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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Heard this rather good gag at a financial conference this morning:
A parish vicar dies and goes up to the Pearly Gates where he is greeted by St Peter. St Peter bids the vicar to step aside and sit on a wooden bench and wait for some formalities to be dealt with.
About half an hour later a farmer comes up, dressed in his overalls. “Ah, Mr Jones, welcome to Heaven! Please do step through the gates,” St Peter says. The vicar looks on, a mite baffled, but keeps quiet.
An hour later, a hospital surgeon of brilliant renown comes up, and again St Peter joyfully waves the good doctor through. Again, the vicar bites his tongue and waits to see what happens.
Suddenly, a sleek young man in a suit carrying a copy of the Wall Street Journal steps in. “Wonderful to see you Mr Gekko!” shouts St Peter. “So good to see you at last.”
At this point our vicar can contain himself no longer. “Why have you let in that capitalist pig through the gates while I, a humble servant of God, have to sit outside on a wooden bench?” the vicar exclaims.
“Well,” St Peter replies, “We let folk into Heaven these days because of results. You see, the farmer gets in because he produced food. The surgeon got in because he healed people. And you, dear vicar, produced no results. In your sermons most of the congregation fell asleep.”
“What sort of results did that hedge fund manager give, then?” asked the vicar.
“Well, that guy produced money for his clients. And unlike you, vicar, when he was at work, his clients were praying.”
After playing some excellent games like tongue-in-cheek No One lives Forever 2 and the the awesome & ultra slick Splinter Cell, I was starting to get the impression computer games were starting to really enter another era: an era in which equal attention is paid to scripts, story flow, voice acting and the ability to interact other than by shooting someone.
Splinter Cell: ultra cool
Shoot people, be stealthy, climb, jump, sophisticated interaction…
take hostages and extract information without saying ‘please’!
Boy was I wrong! Having just played Soldier of Fortune 2, I realise that even quality companies like Raven can produce clunkers. SoF2 is as linear and predictable as the original Doom, the cut scenes are filled with flat and indifferent declaiming and the characters are cliches (in itself sometimes amusing but in this case, not). Even the graphics are nothing to write home about. Level design ranged from uninspiring (“Ah, yet another blind corner… I might as well chuck a grenade as there is bound to be a bad guy lying in wait like the one before. And the one before that. And the one before that…”) to the idiotic (as in ‘my allies will try and kill me if I get too far ahead or behind the patrol I am helping to defend’…. riiiiiight) to the baffling (‘so I shot the guard dead with a silenced weapon, he was nowhere near the bloody alarm button and the alarm goes off anyway instantly? And the logic behind that is…??’).
Soldier of Fortune 2: suspect moustache
Shoot people, occasionally push buttons, try to hide (almost impossible)
plus shoot some more people… and then some more. And again…
I guess that the SoF & Raven brand names are responsible for the game’s excellent sales and I gather that multiplayer in reasonable in SoF2, but I would certainly urge anyone who likes a good plot line, thoughtfully designed scenarios or snappy dialogue in a single player game to look elsewhere and give this by-the-numbers First Person Shooter a miss… Deus Ex or Half Life this game ain’t.
After watching the news tonight, I am coming around ever more to David Carr’s way of thinking. Perhaps sheer irritation by the Bush Administration about the obscurantist stance of the French and German governments regarding the use of force to depose Saddam Hussain may achieve something I have long wanted to see… the end of the fiction in American minds that either France or Germany are in fact US allies in any meaningful sense.
This is the first step needed to de-couple the Anglosphere Atlantic Alliance from the legacy of World War Two and the Cold War. The first clear step that this process is under way will be the permanent withdrawal of most US forces currently stationed in Germany, a situation which is a costly anachronism in the post Cold War world. Maybe the opportunity will be immediatly post-Gulf War II, with the US troops currently based in Germany which are going to be involved in Iraq going back to bases in the USA instead.
I just hope the pompous Chirac and the buffoonish Schroeder keep plucking on the eagle’s feathers… sooner of later Blair, or his successor, is going to have to decide if they want to be on the side of history’s winners or history’s losers.
Hell, changing the name of N.A.F.T.A. to North Atlantic Free Trade Area would not even require reprinting all that stationary with the acronym on it!
“…it rests on the assumption that your kids belong to the state. If we buy that assumption then it is for the state — not for parents, the community, the religious institutions or teachers — to decide who shall have what values and who shall do what work, when, where and how in our society. That assumption isn’t a new one. The Nazis thought it was a great idea.”
– Ronald Reagan in Human Events, February 1979
(Quote via Nolo Consentire)
“The music industry has current employment opportunities for photo retouchers”, Joe S Tallin, a music industry representive, stated in Moscow today. “We’re looking for experienced people, and we’ve found most of our best people over here. They’ve got many years of experience in history modification and were thoughtlessly thrown on the scrap heap to fend for themselves. Those of us doing this in the West are just beginning to learn the art”.
Joe added, unofficially, future projects will include replacing John Lennon with Robbie Williams on a number of old album covers. “It’s just like the Lenin Mausoleum, or dead Russian Cosmonauts” he added. “You have to continuously update the past to reflect the market of today”.
For those who have not run across the story, new copies of the Beatles famous Abbey Roads album cover have had a cigarette digitally removed.
It is a rare thing indeed when I trawl through the pages of the Subservient only to emerge with a smile and a jaunty spring in my step but today is just such an occasion.
Since the credentials of both the author of the article, a Liberal Democrat MP, and the organ in which the article appears, are impeccably federast I think it is safe to say that dire warnings of a split between the UK and Europe is not merely a product of wishful thinking.
“But there are two more profound reasons for the plunge in Britain’s status within the EU that should give Tony Blair real cause for concern. First, there is the euro. Last month, the Portuguese Prime Minister, Jose Durao Barroso, voiced in public what EU heads of government have long whispered in private – why should the UK be granted a leadership role as long as it is unwilling to sign up to one of the central tenets of EU membership? As long as EU leaders believed Tony Blair was merely biding his time before putting the issue to a referendum, there was sufficient goodwill to forgive Britain’s procrastination. But, as the Continent looks on with perplexity at the gridlock between the Prime Minister and the Chancellor, fears have deepened that Mr Blair has missed his chance.
And then, most important of all, there is Britain’s special relationship with the United States. It is difficult to capture the conflicting reactions which Blair’s ostentatious loyalty to George Bush’s foreign policy elicits within the rest of the EU.”
As I have indicated previously, our strategic alliance with the USA is something which the EU cannot tolerate alongside it’s new-found ethos of being a rival to the US and not an ally. The day of British liberation is not at hand and may not even be close but it is just a little bit closer than it was a year ago.
Tony Blair has turned out to be a love-rat; forever declaring his affections for Europe while flaunting his high-profile affair with George Bush. The question is how long he can go on two-timing them both? Surely one of these girls is going to put her foot down and demand Tony’s fidelity before much longer and who can resist the heady romance of being a war-time bride?
I didn’t vote for Blair and I do not count myself among his fans but I find myself being forced to concede that he is doing more to pave the way for British independence than any number of phoney, careerist Tories.
All is not well in the Golden State of California these days as the citizens of that fine place continue to struggle under the governorship of Gray Davis, the man who helped acquaint Californians with the sort of power blackouts we Brits used to get in the unlamented 1970s.
This article (link courtesy of Virginia Postrel) shows how bad the tax revenue situation is on the West Coast, but also points out that the public sector there is as bloated as ever.
My recent trip to California last year confirmed such reports. One thing I was struck by was the poor quality of the freeways, in contrast to the smooth fast roads of neighbouring Nevada.
California could certainly use someone like Ronald Reagan, its last great governor, to shake it up and kick some ass in that state. Many political and economic trends seem to start on the West Coast, like the internet and tax revolts. A place for we Anglospherists to watch.
Perhaps it is better to be irresponsible and right, than to be responsible and wrong
– W. S. Churchill
There is an interesting post by David Kenner over on An Age Like This complete with pictures he took, of the pro-Saddam Hussain protests in Washington DC. It is good to see a bit of blog primary reportage.
Also David has a picture of Protest Awards!: Most Offensive Banner.
Here is a fascinating comment from Sunday Fox News by DefSec Rumsfeld:
Rumsfeld: It — it certainly is not an act of peace or an act of cooperation. The coalition forces our — U.K. planes and our aircrews are constantly subjected to being fired at by the Iraqis. It’s been going on for some years now. It’s the only place in the world where we’re being fired at, as a matter of fact, on a regular basis, except for Afghanistan.
Snow: So, we’re already at war?
Rumsfeld: Well, technically, the state of war that began in —
Snow: Was never —
Rumsfeld: — 1980 — 91 — has never ended. I mean, the — that has still — there is currently a state of war with Iraq that has not ended.
I was just catching up on some of my technical reading. There’s a lot of exciting and original work going on at DARPA. There always has been but the stuff coming down the pike now is just off in the realms of Science Fiction, as you can see from these words of the current DARPA Director, Tony Tether:
“Now that is terrific, but that is not the chilling part. We took the joystick away from the monkey at Duke. The light came on. Who knows what the monkey really thought, but it knew what it had to do. But it had no joystick. However, the mechanical arm at MIT moved the joystick just like it did before. It was thought at first that the motor signal was being transmitted to MIT, but it turned out that the probes had tapped into the monkey’s thoughts for moving the joystick. In other words, the monkey thought about moving the joystick, and the joystick at MIT moved. “
Fascinating in and of itself. But it leads to ever wilder things in the future, as he says in a later paragraph:
“Imagine 25 years from now where old guys like me put on a pair of glasses or a helmet and open our eyes. Somewhere there will be a robot that will open its eyes and we will be able to see what the robot sees. We will be able to remotely look down on a cave and think to ourselves, “Let’s go down there and kick some butt.” And the robots will respond, controlled by our thoughts. It’s coming. Imagine a warrior–with the intellect of a human and the immortality of a machine–controlled by our thoughts. “
I’ll go one further. Imagine a whole bunch of these as semi-autonomous robots slaved to master robots “inhabited” by Marines. Let them shift their viewpoint and control moment by moment from one to another of the uninhabited warbots as needed… If you ever played the old PC game, “Hulk” you’ll know he origins of the idea and how it works.
I don’t really think you are going to go into battle with just Remotely Piloted Soldiers, but I can see the idea as an absolutely huge force multiplier for the troops on the spot.
It’s getting really spooky out here near the singularity.
It is often said that technology is developing far more rapidly than would have predicted at such-and-such a time. But there is another point of view.
And it is still being claimed that we live in a period of exceptionally rapid technical progress and one in which the time elapsing between invention and application tends to get shorter whereas it seems to be true that ours is really an epoch of comparative technological sluggishness when there are not very many authentically new things about and even these, for many different reasons, are being developed rather slowly. (How much longer, for example, will we have to wait for efficient battery-operated motorcars which will enable the pounding, smelly reciprocating engine to be thrown on the scrap-heap; or the typewriter which will type as one dictates, which will release hundreds of young women for other more interesting tasks; or audio-visual cassettes which will enable us to break away from the tyranny and the interminable boredom of modern television; or a cure for the common cold; or much cheaper and efficient ways of digging tunnels so that the surface of the earth could reoccupied by people instead of being overrun by machines; or really substantial cuts in costs of desalination rendering it possible to turn deserts into gardens. This list could easily extended.)
John Jewkes, Government and Technology, Third Wincott Memorial Lecture, 31st October 1972.
Well we have audio-visual cassettes now, and instead of typewriters that do not take dictation we have computers that still (in spite of the endless “computer that understands the human voice” inventions reported regularly since the 1960’s) have problems taking dictation. As for such things as cheap desalination (promised in California as long ago as 1956) we are still waiting – I would also mention nuclear fusion (we have been promised that since the early 1950’s).
The oft voiced claim that ours is the age of the most rapid technological development can certainly be contested.
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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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