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 am grinding my teeth trying to restrain myself from commenting on some of the drivel being written about the recent murder of US soldiers by a muslim US army officer… but this is just a measure of the ignorance that permeates the profession and which is directly responsible for the growth of so called ‘new media’, i.e. things like blogs. Nick Allen writes in the Telegraph in an article titled “gunman used ‘cop killer’ weapon in massacre at US Army base” (a catchy ‘yellow journalism’ title if ever there was one):
Major Nidal Malik Hasan, 39, used an FN Five-Seven, a semi-automatic pistol popular with SWAT teams, that can fire armour-piercing bullets.
Oh for fuck sake. Any weapon can fire ‘armour-piercing bullets’. I know little about Nick Allen, but I assume he is a Brit and therefore knows bugger all about firearms and thus parrots the equally dismal urban US journalist propensity to describe any handgun firing a round capable of penetrating (some) body armour as a “cop killer”. Also I strongly suspect 9mm and 10mm handguns are far more popular with SWAT teams, as SWAT teams have rifles for use against armoured targets.
The weapon is designed for high(-ish) penetration for use against low end body armoured targets (the victims at Fort Hood were almost certainly unarmoured), but it has rather poor stopping power (that said, when it comes to handguns, bullet placement rather than calibre is the largest single determinant of stopping power), making the FN actually a poor choice… presumably the high magazine capacity may have been why the murderer chose it, knowing he was going to commit his crimes at very close range in a ‘target rich’ environment.
If journalists want to be credible, they need to try to avoid loaded (no pun intended) and rather ignorant terms like “cop killer” and not make meaningless remarks about weapons being capable of using “armour piercing” rounds (which is just another way of saying “they can shoot the rounds they are loaded with”). This ghastly incident contains more than enough news fodder that such sloppiness is inexcusable from ‘professionals’.
I am the only libertarian who has read all six VAT directives
– Philip Chaston.
Researchers are claiming that there is a link between individualism and depression. Some may take offence to this notion but it does not surprise me at all. That said, I am far too cynical to automatically assume that the ‘researchers’ are not grinding some ideological axe, but nevertheless I find the basic idea quite believable.
Frankly collectivism is a form of mass delusion, an ‘opiate for the masses’ method of replacing profane objective truth with sacred, subjective ‘acceptable’ truth… i.e. ‘truth’ is what the collective wants it to be. Indeed I would say much of the allure of collectivism is relief from the weight of individual responsibility, the sense of moral externalisation that comes from outsourcing choice to a ‘higher power’.
Individualism on the other hand is a more lonely path without a nebulous ‘them’ to absolve you from consequences and that can be stressful. And so it comes as no surprise to me that some collectivist societies may be less anxious (at least for those who actually buy into the collectivist meta-contextual assumptions) because collectivism depends on a view of the world that filters reality through the comforting, blame deflecting, wilfully ignorant lens of what is politically tolerable… and ignorance is bliss.
Collectivists… happier apparently
It is Friday, and I cannot be bothered to ponder the latest outrages of our political oligarchy. For our mental health, let us ponder the lines of this new little beauty from Porsche.
Burn that carbon, baby!
Blogger and debunker of various economic fallacies, Tim Worstall, points out something that tends to be forgotten in some of the angrier, gloomier commentary about the European Union and the recently ratified Lisbon Treaty. We – the UK that is – can leave if we wish to do so, and it will be a lot less complex than such a process can be made to appear. That surely is the 800 llb gorilla in the drawing room – we can get out pretty fast if the whole edifice becomes intolerable. And there is nothing that any EU bureaucrat or their political allies can do about it. How likely are they to ever use a military option? Hmmm.
“David Cameron ditches referendum and backs away from EU bust-up” chuckles the Guardian… followed by “Eurosceptics welcome ‘never again’ rhetoric”.
So in effect Cameron is saying “yes I know I said we get a vote before… “iron clad” was the words I used… but if those mean old Euros want to grab even more power than all that stuff you are not going to get a vote on after all, we will have a referendum next time. Really, you can trust me”.
Of course the Eurosceptics are happy, because after all, if David Cameron promises something, you can be sure he will keep his “iron-clad” word, right? Amazing.
Never forget that the party of Winston Churchill was also the party of Neville Chamberlain.
A British court has ruled that environmentalism is ‘protected’ as it is functionally indistinguishable from a religion and thus cannot be discriminated against by a company.
We are now only one logical step away from disestablishing the Church of England and making environmentalism the official state religion, a mandated one in fact, complete with inquisitors and witch finders.
Although much will be made of the GOP victories in Virginia and New Jersey, I do not think they really matter that much. The one that did matter, the third party insurgency in New York, was won by Obama’s man… that was the important one.
All the wrong conclusions will now be drawn. The doom-loop has not been broken.
Simon Heffer has a pretty good – and by his standards, measured – take on how Mr Obama has been doing. Latest election results in Virginia and New Jersey were clear slaps in the face for him, and a boost to the GOP.
But as we have found here with Mr Cameron’s Conservative Party, which has profited from the sheer, plodding ghastliness of Gordon Brown, the welcome fall from grace of Mr Obama, a puffed up Chicago machine politician, is very different from meaning that the GOP is back on the road to recovery. As our own Perry de Havilland points out, the Republicans need to rediscover the “leave me alone” agenda of limited government, low taxes, tight spending and free trade. And they need to rediscover it convincingly, and learn the lessons of George W. Bush’s terrible error of talking the free market talk while doing the exact opposite. The GOP also needs to remember that being in favour of small government is not just about economics, either.
As I wondered at the time, the absurd decision to award Mr Obama the Nobel Prize for Peace was almost like a curse. And maybe it proved a turning point: the point at which the sheer absurdity of this hard-left “community organiser” and his Marxist associates became too much for too many Americans to bear. The odds must be shortening on him becoming a one-term occupant of the White House.
For the New York Times writer Mr Frank Rich to complain of “Stalinism” among conservatives is interesting, considering that the New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty helped cover up the murder of tens of millions of people in the Soviet Union in the 1930s.
Indeed the New York Times won a Pulitzer Price for Mr Duranty’s reports (which were one long cover up of the above mentioned murder of tens of millions of people) a prize that it has been asked to return – and has never done so.
Nor is this ancient history.
The publisher of the New York Times is a far left person who (for example) supported the Communist forces in IndoChina (including in Cambodia where the Marxists exterminated one third of the entire population).
The New York Times also has long supported Barack Obama – a man with a life long record of Marxist links. And should anyone care to deny that Barack Obama is a Marxist (in spite of his recent appointments of such people as Van Jones and Mark Lloyd) would they please give me the date when Obama stopped being a Marxist.
Obama was clearly a Marxist when, for example, he was going to Marxist conferences whilst a post grad at Columbia in New York (by the way can the public please see his thesis on “Soviet Disarmament Policy”) so when did he stop being a Marxist? I am not asking for a particular day – a year will do.
Did he (for example) react to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 by breaking with Bill Ayers and the other Comrades in Chicago – by resigning from all the boards on which they sat together perhaps? I think not.
I mean nothing “racist” when I say that for a New York Times writer to call someone else “Stalinist” is for the pot to be calling the kettle black.
P.S. Unlike Glenn Beck I would take any accusation of being a “McCarthyite” as a complement. But then I have read “Blacklisted by History” by M. Stanton Evans, whereas (sadly) Mr Beck gets his version of events from his memory of the CBS journalist Edward R. Murrow. Although, I suspect, that as an-alcoholic-who-is-not-drinking-today Mr Beck has an understandable bias against Senator Joseph McCarthy, a man who never really faced up to his drinking.
In New York 23 Hoffman is going up against both the Democrat and the Republican machines (Dede S. having endorsed the Democrat and working closely with him on get-out-the-vote) so if he wins it will be a big upset in a district that supported Barack Obama.
Actually the New York Conservative party may evolve (from an unimportant group that just follows in the wake of the Republicans) into something like the “Barnburner” (later Van Buren) faction of the New York Democrats of the early 19th century.
No doubt the Republicans will reach out to Hoffman if he wins and say “Caucus with us” – but he would be sensible (again if he wins) to keep them at arms length and avoid going back into bed with people who stabbed him the back.
The Virginia race looks won for the Republicans (famous-last-words) a big defeat not just for Barack Obama – but also for the Washington Post (which ran smear ariticles on the Republican almost every day for the last month or so).
New Jersey.
My prediction is the same as I have been saying for a long time – Christie will win on the day, but Goldman Sachs will remain Governor.
One indication already – 3000 absentee ballots were checked and it was found that the signatures did not match. But, no doubt, they will be counted anyway (and this is the tip of the iceberg – there are more absentee ballots this year than there were in the Presidential election year).
In short, as so often, in New Jersey the fix is in.
I hope I am proved wrong on that one – but it would take a get-out-the-vote effort by the Republicans on a scale they have not managed in New Jersey since 1993 (when there were simply so many people voting Republican that their votes outnumbered the fake votes).
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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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