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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Now it is fashionable to sneer at Starbucks. The coffee, once recognised as a marked improvement on what was available before, is disparaged as being bitter or tasteless or inadequate in any one of a number of different ways. That is the proof of Starbucks’ success. You are free, and indeed able, to complain about the quality of its product because of Starbucks.
In that respect, the company is a shining example of how capitalism and the market is supposed to work. A new product creates a new market and is in turn — for some, anyway — superseded by other competitors offering, in this case, smaller, independent, more innovative and interesting, coffee served in a less “corporate” environment. Innovation inspires emulation and then, in turn, the original innovator begins to look cumbersome and outdated. But your local independent artisan coffee shop selling coffee sourced form a single Indonesian estate only exists because of Starbucks and the corporate muscle it flexed to create the very market upon which smaller competitors can piggy-back. This, again, is the way the system is supposed to work. The rising tide, in this instance, really has lifted all boats.
– Alex Massie.
Well, it may be “fashionable” to dislike Starbucks (usually a pose taken by those who haven’t the faintest notion of what building a business involves) but I could not give a flying expleted-deleted about a lot that passes for fashion. I use Starbucks quite a lot and it has also helped spawn the model of the coffee shop that is also a sort of office/study zone for anyone with a laptop.
The dislike of Starbucks is often nothing more than a reworking of the general hatred of enterprise and trade that is indulged by people who, hypocrically, enjoy its fruits. I recall this great episode of South Park and how it lampooned the hatred of big business chains of this type.
And who can possibly dislike a business that got a name-check in an Austin Powers movie?
Oh behave!
Here is a good, succinct demolition of the argument that if the UK leaves the European Union on World Trade Organisation-based terms, rather by some “Brexit-in-name-only” fiasco, there will need to be a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic. From the very start, I have suspected this issue was being exaggerated considerably by those trying to derail UK independence from the European Union, and the detail here proves it.
This is all contextual: where there are amicable relations, technology, goodwill and a certain degree of co-operation, it means border posts and the rest are not needed, or not used all the time. A case in point is Switzerland: it has access, via scores of bilateral treaties, to Europe’s Single Market, but also has the freedom to do its own trade deals with nations far beyond Europe. When I have driven from France to Switzerland, or over to Germany, there were no border controls I was aware of. Switzerland is in the Schengen Agreement area, which removes the need for passports. Now there’s no theoretical reason why the UK could not also come to a specific agreement on such a basis with Ireland (although it might still reserve the right to require passports to be produced where necessary).
Sometimes situations can change: a few years ago, after the 2015 November mass murders in Paris, border controls were enforced on the Swiss-French border. Also, there are customs checks but these don’t all require “stop at the border and let a bloke search the truck” sort of process. This Q&A guide is an example of what happens.
Now, this being a classical liberal/libertarian blog, some people are going to complain that there are any kind of borders, requirements of passports, period. As a minarchist (minimal state, not anarchist) I take the view that one cannot have a jurisdiction of law without knowing what the boundaries of that legal network are, and so there is a border, even if only expressed as a squiggly line on a map, rather than a wall, fence or something more technically snazzy. England has its Common Law, while the continent has a Civil Code (Napoleon and the Roman legal heritage) and there is therefore a boundary between them, even though in many ways mutual recognition/equivalence agreements can and do take quite a lot of the friction out of where these codes come into contact. (There are some parts of the world with both legal traditions at the same time (such as Malta, which was once run by the French before the Brits kicked the buggers out). And these boundaries may also require people to prove where they reside as citizens, if only to know that they cannot run away from certain legal agreements they have entered into by fleeing to another jurisdiction.
Yes it is true that Socrates was killed by a democracy (Athens), thus showing that liberty (the freedom to say things that people other people hate and therefore call “hate speech”) and democracy are not the same thing. However, this is also true of any other form of government – and the only difference that the system of government that Plato (the most well known student of Socrates and arch-enemy of democracy) wanted to create would have made, is that that a “Socrates” speaking against the state would have been executed without a jury trial, and with no freedom to speak in his own defence.
Just got back from supper with friends to find myself being urged by my Facebook Friend (and actual friend) Tim Evans to read Corbyn’s road map to a communist Britain by Giles Udy. This piece, says Tim, is “spot on”.
Sample quote:
At no point is there any question of the revolutionary Left’s presumed right to overthrow the existing order and impose its own socialist system. Indeed, it claims it represents “the interests of the working class and the whole population” – an intriguing conflation given that the Monster Raving Loony Party gained three times the votes of the CPB in the 2015 general election and the fact that all the far-left parties combined scored just 0.02 per cent of all the votes cast. But the arrogance is pure Lenin: the revolutionary elite must take power because the people do not know what is good for them. When the Left says it opposes rule by tiny elites, it exempts itself.
Did we, at the last General Election, reach Peak Corbyn? Have enough voters who thought they were voting for an amiable geography teacher now get that Corbyn is a far nastier piece of work than that? I wish I could be sure enough about this to remove the question marks. Nevertheless, were the Corbyn tendency to win power at the next general election, I would not only be aghast; I’d also be surprised. It cheers me up, as it must cheer up any anti-Corbynite, that Labour are now doing rather badly in the polls, despite facing a Brexit-deranged Conservative government.
But, does Corbyn even care about winning the next general election? What matters to him, surely, is him and his comrades first getting total command of the Labour Party. What does make chilling sense is that a financial melt-down may occur, any decade now, at which point the Corbynite take-over of the Labour Party will have been completed and communistic stridency (designed to gather all the comrades into one political organisation) will have been replaced by much more organised and conventionally presented duplicity (with all the comrades on message). At which point, all the horrors described in the article linked to above may start seriously to happen. Voters, worrying about far more than mere Brexit turbulence, may then take, in sufficient numbers, whatever bait is dangled in front of them.
Of course, I fervently hope that this is wrong. And actually, if I had to place a bet, I’d bet that it is wrong. But betting is one thing. Being sure about that bet is quite another.
They were thrown into ecstasies of suspicion by finding we possessed a French translation of Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’. If that had been the only book they found, our doom would have been sealed. It is obvious that a person who reads ‘Mein Kampf’ must be a fascist. The next moment, however, they came across a copy of Stalin’s pamphlet ‘Ways of Liquidating Trotskyists and other Double Dealers’, which reassured them somewhat. (George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia)
The BBC has learned from Google that Welsh IP addresses are 7.2% more likely (than other UK ones) to be the origin of searches concerning Jews in conjunction with certain negative terms. Since it lists these terms, the BBC story is now a high-ranked result found by such searches – or so I assume (I have not checked, lest Google record my IP address and the BBC report that Scotland has overtaken Wales). It is suggested that Google discourage these wicked Welsh googlers by not letting these combinations auto-complete.
I see no suggestion in the story that anyone contributing to it has even risen to the level of the communist secret police by e.g. correlating these queries with others from the same IP address like ‘racism evil’. (If any of the offending IP addresses also searched for ‘islamic terrorism evil’, I assume the BBC would only be the more shocked and disgusted.)
On the rare occasions when I’ve tried to imitate a Welsh accent, I often sound like I’m trying to imitate the accent of a Pakistani speaking English. I’ve been told the two accents sound similar because a high proportion of the governesses who tutored children of natives from the Indian subcontinent in the days of the Raj were Welsh. (I have no idea why that should be so or whether it is true.) If the BBC harbours the least suspicion that some of the searchers are studying anti-semitism with a view to opposing it, or that the accent of others might indeed sound Pakistani, it does not mention it.
Once you give power to the government it is nearly impossible to get it back, and it will be used in ways you cannot expect.
– Garry Kasparov
“The problem is not primarily intellectual; it’s moral. It seems that many professional academics have not been taught to develop the basic virtues of emotional self-restraint, justice, charity, and humility. They feel no need to hold in check their feelings of irritation, indignation, hatred – and fear. They recognise no obligation to be scrupulously fair to their opponents. They don’t understand that the most cogent critique is one that charitably construes the opposing case in the strongest possible terms, and only then sets about dismantling it.”
– Nigel Biggar
Today I am reading and watching all those weather reports about how extremely cold it is in the US and some of my friends in New York and Chicago have been telling me about it. But what impresses me above all is that these urban hubs, these centres of modern human civilisation, go on. And we take it for granted that apart from certain disruptions, they do. I came across this wonderful graphic item on the web that visually conveys the daily commute volume into and out of Manhattan.
Have a good weekend and keep warm and safe. This global warming is a real bitch.
“Look around any developed country and it is obvious that there are a lot of people who eat too much. But there is another affliction of modern societies that too often gets overlooked: the greed for attention. If members of the Lancet Commission on Obesity had a taste for food as great as their appetite for hyperbole, their bellies would prevent them getting near a dinner table.”
– Ross Clark, Daily Telegraph, 29 January (£).
“Bill Gates says poverty is decreasing. He couldn’t be more wrong”, writes Jason Hickel, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics.
Prior to colonisation, most people lived in subsistence economies where they enjoyed access to abundant commons – land, water, forests, livestock and robust systems of sharing and reciprocity. They had little if any money, but then they didn’t need it in order to live well – so it makes little sense to claim that they were poor. This way of life was violently destroyed by colonisers who forced people off the land and into European-owned mines, factories and plantations, where they were paid paltry wages for work they never wanted to do in the first place.
The comments give me hope.
Earlier this afternoon Guido posted a list of the amendments* to be voted on in Parliament this evening:
(a) Jeremy Corbyn – calls on the PM to rule out no deal while, predictably, keeping all options on the table
(o) Ian Blackford – notes that the SNP don’t like Brexit, calls for no deal to be ruled out and Article 50 extended
(g) Dominic Grieve – suspends normal Parliamentary procedure on six dates in February and March allowing MPs to hijack Brexit
(b) Yvette Cooper – suspends normal Parliamentary procedure on 5th February to allow MPs to bring a Brexit-blocking Bill in
(j) Rachel Reeves – calls on the PM to seek an extension to Article 50
(i) Caroline Spelman – notes that Parliament rejects leaving without a deal
(n) Graham Brady – calls for the Northern Ireland backstop to be replaced with alternative arrangements to avoid a hard border
As Guido said,
However, of all the amendments, only Grieve and Cooper have any legal effect as they would actively change the Standing Orders of the House, upending centuries of precedent. All the others, including Brady, are only statements of the Commons’ preferences.
The votes have now taken place. All the amendments failed except Spelman’s and Brady’s. That is, the only amendments that passed were to authorise the writing of two new (and largely contradictory) entries on Parliament’s wish list. I was glad to see that the amendments by the Tory Dominic Grieves and Labour’s Yvette Cooper, both of which aimed to stop Brexit by procedural tricks, were voted down by larger than expected majorities, including fourteen Labour rebels voting against their Whip on the Cooper amendment.
Much of what we saw tonight was tail-covering. Spelman’s amendment passed so that if No Deal happens and the zombies come, MPs can say, “Don’t blame me, I voted against zombies”.
Regarding the successful Brady amendment, the EU side has repeatedly said it will not re-open negotiations, so I assume its main purpose is to put the guilt of being the last people to say “No” onto them.
All in all, not a bad night’s work.
* “Amendments to what?” you ask. No idea, unless “Theresa May’s Brexit Plan” is the name of a Bill.
In Britain, as in other countries, more than a quarter of the income tax is paid by 1 per cent of the population. But this is not enough for the Professor, irrespective of whether increasing the rate would increase the take (the purpose of tax being primarily symbolic). He would like capital to be taxed too, from above the not very high limit of $900,000. This would increase both equality and efficiency, according to the Professor, in so far as the money raised would then be redistributed and invested productively by the philosopher-kings of whom the professor is so notable an example.
All this is to be done in the name of what Piketty calls solidarity. ‘If Europe wants to restore solidarity with its citizens it must show concrete evidence that it is capable of establishing cooperation’: that is, it must raise taxes on the prosperous. Overlooking the question of what Europe actually is, or how it is to be defined (I suspect that the Professor thinks it is not continent or a civilisation, but a bureaucracy), this seems to me the kind of solidarity that only someone suffering from autism could dream up, solidarity equalling taxation administered by politicians, bureaucrats and intellectual advisers.
– Theodore Dalrymple.
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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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