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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Along with these fine people, I will be one of the speakers at the Libertarian International conference in Warsaw on June 28-29. I will be speaking about how government regulation of radio spectrum flows through into such things as excessive roaming charges on your mobile phone, and leads to absurd states of affairs such as having a continent wide 3G mobile broadband network that is too expensive for anyone travelling outside their own country to actually use. This is course creates a vicious circle in which regulators feel they have to correct “market failures”. I will be addressing the question of how much regulation (if any) is necessary in the first place.
It would be splendid to see any readers who feel like joining us at the conference and in Warsaw and an associated trip to Krakow on the following days. I know from experience that Warsaw is a fun and stimulating city, and I promise to mount an expedition to seek out vodka in bars with far too much chrome on Saturday night with anyone who cares to join me.
Andrew Sullivan, who supports Barack Obama despite the latter’s Big Government views and the former’s alleged hatred of said, comes up with a defence of Obama’s recent resignation from his church, of which Obama has been a member for over two decades:
The glee with which some have pounced on Obama’s decision to quit TUCC strikes me as unbecoming to anyone who takes faith seriously.
Maybe the “glee” has to do with the way that the rather sanctimonious Mr Obama has, to coin a popular phrase, thrown his old church under a bus lest his membership of a church involving the likes of nutjob Jeremiah Wright damage his run at the White House. Naturally, Sullivan, whose defence of Obama gets daily more desperate, will not countenance the idea. Let’s just ask ourselves whether he would be so obliging about say, a Republican candidate that had been a member of a church taking a “Christianist” (ie, traditional Christian) view of things like gay marriage, for instance. Well, to quote the late Enoch Powell, to ask the question is to know the answer.
Some time ago a commenter on this site pointed out that Sullivan is no longer honest about his political views and motivations, not even with himself.
In case anyone asks, I support gay marriage. The state should be out of the business of regulating marriage between adults, period.
As the UK administration implodes, the sort of idiotic ideas that might once have been swept aside by a pliant media can be now guaranteed to get wide coverage. The Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, is obviously determined that Mr Brown’s fall from grace is swift and brutal. Oh but the voters are going to like this:
Islamic extremists could escape prosecution and instead receive therapy and counselling under new Government plans to “deradicalise” religious fanatics.
The Home Office is to announce an extra £12.5 million to support new initiatives to try to stop extremism spreading.
What, so being an Islamist is like being an alcoholic or crack addict. I am not sure how Muslims will react to the idea that the more extreme representatives of their faith are somehow mentally ill. In a way, the therapy culture undermines what ought to be the most important message of all: that we are rational, responsible beings, with free will, able to take the consequences of our behaviour. Islam means “submission”: to challenge that viewpoint does not involve putting some hate-filled fuckwit on a couch, but by advocating the values of reason and freedom without apology.
The idea that our tax pounds should be used in some daft attempt to “cure” Islamic fanatics is frankly laughable. It also shows how profoundly unserious this government is about the problem. What next, therapy for “extreme” Christians, Jews, atheists, Communists, Fascists, Jedi Knights (okay, that was meant as a joke), Jehovah’s Witnesses?
When Islamic extremists are caught for offences of violence or plotting terror, the correct object of public spending should be on things like these instead.
I am out of tune with the spirit of the age. My first reaction was to laugh out loud:
The grandson of prominent anti-gun campaigner Pat Regan has been arrested on suspicion of stabbing her to death.
– Yahoo/ITN News
It is not just the paradox. It is the way such an incident – horrific in reality though it no doubt is – puts the lie to all such sentimental campaigns.
Children are not angels corrupted by contact with mundane implements; they are social animals, small brutes that will grow into large brutes unless civilized. A civilized man ought to be able to carry a gun without offering to shoot anyone under any provocation short of violence offered. A brute will assault you with whatever comes to hand if he feels slighted, and the last thing society needs is for him to have is greater self-esteem. [(1) – (2)] Fetishising mere tools just further exculpates violent people in their own minds.
Am I too cynical, or too idealistic?
Here is a long and quite good article at the Wall Street Journal about the recent ban on consumption of alcohol on London’s underground metro system. The ban is one of the first measures of the new London mayor, Boris Johnson. On Saturday, with the clock ticking away before the ban came into force from 1 June, large numbers of young people – they seemed to be mostly a bunch of young students – were openly drinking, some playing lots of music, and generally whooping it up on the Tube. Yours truly and Mrs P. forgot all about the ban and so we got a bit of a shock when, on the Circle line, our cabin was full of these raucous, and already extremely drunk, folk. They seemed pretty good natured although I was already betting that the end would end in arrests. It did. Walking by High Street Kensington Tube station later on, I could hear the PA system blare out the message that the station was being closed. In the end, 17 people were arrested for crimes including assault.
I guess this proves Boris’s point for him. Some liberal-minded folk might claim that his ban on drinking on the Tube is nanny statism, not what one would expect from the fun-loving newspaper columnist, former MP and bon viveur. Mind you, defending the right of people to drink and get slammed on the Tube late at night is not the sort of freedom I am particularly inclined to go over the top for. It is not an obvious assault on private property rights as was, say, the banning of smoking in pubs and restaurants. The Tube, after all, receives tax funds and is not a completely private entity. If it were, then the owners could of course decide the matter. They might even ban it anyway to protect the bulk of people who find it possible to travel from A to B without holding a can of beer.
Whether the ban can be properly enforced or not is another matter. I expect a raging trade in small, easy-to-conceal hipflasks.
If a Mafia don forced you and your neighbours to pay him protection and he later had the brass neck to claim that you were getting great value for money instead of the services offered by free marketeers, I think you would, humble reader, suspect a bit of a flaw in the logic. Well, that flaw appears to be lost on the author of a piece that carries the headline, “Why Jonathan Ross is worth the money”. For people who have been blessed with ignorance as to whom Ross is, he is a foul-mouthed, extremely well paid late-night chatshow host and movie pundit who, among other recent glittering performances, told the US actress Gwyneth Paltrow and mother of two children that he’d like to f**k her. Classy.
Excerpt:
The most important thing is that in everything the BBC does, the trust is looking for it to demonstrate as often as possible an understanding that it must justify the licence fee by striving constantly to deliver the highest standards and programmes that stand out from the crowd.
The public values talented performers – but expects, rightly, that it will get the best possible value when paying for them.
The author of this piece forgets that value is in the eye of the beholder. If I think that I get value for money for shopping in Tesco’s, Sainsbury’s or Walmart, that is my judgement, made on the basis of my choice, for specific goods that I happen to buy. If one of those supermarket chains demanded that I pay them a flat fee every year regardless of whether I shopped there or not, and claimed that its services/goods were “great value for money”, and employed loutish staff, I think I might be a tad unimpressed by that logic.
The only way to know if the BBC offers value for money is to let customers pay for it out of their own free will. Everything else is special pleading.
Via the Boing Boing website – is this superb picture. Enjoy.
‘The Caballeros’ of the National Space Security Office were awarded the National Space Society’s prestigious ‘Space Pioneer Award’ this evening for their work in bringing the possibilities of Space Based Solar power to the attention of the powers that be and pretty much every one else.
Although these ideas have been known ‘forever’ amongst my circles, they have been out of the limelight for decades due to a Carter-era hatchet job.
So, congrats to our friends in DOD, and new found drinking buddy Coyote Smith!
The Caballeros receive their just rewards for saving the planet. Coyote is second from right. I’ll add other names later.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
Speaking of drinking… there is a party in the suite down the hall, so that is me away!
There is poetry, there is bad poetry and there is an order of magnitude revealed by the “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly” Fifth Annual Horrible College-Student Poetry Competition.
Some snippets from a piece that has a fluidity we can only dream of:
When I see the fungual discoloration of my toenails,
I see all of the free people not given a living wage by America.
And when I see all of the problems my body has
But I have no national health care plan to help,
I see that I, too, have been victimized by America.
Or this:
[NOTE: Next verse recited stoic’ly, almost Gaelic’ly, like in the movie “Rob Roy” or “Braveheart, with one lone mournful bagpipe weeping from behind]
The dogs of a chicken-hawk war run blindingly on!
Their fateful howling screams a den of fearul shame!
Can they see not the havick they so retchedly reek upon us all!
And that they’re woeful day of wreckn’ing is writ large upon them!
While their currish tails all but hide their rancid fowl deseats?
Will we stand most righteous against the patricianarchal neocon hordes?
Against the hatemongrills, the warmongrills, each mongrills all!
That would dog-wag us into unjust genocide with their hateful doggerills?
For in their primate fear can they not see the truth afire?!
The truth all burning …all … afire?!
Do read the whole post.
“Happily, we were indestructible. We didn’t need seat belts, airbags, smoke detectors, bottled water or the Heimlich manoeuvre. We didn’t require child safety caps on our medicines. We didn’t need helmets when we rode our bikes or pads for our knees and elbows when we went skating. We knew without being reminding that bleach was not a refreshing drink and that gasoline when exposed to a match had a tendency to combust. We didn’t have to worry about what we ate because nearly all foods were good for us: sugar gave us energy, red meat made us strong, ice cream gave us healthy bones, coffee kept us alert and purring productively.”
– Bill Bryson, The Live and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, page 106.
I adore this book.
I recently got round to reading Peter Oborne’s “The Triumph of The Political Class”, which I would tentatively rate as the most important book written about the state of British politics in recent years. His basic argument is that today’s political class has little experience of the real world outside the corridors of power, is drawn from an insular group of metropolitan folk who consider themselves superior to, and cut off from, the ordinary mass; it craves power for its own sake and for its monetary rewards, is corrupt, venal, obsessed by controlling the media, and has damaged and is damaging any institutions and practices – such as the old House of Lords or judiciary – that get in its way. Oborne argues his case with a tremendous passion and penetrating use of argument. At the end of the 334 pages of text one is left – which I think is the idea – feeling rather depressed. With good reason.
So why do I say that the book is incomplete? Well, for a start, Mr Oborne does not spend much time figuring out how the European Union and the growing centralisation of power in Brussels plays into all this. This strikes me as a bit of an oddity. Consider this: if we accept Mr Oborne’s idea that this class of people are determined to acquire power and wealth, why have they been so keen to transfer so much power to the EU? Sure, some of these politicians may have made the base calculation that they can feather their own nests very nicely in Brussels or Strasbourg, but for a lot of them, turning parliament into little more than a branch office of Brussels with a few perks is not much of an ambition. It is odd that he does not spend more time on this aspect of the question.
I also think that Mr Oborne’s attack on the mainstream media for getting too close to the established parties – especially Labour – is seriously undermined by his completely ignoring the role of modern electronic media, particularly the internet. He makes no mention of things like blogging whatever. Now, I do not think that the role of the web should be exaggerated, but surely, the role of blogs in digging into subjects left alone by the MSM has, at the margins, made a positive difference. Take the scandals that have been exposed by Guido Fawkes, for instance.
But perhaps the biggest mistake in the book is quite simply this: it is no good Mr Oborne or anyone else attacking such a political class unless they attack the fundamental problem at its root: Big Government. Remember, that this class is powerful because it has a large structure off which to live. Re-establishing some traditional checks and balances into public life may reduce some corruption and public venality, as Mr Oborne no doubt hopes, but it is only by cutting the state down to size that we will realistically starve the beast that feeds this class. As I have pointed out several times on this site, one of the most damaging things done by the current government was to have enabled a massive rise in the number of people employed directly and indirectly, by the state. The reversal of this process is, in my view, rather more important than wondering whether an MP is fiddling his expenses or having sex with his secretary.
Even so, I urge people to read this book if they want to get a good handle on the state of public life in the UK in the early 21st century.
What it [the UK Libertarian Party] will do, like the Libertarian Party has done in the United States, is to tarnish the libertarian brand, allowing the crazier aspects of libertarian thinking to come to the fore, and achieving nothing of any merit.
– Alex Singleton, ‘How Libertarians undermine liberty‘
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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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