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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It is not just the economic downturn that has got us deep in debt, it is a consumerist politics in which our elected representatives feel compelled to tell us we can have our cake, eat it and walk out without paying.
Writes Matthew Taylor, former policy adviser to the Blair government, in today’s Times. I think that is not quite right. Not “feel compelled” – “are compelled”. Elected representatives do not stay elected very long unless they maintain the fiction for those who voted for them that someone else is less deserving, someone else is paying.
Taylor says ‘leadership’ is the answer. I wonder why we should believe that, when politicians are actually exercising leadership all the time, in the manner their interests direct. Leadership conferred by outbidding other leaders for the favour of the public is precisely where consumerist politics comes from.
Can an individual, or body of people, acting without thought, in a mood of crowd-pleasing over-excitement, amid a succession of equally superfluous and ill-considered acts, be said to have consciously intended anything at all? In an ideal world, there would be effective safeguards against such people.
– Catherine Bennett, on the will of parliament, in Britain the manner of exercising and dispensing absolute power.
I see that the swear-blogger with a nice turn of phrase, Obnoxio The Clown, has developed a love for Malta. Good observations he makes, not least about the lovely ladies of said island. Indeed – I am married to one of them. Anyway, in a week’s time from today, yours truly will complete his scuba diving course – done with the PADI organisation – in the island of Gozo, just to the north of Malta. Weather conditions should be good. I will not be allowed to dive more than a certain level in my course – you have to do more training to go much deeper – but the views promise to be spectacular.
The seas around Malta are very deep, so I don’t know whether I will get to see any wrecks. One of the grim aspects of that part of the world is how much stuff was sunk during WW2. There must be loads of bits of old RAF and German aircraft down there as well, I would imagine.
Via the David Thompson blog – which has a weird and wonderful collection of oddball stuff every Friday, I came across this aspect of science fiction movies.
Some nifty photos and links on this website as well.
“To anyone who pays more attention to Ben Bernanke than Ben Affleck, walking away from a prime gig like Palin’s was virtually incomprehensible, signalling either imminent scandal or incipient dementia. To the rest of America, Palin’s move made perfect sense, firmly cementing her status as perhaps the one politician who truly feels our ennui. First she cheerfully admitted that she had no idea what the vice president actually does all day (just like me!) Then she stared blankly when asked to reveal her thoughts on the Bush Doctrine (the what?) Then, after earning even higher Nielsen ratings in her first big prime-time showcase than the American Idol finale, only to return to Alaska and the dull reality of mulling over potential appointees to the Board of Barbers and Hair Dressers, she bailed. Sorry, politics, she’s just not that into you.”
– Greg Beato.
He’s talking about how the media/political establishment was befuddled by Sarah Palin’s resignation from the Alaska governorship a few months ago.
There is a nice article in the Daily Telegraph today talking of how humans, be they religious, pagan or unbeliever alike have celebrated the festival of the harvest, in this time of Keats’ “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”. And as we remember the other day after the death of “Green Revolution” scientist Norman Borlaug, the harvest has been something that we not only take for granted these days, but have even reached the point where, in recent years, our political leaders have thought fit to actually pay farmers not to grow stuff. The idea of set-aside subsidies was, if I recall rightly, one of those many terrible ideas of Roosevelt in the Great Depression.
Some idea of how far we have travelled comes up in this nugget of information from David Carpenter’s account of early Medieval Britain, The Struggle for Mastery. On page 36, we come across this:
“On the estates of the Bishop of Winchester yields of wheat remained around eight to twelve bushels per acre (a bushel is 36 litres), where on modern farms they are in the seventies.”
Such a massive increase has a lot to do with why, despite the population increase since the 12th Century, Britain had a sufficient surplus of food production to embark on an Industrial Revolution several centuries later. For in the time of William the Conqueror and for some time thereafter, mass famine was a grim reality of life.
So I will be celebrating the harvest this year and salute the scientists, farmers and yes, the commodities speculators of Chicago and elsewhere for making our daily bread as plentiful as it is. Here’s to them. Now, shall I go for wheat beer or the barley variety later this evening?
I don’t want to use these hallowed pages as a forum to moan about the odd personal gripe, but I think I can find an excuse as there is a larger point. What am talking about? I am talking about the fact that at my local London Tube (underground for you non-Brits) station, the down-escalator has been taken out of service for almost nine months. It is in Pimlico, and serves the Victoria line, one of the deeper of the stations in the capital. Result: I, along with everyone else, have to walk down a long flight of stairs, which was a bit of a problem recently after I suffered a painful foot injury (now mercifully healed). It also meant that it is impossible sometimes to use that station if you have heavy luggage. A disabled person would have to go to another station, which is hardly a great advertisement for public transport.
The explanation given for why it has taken this time to service and replace an escalator seems to be something like this: spare parts for these things are incredibly rare and specialised and take months to make. I can even remember once reading several years ago about how the Tube engineers were trying to find spare parts on Ebay. Now, a thought occurs: surely, in this era of computer-aided design, or CAD, and just-in-time stock inventory systems, it should be possible for an engineer, supplied with the correct measurements, to fabricate whatever spare parts he or she needs to fit into something like an escalator, or for that matter, an aircraft engine. And yet this does not appear to be the case.
Of course, another explanation is that the building contractors who work on the Tube, while they may contain some excellent staff, contain an awful lot of leeches who are happy to pocket the contract money and then spin out their contracts for as long as possible. So it may be that the procurement process is woefully inefficient. Even so, our forefathers who built much of Britain’s industrial landscape would regard such delays with contempt. I bet this guy would not have been very happy.
George Gilder – author of such books as the Spirit of Enterprise, has a nice essay up about the technological savvy and business prowess of Israel’s IT sector. Makes a change to read something about that country that does not involve armed conflict. But then, as we should remember, it is the sheer success of Israel as an economic unit, as much as anything else, that drives its would-be destroyers nuts, because it shows up their own massive failings.
I would like to get Gilder’s new book on Israel. As if my reading list were not long enough as it is.
“We’ve heard ample warnings about extremist paranoia in the months since Barack Obama became president, and we’re sure to hear many more throughout his term. But we’ve heard almost nothing about the paranoia of the political center. When mainstream commentators treat a small group of unconnected crimes as a grand, malevolent movement, they unwittingly echo the very conspiracy theories they denounce. Both brands of connect-the-dots fantasy reflect the tellers’ anxieties much more than any order actually emerging in the world.”
Jesse Walker, talking about how the likes of Glenn Beck and other conservative commentators are being targeted by an increasingly jumpy “liberal center”. This is a good article and it has a certain relevance too here in Britain. If something like talk radio or a UK equivalent of Fox were to take off, just imagine the commentary from the MSM.
My favourite banner [registration required] from the Washington DC protest last Saturday which did not happen, judging by many media outlets, was a few “tens of thousands” of right-wing protesters, according to the Washington Post, but drew rather a bigger crowd, according to the Daily Mail, than the new Messiah’s botched swearing in ceremony.
What I would like to know is when “we want less” became an extremist position?
Presently people are very angry about Barack Obama’s speech to young children (with the, now withdrawn, “how you can help your President” stuff), but the real damage is done in the ordinary days of propaganda – ordinary school days, and ordinary school textbooks, that parents do not even notice. For example, American and British schools teach the “Herbert Hoover and his free market policies” legend.
Barack Obama has given the enemy a face – but what matters more is the collectivist movement (that which has for more than a century worked to gain influence in all institutions in the West). Yet many people can not see past the bogey man Obama and ignore the vast movement without which he would be unimportant. Just a Marxist son of Marxist parents – making impassioned speeches in parks (to no one in particular).
It was the movement that made sure he went to the best universities, it was the movement who gave him the comfortable positions on the boards of the various charitable trusts, it was the movement who supported him in his various campaigns for political office.
Sometimes the movement can become a parody of itself – for example when the “mainstream media” try to cover up for a loud mouth like Van Jones. Being a Communist is fine, but going around telling people what you are is not fine at all – it is astonishing that Van Jones was picked for high office for he lacks basic self discipline (the ability to keep his mouth shut about what he is), a quality Barack Obama has so much of.
Nor is Van Jones alone: The “Diversity Officer” (Commissar) who goes around praising the Venezuelian regime, and explaining (in detail) his evil plan to destroy free speech in the United States, violates the first rule of being a bad guy (do not tell your potential victims what you are planning to do to them – at least not till they are tied up in your underground laboratory): The science Commissar going on record gloating about the prospect of forced abortions: The health Commissar musing about how the old are useless and do not enjoy life and therefore…
Too many of the Commissars go about thinking they can say anything they like without it getting to Homer Simpson (who they see as the typical American voter) – because the mainstream media (both broadcasting and print) will never tell the bald, fat man what they intend to do him and his family. But the mainstream media do not have a monopoly of information these days. The movement should have made clear to Obama that he should not pick people who have film and audio records of what they have said. That he should only pick people who have learned to keep their secret plans… err… secret.
However, overall the movement is very effective – on a totally different level from the pro liberty side (who are like a bunch of cats – moving in all sorts of directions and with plan of campaign, more chaos than cosmos – although it is cosmos, non forced cooperation, that we are supposed to believe in, against the taxis, forced order, of the movement).
Still economic law (the nature of reality itself) is the great enemy of the movement – and it may save the West yet, in spite of the chaotic nature and crass incompetence of the defenders of Western civilisation.
From time to time, the Guardian, to its credit, likes to shake up its leftist readership with a dose of sanity. Here is a fine example.
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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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