely ignored, I’ll wager.
In fact, I’ll go further. I’m willing to bet that, even with the pictures of starving Zimbabweans rooting around in the dirt for a few berries are beamed into our homes, our own political leaders will continue to devote their energies to ever-more creative and unscrupulous ways of traducing our property rights and confiscating our earnings. Under the mendacious rubric of ‘social democracy’ Western ‘intellectuals’ will kid themselves that there is a world of difference between their economic philosophies and those of Mugabe. But the difference lies only in degree and the end result differs only in terms of timescale.
But we must neither forget nor forgive. Even while Mugabe is being glad-handed and back-slapped in Paris, we can exact vengeance on behalf of the society he has destroyed. We can do that by committing ourselves single-mindedly to a ferocious and relentless war against the people who would do to us by increment what Mugabe has done to Zimbabweans in swathes.
You can institutionalise kelptocracy on a grand scale. You can ethnically cleanse your minority white citizens. You can employ gangs of vicious thugs to intimidate and even murder your political opponents. You can rig elections and disregard the law. You can use the apparatus of state to deliberately starve your own citizens. You can take a prosperous country and reduce it to a debilitated ruin. But, forcefully ejecting a Guardian journalist from your country puts you beyond the pale:
The Guardian’s Zimbabwe correspondent, Andrew Meldrum, was deported last night even though three separate court orders were made prohibiting his expulsion.
After spending 23 years reporting on the country, Meldrum was manhandled into a car outside the offices of Zimbabwe’s immigration service, driven to the airport and put on a plane to London.
Bearing in mind the melancholy fate of others who have displeased Mugabe, Mr.Meldrum might want to consider himself fortunate.
The foreign secretary, Jack Straw, led worldwide condemnation, saying: “I’m very concerned at this case. Petty and vindictive actions like this simply expose the Zimbabwe regime for what it is.”
Well, I must say I am shocked! Up until now I have been labouring under the apprehension that Mugabe was an admirable African leader.
Michael Ancram, the shadow foreign secretary, said: “This is yet another disgraceful action showing the lack of respect for freedom of expression and speech of Robert Mugabe’s evil regime. This is the act of a dictator.”
As opposed to all the previous acts which were the hallmarks of a reasonable and decent man.
The editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, said: “The deportation of our reporter Andrew Meldrum from Zimbabwe is a political act which should invite the strongest possible condemnation from the international community.
Oh now steady on, Mr.Rusbridger. Let’s not be too hasty now. We wouldn’t want to say anything in a fit of temper that we might regret in the cold light of day.
To be fair to Mr.Meldrum he has been meticulously recording and reporting on the horrible predations of Mugabe’s marxist regime not to mention the transformation of a bread-basket economy into a year-zero hellpit. You do not have to be a rocket-scientist to figure out why he is now being unceremoniously bundled out of the country. But is there any chance that any of Messrs. Straw, Ancram or Rusbridger actually read any of the reports? I only ask because they all sound as if they are somewhat taken aback.
An update following my article on the Bruges Group meeting on Thursday (right before our previous hosting server went nuclear).
The Daily Telegraph is reporting that opinion polls show that the UK public both opposes the single currency and a proposed new EU Constitution.
Okay, okay, I hear folk say, opinion polls are not everything, and the ability of the British political class to stiff the public they are supposed to represent is a matter of record. Even so, Prime Minister Tony Blair is famed for his attention to the focus group. And if public opinion can be galvanised, he may stay his hand at wiping out what remains of Britain as an independent, self-governing nation.
Well, I always was the optimistic type of guy.
As our regular readers will have noticed, we were blown off our server by the bandwidth spike caused by the response to Gabriel Syme’s article on Wednesday. 
We have just moved to Hosting Matters, and thus hopefully such traumatic ‘black out’ events will be a thing of the past from now on!
 Glenn Reynolds has blown up more servers that Al Qaeda!
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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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