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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Short cryptic link-posts, of the sort which will make absolutely no sense as soon as the link stops working, seem to be accumulating here just now, so here’s another. Check this out. It’s Friday Ephemerus (?) number one at David Thompson‘s today.
Seriously, forgetting about the short cryptic thing, but assuming you now know what I am talking about, I think this might make a good visual metaphor for the television people as they chatter about the Glenrothes bye-election, just won by Labour. Suddenly, David Cameron must now be becoming afraid, very afraid. Is the utter cluelessness of the Conservatives about all the financial turmoil grabbing defeat for them from the jaws of victory? Are they starting to McCain themselves? Are they, the party that is confused and hesitant about doing the wrong thing, going to be beaten yet again by the party that is unconfused and brazen about it?
Politics trundles on and the more you pay attention to it the more depressed you are going to get, so what I like to do instead is look at gadgets. Gadgets aren’t everything. An affordable mobile phone is scant consolation if your ludicrously unaffordable house has just been repossessed. Flat screen televisions are only as good as the stuff that’s on them. Cool cars only provide escape from the cares of city life in car commercials, not in cities.
Nevertheless, gadgets are still being done well, and every now and again I like to pick out a new one and praise it on Samizdata, both for its own beautiful sake, and because doing this makes the point that life would be so much better if everything (not just gadgets) was done like that, by grasping capitalists in competition with one another instead of by tyrannically pompous bunglers who are clever only at winning elections or at sucking up to such people. The last such gadget that I got excited about here was the Asus Eee-PC, which I now happily possess, and am gradually finding more uses for. And now, I offer you the Panasonic Lumix DMC-G1, which is a digital camera, which looks like this:
 It doesn’t look anything very special, or very different, does it? And for many people it won’t be. For all those Real Photographers squinting into their optical viewfinders to get the perfect shot with their brick-like Canon or Nikon DSLRs, the G1 would be a severe come-down, because the G1 doesn’t have an optical viewfinder. But for that vast tribe of cheaper and more cheerful digital snappers who prefer cameras that don’t weigh so much, the fact that the G1 has no optical viewfinder is exactly the point. We Billion Monkeys, as I like to call us, look at all those Real Photographers with their clunky black contraptions and we say to ourselves, yes, I’d love my pictures to be as good as theirs are, and it would certainly be nice to be able to use lots of different lenses the way they do, but really, does a camera have to be that big to be that good?
The thing is – from where we Billion Monkeys stand, sit or crouch – DSLRs look like a relic of the analog age, like those weird early steam ships that also had sails on them. DSLR stands for Digital Single Lens Reflex, and this refers to the fact – commenters will doubtless correct me to the degree to which I am, I am sure, somewhat-to-completely wrong – that in order for the optical viewfinder to be an accurate foretaste of the picture being attempted, the light that enters a DSLR has to be divided up and sent off to two different places, one of them being the optical viewfinder and the other being the magical electronic surface that turns the light into a digital picture. This process involves … well, it involves a lot of space and a lot of complication.
So, the G1 does away with the the optical viewfinder. You can still squint through an eyepiece if you really want to, but what you see is a digital picture, not a merely optical one. More conveniently, you can see the digital picture beforehand on a small screen, which, as with the best little digital cameras, twiddles, and hence lets you take pictures that you can still see even when you are holding the camera way above your head or way down in front of your private parts. Most DSLRs still only show you the picture on their screens afterwards, but the latest ones also have these see-the-picture-beforehand screens, but this combining of optical and digital previewing all adds to the size and the expense. What the G1 does is put all its pre-viewing and post-viewing eggs in the one digital basket.
→ Continue reading: The Panasonic Lumix DMC-G1 is a glimpse of a different and better world
We have sometimes been pretty harsh on John McCain at this blog. It is only right, though, to remember the very fine qualities of this man. Coffee House does so. Well said.
Some of the comments that we got yesterday after the Community Organiser from Chicago was elected were wonderful. Here is my personal favourite:
First, demonize him and ascribe his motives to evil and malfeasance, not just policy differences. We should proclaim often and loudly that he is not our president, that he stole the election and he has no mandate. We should repeat false stories about him, no matter how crazy or wrong, until they are accepted as common wisdom. We should create lies and urban legends to smear him and demean him. We should ridicule any verbal slips or gaffes, and ascribe them to his native stupidity and intellectual vapidity. We should accuse him of every sin and crime under the sun and attempt to have him impeached for policy differences, which we should call crimes. We should undermine any programs he wants to pass by misstating their goals and content. We should take quotes out of context to make him seem ridiculous and to make him seem mean-spirited. We should repeat often that he doesn’t care about people who aren’t the same race as he is, and that he is only out for his own kind. We should claim that he is going to try to force a coup and take over the country by force. We should claim he’s going to lock up any dissenters. We should loudly scream about losing our rights and interfere with his speechs and disrupt any gatherings of his party. Our politicians should cynically misstate his policies to make him look bad.
Update: one or two commenters are outraged by this and the words “native stupidity” have prompted at least one commenter to accuse me of being a racist in putting this paragraph on the blog. For goodness sake: the whole point of the comment was that it was written by a very bitter man who understandably feels that it is time that Obama should be attacked in exactly the same way as was Bush, who after all has been constantly attacked for being stupid, for his Texan drawl, whatever. What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
I don’t normally respond to comments by adding to my original posts, but in this case I think it is necessary to lay down a marker to all those Obama supporters out there who might get twitchy when their hero gets any flak: criticism of Mr Obama is not some form of disguised racism. If the Democrats and their cheerleaders in the MSM spend the next four years trying to ward off all criticism of their man as racist, they will demean the genuine examples of racism that still exist. Further, they will, either unwittingly or not, harm racial harmony in the US and elsewhere. They will also deserve our contempt.
Andy Burnham MP to the Royal Television Society (in questions after the speech):
The time has come for perhaps a different approach to the internet. I want to even up that see-saw, even up the regulation [imbalance] between the old and the new.
[Reported by The Register]
Twice is coincidence…
In response to a letter from the UK Department for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR), Nominet is announcing an independent review of its current corporate governance structure, to be benchmarked against established best practice corporate governance standards.
Three times is enemy action…
Hazel Blears MP:
There will always be a role for political commentary, providing perspective, illumination and explanation. But editors need to do more to disentangle it from news reporting, and to allow elected politicians the same kind of prominent space for comment as people who have never stood for office. […]
Unless and until political blogging adds value to our political culture, by allowing new and disparate voices, ideas and legitimate protest and challenge, and until the mainstream media reports politics in a calmer, more responsible manner, it will continue to fuel a culture of cynicism and despair.
I take it that “adds value” means ‘supports us’; “legitimate protest” means ‘sneering at our enemies’; and a “more responsible manner” means ‘without questioning our control of the discourse’.
Jonah Goldberg over at National Review Online’s The Corner blog makes the point that the election of Mr Obama, by a landslide, does rather crush the idea that colour is any longer a serious bar to achievement in the US. Well he has a point, although I am sure there are still plenty of racists around who might try to hinder the efforts of others on grounds of race. But as we free marketeers like to point out, outside the world intermediated via political coercion, being a bigot imposes a serious cost on the bigot, since being prejudiced against a smart, hardworking person on the grounds of their skin colour is stupid. A rational employer, for example, even if he is a bigot, will employ people if he or she can get a competitive edge thereby. That is why markets can have a general tendency, if they are allowed to work vigorously, against bigots, even if racial prejudices persist.
With the institutions run by the state, meanwhile, Mr Goldberg argues that with the election of Mr Obama, it is going to be much, much harder for defenders of racial quotas in things like university admissions to continue with the idea that reverse discrimination is required any longer. Hmmm. I personally am a bit skeptical: there is such a large vested interest in maintaining the politics of grievance that getting rid of reverse discrimination will not be easy. But I think one welcome aspect of Mr Obama’s election is that he will emphatically knock down the image of America as closed to non-whites. It has been nonsense for years of course, as a prominent, black economist like Thomas Sowell has been pointing out. Condi Rice and Colin Powell’s advancement to the summit of government hardly squares with the idea of a bigoted Republic, although having served under Republican administrations, they do not get much of a pass from the MSM. But the grievance industry, as an unintended consequence, just took a big hit with the election of the Community Organiser from Chicago. That is surely a good thing.
But what’s not open for debate, after tonight, is the sheer futility of trying to build a coalition from the center out. Because the center won’t stand still for any candidate.
– Dan McLaughlin, as pointed out by commenter Andrew X.
I attended a US Election Night Party in central London last night. It was wall-to-wall Obamamaniacs. They had badges (or ‘buttons’ as you Americans call them) on sale and while my first choice would have been Bob Barr, I chose a McCain/Palin one just to piss everybody off. Significantly, the Obama/Biden badges were on sale at £5 each while the McCain/Palin ones were going for a knock-down £3. A portent of things to come, I thought.
Anyway, since Perry has manfully tried to steer us all towards optimism this morning, I felt compelled to sink my hand into the mud, dredge up a big, smelly, greasy, filthy dollop of pessimism and smear it all over you. Oh come on, you know you love it really.
So, the USA has finally got its version of the Tony Blair/New Labour revolution and, if our experience is anything to go by, then ‘get ready for da pain’. I wish someone had had the foresight to slap an export restriction on it. It means (as if you have not already guessed) a whole heaping helping of new taxes and regulations but, most tellingly, a huge expansion in the public sector payroll. What better way to ensure future election success than with an army of loyal, grateful and dependent voters? That’s how they did it here. Welcome to the client-state. Can they do it? Yes they can. And they will.
The Republican Party (which I care little for) is probably buggered. Not only is it going to take them a long time to get over the now-universal loathing of ‘Bush and the neocons’ but they are also likely to paralyse themselves with an extended period of intra-party squabbling about which directon to take. Furthermore, it is very unsafe to assume that they will move in the right direction. We made that mistake here after the Conservatives got their clocks cleaned in three consecutive elections. “They have no choice”, we said “but to take the party in a more free market, libertarian direction”. Boy, were we wrong about that. Instead, they decided that what they needed was a big dose of what the other guy was having. Don’t be surprised if you find that the whole centre of American political gravity has shifted semi-permanently to the statist/left.
However, libertarian ideas (which I care a lot for) are also probably buggered. The Keynsians are busy priming their pumps which means that not only are things going to get worse, they are going to made worse. But do you think that Mr. Audacity and his chums are going to get the blame for that? Think again. “Unregulated, free market capitalism” (as if we have ever been within a cruise missiles range of any such thing) has already been fingered as the culprit for this crisis of regulatory statism and that gigantic lie has now become the accepted narrative. As I always say, its perceptions that matter. For crying out loud, the epidemic of violent youth crime in this country is still being laid at the door of Margaret Thatcher (“She created a greedy, me-first society where nobody cares about other people”).
Furthermore, we can expect to have to deal with an emboldened IslamoLeft. Regardless of whether or not there is any objective justification, they will see this as a vindication of their efforts meriting a redoubling of their political ‘jihad’. I’m not necessarily referring to bombs on buses here but, if I was them, I would be drooling at the sight of all those 20-something “Yes we can” chanters and gearing up to harvest a fresh crop of Useful Idiots (a Western commodity so reliable that it really ought to be the subject of a futures contract, like pork bellies or cocoa).
So, there we have it. Several reasons to be uncheerful. What do we do? I have no idea. Probably carry on doing this. What else can we do?
Have a nice day.
And come back soon.
Missing you already.
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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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