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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By “ourselves”, of course, I mean supporters of the English football team. Tonight, in the group stages of the World Cup “soccer” tournament, England’s not-entirely-convincing team takes on the might of Algeria. The English team failed to beat the USA a few days ago, conceding a soft goal due to a horrendous mistake by our goalkeeper. But England were not as terrible as some media commentaries suggest: some players such as Glenn Johnson, Aaron Lennon and Stevie Gerrard were good, in my view.
So far, I have quite enjoyed watching the tournament. I don’t get all that bothered by the endless din of the horns that the South African fans insist on blowing. If it drowns our some of the more moronic chants or even the banalities of the commentators, that is no bad thing. The local fans look as if they are having a great time, although as no doubt Samizdata commentators will point out, they are ultimately also paying for a lot of this razzmatazz. I have not checked all the details, but I assume that the government of South Africa, and hence the taxpayers, are funding some of the cost of all this.
So far, my prediction is that the finalists will probably be drawn from the following: Brazil, Argentina, Germany and possibly England (you’re mad, Ed). France lost big last night to Mexico; Spain, which has been considered among the favourites, was stunningly defeated by Switzerland, which brought a gleam to my pro-tax haven eye. Even so, Spain could and should probably progress to later stages.
As for England, all I can hope is that we don’t give away possession easily, give plenty of the ball to Wayne Rooney, and hope the goalkeeper remembers the old adage – keep the body behind the ball.
Here is what Brian Micklethwait wrote about the previous World Cup, back in 2006. I don’t remember a lot about it as I was getting married at the time.
Bob Bigelow, the operator of two inflatable test habitats in orbit, fired one back at the idiots who claim to be all for free-markets, capitalism and liberty… until their own socialist-space ox gets gored:
“… I don’t understand the critics who say ‘commercial’ entities can’t safely build a capsule. Why is it that Boeing, the company that constructed the ISS itself, can’t safely build a capsule that would go to their own space station? These are the sorts of questions and issues that we will be posing in Washington as a member of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation.”
Paul Marks, as regular readers know, regards the Economist as a sort of bellweather of conventional (ie, frequently wrong) wisdom. The magazine recently carried this editorial on the supposed inadequacies of the US political Right.
He sent this letter to the magazine. Somehow, I think they are unlikely to run it, but we can:
Dear Sir,
In your current edition you have as the main cover story an attack upon the “American right”. In reality, of course, it is not the fact that the people you attack are American that causes you to hate them – you hate them (and attack them in the most abusive terms you can) because they commit the dreadful crime of not agreeing with you.
You hate the British “right” just as much as you hate the American “right” – with “right” really being defined as people who do not support endless bailouts, corrupt “stimulus” government spending, and corporate welfare (such as the Central Bank producing more credit money and issuing it in various sweetheart loan forms to politically connected financial sector enterprises).
I am not really interested in the fact that you use abusive language (“mad” and so on) and cartoons against people whose only crime is to have different political opinions to yourselves, after all I have used abusive language (such as “corrupt”) to describe your editor, Mr John Micklethwait, and the only reason I have never drawn an abusive cartoon of him is that I can not draw.
No, what interests me is your claim that America needs a “better opposition” to President Barack Obama – and your implied claim that you should be the guide to such an opposition.
→ Continue reading: An open letter to The Economist
The Times has vanished behind a pay wall and… frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.
There is nothing about The Times that cannot be easily replaced with other on-line sources. Move along, nothing to see (literally).
SpaceX has signed a $500M deal to launch the next generation Iridium satellite system.
The mammals are now getting big enough to go for the dinosaurian jugular vein.
Never has there been a worse time to be a US ally.
– Daniel Hannan finally admits that he was wrong to have backed Barack Obama for President
The usual explanation for the troubles now afflicting the EU that is doing the rounds now is that the Greeks and Spaniards have recently been behaving even more like Greeks and Spaniards than they usually do. But Helen Szamuely offers an alternative explanation for the EU’s current woes. Germans, she observes, are finally reverting to being regular Germans.
Having quoted a Der Spiegel article about how German Chancellor Angela Merkel is now mysteriously unwillingly to bow to France in the manner of her predecessors since WW2, Helen says this:
This fits with the point I have made over and over again: the EU is predicated on a guilty and subservient Germany. With time going on and new generations, who cannot even recall the war, appear on the scene (and in Merkel’s case there is the added point of growing up under the Communist system) guilt and subservience can no longer be relied on and the Franco-German motor, which presupposed French supremacy is now sputtering. In many ways, that is more important than the Greek or Spanish fiscal crises.
And that fits a point that I have made over and over again, which is that when it comes to predicting the future, there is one kind of thing that one can say with certainty, when all else is guesswork. Statements of this kind are always going to be true: in twenty years time, you and I and everyone else will either be twenty years older, and influencing the world in the way that people twenty years older that all of us are likely to influence the world (in my case hardly at all), or dead.
All manner of interesting suggestions about the relationship between events and later events can be derived from this kind of observation, including even events which have yet to happen, as Helen Szamuely’s own earlier versions of the above presumably suggest. Such speculations are not all going to be right. But they can be very interesting and suggestive.
Historically, one of my favourite such twinning of two events is: Battle of Crecy 1346, Peasants Revolt 1381. A great many of those “peasants”, including their leaders, were the veterans of earlier continental wars.
Now? Well, can it be coincidence that our current financial turmoil is happening just when, for the first time since it happened, hardly anyone is still alive and counting for anything who remembers the previous bout of such financial turbulence, that started erupting around 1929?
We are incredibly heedless in the formation of our beliefs, but find ourselves filled with an illicit passion for them when anyone proposes to rob us of their companionship.
– James Harvey Robinson, via Dale Carnegie’s classic How To Win Friends and Influence People
In the United States one of the biggest exercises in false consciousness the world has ever seen – people gathering in their millions to lobby unwittingly for a smaller share of the nation’s wealth
The Guardian’s George Monbiot is talking about the US Tea Party Movement.
Which is it, do you think? Has nobody ever told him about the fixed quantity of wealth fallacy, or does he just enjoy winding people like me up?
The following was posted as a Samizdata comment by the pseudonymous ‘Jaded Libertarian’, but it deserved to be an article in my not so humble opinion, and so…
I read in the paper today that after subjecting 500,000 people to mandatory face to face interviews, the government denied passports to eight for fraud.
This is the thing that most do not get. The big evil does not justify, never justifies, the small good. Causing inconvenience, misery and transgressing the privacy of half a million people in order to catch eight fraudsters is absurd.
And our society is full of such absurdities. Millions of adults are denied the “gift of giving” into their children’s lives by “child protection” policies. There is this assumption that any adult watching children swim is potentially sexually aroused, for example.
I would contend that the people who make such laws have dirty minds. I find it nobler and better to live life as though perverted degenerates do not even exist, for they are thankfully rare. And on the rare occasions where monsters abuse society’s trust, why, we should quickly and simply hang them in the town square and then return to life as before.
This is the model for transgressing only the liberties of the lawless, and not those of society at large. If you have to tread on the freedoms of innocent people to catch the lawless you’re doing it wrong.
“If it stops one fraudster, if it saves one life and if it protects one child it will all be worth it” the statists cry. These thoughts are supposed to make us feel warm inside as we queue to be inspected by the passports office, as security cameras follow us down the street and as police demand to know what we are doing for no particular reason. We are to lay our personal freedom on the alter of society in the name of the common good, and feel heartened by our sacrifice. As bizarre as it may sound, there are “true believers” in this cult – I see them all the time.
Down that road lies 24 hour policing of the entire population, and lives that are not worth living for all but the party elite. Basically 1984 made real.
And it all began when we passed that first law that mildly inconvenienced many in order to wheedle out the wicked few…
Full government control of all activities of the individual is virtually the goal of both national parties
– Ludwig von Mises
I have not yet given much thought to writing out a piece here on the oil spill – this is, on one level, a complex issue that does not lend itself to quick-fire blog postings. This article over at the Melangerie blog (which I thoroughly recommend) is a great piece, very fair and perceptive, in my view.
One issue for us free marketeers is this: we like to talk about how pollution is, in some ways, a property rights issue. When a huge oil leak contaminates a sea and damages vast amounts of marine life and say, fishing industries, it is an interesting question on how exactly that issue gets resolved without some way of apportioning costs and compensation. Is a state needed to oversee this? Can it be fixed by entirely non-state means?. There are some free market environmentalists out there who might have some ideas. Rather than write more, I would be interested in comments.
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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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