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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Many thanks to Instapundit for pointing me to this article by Trent Telenko. The whole article and all his links are interesting reading, but this one is evidence for the nightmare scenario. I very strongly suggest everyone read it. Tell everyone you know: some of the first round UN inspectors believe Saddam already had nukes in 1997 and prevented them from getting at the things. This is enough to give you chills.
I just pray (for what its’ worth from a nonbeliever) we don’t lose a city before we cure the problem at source.
There are two anti-war movements… and I think both of them are wrong, though for quite different reasons. But it is the Old Left’s anti-war sentiments regarding Iraq which Janet Daly takes to task in her article in the Telegraph Answer this: do the people of Iraq deserve freedom?. Although I am not a huge fan of “hang ’em an’ flog ’em” conservatives like Janet Daly, I find myself in broad agreement with her on this.
Whilst I realise isolationists (many of whom are on the conservative right or are paleo-libertarians) who oppose the destruction of the Ba’athist regime are often a different intellectual kettle of fish and do not see themselves as give aid to a tyrant, it is the questions like the ones Janet Daly poses which cause me to describe the left wing/paleo-socialist ‘anti-war movement’ as the ‘Pro-Saddam Hussain/Anti-liberation-of-the-Iraqi-people movement’.
I don’t expect isolationists who oppose George W. Bush’s policy of pre-emption to be converted by his State of the Union address last night, but this paragraph helped to tilt my mind in favour of the view that taking Saddam Hussein down is the right, if perilous, course:
Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words and all recriminations would come too late. Trusting in the sanity and restratint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option.
Exactly.
In the course of my duties as a occasional and strictly-when-I-feel-like-it culture blogger, I watched, with a view to commenting on, a short profile that was shown on BBC2 TV last Monday night about the great conductor/pianist Daniel Barenboim, a musician I’ve admired and enjoyed the recordings of ever since I first heard him in the nineteen sixties. The show only lasted half an hour and there wasn’t time for much to be said, but one very interesting thing was said, by conductor/composer Pierre Boulez, who, perhaps somewhat surprisingly (trad classical musician versus enfant terrible avant guardist, etc.), is a close friend of Barenboim’s, as well as a musical collaborator from way back.
Boulez pointed out that Barenboim is unusual in being a musician whose repertoire and general interest in the world and its affairs have both broadened over the years rather than narrowed. And it’s true. The typical top-flight classical music career starts in a blaze of somewhat indiscriminate fireworks and political pontifications, and then as age sets in our wunderkind becomes a not quite so wunder-mensch, cuts out the political posturing and the extraneous repertoire, and homes in on a gradually diminishing core of favourite pieces, and then disintegrates and dies.
Barenboim is doing the opposite. He started out as your typical sheltered prodigy who loved the great classics of classical music to distraction, and ignored just about everything else. But his repertoire has never stopped expanding, and simply as a result of being an A-list classical musician, and especially in his capacity as boss of one of the Berlin opera houses in the years since unification, he has found himself reflecting, if not quite on the wider world as such then most certainly on the place of classical music within that wider world. (You don’t conduct the first Wagner ever played in public in the state of Israel without thinking about that very carefully!)
To this end, he writes. Go to his website (see the link above) and you’ll see what I mean.
Barenboim is not an actual blogger. He is no daily diarist. Nevertheless, his writings are referred to at his website as a “journal”, and had this site been set up only a few years later, it might have included a bona fide blog. After all, these classical musicians are having to sing for their suppers, to fight for their arts council grants and their permanent recording contracts, and they know it. (And if your appetite for supper is anything like Barenboim’s, you really have to sing, let me tell you. Old style opera in the newly wilting German economy. That’s one hell of a sell.)
So, Barenboim writes. My question is: are any genuine Barenboim-level celebs actually finding the time to blog, in approximately the kind of way that we guys do?
I rule out writers, because that is not enough of a sideshow to really be a sideshow. But how about sportsmen? Do any movie stars blog? Perry mentions film producer/occasional blogger Brian Linse here from time to time, and he could become very famous if things go well for him. But, unsurprisingly, Linse seems like he’s too busy to put frequent postings on his blog. Either that, or he just can’t match that Barenboim level of energy. (Few can, let me tell you. That’s no big criticism.)
I’m guessing that some pop stars blog. But are they any good? Also, I tend to discount them because, if they write lyrics, that sort of makes them writers too.
But that’s my question. Who is the most famous blogger? Not famous for blogging, but who happens to blog about the life that does make him or her famous. Anyone?
Professor Malcolm Law, a leading nutritionist in Britain, proposed a solution to obesity increasingly prevalent among children. As with most health professionals who are given a public platform in this country his proposal reflected the spirit of our statist age. Faced with evidence that Britons are fatter than ever and that increasing numbers of children are classified as clinically obese, he argued that politicians should seize the initiative and force food and drink manufacturers to reduce the size of products.
Professor Law believes that nothing less than an end to the ’20 per cent extra free’ culture will stave off the kind of nationwide obesity which in recent years has swept across America. He pointed to a study carried out last year which revealed that diners who ate a large meal at one sitting felt no more hungry after eating a smaller portion – if the plate was full, in most the cases the diner felt satisfied with their meal.
“Forty years ago the Government forced the tobacco companies to reduce the tar content of their cigarettes in the interests of public health. A similar approach needs to be taken today with ice creams, chocolate bars and other products.”
Note the language that our learned friend uses: “If we don’t cut down on the size of our portions we will find that in future we have a much higher incidence of obesity and heart disease. There is likely to be a large public health impact.”
This is the kind of attitude that has kept the NHS (Britain’s National Health Service) in place and indeed as long it exists the ‘public health impact’ will always be an argument for the health fascists. As long as the taxpayers are required to cover the cost of the consequences of other people’s actions, that is, a state-funded health system having to pick up the bill for the treatment of diseases associated with obesity, the ‘statist’ wolves in ‘public health’ clothing can make demands on the government to control our eating (drinking, smoking, living etc) habits.
And we know that the state is not your friend.
It seems the shakedown artists (sorry, legal campaigners) trying to sue fast food colossus McDonalds are not giving up their fight easily, even though a judge recently threw out a case from a man claiming he had been been turned into a lardbutt.
At first, it is tempting to file stories like this under this blog’s ‘humour’ category, and of course in the past stories about overweight folks suing fast-food joints would have been the sort of thing to have been written up in the The Onion or Private Eye. But no longer. It seems one feature of decades of Big Government has been the steady infantilisation of large chunks of the populace to the point where the concept of taking responsibility for one’s own actions no longer applies.
Perhaps folk who sue fast food retailers should instead sue the State education system for making them so dumb in the first place.
On this day in 1986, the space shuttle Challenger was lost during boost. Dick Scobee, Mike Smith, Judy Resnick, Greg Jarvis, Christa McAuliffe, Ron McNair and Ellison Onizuka died in the breakup and crash of the spaceship.
May their souls rest in peace and guide those who work to carry on their dreams of the high frontier.
On this day in 1986 Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Judith Resnick, Dick Scobee, Michael Smith, Greg Jarvis, & Christa McAuliffe lost their lives in the Challenger space shuttle (STS 51-L).
Look here for an independant view on the reliability of the shuttle done by Richard Feynmen after the loss of the Challenger shuttle. I believe that he was asked to do this as part of the official investigation, but when it turned out to be so damning, they refused to use it in the report.
On this day in 1967, Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee died in a fire during an all up test of Apollo Capsule 101, later renamed “Apollo 1” in their honour.
May their souls rest in peace and guide those who work to carry on their dreams of the high frontier.
Most of the British armoured vehicles being sent to the Gulf in preparation for war with Iraq’a Ba’athist Socialist regime will arrive not painted in the correct desert warfare camouflage, but rather in the European colours. Not enough money for paint? Did the fact the Army was going to go to Iraq somehow take the Ministry of Defense by surprise?
This shoddy state of affairs is a measure of the true attitude of the Labour Party towards the military they are about to order into action. Yet somehow they find money for welfare payment to asylum seekers and legal aid to burglars who want to sue householders who use force to defend their property.
Natalie Solent (“brain like a planet” – Alice Bachini) has this to say today about farm regulation:
Note the vague and subjective nature of the criteria by which the officials make these decisions – “Is the farmhouse character-appropriate?” “Is the residential aspect in balance with the farm?” If one has high taxation one needs a complicated regime of rules to allow wealth to be created at all. Once the regime of rules becomes sufficiently complicated it collapses under its own weight and becomes a regime of the personal judgement of officials. And personal judgement must frequently mean personal whim, personal caprice. We are edging back to the lord administering justice as he pleases in his own demesne.
Apart from the word “edging”, which I would probably have done as “moving”, I agree.
But now here’s a thought. If it is true that any year now the public sector will be carved up again into slices of property which the ruling official can rule as he pleases, might this perhaps be a way that classical liberal ideas could smuggle themselves back into society again? Might not some of these local lords of the manor decide to preside over a genuinely free market, and if they do, would they not attract lots of business? And might it not then start to spread?
If the very laws themselves are now more and more being enacted upon the whims of individuals, and they are, might not laws in due course find themselves being abolished by the same mechanism?
A further relevant thought, which I often find myself repeating because it has so many applications and resonances. When I worked in that free market bookshop in Covent Garden in the eighties that I’m always going on about, we found that some of our most loyal, knowledgeable and ideologically simpatico customers were people in the upper reaches of the civil service. Why? Because, whereas outsiders still tended to hope for the best from the government, these people all knew the worst. They knew that government screws up almost everything it touches, because time after time, they’d been right there when it was being done. Often these people start out very statist in their thinking, which is why they started out working for the state. But if they are well educated (and they mostly are) and intellectually scrupulous (which some certainly are) they find themselves compelled to revise their statist opinions.
So it is not so very fanciful that at least some of these high state officials who mutate into lords of the manor might well be our kind of people, and want to do our kinds of things.
The mighty N.Z. Bear has a splendid article about what he would do if he was UN Secretary General for a day, fisking UN Resolution 1441 and Iraqi non-compliance. Good stuff!
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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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