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]
It is occasionally an accolade when a person’s name becomes a figure of speech, such as ‘Churchillian’ for example. Far more commonly however it is a sign of cultural stigmatisation: a Hitler, a Napoleon, Fisking, Dowdification, Pilgerisation… these are not saying anything nice about the source of the respective terms.
And to which must be added, to be ‘a Spitzer’.
There is a magnificent article on TCS Daily called The Universal Spitzer that I strongly commend to everyone:
It is a shame that we only laugh at a Spitzer when his secret sex life is revealed to us. Instead of mocking Spitzers for their private foibles, we should be contemptuous of their public pronouncements. Whether it is “cleaning up Wall Street” or “giving everyone health care,” the Spitzers are making extravagant promises that only result in expanded government power.
Great stuff. Read the whole thing. The article also links to an excellent article by Virginia Postrel about the deeply unpleasant John McCain which I missed first time around.
Obama’s speeches frequently include passages that flatter their listeners who aren’t quite intelligent enough to realize how shallow his thinking actually is into thinking that they are more intelligent than they are.
This is a must-visit for fans of 007 and his literary creator. There are a few events this year to mark what would be Ian Fleming’s 100th birthday, 28 May, which also happens to be my own birthday, by weird coincidence. Sebastian Faulks is bringing out a new Bond novel on that day. Most of the attempts to carry on the character by other writers have not really worked, although Kingsley Amis had a good shot at it. I quite enjoy Faulks’ writings, so this might be good. Let’s face it, the movie-makers have already used up all the original Fleming story lines so they could use some decent new ones without too many corny one-liners or implausible villains.
There has been a lot of comment this week about a House of Lords report on the benefits, or otherwise, of mass immigration to the UK as far as the economics is concerned. It did not address the cultural aspects, such as the influx of large numbers of people from fundamentalist Islamic states or people with other, very different traditions to those of the existing population. It talked about the impact on the economy. The general conclusion is that in the long run, there is a very small, positive impact on growth but no real impact overall on GDP per head. And for some parts of the existing workforce, the impact is bad: lower wages, or no work at all.
The Sunday Telegraph, in its leader column, broadly endorses this analysis. What bothers me, however, is this: if immigrants are ‘taking’ a certain number of jobs (our old friend, the Lump of Labour Fallacy, is at it again), why not recommend say, a drastic pro-emigration policy for say, 25 per cent of the population, or even half? I mean, if there are “too many” people in the UK, why not go for a massive reduction? Indeed, if you take the argument to extremes, you could argue that we would be fabulously rich if the population were reduced to say, 100,000 or one million.
But that would remove all the benefits of a large population, which the immigrant-bashers overlook: the skills, or ‘human capital’ that a large population makes available. The silliness of the complaints about all those foreigners ‘taking’ ‘our’ jobs is not just the Lump of Labour Fallacy, however, which by extension is part of the closed-system thinking one associates with socialism and many other collectivistic doctrines.. It is also the unspoken assumption, rarely explicitly spelled out, that there is some sort of optimum, or “just about right” level of population for a given geographic area. But how do the noble Lords or even a mere economist figure out how many people in a country is right or wrong? And as a commenter said, I believe on this site, some months ago, you do not hear about Tescos or Vodafone moaning about “too many customers” putting pressures on their services.
Of course, some commenters will insist that the cultural implications of mass immigration from the Islamic world, say, outweighs what economic benefits there might be, but that is a separate issue.
I realise it is only April, so there is ample time for someone else to win the much vaunted Samizdata prize of ‘oddest remark of the year’, but this has to be a real contender:
However, Prof Rowthorn said the most likely victims were British-born school-leavers who had never had a job, having failed to find the kind of casual work they might have walked into a few years ago. The claim will fuel a political row over the prospects for a generation referred to as “Neets” (not in education, employment or training).
The professor said: “We are looking at the most vulnerable, least skilled and in some ways least motivated members of the local workforce. The problem that eastern European migrants pose is that they are good workers.”
So the fact good workers are arriving in the UK is a ‘problem’ and that employers have them to hire rather than having to try and coax an honest day’s work out of the least unmotivated native born lumpen is… a bad thing for people in Britain overall? Hmmm.
Also as the total number of job has been rising steadily for quite some time, it is hard to hide the fact the children of the British ‘welfare’ state are simply acting as the state has conditioned them to act. Of course the irony is that the people in some part replacing them are high initiative individuals arriving from former communist countries in search of better opportunities. And such people filling jobs grows the economy, so again the advantages overall take wilful blindness not to see.
Locals who cannot compete with Eastern European need to ask themselves why that is. My guess is that they are not really trying to compete very hard because after all, they can always just sign on for the dole. I find it hard to be sympathetic when a person’s poverty is simply a function of a lack of motivation.
Of course one is not suppose to say things like that. My bad.
As you know, I am not a skeptic of the science on this issue, something you never really see outside of journals… but I am utterly disgusted by the politics of it and the loathsome people purveying it for totalitarian purposes. This is not to say I will claim the writer was one of them, but that person may well have been pounced upon and forced to recant.
Perhaps I should note my own standards on this issue. I often ‘publish’ a late draft because my preview mode is not the best and do spelling, punctuation, link checks, syntax and such live. Sometimes in that interval I will make significant changes if I feel I did not make my point clearly. But once I am done, usually within 5-10 minutes of first publication, the article is forever frozen and any corrections (other than spelling or commas) is placed underneath the article in italics.
Making changes in the first few minutes after publication in this fast paced world is necessary. Going back hours or days later and making wholesale rewrites to the public record is not.
One might also note an exception: if one finds they have issued a libellous statement or accidentally published proprietary information or totally false information that is of course grounds for pulling the whole article… or striking out the offending phrase and placing a note like this one underneath. This is what the BBC should have done if they believed they had published incorrect data.
Note that I have been ‘playing’ with this article to explore with you the range of changes and time periods I feel comfortable with. There are some difficult issues here and I am not sure where the precise line is… although I am sure the BBC was well over it in this case.
This is one of those before-I-entirely-forget-about-it and better-late-than-never postings, for which deepest apologies to all who might mind that I didn’t put it up a week ago, when I should have.
So anyway, some while ago Antoine Clarke and I did one of our occasional recorded conversations about politics, here and in the USA. After we’d talked about the mess the US Democrats have got themselves into (I suggested a coin toss to settle it), we then mentioned the Libertarian Party, and the fact that they will soon be choosing their Presidential candidate. And after that, we switched to libertarian politics on this side of the pond, the point being that, in a very small way, there is some UK libertarian politics to report, in the form of the recently founded UK Libertarian Party. Antoine mentioned that the UKLP was having some kind of public event in the near future, and I mentioned this possibility in the blog posting I did in connection with all this. And “Devil’s Kitchen”, one of the bosses of the UKLP and also a noted blogger, left a comment:
We have a general meeting and piss-up from 3pm this Saturday (29th March 08), upstairs at St Stephen’s Tavern, Westminster.
Do feel free to drop in if you so desire …
So, I did. This was just over a week ago, as I say. As I made my way there, I feared the worst, namely a little clutch of social dyslexics as old as me and as badly dressed as me, but even fatter and even uglier, some of them clutching grubby plastic bags full of newspaper cuttings. I got there nearer to 6pm than 3pm, and immediately thought: oh dear, I am too late and they have all gone. The first floor of the St Stephen’s Tavern was, you see, full of normal people. But just as I was about to leave and go home again, the guy who turned out to be Mr Devil’s Kitchen himself hailed me. He even recognised me. So, I went over, and asked him which of this enormous throng of people were the UKLP. “They all are”, he said.
I did not stay long, because I was trying to recover from a nasty cough and cold. Also, what with these people looking so normal, and hence of potential political significance, I did not want to infect them. But I stayed long enough to discover that they all seemed to have lives and jobs and brains, and social antennae, and the looks to match. Mostly they were twenty somethings or thirty somethings, mostly male but with a few young women. I was allowed to take photos, but the ones without flash were too blurry and the ones with flash (which I seldom use) made all concerned look like horror movie extras, because my red-eye thingy was either not switched on or else is useless.
Which was a pity, because appearances matter, or they do if you are trying to start a political party. If your only concern is publishing things, the way it always has been with me, fine, look any way you like. But trying to be politicians and looking old and ugly means that you are not just old and ugly, but stupid and pathetic as well.
But I did stay for a bit, and I can report that the effort put in by my generation of libertarians and libertarian fellow-travellers, such as those who run and write for Samizdata, have most definitely not been wasted, if all these nice intelligent young total strangers were anything to go by, which they surely are. I have always been deeply pessimistic about whether libertarian parties can ever get anywhere, but have reluctantly come to the conclusion that although it is a dirty job, someone has probably got to do it, and whether they should or not, they will anyway, so why fight it? I wish these people all the luck that I fear they will need.
I also learned something else. Mr Devil’s Kitchen is, like David Cameron, an Old Etonian. That’s another thing that maybe should not count, but does.
To hell with constructive engagement. This is a state that imprisons, tortures and kills its political opponents. It is a state that pollutes public discourse with untruths, and that not only seeks to suppress truths, but that seeks to suppress the free exchange of thought between its citizens. It is a state that gives succour to the genocidal regime in Sudan, and has backed itself into the position of casting Buddhist monks as dangerous terrorists.
The recent scary share price fall in HBOS, the UK banking group, prompted alarm that hedge funds and other naughty speculators were deliberately bad-mouthing the company in order to make its shares drop, and profit from that fall. There may be some truth in this: the UK financial regulator, the Financial Services Authority, is checking this case, although my confidence that the FSA will find anything has not been improved by the watchdog’s almost total uselessness over the Northern Rock affair. But as this article points out, the supposedly demonic practice of “shorting” a company is often a good thing. If investors can make a profit by a company they think is headed for trouble, it can light a fire under the complacent/useless/criminal/other executives of that company.
It all sounds a bit like witchcraft to the economic non-expert. What the bejeesus is shorting? Simply, it is the practice of borrowing something like a company’s shares in the expectation they will fall in price, then selling them, repurchasing them at a cheaper price a couple of days later, and pocketing the difference. Short-selling used to be mainly done by hedge funds who borrowed shares, bonds and other things from banks. But through derivatives like spread-betting accounts, contracts for difference and warrants, even your average Joe Punter can do this, although they would be wise to realise the risks. Numero Uno risk is that the market will not fall as the punter expects, so the investor, be he Nobel Prize winner or retired executive trading stocks in Surrey, should limit their losses by buying a pre-arranged clause to close off a bet.
Making money when a market falls. How cool is that?
We will know that South Africa does not have the stomach to support freedom and democracy for this vulnerable country. Zimbabweans must now exercise their Lockean right of self preservation to exterminate this kleptocratic elite who deny them consent and rob them of their property.
It has been revealed that the Europhiles in the Tory party, led by John Maples MP, rigged the Tories’ recent primary for Members of the European Parliament in order to prevent the deselection of Europhile incumbents and to promote women that had received too few votes. ConservativeHome has the full, sordid account.
Shane Greer – a sound centre-right blogging celeb – keeps popping up on Sky News. The news channel’s blog posting about his appearance yesterday bills him simply as “top blogger Shane Greer”. He was on the channel to discuss the stories moving across the web, although the last time I saw him, he was reviewing the papers.
Shane has got an important political media job too (he is executive editor of the forthcoming magazine Total Politics). The presenter did mention that (it is just before the clip below starts), but while Shane was speaking the caption was www.shanegreer.com, his personal blog. I noticed, similarly, Jeff Jarvis being introduced on the channel either today or yesterday as being the author of the BuzzMachine blog.
This is yet more evidence that blogging really is fully mainstream. Additionally, Shane’s blogging-print media combination highlights for me that the traditional media and the best of the blogosphere are now increasingly one in the same.
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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