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 been a keen cyclist for most of my adult life. I know what you’re thinking, “Grow up get a car.” Ah, but I am ahead of you on that one; I have both.
Anyway, the cycling did originally come about because – confession time – once upon a time I was an environmentalist. But as I grew out of such nonsense it has continued. I enjoy it. Well. Sometimes. Not when it is cold or wet and definitely not when it is cold and wet.
But whatever the weather may be cycling is dangerous. I am a cautious cylist. I choose my routes carefully, I am careful at junctions, I give parked cars a wide berth, I use lights at night and wear reflective clothing. I am very careful turning right. I am appalled at the risk some of my “fellow” cyclists take. But despite all this I am painfully aware that there could be a juggernaut/white van man/Nissan Micra with my name on it. The BBC employee, Jeremy Vine, likes to put a camera on his bike and upload the footage. Now putting aside the fact that Vine is a BBC employee and therefore [insert insult here] the footage he posts is alarming. Again and again we see drivers breaking the rules of the road and putting him in danger. And there are plenty of other less-well-known cyclists doing the same.
There is another factor here. British roads are amongst the safest in the world. British drivers are amongst the safest in the world. I have even heard a Dutchman compliment us on our consideration. Which implies to me that this is as good as it gets.
So, I am in favour of cycling lanes and punishing motorists? Not really. Although I do like cycle lanes I am aware that society should not and will not be organised on the basis of what suits Patrick Crozier. Frankly, the safety argument could just as well be used to ban people from such a reckless activity as cycling in a built-up area.
Mind you I am acutely aware that the cycling fanatics employ the best arguments. They continually point out the danger that motorized vehicles represent and the pollution they cause. Which is true. Well I say that but I recently learnt that there is an argument that exhaust fumes are not polluting at all. I am not ready to accept that just yet but it is interesting. On the other side of the argument motorists tend to complain about cylists jumping red lights – true but it’s their funeral – and cyclists making no contribution to road upkeep – true, but the contribution would be miniscule. What they ought to be doing is reading their Basiat and pointing out the unseen benefits of motorised transport – the comfort, protection from the elements, load-carrying capacity and the unseen costs of cycling – namely congestion and smelly office workers.
So how should roads be organised? How should the competing claims be reconciled and how should road managers account for the unseen as well as the seen? Well, I am a libertarian aren’t I? I believe in free markets. So, we privatise the roads and, hey presto! job done. Except it is not that easy. Glossing over the difficulties in privatising roads, there is no track record of private roads. Yes, there are some private motorways – and there would be many more if I had anything to do with it. Yes, there are little private roads here and they are usually badly pot-holed and serve a tiny number of residents. But nothing – to the best of my knowledge – on a town let alone a city-wide basis. Why is this? My guess is it is because if you own a road – in all the ways you can own a road – you are the state. If you own a road you can put the people who live on that road under house arrest. You can completely control them. The state tends to jealously guard such a power.
So roads – especially those in urban areas – will continue to be state-owned. But that doesn’t mean we libertarians have nothing to say on the subject. A useful thought exercise – one can be applied to all sorts of areas, not just roads – is to imagine what would happen if there were private ownership and a free market. In this case it is to imagine what would happen if roads were privately owned and use that as a guide.
So, what would happen in this hypothetical world? Well, you can never be sure but there are a few things I am pretty sure would happen. There would be road pricing; certainly on arterial roads. Would that lead to rat runs? Maybe but those would be priced too. There would be a pollution charge to compensate the victims – should any be found. Road pricing would also apply to cyclists. Although there would be a reduction due to the reduced level of wear and tear they cause there would be an increase to take into account the congestion they cause. All this means that bicycles would have to be registered. It is perfectly possible that such a charge would price cyclists off the road. Or maybe, it would price the vast majority of motorised vehicles off the road. Who knows? although I suspect it would be more the former than the latter.
“What was most alarming was the alacrity with which the broadcast news media fell into line – with boundless enthusiasm – as they were given a key role in the day-to-day dissemination of government authority.”
– Janet Daley, Sunday Telegraph (£). She was writing about the BBC’s conduct during the and after the lockdowns.
One of the many reasons why I regard the past few years of “Conservative” government is wasted is its failure to remove the BBC licence fee, and convert the Corporation into a privately financed operation, with some of its operations broken up. The Tories just aren’t strategically minded in removing embedded Establishment sources of opposition and building the groundwork for this. (Even Margaret Thatcher never quite pulled the trigger.)
Genuine Guardian headline.
Humans boldly going into space should echo the guiding principle of Captain Kirk’s Star Trek crew by resisting the urge to interfere, researchers have said, stressing a need to end a colonial approach to exploration.
As a Trekkie (watched The Tholian Web again last night), a libertarian, and a convinced anti-speciesist, I would gladly join with these brave scientists to demand an end to the colonial oppression of our fellow sapient beings… but before we end it, is there not a small logical barrier that we need to cross first?
Nasa has made no secret of its desire to mine the moon for metals, with China also keen to extract lunar resources – a situation that has been called a new space race.
But Dr Pamela Conrad of the Carnegie Institution of Science said the focus should shift away from seeking to exploit discoveries.
Indeed it should. What about the intelligent aliens bleeping piteously for release from the human yoke?
Oh.
OK, then, alien animals. Tell me how they are oppressed so I can send them thoughts of solidarity across the light years…
“Regardless of who or what is out there, that attitude of exploration being almost synonymous with exploitation gives one a different perspective as you approach to the task,” she said.
Regardless? FFS, lady, give me something to work with here. This is the Guardian, it doesn’t have to be much. I’d have been satisfied with some oppressed alien fungi, but “regardless”, as in “regardless of whether there is any victim whatsoever”, does not hack it.
→ Continue reading: “End ‘colonial’ approach to space exploration, scientists urge”
Race becomes the supremely important phenomenon, masking every other aspect of a complex culture. Racial politics provide the framework of values by which every institution concerned with the past is to be judged. There are many important factors in the way that human societies develop. Race is only one of them and not necessarily the most important. Any serious commentator on the current state of historical studies ought to welcome attempts to present aspects of history which have previously been ignored or marginalised. That includes the story of ethnic minorities and non-European societies. But it does not mean that the whole of Britain’s modern history should be viewed through their eyes. It does not mean that the role of slavery or empire in Britain’s economic, cultural and social history should be exaggerated beyond recognition. And it does not mean that current political priorities should determine how we understand the past.
– Jonathan Sumption
[T]his also proves that relying on a Kindle or other tech is a folly. I have quite a library in my flat, and sometimes friends of mine poke fun at it and ask why I don’t put all this on a digital device. The naivete is clear.
Buy the actual books; learn to look after them, keep copies of really valuable ones. And give them to those whom you respect and love in your will. Beware anyone whose bookshelf is smaller than their plasma TV.
– Johnathan Pearce
Well done on James Bond enthusiast David Zaritsky for taking a stand. Let’s treat readers like adults. Sure, the language in some of the books isn’t what I would want it to be, but then Joseph Conrad, Mark Twain, and many other writers could be faulted on the same basis. I understand that the Fleming family (I know some of the members and they are good people) has authorised this. But I think this is a mistake, because this process isn’t going to stop.
In a free market (I hardly need to stress the point in this neighbourhood) the owners of copyright and so on can of course do what they want. Their house, their rules, etc. But from a broader perspective, caving into this sort of pressure for change is a mistake that the owners will regret. Fleming wrote books that were racy at the time (even the late journalist, Paul Johnson, was furiously angry about them, showing his prudish side). Fleming had a journalist’s ear for accuracy in conveying dialogue, and the Harlem and Jamaica scenes in Live and Let Die, for example, show that. It isn’t nice, but segregation America and the language used at the time wasn’t nice, and Fleming was both beguiled by American prosperity and shocked by its underside. He conveyed that in muscular prose. (This is a man, who, remember, covered the Moscow show trials in the 1930s, and he knew what censorship meant.) I also think it is presumptious for his descendants to suppose that he’d be fine with having his books re-written to suit more sensitive tastes. The evidence cited in support of this claim is flimsy. One thing he condemned, as the books show, was moral priggery. (This short collection of essays nicely explains this.)
And then there is the Roald Dahl case. Puffin, the publishers of books for children and young adults, has re-written his stories, such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, to remove words and sentences that, for various reasons, are deemed unacceptable, such as making some characters gender-neutral, or removing the word “fat” around one of the various horrible children, etc. It is bowdlerisation, and some of the actual story “punch”, and that sense of subversive naughtiness that Dahl had, has gone.
Here’s an incisive commentary on the sorry business from Yaron Brook. Dr Brook thinks the whole “woke” phenomenon has peaked, and maybe it has. There is a defensiveness and sneakiness around what’s gone on in the Dahl case that suggests the perpetrators know what they are doing is bad. I am unsure: I think a lot of foolishness lies ahead of us. The Fleming adjustments are more open and proud, and that bothers me.
Anyway, my take is it that if you don’t like a book, fine. Explain why. That’s what learning, and education, is supposed to give us in developing a capacity to judge and discriminate. A person who cannot do that is not educated.
In the meantime, pre-censorship copies of Dahl, Fleming and others will be worth a lot more money. I have sets of all the Bond stories, and several moth-eaten paperbacks. I intend to keep good care of them. They’re not for sale.
By a sort of savage irony, today is World Book Day. Isn’t that nice?
“Government subsidies are never free, and now we are learning the price U.S. semiconductor firms and others will pay for signing on to President Biden’s industrial policy. They will become the indentured servants of progressive social policy.”
– Wall Street Journal. ($)
A couple of follow-ups:
Democrats last year snookered Republicans into passing their $280 billion Chips Act, which includes $39 billion in direct financial aid for chip makers and a 25% investment tax credit. Republicans hoped this would satisfy West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, but after Chips passed he quickly flipped and endorsed the Inflation Reduction Act.
Now the Administration is using the semiconductor subsidies to impose much of the social policy that was in the failed Build Back Better bill. On Tuesday Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo rolled out the new rules for chip makers and summed up the politics to the New York Times: “If Congress wasn’t going to do what they should have done, we’re going to do it in implementation” of the subsidies.
For a fascinating insight into the arguments and geopolitical tensions around silicon chips (and the role of Taiwan), I recommend Chip Wars, by Chris Miller.
Every time I look at Joe Biden and his allies, and particularly at Biden, a machine politician with beady little eyes and wandering hands, I think of an Ayn Rand villain.
Finally, a Labour government will be very, very funny. We’ll enjoy Keir Starmer frantically attempting to make sense of his little bag of contradictions. We’ll eat popcorn as the Corbynites feud with the New Labour nostalgists. We’ll watch MPs who can barely spell “policy” do policy (of course, that’s nothing new but it will be fun to have a different cast of characters). This might be small consolation, but what is life without morbid comedy?
– Ben Sixsmith
What I love about this new encryption law is how much easier it will be for foreign governments to spy on British citizens and enterprises now that Britain has unilaterally disarmed.
– Perry Metzger
“In many cases rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city, except for bombing”
– Economist Assar Lindbeck, who as it happens was a socialist
I posted this on the day of the invasion and I think it aged pretty well.
Russia is not attacking Ukraine in response to actions of the USA since then, that’s an Americocentric delusion. This is not happening because Ukraine wanted to join NATO, it’s happening because they are outside NATO, which is not the same thing at all. Russia is not driven by fear of NATO strength, it is driven by perceptions of western weakness. Russia believes the cultural, military and geopolitical balance has tipped in their favour, expecting the west will respond to their invasion of Ukraine today with nothing more than official grimaces. I hope they are not correct about that but we will soon see.
Putin is motivated by oft stated imperial ambitions to Make Russia Great Again, to ‘restore’ Russia to its imperial boundaries with Moscow as the New Rome (yes, they really say that); Ukrainian rejection of that notion and assertion of their own identity is therefore intolerable. But reject ‘the Russian world’ they did, because Ukrainians do not wish to be ruled from the Kremlin even indirectly. That is why they overthrew Russia’s favoured oligarch and sought to chart their own course in the world.
That is what this war is about.
I still see things much the same and am delighted my fears about a lack of meaningful support for Ukraine were misplaced.
Taking the meme ‘Everyone I Don’t Like Is Hitler’ to dizzying new heights, now we’re being told it’s far right to want to drive your car. Motorist and fascist, peas in a pod. Protesters against Low Traffic Neighbourhoods and so-called 15-minute cities – policies being adopted in various regions of the UK that will severely limit where and how often a person can drive his car – have been damned as hard-right loons. Who but a modern-day Brownshirt would bristle at eco-measures designed to save Mother Earth from car toxins? One author attended this month’s colourful protest against Oxford City Council’s anti-driving policies and decreed that this motley crew of car-lovers are on ‘the road to fascism’. Only they’ll never get there, presumably, given the elites’ penchant for road restrictions.
– Brendan O’Neill
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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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