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 was supposed to be in Milan on Friday. But instead, I ended up spending a night in a tiny Austrian village and having to cancel my meetings in Italy.
I was heading through the Austrian Tyrol on Thursday when after rounding a corner on a descending road, my car started skidding on ice and began spinning uncontrollably, somewhere vaguely near Bischofshofen. After several terrifying seconds I came to rest with a gentle bump against a flimsy metal barrier between me and about a 100 metre drop. And then a few minutes later, while I was still sitting there trying to calm down, a woman in an ancient Skoda with German plates did the same thing and I thought she was going to shunt me over the edge. I jumped out of my car as her slowly spinning vehicle came closer and closer… and I immediately slipped on the icy road and went sprawling. Just to add to the fun, I didn’t even have my shoes or big coat on, just a tee shirt and a little skirt. But like me she just bumped into the barrier, which was obviously stronger than it looked, missing my car by about 2 metres. I have to say I felt my lapsed Catholicism flickering back to life at that moment.
My German is rudimentary and she did not speak any of my languages, but I think we were both trying to calm each other down for a few minutes and I am pleased to say that she burst into tears and not me. Her name was Hanna and while my car had only a teeny little dent on the rear bumper (I hit the barrier backwards), her car was more damaged, with both front lights broken, as she hit the barrier straight on and a bit faster. Additionally, neither her wipers nor one of her rear lights was working and her engine was making alarming spluttering sounds. → Continue reading: Unexpected detours and Austrian chivalry
On Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds touches on a matter in which true justice does seem to have prevailed. But this is indeed an issue which has long made me of the view that of the many splendid and admirable things about the United States, the US system of justice is most certainly not one of them.
As a sheer matter of practical justice, it cannot be right that the winner of a legal action can nevertheless be reduced to penury by having to pay legal fees, particularly if they were not the party which brought the action. Unlike most of the rest of the western world, who operate upon the principle that the looser of an action pays the legal costs of the winner, in the United States both parties to an action are responsible for their own legal costs regardless of who wins or loses… thus a person can be unsuccessfully sued and still end up bankrupted by their own lawyers as they cannot always recover their costs.
I cannot help thinking that the overweening power of the Bar in American politics is the reason this has never been addressed. The ‘pay your own costs’ principle is a licence for speculative law suits of dubious merit, a veritable ambulance-chaser’s charter, removing the cost incentive to only litigate when the merits of the case make success highly likely. Surely introducing the ‘looser pays both sets of legal fees’ principle across the board in the USA would, at a stroke, reduce the flood of absurd ’emotional distress’ and ‘tripped on a mat’ litigation as well as making it less attractive for well funded individuals and corporations to use the threat of bankruptcy-through-legal-fees to intimidate those who are less well funded. Also, less wealthy defendants who nevertheless have solid cases can approach far more capable (and thus expensive) defence counsel as upon seeing off the accusations in court, they can recover costs from the other side.
WASHINGTON, DC. According to a Cato Institute report released Monday, the U.S. has become overly dependent on foreign turmoil for its conversations and media coverage. “The American people consume as many as 60 million barrels of crude speculation every day, using it for everything from driving discussions to heating up political debates,” the report stated. “Unless we can dredge up domestic sources of turmoil, we may end up utterly dependent on the Middle East for conversational fuel.”
From The Onion via Mondial Global Investors
As I read more and more stories in the press and see the astonishing images of the inferno around Sydney on the British news channels, I cannot help but marvel how well Australia is served by its magnificent firemen. Yet it is clear that what is happening is hardly less than an emergency of wartime proportions. And in wartime, a society has to do what it has to do to protect itself. Of course people might argue that a natural disaster is hardly the same as a war and that is true.
But many of these fires are not natural at all, they have been set by arsonists. Just because the state is not the target of these premeditated acts, it is not regarded as an act of terrorist violence. Yet, the target of these vile nihilists is nothing less than Australian society itself, an infinitely more valuable asset than the damn state.
So what is to be done with any captured arsonists? Well my vote is to handcuff them to a tree and just leave them there. That might not sound very libertarian but the way I see it, acts of violence are intolerable and can be reasonably met with acts of violence. Liberty is about being free to reap the fruit of your own actions… what could be a more elegant manifestation of that than an arsonist roasting in the fire they themselves started?
Perhaps I will not feel so extreme tomorrow but seeing the images of those exhausted fireman just fills me with fury at the thought their lives are in peril through the actions of worthless nihilists who care nothing for the property or life of others.
Those wanting to delve into the odd references that sometimes appear on Samizdata might wish to point their browser to Shoggoth.net and The H. P. Lovecraft archives. These sites will provide the curious with many lurid tales that will explain the lure of ‘Old Ones’. It might interest the reader to know there are many tales linking the octopoid Old Ones and the discovery of oil. Could Riyadh merely wish to pump its oil out to free those trapped beneath it? Is this why the Saudi’s are so reluctant to cut back their oil production when OPEC wishes them to? The Saudi desert contains many ancient temples said to be dedicated to gods as old as man itself as well as oil. Is their resistance to outsiders hiding something sinister?
Could the Whahabi desire to fund their brand of Islam all over the Arab world been in preparation for the arrival of someone? Many observers say that some in the Saudi Royal family have tentacle-like networks all over the Muslim world. A deliberate hint or merely a blind stumble on the truth.
I think it is time for all good scholars of the al Azif*1 to re-examine the accursed tome. Has Mr Bennett stumbled on an 1000 year old scribes’ error?
Andrew Ian Dodge
Doctoris Metaphysicae: Miskatonic & Anglospherist Cultist
*1 = better known as ‘The Necronomicon’
[Editor’s note: as you might have noticed, we Samizdata folks are endlessly amused by references to horror fiction written in the 1920’s and 1930’s]
Now that Will Wilkinson is back from his Teutonic debauching, The Fly Bottle is overflowing with typically excellent offerings.
Goldberg pretends to loathe grab-bag culture, but he and his ilk do it just the same when they pick Christianity over Celtic paganism and individual rights over collectivist subjugation. However, conservatives attempt to camouflage that their preferences are just preferences by constructing a highly selective narrative about “Western Civilization” that gives their preferences the illusion of intrinsic worth as necessary keystones of their fictitious cultural edifice. I’m not being postmodern here. I’m being descriptive.
Of the essentials of Western Civilization, Goldberg writes:
… some of the ingredients for Western civilization I have in mind are such categories as Christianity and religion in general, sexual norms, individualism, patriotism, the Canon, community standards of conduct, democracy, the rule of law, fairness, modesty, self-denial, and the patriarchy.
Why not Stoic mysticism, collectivism, military nationalism, absolute monarchy, slavery and the Napoleonic Code? Why don’t these go in Jonah’s grab bag?
Top notch stuff.
A great film and nice biscuits but…
Ginger Stampley spectacularly misunderstands not so much our views on the dynamics of insurrection, but the entire nature of the conversation that was taking place. Whilst I also think she gravely under estimates the polarisation going on in American society, I do not think that is really the issue. She says our views are based on dystopian fantasy. Well, yes… that is the whole point. Neither Walter nor I think the United States is ripe for armed groups to rise up against state tyranny… things would have to get far worse than they are for that to even be within the realm of possibilities as things stand.
I actually look to civil society in the United States, for all its many and variegated flaws, as the Anglosphere’s beacon of hope and regard it as almost certain to overcome the contrary tides of repressive statist stasis (well, almost certain). For there to be an armed insurgency in the US beyond that of fringe groups like the KKK, I would have to be quite wrong in my essentially optimistic long term view of US society. Yet if it turns out I am, and that Waco was just the first and most spectacular of many, then the dystopian fantasy would indeed be turning into dystopian fact, and the required ‘popular support’ for armed resistance Ginger talks about would indeed start to develop.
The reason I am so keen to prevent the attempted disarming of American society is that this is a wonderful litmus test of civil society’s health… and hence why I am increasingly pessimistic about already disarmed British civil society, which grows more like Stanley Kubrick’s vision of ‘A Clockwork Orange’ year by year as our common law rights are rachetted away by Brussels with the assistance of people like Tony Blair and Jack Straw and David Blunkett and Michael Hesaltine and Christopher Patten, all profoundly hostile to the essential underpinnings of non-state centred British civil society.
Thanks to Gary Larreategui for a small correction
Scholar of arcane Anglospheric Cultism, the eminent James C. Bennett of Miskatonic University, has turned up a disturbing fact after translating an ancient text. In a closed session address to Foreign Policy Research Institute, Bennett reported his findings:
H. P. Lovecraft got it garbled: It’s “In his house in Riyadh great Cthulhu lies sleeping.” That’s why the Saudi Whahabis hate all other varieties of Islam. Their form is really Cthulhu-worship.
Naturally the Saudi ambassador dismissed this as:
Obviously just another Zionist smear campaign and quite clearly racism against Middle Eastern people. So what if a few of us smell strongly of fish, commune with extraplanular creatures and have tentacles under our burqas?
Alarming stuff.
[Editor’s note: you need to have read H. P . Lovecraft’s horror stories to have the slightest idea what this means]
I came across a few articles on Newsbytes that you, dear bloggers, may find interesting.
The first deals with attempts to define and refine the Net in terms of national borders.
The next two concern privacy on the net and are worth the read. In this article, a killer found his victim thru the net while this older piece deals with your right to anonymity.
Thought provoking stuff. Enjoy.
When authorities warn you of the sinfulness of sex, there is an important lesson to be learned. Do not have sex with the authorities.
-From “Life In Hell” by Matt Groening
Tom Burroughes makes a great point with his new phrase, “False Market Fundamentalism Syndrome”. However, I think that for reasons of making it simple for the simpleton members of the press we should call it FMFS. It then sounds like a disease and we all know how the press like reporting on diseases, even ones that don’t necessarily exist. If it sounds nasty, press outlets like the BBC in the UK and CBS in the USA just on trying to be cutting edge in convincing the populace that absolutely nothing in life is safe.
Further the thoughts on ‘paleos’ of both left and right, it never ceases to amaze me to hear a senior politician make a pronouncement about how ordinary people feel about their freedom. It generally runs along the lines of; “they are too busy to be concerned with theoretical arguments about freedom. They are concerned with the money in their pocket, the state of the roads and public services.” The first time I heard this it amazed me to the core of my being.
Of course the general public has a lot to answer for, after all the natural reaction to almost anything is: “the government ought to do something.” It is critical for libertarians to counter this belief that the government is the answer to all problems. This suits statists of course since it is they who have been convincing the populace that the state is the answer to all their problems. Most depressing is that this belief pervades both the traditional left and right.
Andrew Ian Dodge
“What Sucks? Statism Sucks!“
Advocates of the imposition of irreversible transnational socialism (Trazi?) for Britain via the European Union, have long implausibly argued that it was a purely ‘economic matter’ rather than a political/constitutional issue. For the few credulous enough to actually believe that, the remarks of UK Treasury official Gus O’Donnell must have come as a bit of a shock.
Gus O’Donnell, the Treasury official charged with overseeing assessment of the tests, was cited in several newspapers on Friday as having said it would be impossible to reach a “clear and unambiguous” verdict on the tests. “Ultimately, it will be a political decision,” The Times quoted O’Donnell as telling a student seminar. But a Treasury spokesman said O’Donnell’s comments, taken from a careers presentation to a group of undergraduates in late November, had been “totally misrepresented”. “Mr O’Donnell has no recollection of saying ‘ultimately it will be a political decision’,” the Treasury spokesman said.
Ah, that explains it then.
via Reuters
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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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