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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I have a theory about gadgets, which is that we all get fixated on a particular type of gadget, on account of the particular sort of life we lead, or were leading when the fixation struck. I now live a very settled life, so, although I love my favourite sort of music considerably more than life itself, the iPod now holds no appeal for me. When on the move I prefer to read books. But when I first got bitten by the computing bug (which rapidly became the computing necessity), I lived a very unsettled life, and I thus became fixated on the idea of a really good, but really portable, computer. My first computer was an Osborne, which I could just about shift from one work surface to another, or move from one house to another, every few months. But, not surprisingly, I yearned for something lighter. Much lighter.
Laptops as currently understood have never enthralled me. Too expensive to take everywhere, and risk losing, to accident, forgetfulness or thievery. And still too big and heavy for my feeble arms.
So it is that I have been tracking the Eee PC, ever since they first announced that they were working away at it to the point where they would be able to announce it for real, with things like specs, a price, and somewhere you could actually go and buy it. The trouble with all ultra-portable computers up until now is that the smaller they have been, the more expensive they have been. What I have always wanted is a proper computer small enough to fit into a big pocket – and by the way why don’t they make pockets bigger? – yet cheap enough to be purchasable out of semi-petty cash, and hence, at a pinch, if someone does pinch it, or if I drop it or something, I can just about afford to buy another without severe financial meltdown.
So anyway, the news now is that I am apparently not the only one on this planet thinking like this. The Eee PC is about to become a runaway hit:
The company first said the computer would be on shelves by August, then September, before it finally arrived Oct. 17. The holdup, says Shen, was making sure the interface worked well. To test it, Asustek took 1,000 prototypes and distributed them to employees and vendors, with strict orders to share them with family members of all ages. Bloggers on Eee PC Web sites that sprung up after the Computex show groaned that the product was taking too long to come out, but that didn’t bother Shen. “The user experience must be very high,” he says. “So we delayed, because with all the momentum built up around this product, I want to make sure it’s exactly right.”
There’s nothing as cheap as a hit, and when you have a hit, make ’em queue round the block. Bloggers groaning? My oh my. But yes, me too.
However, I will not be buying an Eee PC until I can physically handle one, either owned by a friend or in a shop. Or, you know, maybe I’ll meet a stranger with one and ask to have a go on it. I hope the keyboard is very small, so that it is. I have very small hands, and you know what that means. Finally, this may be of some advantage to me.
Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams is like a compass-that-faces-south… always wrong but useful nevertheless because as long as he is dependably wrong, he can still be used when plotting a course.
His latest pearl of wisdom is the solution to reducing the numbers of children acting irresponsibly by engaging in violent crimes: Stop holding them responsible. His logic is hard to fault. If you deem than a child cannot be responsible for their actions, clearly they cannot therefore be irresponsible… voila… less children acting irresponsibly. In fact by definition no children can be said to have acted irresponsibly because the very notion of judging responsibility is disallowed. In a political and law-enforcement culture in which ‘that which is not measured never happened’, I can see the attraction of this approach. But then again Britain’s welfare state treats everyone regardless of their age like an irresponsible child, incapable or unwilling to look to their own pensions, medical care, etc. etc, so perhaps there is a bigger meme at work here.
It’s not to weaken the seriousness of what they do
… the Archbishop says, and then promptly weakens the seriousness of what they do by suggesting a child can cause the death of someone and get away with it, whereas an older person cannot. So how is that not weakening the seriousness of what the child has done? Also I am curious, how is taking away responsibility going to encourage more responsibility? Perhaps the following is what the Plod will be told to do:
PC Dixon of Dock Green: “Now look here, Little Timmy, it is very bad throwing rocks at people and killing them. If you do that when you are older, we will be very cross.”
Little Timmy from the Bedlam Estate: “Oh, okay then, I’ll just get it out of my system now while it doesn’t count.”
PC Dixon of Dock Green: “It’s a fair cop, Timmy, just don’t do it after you turn sixteen, okay?”
Little Timmy from the Bedlam Estate: “Nice hat, Copper. Hand it over.”
Oh, and mothers too, they also should not be held responsible for some reason. It is all down to too many bad movies and Britain’s ‘gun culture’, whatever the fuck that means in a country which probably has less civilian guns in total than almost any single US state other than the very smallest ones. I wonder of God’s Idiot would describe a nation without much in the way of musicians or musical instruments as having a ‘musical culture’?
However would we manage without the Church of England to guide us, eh?
Most people in the UK, and many abroad, are familiar with the case of Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian who was shot dead by Metropolitan police as a suspected suicide bomber on 22nd July, 2005. The latest in this saga is that the shooting was ruled a breach health and safety laws.
Well, okay, I am fairly sure that Jean Charles de Menezes would have felt his health and safety were not well served by the people who shot him dead. But surely coming to that conclusion cannot have taken more than two years of deliberation. The Met screwed up big time and killed an innocent man in a horrific way, that was clear fairly soon after the event.
But at the risk of seeming heartless, mistakes happen. I am not saying the Met should not be raked over the coals for this horrendous error (indeed they should be), but one can still take the view that the principle of shooting dead suicide bombers who are in public places is still a rather good one, just so long as the people doing the shooting have a bloody good reason to think the people they shoot are indeed suicide bombers. That is not a casual qualification of principle… if the decision-making processes used by the Met to make such calls is always likely to be as defective as it demonstrably was on 22nd July, 2005, then we need to be convinced that this is no longer the case if we are to ever trust the police to make that sort of decision again.
But that is a fairly straightforward managerial question… it seems to me that the real issue that needs to be settled is not ‘did the police screw up’ (clearly they did) but rather was the police’s response to its dreadful mistake criminal?
We were fed a stream of completely baseless lies in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. Jean Charles de Menezes looked middle eastern (he did not), he was wearing an unseasonable padded coat that could have hidden a bomb (he was not), we was running towards the train (he was not), he ran when challenged by armed police (he did not), he jumped over the turnstile (in fact he used his god damned travel card)… The CCTV footage? It was not turned on. And then it was but it did not record. And then it cannot be found. Lie after lie after lie.
The real questions which need to be answered are not “were the health and safety laws violated?”… An innocent man was shot in the head seven times by the police for Christ’s sake! Of course it was a mistake, no one thinks the police intentionally shot the wrong man just for the hell of it. The question is, why are the people who then tried to cover it up not looking AT THE VERY LEAST at the end of their careers and more reasonably, prosecution for conspiring to pervert the course of justice? What were the names of the people behind each of those falsehoods? Presumably the people who said those things are still working for the Met. Otherwise what? Did journalists just invent those claims? I would really like to know. I have watched the coverage waiting for these things to be asked and not seen anything along those lines. Instead, we hear about ‘health and safety laws’. Amazing.
Mistakes happen and that is tragic. But if the police (who exactly?) then try to cover that fact up, lethal mistakes will continue to happen, which is a catastrophe.
That is the real issue.
I started off wanting to cheer this article – an angry denunciation of the rich folk who often back Green causes – but I then began to wonder whether I was falling for what amounts to an ad hominem argument, and felt rather ashamed of myself. To be sure, it is true that many greenies are extremely well off, or comfortable members of a middle class that feels guilty about material wealth – the legacy of all kinds of crap cultural and political ideas – but is it really a killer argument that a cause X or Y is backed by rich folk like Zac Goldsmith or Peter Melchett? What counts in the end is are their ideas right or wrong? For instance, Bjorn Lomborg is a sharp debunker of eco-cant and I think his take on the more extreme forms of greenery is accurate, but what does it matter whether Lomborg is a middle class Danish academic, heir to a massive fortune, or a humble shop worker?
There is a broader point here. At the Libertarian Alliance conference last weekend, I could not help reflecting on the many posh, incredibly rich folk who were old fashioned liberals (or Whigs, as they used to be called). The walls of the National Liberal Club – a fine institution – are adorned with wonderful portraits of gentlemen in frock coats and women in elegant dresses, or stern-looking 19th century businessmen and industrialists. One of the benefits of having an independent income is that it gives a group of people time to think about certain issues that cannot be done by someone working long hours for a salary and who has to please a boss; independence of means also can encourage independence of mind.
So Brendan O’Neil is wrong on this occasion, although I share his skepticism on green scares 100%. I do not give a monkey’s whether Jonathan Porritt is posh or not; it is his reactionary ideas to roll back the glories of modern industrial civilisation that bother me very much.
Whatever happened to getting your head down and doing the damn job? Whatever happened to going bowling in your own time? You want to take some of the crew from work? Well, that’s nice, too. And if a more fruitful professional relationship between a close-knit group of employees is the result, well isn’t that peachy? But really, if we are all big about this, shouldn’t we be able to interact productively without the panacea of fake camaraderie or a day throwing up in a corporate box at the races? Some of the 7/7 bombers went white-water rafting before the event, you know; and what great team players they turned out to be.
– Martin Samuel. I have never suffered a “team building” trip away from the office, thank god (my boss has better things to do).
I was trying to think of something profound to say but in the end, what the heck………
The campaign to become Mayor of London must be taking its toll. Boris Johnson writes today that the interests of the US and the rest of the world would be best served if Hillary Clinton reaches the White House. His reasoning is thin at best. Perhaps the real problem is that America, even though it is such a vast nation, has only been able to produce Presidential candidates of such dreadful quality as this lot (I am afraid that applies partly even to Ron Paul, for whom I have a lot of sympathy).
First turn up volume as soundtrack is quite soft…
I was watching the Channel 4 news coverage of the state visit of the King of Saudi Arabia to Britain, when something I saw nearly made me fall off my chair laughing.
So what does the British Army band for the guard of honour strike up as The Man himself steps out of his limo to high-five Her Majesty?
The Darth Vader March from Star Wars (click on ‘watch the report’ to see for yourself). I kid you not.
Someone somewhere deserves a medal.
I’ve yet find an area that I’ve studied extensively where the arguments justifying the state stand up to historical evidence. I think the state’s takeover of these aspects of human life occur for different reasons than the reasons currently given for the state in those areas, and that what we see is a lot of ex post rationalisation to justify the state. I haven’t looked at every area, and certainly may find some where I wouldn’t make that argument. But I have yet to find one.
– Bruce L. Benson (one of the speakers at the LA/LI Conference last weekend) talks about his work to Patrick Crozier – the whole thing lasts a little over 15 minutes
At the recent Libertarian Alliance conference in London, one of my favourite speakers, Leon Louw, mocked the idea that water on earth is scarce. Two-thirds of the Earth’s surface is covered with the wet stuff, in fact. What people mean when they say that water is scarce is not that there is a lack of H20, rather, there is a lack of drinkable, clean water. But the idea that water is scarce is, in and of itself, bonkers. As Leon said, if an alien from outer space talked to some ecological doomsters and heard their moans about water shortages, he would probably fly off in search of more intelligent life elsewhere.
Heaven knows what an intelligent alien would make of George Monbiot.
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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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