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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If you enjoyed the You-Tube video which Thaddeus pointed out, you can find the main track and much more at the band’s web site: Stuck Mojo Media.
As I spent a good chunk of my life on the bottom end of the music business I know what life there is like. Let us just say I never gave up my day job.The cost of instruments, equipment, recording, new strings for each major gig and not to mention the bar tab… make a musicians life a tough one. Even if you do have the day job to live on, you spend your life in deep levels of sleep deprivation. The only thing which keeps you going is the buzz you get from the audience. Please show these guys your gratitude by buying their music or putting something in their tip jar.
Do your part to make sure they can keep doing what they are doing!
The EU is going to ban ordinary lightbulbs because we are making the wrong choices and not buying the energy efficient ones. And who’s to blame for poor sales of the more efficient ones? The EU.
Movies have consequences:
“Iranian commentators are mainly angry, defending Iran’s action,” the e-mail said. “The reason for that is a) UK does not have a good/positive history in Iran b) Persians have been treated badly by Westerners e.g. in the movie 300 or referring to Persian Gulf as simply Gulf or Arabian Gulf, so now having the poor young sailors captivated by Iran, many Iranians feel proud!!!!!!”
Now what are the chances of Ahmedinejad changing his name to Xerxes?
The British government has issued a formal apology for Britain’s conduct during the Second World War.
Speaking from the House of Commons, Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett described Britain’s conduct in the 1939-1945 period as “shameful”:
We recognise that British military aggression between the years of 1939 and 1945 led directly or indirectly to the deaths of many, many people in Europe, Asia, Africa and elsewhere. It is time to acknowledge this fact and to apologise for it.
The opposition Conservatives roundly condemned the Foreign Secretary’s remarks as not going far enough and being “too little, too late”. They urged the Government to issue a further apology for all the environmental damage inflicted on the world by British forces during the war and since.
In Germany, a spokesman for an association of SS veterans described the apology as “a good start”.
The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) has increasingly wielded its regulatory powers in recent years, as infertility treatments have become more common and diverse. Some of the regulator’s decisions have been criticised as arbitrary or inappropriate, using an ethical calculus to coerce parental choice when it is not required. Their latest intervention is controversial, though based upon clinical outcomes.
At present, multiple embryos are implanted in the womb to increase the probability of a successful birth. This has potentially undesirable consequences if the health of the mother or the children is impaired. Studies have monitored infertility treatments and demonstrated these drawbacks.
Half of the mothers of IVF twins give birth prematurely and the babies are below the minimum ideal birth weight of 5lb. They run a much higher risk of dying, lung and heart problems, having cerebral palsy or developmental difficulties and facing chronic conditions as adults. Many spend time in special neonatal care units in hospitals. Mothers who conceive more than one baby after IVF are far likelier to suffer a miscarriage or dangerously high blood pressure than women who have one child naturally.
This should be viewed as additional information that clinicians would take into account when advising their patients and making a diagnosis or a recommendation. If the regulator had drawn attention to these studies and noted that inspectors would wish to see these taken into account during diagnosis, no observer could criticise such diligence. However, we live in New Labour Britain, home of targets and micromanagement:
Shirley Harrison, the HFEA’s chair, will this week defend the decision to put medical safety above the rights of childless women to choose how many embryos are transferred. She will cite research showing that having just one embryo implanted does not reduce a woman’s chance of conceiving.
Doctors will retain the freedom to use their clinical judgment to decide if a woman rated a ‘poor responder’ to fertility treatment should still get two embryos. Clinics will be told to reduce the number of multiple births through IVF over time from 25 per cent to somewhere between 5 and 10 per cent.
This is a decision that should rest between the doctor and the patient. If the patient is aware of the risks and responsibilities, they may then take the difficult decision required in this matter. It is not up to HFEA to usurp clinical practice and private judgement in this matter.
There has been a bit of a backlash against what might be called the “self-esteem” movement in psychology and education in the United States and elsewhere. Here is an item. It is certainly true that a lot of intellectually vapid rubbish has been written about this. For a lot of the time, it seems, “self-esteem” is nothing more than a desire to be freed from judgement, hard work and effort.
I think there is a danger that in the backlash, that the baby gets chucked out with the bathwather, however. If you think about it, self-esteem is about the idea that as human beings, we are both competent to live and worthy of achieving happiness on this earth. This has nothing to do with a vague, dope-induced “feel-good” sort of sentiment, but is something quite different. Achieving happiness and believing that one is deserving of that is often quite hard. In a culture soaked in guilt about material wealth, where people are constantly told to feel bad about prosperity and “selfish individualism”, it is actually quite gutsy for someone to stand against all this. If one thinks about it, self-esteem, properly understood, is a key component of the idea of human rights. If people are entitled to pursue happiness and the good life, then they need rights to protect and advance that.To believe in the idea of the sovereign individual, one has to believe that individuals are competent to decide their lives and also worthy of such. And a self-confident, happy and proud person is surely what a healthy, liberal civil society needs. I fear that a lot of the people now bashing the self-esteem movement are not just sensible skeptics about the latest fads to come out of academia, but also collectivists and authortarians who fear what might happen if people really do want to pursue happiness and self-fulfilment.
This classic on self-esteem is always worth a read, by Dr. Nathaniel Branden. And let’s not forget the important Victorian tradition of “self improvement”, starting with the great Samuel Smiles’ Self Help, which is much more than just getting seriously rich. There is a lot of chaff out there, but a lot of wheat as well.
The next time you read someone denounce the United States as a haven of unfettered capitalism, read this story and similar ones like it. It is a reminder that the cause of free trade has been on the back foot in the United States for some time.
Regardless of one’s feelings about the dark side of China – its dreadful human rights record, for starters – to slap tariffs on the country’s imports to buy a few votes from special interests in the US will come at a high price for future global economic growth and at a cost to US consumers of products like paper, steel or electronics. Adam Smith wrote the Wealth of Nations over 230 years ago. One might hope that his lessons would have sunk in by now.
It was deplorable that the woman hostage should be shown smoking. This sends completely the wrong message to our young people.
– Patricia Hewitt denounces Iranian treatment of a member of the fifteen captured British navy personnel. Is there a more perfect illustration of the misplaced priorities of Blair’s Britain?
(Via Tim Blair, who notes “as always with such a blindingly stupid quote, be alert to the possibility it’s too stupid to be true.” Perhaps regular Hewitt-watchers would not see the need for such caution.)
Sean Gabb has been a busy chap lately. As mentioned in an earlier post, the latest issue of Free Life Commentary exposes the fraudulent nature of the British Conservative Party’s ‘intellectual revival’.
Also Sean will be on BBC Radio 5 Live on Sunday 1st April at 11:30am UK time, to discuss whether ‘junk food’ advertisements should be banned (no prizes for guessing what his position is). This programme takes calls and so some of Samizdata.net’s readers might like to ring the relevant number and air their views. All the BBC Radio 5 details, such as telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, and on-line listening, can be found here.
Another thing of interest and relevance: the Libertarian Alliance has released its latest pamphlet called Habits Are Not Illnesses: A Response to Dr Robert Lefever, by Joe Peacott.
Whatever you may be doing this weekend, whether it’s playing a few rounds of golf or taking a trip to the seaside or pruning your rose bushes, let us help you to set the mood and deepen your sense of tranquility and peace with this admirably tolerant, progressive and diversity celebrating video.
Relax and enjoy!
The other night I had a look at the 18 Doughty Street internet-based public affairs TV programme. I quite like what Iain Dale and the others in that outfit are trying to do with internet TV: breaking into the arena now dominated by BBC, ITN and Channel 4, channels that are by and large infused with the meta-context of the liberal-left. 18 Doughty Street is unashamedly pro-liberty, pro-capitalism, pro-America and anti-Big Government in its thinking. My main doubt is whether it can keep going without being able to make hard cash. Anyway, it is also attracting guests from across the spectrum, and it is an appearance by a leftist blogger on the show the other night that got my attention.
Dale was interviewing three bloggers about events of the week, and one of the guests was Alex Hilton, the author of the blog Recess Monkey, a leftist site with a sense of humour that may or may not to be to one’s taste. He recently got into a bit of a pickle by posting the ‘news’ that Margaret Thatcher, whom Alex loathes, had died. She is, of course, very much alive. Iain Dale phoned up the BBC after seeing the ‘story’ and promptly Hilton had to retract and publish a rather grubby apology, albeit one with a fairly nasty sting in the tail. What a nob, I thought. Then I saw his appearance on 18 Doughty Street. Fairly boilerplate lefty, I thought, a bit cocky, not a bit ashamed of spreading an untrue story, in fact, denying that that the death of Mrs T. would be a ‘story’ at all (any newspaper editor would turn him down on the spot if he thinks that the death of a famous politician, however old, is not a story. I certainly would).
Anyway, the interview went on. I was interested in how Hilton described how he came to hold the views he did, which is always interesting, in my view. His family background is working class – printing and coal mining, two industries that succumbed to the crackdown on subsidy and the trade union closed shop thanks to the Thatcher years (I strongly support both such changes, naturally). Hilton is a reminder, however, that a lot of people experienced the hard side of those changes, necessary though they were. I was a bit disappointed that Dale did not ask the question, “So Alex, are you in favour of massive coal subsidies and the old print union methods, then?”, which was a pity. But at one stage we got a really interesting admission. Hilton was talking about leftist economics bloggers, and said it was a pleasure to come across such folk, because on the whole, “economics is an emotional issue for socialists”, or some such. I certainly remember the use of the word “emotional”. Bang. For a socialist to actually admit that their views on economics are driven, not by logic, factual evidence, by reason, but by “emotion” is a big admission. It is an admission of intellectual defeat if you do not say that you have reason as your main motivator. It is to run up a big, white flag in the battle of ideas. When Marx was writing about class and the rise of the proletariat, he did not present his arguments as “emotional” – though of course they were in many respects. He used the language of science a lot. The left used to talk about ‘scientific socialism’. Their posters had big pictures of factories, machines and aircraft on them, all waxing lyrical about technology and the power of reason. The left is now a very different, post-modernist beast. Reason is out. Emotion is in.
Socialism just took another little step towards its coffin on that show. Nice one Alex. Keep up the great work. Just do not try to kill off Britain’s greatest post-war Prime Minister ever again.
Civitas – otherwise the most authoritative and radical of modern policy institutes… has published the longest petition of intellectual bankruptcy I have read in years. I do most strongly urge David Green to withdraw this book at once and remove it from the Civitas catalogue.
– Sean Gabb, reviewing Danny Krueger’s new book On Fraternity: Politics beyond Liberty and Equality
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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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