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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There is a report in the Telegraph called Entire village suspected of mayor’s murder that caught my eye.
Although no official statement has yet been given, the Guardia Civil have indicated that they strongly believe those responsible for the murder of the 50-year-old mayor bore a grudge over his policies in the village. There is no shortage of contenders. During his 12 years in office, the mayor, a member of the conservative Popular Party and the owner of the village’s only guest house, had been involved in almost four dozen individual court cases with homeowners in Fago. He had taken out injunctions to prevent people making home improvements and closed down a bed and breakfast because it competed for business with his own establishment.
[…]
“He was an unpleasant man who ran this place like his personal kingdom. He made life difficult for most of us but for a select few he made life impossible,” he said.
I regard it as a truism that ‘the state is not your friend’, but it is easy to concentrate one’s attention on the outrages to personal freedom that come out of central government, the big sweeping laws that abridge liberties and which get talked about in the national newspapers. Yet in many ways the most fearful tyranny is the one which gets imposed by people living right next to you, because it is almost impossible to avoid or mitigate… well not entirely, as Mayor Miguel Grima discovered.
Just to state the obvious, White Rose is inactive. This is due to a simple lack of time on the part of the main contributors. Work, life, other blogging… alas White Rose is currently a ‘blog too many’.
Quite possibly WR will be reactivated at some point in the future as Gawd knows the need for it has not gone away.
TTFN.
Producing a plausible TV show about international terrorism without depicting Muslims is like producing a plausible TV Western without depicting cowboys.
– The indispensable Robert Bidinotto
My friend Amy Alkon (ask Perry about her delightful “Godless Harlot” business cards) is a nationally syndicated advice columnist in the US. She gets requests for assistance “a little too frequently,” as she puts it, from a certain girl in the UK. After being copied in on a round-robin email appeal from this British girl to several advice columnists, Amy pointed out to the help-seeker that she is more likely to spend her time responding to those who are not mass mailing loads of other people with the same question. How did the girl respond?
Excuse me, but you are supposed to give me advice, not insult me. Now give me advice, before i report you to the council.
Somehow I do not think that Amy need worry about having to fight an extradition order.
An idea of the late FA Hayek was that people could use different currencies within the same jurisdiction and break away from the idea that if you lived in country A or B, you could only use one currency within A or B and never use more than one in each place. The idea of “monopoly money” is so ingrained that to broach the idea is to incur looks of incredulity. (“But surely that would be messy!”) Now, I have looked quite a bit at the idea of competing currencies and there strikes me as being nothing that is implausible about such an idea as such. This story in the Daily Telegraph is therefore most interesting:
If you live in the Bavarian region of Chiemgau, you can exist for months at a time in a euro-free zone of hills and lakes with a population of half a million people. Restaurants, bakeries, hairdressers and a network of supermarkets will accept the local currency: the Chiemgauer.
Notes are exchanged freely like legal tender. You can even use a debit card. Petrol stations are still a problem, but biofuel outlets are signing up. Dentists are next.
The Chiemgauer is one of 16 regional currencies that have sprung into existence across Germany and Austria since the launch of the euro five years ago.
Article worth reading here from time back by Max More.
The Register reports:
Following four hours of heated debate, the San Francisco Police Commission voted 5-0 in favor of adding 25 new cameras in eight locations throughout the city’s roughly 50 square miles. Currently there are 33 cameras in 14 sites.
I had to read that story several times to acclimatise myself to the culture shock. If you do not live in Britain compare another Register story:
The police and Home Office are to press for regulatory powers that will insist that every one of the 4.2 million CCTV cameras in Britain is upgraded so it can be deputised to gather police evidence and provide a vehicle for emerging technologies that will automatically identify people and detect if they are doing anything suspicious.
Now (if you do not live in Britain) count your blessings.
… on TV programmes he (quite sensibly) does not watch. Her Majesty’s Government was actually doing something about Big Brother. Granting him more arbitrary power. The Telegraph’s legal editor explains:
[The Serious Crime Bill] allows judges, sitting without juries, to make orders which, if breached, would put us in prison for five years.
Two conditions must be satisfied before the court can make a serious crime prevention order. First, the judge must be satisfied that someone has been “involved in serious crime” – anywhere in the world.
To be “involved”, you do not have to have committed a serious offence, or even helped someone else to have committed it. All you need to have done is to conduct yourself in a way that was likely to make it easier for someone to commit a serious offence, whether or not it was committed.
And what is a serious criminal offence? Drug trafficking and money laundering, of course. But also fishing for trout with a line left unattended in the water. Depositing controlled waste without a licence. And anything else that a court considers to be sufficiently serious.
Read the whole thing here. The Bill itself is here. Observers of government will notice that it is, unusually for important legislation, being introduced in the Lords. I would welcome any theories why.
I happened to read a ‘house’ copy of the Daily Mail (not something I would pay good money for) whilst having lunch at Pret a Manger today and saw with some incredulity that the news seems to be dominated by some particularly ugly ‘celebrities’ I have never even heard off insulting a very attractive Bollywood star who I have indeed heard of, in the dismal ‘Big Brother’ reality TV programme. Questions in the House? Comments by the Prime Minister and Chancellor? Some of the breathless reports act as if an exchange of nuclear weapons with India is in the offing. Organs of the state threatening to get involved because of ‘racism’? Clearly someone must have put something in the water. Is this really that important? Even on its own terms the whole thing is bizarre, though it does appear that to many ‘racial equality’ means only being allowed to be a jackass to members of your own race. That does not sound very equal to me. Surely the only ‘punishment’ required for the gorgeous Shilpa Shetty’s tormentors is to be revealed as ignorant trailer-park trash to the millions of people who inexplicably watch this programme.
My incredulity factor peaked later tonight however when the top story on SkyNews was the ‘Big Bruvvah racism row’. Oh what drivel, particularly when there is a real ‘human interest’ story to report on, namely the astonishing action by some Royal Marines and Army Aviation in Afghanistan. How on earth could this not be the lead news story?
I seem to recall someone, maybe even Iain Dale himself, saying to me some weeks back that what 18 Doughty Street TV needs is for someone important to say something newsworthily scandalous on it. The world, and in particular the Mainstream Media, would then start to pay attention to it.
So, could this be the breakthrough?
Iain Dale is surely hoping so:
In an interview on 18 Doughty Street’s One to One programme last night, Lance Price, former Downing Street spin doctor, has sensationally claimed that Tony Blair himself was the source of quotes describing Gordon Brown as having “psychological flaws”.
Price continues to say he was told by a figure very close to the Chancellor that Alastair Campbell “took the rap” to allow the Prime Minister to escape blame.
Judging by the email that I (and presumably the rest of the world) just got, in the small hours of this Wednesday morning, I get the feeling that Iain Dale reckons that this just might be the media ruckus he has been waiting for.
Now do not misunderstand me. I care very little for the fortunes of the Blair government, nor for the fortunes of whichever political gang – Brownies? Cameronics? – gets to replace these people for the next few years. 18 Doughty Street TV would like it be Mr Cameron and his friends, but I really do not care. I consider them all to be as psychologically flawed as each other. Whoever wins the next spasm of electioneering, we already pretty much know what will win, and it is unlikely to be nice.
What I am interested in, and do feel entitled to be optimistic about, is seeing the British broadcasting media go the way of the British print media and of the internet itself. I want British broadcasting – in particular British broadcasting about politics, and about what politics is and what politics should be – to lose its air of cosily unanimous religiosity, in which the only competition is in who can present the same centre-to-left news agenda and the same stale centre-to-left editorialising about it with the greatest earnestness and piety, and to become instead a bedlam of biases, biased in all imaginable directions, with no meta-contextual assumption left unchallenged. 18 Doughty Street TV has been a small step in that direction, not so much because of what has actually been said on it, but because of the example it has set to others concerning the viability of non-majoritarian broadcasting, and about the possibility that truly different things could start getting broadcast.
Although I do not know or care who Lance Price is, lots of others do, and I am accordingly still intrigued by the possibilities opened up by what he has said. Because of it, a whole lot more people are liable to hear, not just about 18 Doughty Street, but about “internet broadcasting” in general.
British print media people have always been quite diverse in their tone, so although the internet has been a technical and professional challenge to these people, it has not been that much of an ideological jolt for them. British broadcasters, on the other hand, have tended to understand the new ‘social’ media rather better, in the purely technical sense. The BBC web operation has had a huge impact. But ideologically, British mainstream broadcasting people are far more uniform in their ideological outlook, and potentially therefore face far more of an ideological upheaval at the hands of the new media.
So, I hope that neither Iain Dale nor I are making a fuss about nothing. I hope that this proves to be a fuss about something.
In conection with the above, this BBC report (credit where it is due) about Skype offering internet TV services, also makes interesting reading.
Some time ago I had these thoughts about the high price of crude oil and the implications for the energy market. Well, the price of oil has been falling, rather fast, these past few months. High prices have forced people and businesses to economise on their use of oil. Sales of large-engine cars and SUVs are down. A perceived slowing in the pace of global economic growth is also hitting the price. New sources of supply, and spending on new refinery capacity, is also pushing prices down. Some of the speculative froth in the market which may have added to the high price of oil is also unwinding a bit.
The rise in the price of oil to nearly $80 a barrel last year triggered all manner of near-hysterical claims about how governments must act to drastically reduce our reliance on such a source of energy. But market participants were acting even as political and media blowhards predicted doom and gloom. There is nothing like a fast rise in the price of a key thing like energy to focus minds on how to adjust behaviour. The rise in the price of oil has spawned a plethora of ventures to develop new sources of energy; encouraged new drilling and exploration efforts to find new oil supplies, and encouraged people to economise on their energy consumption.
With any luck, if oil keeps falling, it will slow the flow of money into the coffers of thugocracies like Saudi Arabia and also crimp the ambitions of Hugo Chavez in oil-producing Venezuela. That has to be a good thing, although George Galloway might have a problem if oil-rich dictators lose some of their revenues.
“Castro Reportedly in Grave,” begins an Associated Press headline. Unfortunately, the next word is “Condition.”
– James Taranto
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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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