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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From time to time people get distressed by what they read on blogs. And there is much to be disturbed about when swimming in the sea of opinions, frustrations and outpourings as anyone who’s gone wondering on the intertubes can attest.
But I digress. William Heath has had a rough moment online – he came across something that bugged him.
We love the blogosphere; it’s full of great ideas, insights and humour. The boring bits are dull, of course. But there’s a distinct part of it that bugs me. I think I call it the “Blogosphere of Hate”.
[…] This crystallised in my mind when I got drawn (via the Spy Blog I think) to someone called “Not a Sheep” who’d written a post about New Labour and immigration. The post turns into a laundry list of people and things that non-sheep hates.
That’s it. That’s what bugs me. I’m not interested in the things people hate, and I dont think we have much to learn from people who are motivated by hate.
A commendable sentiment and perhaps I would be a better person if I could say the same about my feelings about some issues and people. I must admit my blogging started out of frustration and overwhelming hatred of what I have seen happening in politics. As the venerable Instapundit says about blogging: It beats shouting at TV.
There were no lofty visions of learning from or educating others. At the very start, it was simply a pressure valve, a pub rant (or cafe debate if you are a continental) spilling out into the cyberspace. Of course, I would like to think that things have evolved since then but for the purposes of this post, blogging certainly was not great busyness (to unkindly bastardise the Quaker principle William quotes in his post).
So let me count the ways… there are (types of) people I hate, not just institutions – for start all the communists, also those who consider socialism anything but a collectivist life-and-soul-destroying dystopia, I hate people who wear t-shirts with pictures of mass murderers such as Che or with symbols of evil a la red star or hammer & sickle. Oh and I hate most politicians as a self-selected group of people who routinely encroach on everyone’s autonomy and mess things up along the way.
Yes, hate is a strong word and I should use it with caution. However, I insist that there are times when it is appropriate.
Finally, I do not see the blogosphere as a place (‘bookosphere’, ’emailosphere’ anyone?), it is people talking, communicating, publishing, distributing, lazying about, wasting time, creating, connecting, saying great things etc. Just like most human activity, it can be seemingly or genuinely wasteful. Out of that, blobs of real value float up to the top. Occasionally.
That reminds me, I especially hate people, and there is plenty of them around, who try to impose their order or standards on all this, wanting to ‘keep‘ just the good bits, and ‘protect‘ us from the bad ones. It just don’t work like that.
Take a look at this, and scroll down for some of the comments. I still occasionally come across the sort of comments in the vein of “would it not be a good idea to stick all those yobs in the Army/whatever or make them do unpaid work?” etc, etc. These comments come up when there is a discussion about problems of our terrible young people. And this seems to be a viewpoint that transcends the usual left/right political divide: conservatives like the “get em sorted out” mindset while the left goes more for the “building a sense of community” approach. As usual, the notion that individuals are entitled to live their lives for their own sakes gets lost. I mean, that is just so damned selfish.
The issue is quite simple: if the problem is youngsters getting bored and into trouble, then the obvious solution is paid work, hence removing all the legal and tax barriers to said, such as minimum wage laws, restrictions on hiring teenagers, and so on. Acquiring the pride of getting a paycheque strikes me as far more useful in encouraging positive behaviours than some sort of conscription plan for young adults, as seems to be on the cards in the US.
And I’ll repeat my point that it is not enough just to speak out against plans to conscript 18 to 25-year-olds, for example. Proposals to make people attend schools (or whatever euphemistic words for such places exist) until they are 18, for example, is also wrong, and in many cases, counterproductive, particularly where non-academic youngsters disrupt the teaching of their fellows because they are bored senseless. Far better to encourage apprenticeships, with things like tax breaks, than keeping them in one damned education project after another.
If this idea of a young civilian corps in the US becomes fact, I wonder how many of all those young Obama fans will became disenchanted with him? But then I recall that Mr McCain, his vanquished opponent, was pretty keen on all this service stuff as well.
Fraser Nelson over at Coffee House picks up on a point that has been obvious to yours truly for a while as well: the dystopian novel, Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand, nicely charts the sort of demented statist economics that we are seeing back in fashion now. Rand’s novel is more than 50 years’ old and it focuses on the railroad industry, but its themes apply just as well to the world of modern banking or the internet.
Even if you decide to skip the enormous John Galt speech at the end of the 1950s novel, reading this book will help clarify a lot of the issues now swirling around. I can think of a few people in public life today who would qualify as the villains. Who, however, are the heroes? Where are the Dagny Taggarts, Hank Reardens or Francisco D’Anconas of today? There are mutterings about the book being made into a movie, starring the likes of Angelina Jolie (who is actually a lot smarter than some of her Hollywood peers), but I am not sure what the situation is with that. Hmm, let me speculate on the glory of an anti-statist movie winning an Oscar.
As a side observation, I cannot help but notice that ever since the UK government nationalised banks such as Royal Bank of Scotland, which owns Coutts, the private bank, there have been worries that wealthy clients of Coutts must be a bit nervous about having their finances run by folk beholden to the state. Indeed, as Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds might say. Those banks which have by luck or deliberate choice avoided state bailouts will benefit.
Via the indispensable Bishop Hill blog, is this scary Henry Porter article about how many Britons, including professional photographers, are being arrested for taking photos of supposedly “off-limits” buildings. I also notice in the article that yet another Tory MP has been arrested.
The police seem to be developing quite a taste for arresting MPs on dubious charges these days. But at least some judges are beginning to tighten the screws on coppers demanding to arrest or search people in “high profile” cases. But what about the rest of us plebs?
Daniel Finkelstein says what needs to be said. Brilliant article.
Following on from my post earlier about what sort of things might be regarded as wrong or intolerable by future generations that are widely done now, this book by David Friedman (son of Milton F), which looks at potential future legal, scientific and ethical controversies, looks interesting. For instance, Friedman asks what might happen to inheritance wrangles where the “deceased” is in fact held in cryonic suspension and hence not technically dead, as might be defined in a specific legal code. Some of this stuff might appear pure science fiction, but SF has a way of sometimes becoming reality. After all, the very fact that many people can afford to not use animal products such as leather has been made possible by synthetic fibres and materials such as plastic, something that did not exist about 100 years ago. Other developments could also make certain moral controversies either irrelevant or shift the boundaries markedly, or raise controversies that no-one has to contend with now.
On the dystopian side, the developments going on in IT might raise such worries about how the state might try to do things like implant computer chips into people’s bodies as a sort of ID system. Only the innocent have anything to fear…
The hottest story in cricket just now, if you are an England cricket fan like me, is the apparently near simultaneous resignations of the England captain and the England coach, but I think the bigger story in the long-run is the third test between Australia and South Africa, which Australia won this morning (my time). Had South Africa won, they would have won the series 3-0. As it was, they won the series 2-1, and Australia had a consolation victory.
Except that actually Australia achieved more than that. They achieved, by this otherwise merely consolation victory, the continuation of their reign as the top-rated test cricket team. This was what the match was about, given that the South Africans had already won the series, in other words it was about plenty. Without the test rankings system, this game would indeed have been decidedly empty. With these recently contrived rankings, Australia still stay top country. Now okay, you could argue that they aren’t really the top country any more, having just lost to India and now to South Africa. Well, maybe so, but sporting tournaments have a force of their own. If, according to the rules and calculations of whatever tournament it is, you win, then by golly you win and that still counts for something.
I remember when Greece, a palpably second-rate team but coached, as I remember it now, by a German who knew his stuff, fluked and battled their way to winning the European soccer championship. They clearly were not the top team in Europe. But did that mean that their win in this particular tournament meant nothing? Did it hell.
Australia are still top of the world test cricket rankings, and that’s a whole lot better than not being top, which is what would have happened had South Africa won this latest game. → Continue reading: A good day for the test cricket world rankings
Via Timothy Sandefur’s blog, I came across this interesting question: what practices will be regarded as disgusting and barbaric in a 100 years’ time that are widely accepted and tolerated now? Tim reckons meat-eating is a possibility, and I sympathise with that. I would like to think that the practice of forcing people to attend places called schools between the ages of say, 4 and 18 and then taxing nearly half of their wealth at source and regulating the ways they spend the rest of it might one day be regarded as barbaric as slavery. We can always hope.
Talking to fellow contributor Brian Micklethwait last night, we somehow got on the subject of the recent property and debt market bubble, and what a total mess things were. And Brian pointed out that some market bubbles, like the infamous Dutch tulip bubble of the 17th Century, were based on almost a totally ridiculous notion, delivering nothing of value, whereas at least the tech bubble of the 1990s, for all of the associated craziness and subsequent pain of the crash, did at least propel a lot of useful innovation in the internet and associated world, just as the railway boom of the 1840s in the UK helped drive forward development of the railways, even though the industry had its fair share of crooks and incompetents. And for that matter, even the tulip bubble, as the Wikipedia entry I linked to suggests, did perhaps help to drive development of what is still a huge horticultural industry in the Low Countries.
The trouble with bubbles is that they pop. But it is too easy to forget, in our current fit of puritan disgust for speculative frenzy, that much, if not all of the energy that can drive prices for things higher is reflective of often dynamic and highly beneficial changes in the long run. I still believe that in a few years’ time, unless we have reverted to statism completely, that the long boom of the 1990s and most of the ‘Noughties will be seen as a generally good thing, even though part of it was driven by unwisely cheap money set by central banks – state institutions – rather than genuine economic rationale.
“Economists from across the political spectrum agree that if we don’t act swiftly and boldly, we could see a much deeper economic downturn that could lead to double-digit unemployment and the American dream slipping further and further out of reach,” Mr Obama said.
Across the political spectrum eh? And which spectrum would that be? Let me guess… the spectrum that runs from Democrat regulatory statist to Republican regulatory statist? There is no ‘spectrum‘ in front bench congressional politics in the USA (or the UK), just a groups of people who are arguing over how much deeper the same hole they are standing in should be dug in order to get out of said hole.
That is why the USA needs vastly less bipartisanship and a whole lot more disunity. The truth is that NOTHING the US government will do is going to prevent double digit unemployment and economic depression. Both parties were the authors of this situation and every time some jackanapes in Washington DC uses the term ‘bipartisanship’, it is worth pointing out the discreditable Republican role creating a vast edifice of state controls that prevent markets from actually working.
Outside the USA, explicit attacks on capitalism are perfectly acceptable by leading politicos, so it is unsurprising to see Britain’s dismal prime minister Gordon Brown petulantly blaming ‘unbridled capitalism’ when Britain’s regulation smothered and very much ‘bridled’ economy refuses to respond to his ever more pointless orders. But in truth politicians in the USA, the ones in both parties who have done equally absurd things to bury the US economy, in practice share much the same views about ‘capitalism’ as Gordon Brown does. The reasons for that are not hard to figure out.
They are trying to blame everyone other than the predatory political class and its army of tax funded clients and instead point at those pesky people who actually create wealth rather than destroy it as the problem. It is not so much that they are consciously lying about the nature of reality but rather their underpinning axioms within which they see everything simply cannot cope with a world view that does not place politics and regulation at the heart of absolutely everything and as the solution to everything. And if vast reams of regulations are a given then problems cannot be regulation per se but rather that the wrong regulation was tried this time and so ‘we’ need to try different ones. The notion that there is something systemically wrong with creating a massive impenetrably complex tower of (often contradictory) laws simply does not compute. Most politicians, and indeed most people generally, do not even see the teetering structure in totality, just the changes compared to the last time they looked. The tower of regulations simply is… the only ‘sensible’ discussion they will even entertain is how much more should ‘we’ pile on this year.
But then that is one of the major upsides of the massive global crash that is coming down upon us all… the tower that has been created has been struck by lightning and yet they want to save it by piling the structure higher even as it is tipping over… whereas the correct course of action is to get out from underneath it.
Now let us make sure that the people responsible from the largely interchangeable statist ‘right’ and ‘left’ are the ones who get the blame because the smarter ones are already trying to shift it to anyone else but themselves. Our job in the non-mainstream media is to make sure the political life gets crushed out of them as they so richly deserve.
The ‘Crisis of Regulatory Statism’ meme needs to spread.
I loved Liar’s Poker, and Michael Lewis returns to his old stamping ground of Wall Street to write one of the best summations, in my view, of what happened in the markets leading up to the current woes. I do not buy into all of his analysis but as an entertaining version of events, it is pretty good.
Another good, if flawed account of the problems of the debt-driven economy came recently from Niall Ferguson, the historian. He has good things to say on how the understandable desire for home-ownership – encouraged by political leaders such as Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s – tipped into an attitude which stated that owning a home is almost some sort of “right”. If you think about it, paying a mortgage where you own only, say, 10 per cent of the equity is not really ownership, but a form of lease agreement. But I think Ferguson under-plays the role of central banks in the 1990s and ‘Noughties in getting complacent over the warning signs coming out of the housing and asset markets, such as gold. He had a recent television series on Channel 4 on this whole process – sponsored, I could not help noticing, by the Cayman Islands – and I was impressed by how Ferguson explained the often eye-watering complexities of derivatives and asset-backed products in simple ways without dumbing it down. Doing good-quality television shows on economics, where so much has to be conveyed by mood and picture, is hard. And Mr Ferguson’s modulated Scottish accent is a damn sight easier on the ear than the bizarre inflections of Robert Peston.
Yesterday was the fifth anniversary of the arrival on Mars of the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit. Despite a few problems to do with their age, both this rover and its identical twin Opportunity are in good working order and are still wandering around the surface of Mars and sending back interesting findings.
The obvious first thing to do is to congratulate everyone who had anything to do with these missions for a truly magnificent achievement. During my life, watching NASA’s manned space program has been intensely frustrating. Huge amounts of money have been spent on overly expensive boondogles that achieve less than was achieved in the years around the time I was born, despite there being no shortage of new and exciting things that could be achieved. At the same time, though, and on vastly smaller budgets, the unmanned probes produced by and with NASA/JPL to explore the planets and the solar system have managed magnificent achievement after magnificent achievement. Since I was a child we have learned so much about the planets and the solar system, and I have found it hugely inspiring. Seeing high resolution photographs of the moons of Saturn, or the surface of Mars, or the Great Dark Spot of Neptune – who would have imagined such things.
And yet, one thing that amazes me even more is the strange way in which NASA planetary probes stretch and warp time. For instance, the two Mars rovers were sent to Mars on missions that were supposed to last for 90 days. Both missions are now at five years, which is a little over 20 times the original length of the mission. This is an extreme example, but these missions often dramatically outlast their stated lifetimes. A four year Mars Global Surveyor mission turns into nine years. The Cassini mission to Saturn has been there for the planned four years, has had its funding extended for another two, and may manage more than that.
One reason why missions are able to be extended for long periods is of course the extraordinary ingenuity of the people who run them. That software is being upgraded and hardware used in unplanned ways to fix all manner of problems with stuck robotic arms, failed high-gain antennas, wheels getting a little sticky, rovers stuck in sand-dunes, and that these things so often seem to work is another thing that amazes me.
Yet, I wonder further. Clearly, when these missions are launched the hope is that they will keep going a lot longer than stated in the “mission objectives”. Clearly, also, in many cases the principal scientific goals will be achieved in the first few days or months after arriving at the destination, so what decides success is what happens shortly after arrival. Arguing that “everything else is a bonus” after the core objectives are achieved is probably fair.
How much of it is politics, though? I am sure it is easier to get funding for a five year old mission on the basis that “We have a rover on Mars that is still working and it would be a horrible shame to end the mission now” than asking for six years of funding at the beginning. I am sure also that when scientists are told that “You can’t have funding for A, B, C, and D, but we will give you funding for A and B”, they will find a way to include C and D while pretending that A and B is all they are doing, particularly if A and B are Jupiter and Saturn, and C and D are Uranus and Neptune.
And yet, when a 90 day mission is still going after five years, I cannot help but think that someone, somewhere, is taking the piss out of someone. All I can ask is that they please keep doing it.
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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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