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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James Bowman on the latest work of Quentin Tarantino, a sort of cartoon treatment of WW2:
“It is important for us to remember that those known to history as Nazis were not cartoon characters. Nor were those who fought and finally defeated them. Nor was that defeat accomplished by a gang of bloodthirsty, free-lancing American Jews in search of revenge who manage to commandeer a ludicrously implausible scheme to assassinate the entire German high command, including Hitler and Goebbels, in a small Parisian cinema by setting fire to a pile of nitrate film. I know, I know. Mr. Tarantino’s are not real Nazis, any more than these are real historical events. But that doesn’t seem to me enough of an excuse for them when American schoolchildren — for whose eyes this film is principally intended — may scarcely be supposed to know what was real.”
I think I’ll give the movie a miss, having never cared for any of Tarantino’s output. A friend of mine once told me that he thought T’s films were brilliant, but wicked, morally empty. For balance, here is a slightly more favourable review by Roderick Long.
I came across this gem of a comment by an Obama supporter – assuming the commenter was sincere and not a troll, and it is just too good to go unremarked. The comment was made on a suitably acerbic column by Matt Welch, one of those Reasonoids who have gone very sour indeed on the US president.
Here is the comment:
“I´m american and not angry. i´m happy with our new president. vladimir putin likes him, too. looking forward to his next 3 years as president.”
Priceless.
“The fact that compensation would often not be forthcoming either because of inability to catch the offender or inability to pay if caught would motivate us to take out “crime insurance”, which in turn would motivate the insurance company to catch such criminals as it profitably could. Criminals would have plenty to fear from these highly motivated companies, who of course would acquire from their clients the right to such compensation as they could exact, at least up to the level of full resitution. It would be interesting to know whether the net effect would be more satisfactory than the current system, but when you consider the all-but-total failure of the punishment system actually employed in, say, the United States and Canada, it is difficult to believe that it wouldn’t be a major improvement. Everyone agrees that we have very far to go in the way of improving our system of responding to crime. It is a sobering thought that getting rid of one of the most spectacularly cost-effective systems in the history of mankind short of war is perhaps even less likely to be seriously considered than is abolition of war.”
Jan Narveson, The Libertarian Idea, pages 230-231.
If you are rich enough, you will be able to circumvent the prohibition and obtain the right to select the sex of your child. The Human Fertilisation and Embryological Authority bans the practice here, though their grounds are weak:
Britain’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority remains cautious, citing public opposition to sex selection. “In the US there is no official regulator to monitor clinics and no legal obligation to offer the counselling that is an important part of treatment,” a spokesman said. “Those who choose to go overseas for their treatment should make themselves aware of the laws and consider what impact there may be on any child that is subsequently born.”
Public opposition is cited, alongside a nannyish presumption of in loco parentis. Public opposition is not a sufficient reason for curbing reproductive freedoms and gives a veto to lobbies who invoke the ‘yuck’ factor. The HFEA model of regulation never succeeded and medical practices should be allowed, except in cases of safety.
If Parliament wishes to outlaw a reproductive technology,then let it do so: otherwise, the presumption of freedom should prevail.
It is always rather foolish to invoke misty eyed national wells for values. One can always point to counter-examples.Now we know that Alex “a touch of the” Salmond and Gordon Brown have one thing in common? Is Macavity a ‘Scottish’ value?
There is one person in the SNP administration, however, who appears to have worked out just how sensitive this situation is: and that is Mr Salmond. Usually, the First Minister has to be restrained to stop him pushing in front of his ministers when there is an announcement of any import to be made.
However, with this decision, Mr Salmond has been remarkable only by his absence. Mr MacAskill was left to face the world’s press yesterday, on his own, not with his First Minister sitting by his side.
A few months ago I noted the importance of having good people selected for the top jobs at NASA under the Obama administration. I believed then, as now, that NASA and the current way of doing business is a fact of life for those in space business and the best we can hope for is folks in the power seats who are positive towards wholly private space ventures.
There has been much too-ing and fro-ing in Washington during the ensuing months over the role of private sector and the old socialist space model. Surprisingly (to some), the most anti-free market action came from a Republican, Senator Shelby from Alabama. He succeeded in reprogramming funds for the COTS-D program, aimed at enabling the purchase of Astronaut tickets to space in a commercial way, back to funding of the old NASA and Aerospace Design Bureaus model borrowed from the Soviets during the Moon Race. Republicans are no different from Democrats when it comes to the basics. They like the Space Kommisars when they represent jobs and campaign contributions in their district or State.
But change is overdue. There is simply no choice for NASA and everyone knows it. Most importantly, the people now in charge understand it and with the supporting Augustine Commission findings (one of whose members, by the way, is a long standing occasional Samizdata reader) that change is about to be implemented.
As I indicated in the title, the end results of all this appear to be even better than I had dared hope.
Next year in L5 anyone?
Sometimes it is the willingness of a person to be brutalised, rather than its enforcement as such, that chills me to the bone. Check out this story.
Of course, if the woman genuinely consents to such treatment, then I suppose it would be no different to that of a person who visited S&M bars and liked being beaten up, etc. But a lingering suspicion lurks that this woman, and many others, are not really acting with a great deal of control over their lives.
Jeffrey Rogers Hummel lays out a pretty solid case for saying that the US government will let down international borrowers, and fairly soon. This is not a new or original argument, but he does so with great aplomb. Definitely worth a read.
“To kill someone for their class origins is just as bad as killing someone for their religious or ethnic origins. You’re killing someone, d’ye see? That Uncle Joe did it in the name of the proletariat while Hitler did it for some other reason he’d made up does not make Joe less evil, sorry, it just doesn’t.”
Tim Worstall.
You simply have to watch this to believe that a bit of sand could be turned into art of such emotional depth.
I am simply left speechless by the performance artistry of this young Ukranian woman.
PS: I owe many thanks to Sharon Shannon for making me aware of this.
As FA Hayek pointed out many years ago in his masterpiece, The Constitution of Liberty, if healthcare is paid for out of general taxation and delivered free at the point of delivery, then in a world of scarce resources – and healthcare is always constrained at any time by the supply of doctors, drugs, etc – then such care must be rationed by some form of bureaucratic/political rule. As Dr Hayek presciently warned at the time (1950s), any such rationing will put doctors, politicians or other people in power in the position of a god, in having the decision about who gets treatment for what, or whether life A is more “worth saving” than life B. For example, one such utiltarian consideration might be that it is more “cost-efficient” to save the life of a young kid with his whole life ahead than an 90-year-old. That is what happens when socialised medicine is established. It transfers key powers to people in ways that raise disturbing issues of accountability and control.
Now a socialist might respond that it is still better for health care to be rationed by some rule they consider to be “fair” than by the supposed lottery of the market, although in fact, as I would respond, there is, due to the benefits of competition and entrepreneurship, far greater chance that all but the poorest will get better healthcare under a genuine free market in health than under the system of centralised, state-provided healthcare. Also, if the possession of a large fortune is partly a matter of luck, then luck, being blind, cannot be either just or unjust. It just is. Some folk have access to better dentists or whatever because they are richer. That may annoy someone who cannot afford the whitest teeth, but that is not proof of unfairness, as such. To prove it, one would have to construct an ethical theory that says that humans have an apriori claim on their fellows to receive a certain amount of healthcare/watever as a “right”. But such “rights” are abuses of the term: one cannot have a right to X that requires that another be forced to provide X, such as forcing folk to train as doctors to serve the sick, and so on.
I was led to think about the latest twist in the US healthcare debate by reading an article by the US writer, Nat Hentoff. He totally bypasses the issue of how to deal with scarcity under socialism in ways that are fair. He rightly worries about the sort of brutal choices that state-rationed healthcare provides, but then does not see that any system of state-run, and socialised medicine, makes such issues of rationing unavoidable. Rationing by such tests of age, “need” and so forth is a feature of socialised medicine, not a bug.
(H/T: The Corner).
Excalibur-Almaz has announced its orbital tourism plans. They have built up a great team of astronauts, cosmonauts and contractors and are in the process of resurrecting a flight tested Russian military capsule and space station. They have a long way to go to get the thing flying again, but that is the point, it is ‘flying again’, not ‘flying the first time’.
I unfortunately must step lightly here as I was one of the persons in my company involved in some early consulting for them. NDA’s you know!
I can say that it is a very interesting project!
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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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