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]
|
Via Tim Worstall, this:
Donestk was founded in the 19th century by John Hughes, a Merthyr Tydfil steel worker who had landed a contract from the Tsarist government to provide steel plating for the navy.
Now residents of the city have responded to pro-Russian protests for autonomy from Kiev with an internet vote that rejects Russia’s claims in favour of a turn to the Queen and London.
It calls for the restoration of the original name Hughesovka or Yuzovka and requests London rule.
After the Bolshevik revolution, the city was renamed Stalino and finally called Donetsk in 1961.
A total of 7,000 people had voted by Sunday with 61 per cent voting to secede to Britain and a further 16 per cent voting to make the city an English-speaking autonomous region inside Ukraine.
“We demand a referendum on the return to Yuzovka to its original bosom – a part of Great Britain,” the preamble declared. “Glory to John Hughes and his town. God Save the Queen.”
I read in Colin Thomas’s book on Hughesovka / Stalino / Donetsk, Dreaming a City, that the name “Stalino” preceded the era when everything was named after Stalin, and initially was intended to identify the town with its main industry, steel.
“There’s nothing like a bunch of unemployed recent college graduates to bring out the central planner in parent-aged pundits.”
– Virginia Postrel.
There may indeed be what US law professor and uber-blogger Glenn Reynolds calls an education bubble in the US (and for that matter, here in the UK). That does not, however, mean that studying a “liberal arts” degree is somehow shameful or pointless, and yet that is the impression I sometimes get on part of the right-of-centre blogosphere. By all means let’s cut the state education establishment down, but that is utterly different from the argument about education per se and ideas about how people should broaden their horizons culturally and intellectually. It is important that libertarians/classical liberals understand that distinction, and make it often.
Why I wuvs capitalism, part Umpteen Hundred and Two.
No. 6: Bach on a Japanese forest xylophone. It’s actually a mobile phone advert.
Shortly after the Twitter ban came into effect around midnight, the micro-blogging company tweeted instructions to users in Turkey on how to circumvent it using text messaging services in Turkish and English. Turkish tweeters were quick to share other methods of tiptoeing around the ban, using “virtual private networks” (VPN) – which allow internet users to connect to the web undetected – or changing the domain name settings on computers and mobile devices to conceal their geographic whereabouts.
Some large Turkish news websites also published step-by-step instructions on how to change DNS settings.
On Friday morning, Turkey woke up to lively birdsong: according to the alternative online news site Zete.com, almost 2.5m tweets – or 17,000 tweets a minute – have been posted from Turkey since the Twitter ban went into effect, thus setting new records for Twitter use in the country.
May it continue thus.
If that’s not bad enough, researchers at the University of Maryland insist that global warming will destroy civilization. A forthcoming journal article asserts that expanding population and the difference in wealth between the rich (“the elites”) and the poor (“commoners”) will bring down the United States in the way the barbarians brought down the Roman Empire. There’s a solution, of course. Higher taxes, increased regulation and more government supervision of everyone’s lives, and other liberal nostrums.
[…]
Sacrificing babies to the ancient gods of Carthage didn’t save that ancient empire, and abortion won’t chill the climate today. The public is tuning out the likes of Al Gore and his prophecies because they notice that two decades of hysterical predictions haven’t come true.
In a climate of skepticism, the only way for scientists with a scam to get attention (and government grants) is to concoct ever more over-the-top claims. If driving a Chevy Volt will reduce incidents of rape or a curlicue light bulb will rescue Western civilization, a finding that Earth’s temperature hasn’t budged in 210 months should be something to celebrate. It means the planet is doing just fine.
– Extract from a Washington Times editorial.
A rather spiffing article in spite of the preposterous use of the word ‘liberal’ to refer to illiberal collectivism.
We’ve all felt that need to tell the hard truth. Assert the raw and unadorned core repeatedly and dogmatically. React with righteous anger and fury, even without elaboration, to the point of being downright offensive. There is a role for this. Injustice in our midst — and there is so much of it — cries out for it. I wouldn’t call this brutalist. I would call this righteous passion, and it is what we should feel when we look at ugly and immoral things like war, the prison state, mass surveillance, routine violations of people’s rights. The question is whether this style of argument defines us or whether we can go beyond it, not only to lash out in reaction — to dwell only in raw oppositional emotion — but also to see a broad and positive alternative.
– Jeffrey Tucker, whose recent essay on what he sees as being the less charming features of libertarian commentary has provoked quite a storm, thereby validating his point.
As JGrossman, one of the commenters to the Guardian article I will quote extensively below, says of it, there are some views to which the only possible response is to quote the physicist Wolfgang Pauli:
This is not only not right, it is not even wrong.
The article I am about to quote falls, crashes and burns into that category.
Some background: the writer, Dawn Casey, is an Australian museum director and a well known Indigenous (i.e. Australian aboriginal) public figure. Warren Mundine, mentioned in the article as head of Tony Abbott’s Indigenous Council, is of the same heritage. Christopher Pyne, the Australian Education Minister, isn’t. How sad that one needs to spell out such things to understand what is being debated here. Here is what Dawn Casey writes:
Last week, Warren Mundine, head of the prime minister’s Indigenous council, was quoted in the Australian as saying that it is ridiculous to include an Indigenous culture perspective in the teaching of science and maths. Mundine said: “I agree with Christopher Pyne, I think in some areas we have got ridiculous. What is Indigenous physics? Physics is physics. If we are to compete in the job market we must learn technology and engineering, we need to be taught subjects properly.
“I agree that we need to reassess the curriculum because we need real units that teach the subjects without this ridiculous insertion of culture, the idea that you have to have an indigenous or Asian perspective, to be frank, is silly. The sciences and maths should be taught properly.”
Mundine’s comments add nothing to the very important debates on what should be included in the national curriculum and how children, regardless of their cultural background, should be taught. They ignore that culture permeates everything we do — including maths and physics — and reinforces stereotypical views that Indigenous culture is only about language, kinships systems and hunting and gathering – important as they are.
[…]
For centuries, people from all cultural backgrounds have been developing ideas andsolving problems. Euclid who lived in Alexandria more than 2000 years ago laid the foundations for mathematics. Australia’s Aboriginal people represent the longest-living culture on earth. It is incredible that our culture should be treated as a stand-alone subject or as part of the humanities.
[…]
To go back to a time when Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture was put into an ethnographic box, as some sort of anthropological curiosity, and excluded from the breadth of mainstream knowledge, including maths and science, is to disadvantage all Australians.
The commenter who quoted Wolfgang Pauli chose his example well. Pauli was born in Germany but had to flee to the United States in 1940 because of his Jewish ancestry. So he would have been familiar in his own life with the concepts of “Jewish physics” and “German physics”. One can guess what he would have made of “Indigenous physics”.
The government lost the crypto-wars. Crypto is now freely available, but in a sense they won because there are so many ways at people’s data that bypass the cryptography. What we’re learning from the Snowden documents is not that the NSA and GCHQ can break cryptography but that they can very often render it irrelevant… They exploit bad implementations, bugs in hardware and software, default keys, weak keys, or they go in and break systems and steal data.
– Bruce Schneier
The idea that Vince Cable is a statist thug is hardly controversial in these parts. Moreover he affects some of the same nauseating fatherly manner as the late Tony Benn, and frankly they have more than a little in common. Well, not the dead bit yet. Sadly this approach is something folks in Britain are total suckers for, and indeed my utter hatred for these people is often greeted with genuine bafflement.
“Yes, I grant you he may not always be right,” they say, giving me a bemused smile, “and he a bit of a leftie, but he is such a nice chap!”
Generally the sound of my grinding teeth goes unnoticed as I try to resist the urge to shout “it’s a tactic you guileless English moron!”
Cable is someone who is strongly of the view his notions of what other people can earn should have the violence backed power of the state enforcing them. In short, he agrees with the approach of Castro’s Cuba, he is just willing to set the maximum wage rather higher. But in principle… yeah.
If he does not ‘understand’ why someone else earns the amount they earn, it must not be allowed.
What I have never ‘understood’ is how anyone could regard the LibDems as a party of civil liberties when you tot up all the pluses and minuses. Indeed if the Tories are the Stupid Party, Labour is the Evil Party… then the LibDems are perhaps the Incoherent Party.
…and apologist for the greatest mass murder in human history, Mao Tse-tung, has died. He outlived by some 38 years the 50–60 million people who were murdered directly or starved to death at the behest of the Chinese Communist Party that he so admired in his moronic youth.
Here’s why the CNN gig didn’t work out: Morgan was too rude. A lot of Brits go to America and presume that a) all Americans are fake and b) they’ll appreciate someone explaining to them what’s wrong with their country. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Oh, Americans can take criticism – which is why Christopher Hitchens and John Oliver flourished out there. But they’re not “fakes” and they don’t like being told by foreigners that they’re “messed up”. Who would? Americans are, nine-times-on-ten, honestly nice people who appreciate good manners. Be polite to them and tell them how much you like their country before you offer any spiky observations about their (often) bizarre way of life. In other words, act like a polite guest would. Not like the jerk who turns up uninvited to the party, helps themselves to a beer from the fridge and starts asking the host why his kids are so fat.
To rudeness, Piers added arrogance. Take the guns debate. When the Sandy Hook massacre happened it was right for Morgan to broadcast about it and, as a Brit, he was entitled to raise questions about America’s gun laws. But he acted as though no one had ever thought to discuss the subject before. Like, ever. He tried to make gun control his own personal crusade, to “school” the Americans on law and order. And he displayed a crass insensitivity towards issues such as the importance of the Constitution or the American tradition of self-reliance. The scale of his ego was extraordinary. No US liberal has ever managed to challenge their country’s fundamental respect for gun ownership. Why did he imagine that a guy with an English accent – the accent of George III no less – would succeed where Bill Clinton, Teddy Kennedy or Barack Obama had failed?
To put it more succinctly, Piers Morgan is a supercilious tosser. Quite why CNN bosses imagined he would be a hit in the US is beyond me. And even Tim Stanley’s article, linked to here, is a bit patronising. Americans do indeed have their oddities, but so does every national grouping. The mark of a good journalist is to understand them thoroughly first.
Morgan is also an example of why the idea of a common “Anglosphere” culture has its limits. He might as well come from Mars, as far as many people are concerned.
This post is not about elephants. I gave you elephants yesterday. Nor is it really about Gypsies and Travellers per se. If you want my thoughts on them, I had some in 2004 and some more in 2011. My post of 2004 was better than my post of 2011 and my post of 2011 was better than this one, but even this late night biscuit of a post is better than this Guardian comment piece which is intended to help Gypsies and Travellers but has evidently made most of its readers more hostile to them. Too many Gypsies and Travellers end up in prison, says the writer, Joseph Cotrell-Boyce, and “this must be addressed”.
It can be assumed that Mr Cotrell-Boyce would like you to sympathise with Gypsies and Travellers, since he is Policy Officer for the Traveller Equality Project. So why does he stir up fury against them by never acknowledging what everyone knows, that Gypsies and Travellers disproportionately end up in prison because they are at the present time disproportionately criminal? For stir up fury he does; comments loudly saying what he will not say have hundreds of recommends, while comments that you would think Guardian-readers would lap up, blaming all the ills of the Gypsies on cuts in council services due to a “Tory big-business agenda”, have, at the time of writing, a zero to the right of them. I am mystified that anyone can argue so ineffectively. To put in a brief nod to Jumbo – “yes, there is currently a crime problem among Gypsies and Travellers” – would not commit him to the belief that this state of affairs is eternal, or is the result of them being lesser beings, or that all Gypsies are criminals, or that most Gypsies are criminals, or that unfair prejudices against them do not exist, or that more education would be wasted on them. He could even continue to assert (may God mend his wicked ways) that what Gypsies and Travellers need is more state welfare and Equality Projects, and would meet better success in doing so. Debate abhors a vacuum and it is a delight to the human soul to shout out what someone else is reluctant to say.
I see this type of counterproductive elephant denial everywhere, but mostly in the pages of the Guardian.
|
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.
|
Recent Comments