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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On November 2nd, 2001, I rounded up a posse of disgruntled hyphenated libertarian types on three continents and an island, telling them they were henceforth ‘samizdatistas’ and offered them a way to get their ‘gruntles’ back that was far more effective than cursing at the television every time the news came on.
We started off initially on blogger.com along with many other so-called warblogs, before eventually migrating to Moveable Type.
We drew our initial inspiration from Glenn of Instapundit fame (and duly got Instapundited quite a few times) as we raged anti-idiotarian fury against the mainstream media’s editorial absurdities.
We coined a few terms which seem to have gained wider currency, such as Moonbat and Tranzi. We learned the fine art of fisking, slew some trolls, stomped on a lot of blogroaches, fact-checked a few asses and we wrote more than a few blogapotamus postings.
Putting one in the eye of The Man yields many benefits and millions of page views, a couple crashed servers, 8,651 articles and 129,117 comments later, Samizdata.net once again proves that not only is blogging far more fun than gainful employment, it is a great excuse for throwing parties… and thus tonight at 7:00pm London time we hold our Five Year Blogger Bash, therefore expect light blogging from the UK contingent and possible heavy casualties by tomorrow morning.
As I write I am sitting in a motel room in Colorado after two days of meetings in Wyoming associated with the launch of a new company. I am sad to say I will miss the coming festivities of the Samizdata Fifth Anniversary party so I hope those present have a wonderful time.
Meanwhile back in Colorado… exactly why is it I am blogging about the start up of another commercial space company?
Perhaps it is the officers of the new company, Wyoming Space Information Systems (WYSIS) : James C Bennett, CEO; Dale M Amon, CTO; and Rand Simberg, Space Operations.
I expect Rand will also make some announcement on Transterrestrial Musings if he has not done so already, and I will post more information as we finalize and develop plans.
I do not know (I seldom do) whether this is original or not, but it sounds like a very significant achievement, which these people have at least copied and marketed quite well, or, better yet, may actually have semi-invented.
Gizmodo reports:
An amazing innovation in the software world today: ALIPR (Automatic Linguistic Indexing of Pictures) is a program that takes a look at digital images, applies some fancy math and then spits out a list of appropriate tags for the picture. It isn’t perfect, but the designers claim it has a 98 percent accuracy rate. They’ve been letting it dig through Flickr and the software has matched at least one user-defined tag almost every time.
As a constant searcher for photos, I have often found myself exclaiming “I wish you could search pictures!” By that I do not mean merely search the titles and wording that people have attached to pictures. I mean search the actual pictures themselves. It would appear that this process is now well and truly under way.
But, does this stuff have a dark side? How soon before you can take a photo of someone, and say to the internet: Show me all the other photos you can find of this person. You could learn a lot, including quite a few things he might not want you to know. Imagine that kind of thing combined with searching through pictures like these, which I like to take of London tourists.
I have been browsing through John Battelle’s book The Search (no problem finding books on the internet) in recent days, and he has interesting stuff on the privacy-invading potential of this kind of thing. (And oh look, Battelle’s Searchblog reports on something very similar to the ALIPR thing, by the sound of it.)
Oh dear. The original idea of this posting was to be writing about something good, to counter the relentless temptation of those who want the world to get better but cannot help noticing all the ways in which it is getting worse. Never mind. Gizmodo has lots of other stuff like this. (Now you can do your work on one screen, and have crazy pictures on the other.)
As does this blog, which I also recommend. Sample quote:
Women aren’t even trying to pretend they don’t like having sex with robots any more.
More bad news. But the good news is that if you want more pictures along those lines, they just got easier to find.
With Democratic control of the Senate confirmed, one wonders what the next two years will bring on the domestic scene.
Its easy to say what will not happen: There will not be any form of tax relief or reform, or reform of entitlement programs. And no, I do not see expansion of such programs as reform. In short, it is hard to imagine anything happening that will advance the cause of limited government.
On the tax front, the only question will be whether the President will have the stones to veto a tax increase bill. Certainly the Senate, and in all probability the House, will be more than willing to send him one. Given this President’s indifference to the virtues of small government and his status as a lame duck with no re-election chances to blow, I think the odds are that he will sign it.
On spending, expect more of the same. The Dems’ main complaints about Republican spending have been that (a) it has not been enough (b) it has not been directed to Dem constituents and (c) it has not been accompanied by tax increases (this is what passes for fiscal responsibility in Washington these days). Will ‘compassionate conservative’ Bush veto spending bills because they redirect money to Dem causes rather than Repub? I can not imagine why.
Oh, expect knock-down drag-out fights over court nominations, especially if another Supreme goes down. In fact, I would expect any nominee to fail, unless they are a squishy statist who is willing to yammer on about how the Constitution is a living document.
Expect investigations out the wazoo, which should paralyze the executive branch (not that that would take much) and the intelligence community (hmm, bug or feature?) and produce lots of political theater, but in the end it will all signify nothing. These investigations are actually Pelosi’s best opportunity to divert and satisfy her nutty lefties (if she cares to do so). The alternative is to let them actually try to make policy (shudder).
A couple of issues to keep an eye on. The Dems have gone dark on the issue of gun control, but there is no reason to believe they do not still want it. One sign of their (over?)confidence in their position will be if they feel bold enough to come back out of the closet on this issue.
For a very early indicator of whether the Dems are serious about governance, keep an eye on who gets the chairmanship of the House Intelligence Committee. The presumptive chair, Alcee Hastings, belongs to a very exclusive club – federal judges who were impeached and removed from office for corruption. If Pelosi gives him the job, then look for a wild ride for two years, because the inmates will truly be running the asylum.
After an election in which “although many individual races were close the cumulative effect was a thumping” I watched President Bush give a brief statement and then spend the best part of a hour answering questions from a room full of journalists many of whom are his sworn enemies.
Political leaders in Britain do not react to election defeats that way – the give a statement and perhaps answer a question or two (normally not) and then run away.
I may disagree with a lot of things about what President Bush has done (for example I think that he has made the entitlement program burden, about which he rightly warned today, even worse than it was before he came into office), but he is clearly a man of great courage.
I could not have done what I watched him do today.
With the election in the bag and the Democrats measuring the drapes in the House and likely the Senate, probably the most important question, which means of course the question that no one in the mainstream is thinking about, is how these election results will be perceived in the war zone.
The enemies of the West have been counting on ‘Vietnam Syndrome’ to deliver the United States to defeat. I cannot help but think that this election will give them great comfort and lead them to believe that Vietnam Syndrome has indeed taken hold. While I believe that there is less support amongst the populace for rapid ‘redeployment’ (this year’s code word for retreat) from Iraq than many believe, in the ‘perception is reality’ hall of mirrors that is domestic and international politics, the relentless pounding of this meme by the new Democratic leadership and their allies in the press will likely make it self-fulfilling.
If Bush gives the new Democratic leadership their way, then I think that the jihadis will be proven right, and they will ultimately succeed in outlasting the United States in Iraq. If they get their way, the US will withdraw under fire, the nascent Iraqi state will collapse into civil war, and we will see the spectre of helicopters evacuating the last few Americans from the Green Zone. The world-wide high-def broadcast of American defeat will do much to entrench our jihadi enemies and dishearten what is left of the West.
Very few Americans are anti-war. Most Americans are anti-losing the war. The Bush administration made the serious mistake of not fighting to win in Iraq, which in turn means the war dragged out past the (roughly) six year span that Americans will tolerate being at war. With the mainstream media still controlling the terms of discourse, and using that control to relive their glory days of bringing about American defeat in Vietnam, Americans got the sense that we were losing in Iraq. Americans hate a loser, and so they turned on the party in power.
The election will hearten our enemies in Iraq, and we can expect redoubled conflict in that country as they seek to entrench their gains in the American mindspace. The Democratic Congress will seize on this development to push for what they have promised, which happens to be exactly what our enemies want; namely, precipitous American withdrawal. If they get what they want, then the jihadis will have won this campaign, and I think we can look forward to a reinvigorated Islamo-fascist movement worldwide, with all the bloodshed and suffering that entails.
Not to worry, though. The minimum wage will be increased, redistribution of wealth will be accelerated, and many words will be hurled at the real threat, global warming. And isn’t that what really matters?
Well Nancy Pelosi and her friends are overjoyed – higher minimum wage levels, more government spending, especially on education and heath care (buy stock in the stem cell companies that the Democrats intend to increase subsidies to) – and an end to the timid Republican experiments in choice in schools, medical care and in pension accounts, more regulations (and efforts at world regulations – such as Barney Frank’s dream of a world government financial services regulator) and all the rest of it. And I do not expect President Bush to veto much (Captain Veto he is not – this is not the Administration of President Ford and William Simon).
Turning to the election itself:
It looks like an odd combination of some Fox people thinking a Senator was too old and tired and the Libertarian party have handed the United States Senate to the Democrats.
Conrad Burns looks like he has lost by a few hundred votes – he was denounced on Fox (on the O’R. Factor) as “too old and tired” to have any hope of victory. And the Libertarian candidate (Mr Jones) got 3% of vote in Montana (my guess is that some of those voters would have gone Republican, some stayed home, and just about none gone Democrat).
So one Fox News prediction, that the Libertarians would act as spoilers this time round, has been proved correct.
However, the Republicans deserved to lose. Their ‘compassionate conservatism’ (i.e. be soft on spending and wink at Pork) finally irritated the base so much that they stayed home. And Mr Foley did not exactly help either – Democrats may be ‘cool’ with man-boy stuff (Congressman Frank got away with the under-age male prostitution that operated from his home, and another Democrat got away with sex with House page years ago), but Republican voters are not cool with it. Perhaps these voters are ‘bigots’ but that is just a fact of life.
The money of Mr. Soros and others could be counted on (via various front organizations) to bring out the Democrat vote (and finance adverts – such as the tissue of lies that destroyed JD Hayworth in Arizona).
And John McCain’s ‘Campaign Finance Reform’ sometimes meant that some Republicans found themselves outspent (because spending by the leftist groups did not count as spending by their opponents).
And yes virtually all the newspapers and mainstream television acted as part of the Democratic party (Arizona was a good example of this in the House races).
But even where the Republicans had a friendly newspaper they lost – both seats in New Hampshire in spite of the ‘Manchester Union Leader’.
“It was the war stupid”
The voters are quite happy to use force overseas in order to (for example) kill or capture O.B.L. – but they are (for better or worse) not prepared to spend money and blood on some ‘War for Democracy’ in Iraq or anywhere else.
The neo-cons coming out just before the elections and sneering at President Bush and Donald Rumsfeld as morons for the conduct of the war that they, the neo-cons, demanded was also unhelpful (and disgusting). Supposedly the war would have been fine if ‘smart people’ had been in charge – yes right. As I am part Jewish myself I will resist a Mel Gibson moment about the neo-cons – the sooner these backstabbers are forgotten the better. → Continue reading: The last great leftist victory in the United States
WASHINGTON, DC—After months of aggressive campaigning and with nearly 99 percent of ballots counted, politicians were the big winners in Tuesday’s midterm election, taking all 435 seats in the House of Representatives, retaining a majority with 100 out of 100 seats in the Senate, and pushing political candidates to victory in each of the 36 gubernatorial races up for grabs.
The Onion notices the awful truth. Their overall election coverage is quite chuckle-inducing, too.
Update: All right, there are a couple of decent ones in there. I like Dr No.
(h/t: Avatar Briefs)
It looks like we have caused the Republicans a bit of grief:
So far, losing because of libertarians hasn’t caused Republicans to move toward the libertarians ideologically. But maybe things will change this time.
Our election results are available as they come in via our party headquarters.
For years I have felt alone on election nights with nothing to follow except the voting tallies and changing balance between the left and right wings of the ruling party. Kudos to LPHQ!
Over on Antoine Clarke’s Election Watch, I am running results and commentary on the U.S. mid-term elections tonight.
The most reliable source last time was RealClearPolitics. However, they’re admiting a huge range of possible outcomes in the Senate, from only two Republican losses, to six, which would mean a change of majority.
Well, I am off to bed and despite my interest in politics, have not really the desire to wait up to see what happens in the U.S. Congressional races. My hunch is that by the time I wake up here in London, the Democrats will have taken the House and the Republicans might just hang on to the Senate, but it will be a very close call. I sympathise with the argument, put by various libertarians and small-government Republican supporters, that Bush needs what we Brits call a mighty kick in the bollocks for a number of bad moves, such as the explosive growth of spending on non-defense items, tariffs, the Patriot Act, growing interference in people’s private lives, etc, etc. I can see why many voters, even hawkish ones, have become bitterly angry over the mess in Iraq and wondered whether the Coalition should have heeded the voices of caution and pursued a containment/deterrence line rather than pre-emption. (I backed the ouster of Saddam pretty much from the start but have had my doubts about how the power vacuum might get filled without a sufficiently strong effort to help rebuild the country). The Republicans might, just might learn a valuable lesson: they have had power in Congress since 1994 and more recently, the White House. People do not tend to vote for centre-right parties in order to see a big rise in the size and power of the state. Maybe someone should send Bush a copy of Barry Goldwater’s old classic, The Conscience of a Conservative.
My main worry, drawn from the experience of Britain’s Conservative Party, is that a defeat for the Republicans may not lead to the sort of questioning of the Big Government philosophy known as “Compassionate Conservatism” as championed by Bush in recent years. We have seen how David Cameron has sought to meld the Tories into a pale imitation of NuLabour, in some ways trying to outdo Blair in the spending and taxation stakes. For all the talk that American politics is deeply polarised, perhaps the real truth is that the choices in front of the electorate are not distinct enough.
In case you want to scare off a mugger, why not buy some of these and put them on your coat? Tastes may vary.
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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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