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]
|
Bruce Willis, as you note, won’t get on a plane to Britain and is going to get a few rasberries come Die Hard Whatever It Is Up To Now. In this he follows the heroic tradition of Sly Stallone who wouldn’t fly for fear of catching Foot & Mouth from the loo seats, or something. Oh yes, I remember now, his problem was fear of what we used to call “terrorism”. Contrast our own magnificent Sting, up there on Concorde! Quite takes you back to the cutaways in Eagle Magazine, doesn’t it, “Another British World Beater!” Just don’t mention the cricketers.
On second thoughts, while I freely award boos and cheers to all the right people, let’s not get hung up on gesture politics. Or on giving unwarranted attention to the irrelevant political views of famous hunks.
BTW on my husband’s Eagle Book of Cutaways the de Havilland Comet is right next to the Short Solent flying boat. Isn’t that cute?
The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
– Justice Louis D. Brandeis, US Supreme Court Justice,1929
It should be clear beyond any reasonable doubt that the judgement, discrimination and taste of the previous King of Jordan, Hussain, was remarkable… astonishing even. It should also be absolutely clear that the current King, Abdullah, was not just an inspired choice to succeed him but has in fact taken the talents of his predecessor to undreamt of heights of excellence.
Am I referring to their handling of Jordan’s relations with Israel? Was I thinking of how they have dealt with the dangerous and unpredictable Syrians? Did I mean the wide ranging internal reforms within Jordan? How they walk the tightrope of the ethnic dimension of Jordanian politics? No, none of those things.
I am of course referring to the Hashemite Kings outstanding taste in elegant, exquisite, intelligent women! Queen Noor was, and Queen Rania is, simply breathtaking. In these days of geopolitical turmoil, terrorism and economic confusion, let us pause for a moment and applaud a world leader for his taste in babes. As Mel Brooks said “It’s good to be the King!”
We do have some genuine friends in the Middle East… and is it such a bad thing that some of them are real lookers?
Actor Bruce Willis refuses to fly to Britain ‘because his children pleaded with him not to’, cricketers Robert Croft and Andrew Caddick refuse to fly to India due to ‘security concerns’. Fine, that is their prerogative. It is also the prerogative of others to judge these ‘public’ individuals by their actions. In spite of the fact these people are far more likely to die whilst crossing the road, they allow misplaced fears to determine their actions.
Terrorism works when people allow themselves to become terrorised and that seems to have occurred with the timid of heart. Apparently Willis wants his children to react to even the most indistinct nebulous ‘threat’ by cowering behind the gated walls of their mansion. I hope his next role as an ‘action hero’ is greeted with the same derisory smirks and pithy asides that greeted Ann Heche when she played the heterosexual love interest for Harrison Ford in ‘Six days, Seven Nights’.
In less dissembling times, I think Willis, Croft and Caddick would have been called ‘cowards’.
So when Ann Heche’s former partner Ellen Degeneris stands up at the Emmy’s last night with a red, white and blue ribbon and says “What would bug the Taliban more than seeing a gay woman in a suit surrounded by Jews?”, it becomes clear that not only is she a very good comedienne, not everyone in Hollywood is cringing in terror and blaming it on ‘their children’.
So here’s to you, Ellen. As we always suspected, you are indeed the one wearing the trousers.
The state is a core of malevolence surrounded by a thick cloying crust of incompetence
-Perry de Havilland
(from the JP Morgan Tech Daily)
Smart bandage spots infection
A hi-tech dressing could help doctors tell the difference between types of bacteria and send the results to a PC, BBC News reported yesterday. This information can help doctors choose which antibiotic might be most suitable to treat it. The silicon sensor in the dressing is the size of a pinhead. Scientists hope that once the test is fine-tuned, it can be read by a computer, enabling a patient at home to monitor cuts and wounds for signs that dangerous bacteria were invading.
Whilst I am far too modest to tell anyone how many notches I have on my bed’s headboard, someone can reasonably add two more notches now that Dale and Natalie have lost their virginity by blogging (presumably the ‘someone’ in question is the seemingly omnipresent ‘Joe Blogs’… who obviously ‘swings both ways’ it would seem, unless Joe is short for Josephine).
Good to have you (oops) both aboard.
Regarding the Samizdata displacing the Libertarian Alliance Forum, I don’t think so. A blog is not really as interactive as a forum and thus suggests we post in a less ‘immediate’ way. I think blogging is more akin to sending a letter to the editor of some dead tree publication. When we blog, we are letting the world know what we think either by re-posting something we have found of interest or, primarily, by writing our own editorial on the events that are of interest to us as critically rational individuals. I regard a forum such as the LA-F as more akin to public conversation.
Take it from me. The Pope really is Catholic. I live in Ireland. We know these things. I’ve also trompped around in America’s forests and I can likewise state with impugnity: “Bears shit in the woods”. They really do.
Now given these simple guidelines, why is it so difficult for the media to understand a similar tautology: “Civilians get killed in wars”. Sorry, it’s not nice, but dems de breaks. Innocent bystanders get killed in all sorts of random and horrible ways. Bombs miss (although that is becoming almost apologetically rare). Bullets, rockets and shells don’t go into orbit. As Myers, Rumsfeld, Stufflebeem and others have said in one form or another: “Stuff goes up, stuff comes down, people get hurt”. That’s gravity for you. It’s a real bitch ainit?
The guys on the ground aren’t very nice people. The Taliban are quite capable of killing Afghans and claiming someone else did it. They killed enough of their own before we got there, so why would anyone think they’ll stop now? And to top it off, there is a lot of shooting and shelling going on. The Northern Alliance isn’t firing blanks you know.
Lastly, there has got to be an awful lot of left over ordinance. They are still digging up and disarming bombs in London from the Blitz in 1940 fer crissakes! And that only occured for a few months sixty odd years ago. Afghanistan is filthy with unexploded modern ordinance from over twenty years of nearly continuous warfare. Civilians are lucky to survive walking to whatever passes for an outhouse in that sort of environment.
Could it be that the newsmedia focus on civilian casualties has nothing to do with newsworthiness? I have this deep down suspicion that we’re seeing the “civilian casualty” stories not because they are news, but because they are theater. Anyone with a theatrical background knows that “Kids and animals” always steal the show. The only thing that gets attention faster than a cute fluffy doggie and a towheaded (or turbanned) 8 year old are dead ones. That is what the news media is selling us. It isn’t news. It’s pandering.
Am I being harsh? Damn right I am. War is hell and nothing you can say or do will change it. Look at the aftermath of WWII. The ruins were filled with orphans, children with damaged limbs, eyes, souls. Terrible, terrible things happened to people in Europe. And yet I don’t think you will find many who would have preferred the alternative. Nor do many of us prefer the alternative of a world in which the horror of 9-11 is overshadowed by even worse events, one after another after another.
So let’s put our news focus on what matters. Winning.
Like Dale Amon, I lose my co-blogging virginity today, indeed at this moment. That’s like not with for any tabloid journalists reading this. If any are, keep reading. You might learn something for a change.
Many hear will have heard me gushing on about (a) blogs and (b) being paid for them as the Wave of the Future etc. The “being paid” bit strikes me as important because only money can transform the provision of decentralised, unmediated news from a hobby of the intelligentsia to a major former of opinion. We need a system where you can, without effort, pay a tiny sum to read a web page.
But it’s not all good news. An obvious problem is that of preaching only to the converted. If the “team” list under the toilet sign at the top of the screen all contribute, this blog looks likely to become the Real Libertarian Alliance Forum. I find this somewhat worrying, and not only because it’ll make Mario Huet feel bad as his numbers go down through no fault of his own. We’ll all become – dare I invoke Banquo’s ghost? – atomised.
BTW I have set up my own blog at http://nataliesolent.blogspot.com. I don’t think my blogspot’s evolutionary niche lies in discussion. Rather I aim to just post comments about news stories and thoughts that interest me. So my dears, don’t be sad that I haven’t invited you, because I haven’t invited anyone. All I want in life really is to be a James Bond supervillain and have a cool wall of TV screens. My Birman cat already fits the part beautifully.
The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else
– Frederic Bastiat
There was a time when fraternity pranks meant something. When a frat had to really do something creative or at least utterly stupid to get kicked off a campus. One of the best stories I know of was about the Theti Xi chapter at CMU. In a hell night circa 1959, the brothers went out and welded a trolley car to the tracks. One brother asked for change for a twenty, which was a large sum at the time. And yes, trolley drivers did carry change back in that politer and better behaved day and age. Meanwhile one or more other brothers placed the thermite “bomb” at the trolley’s wheel. The rest is history. The City of Pittsburgh had to send out a crane to lift the trolley off the track after the segment of track was cut in front and behind with a torch. Hey, these were CMU engineering students. They know how to do it the job right.
The frat of course got suspended from pledging for nearly four years and was nearly wiped out. Which is fair enough for a prank of that magnitude and expense. But it was funny and the stuff legends are made of. I’d not have believed it at all if one of the brothers had not shown me a scrap book with the original city newspaper clipping. I also saw the wheel and section of track, which were still floating around frat row in my day.
So what is my point? Well, Glenn Reynolds has just posted this link about a rather minor bit of frat fun at the University of Wisconson. At a student variety show, a student pretended to be a black basketball star known for his lines in a commercial. They thought it would be even funnier if he appeared in blackface makeup.
For this the school is considering expulsions. Now I am not one to just idly sit back and talk. I used google, the search engine what God gave us, and with a trivial amount of work arrived at the email address of the Vice Chancellor. I settled for him since there was no email address for the Chancellor. The point of this ramble is best summarized by the email which I have sent to him:
I think you should think long and hard about the real meaning of this and the liberties that will be infringed upon if the fraternity students are punished for basically… nothing at all.
University life is a time for doing silly things, being a complete idiot, even being a total ass. That is part of being a member of a free society.
Likewise others have the freedom to state that they think you have been foolish. However they do not have the right to force you to behave or speak otherwise. Those are the protections that the constitution gives all Americans. It does not say “Freedom of speech, so long as you say or do nothing contrary to the prevailing local opinion”.
Your students have the right to burn the flag, protest war, wear blackface makeup, streak across the campus commons, and do any of those things that students do. Other students have the right to disagree and to state their disagreement, whether it be to have a pro-war demonstration or to stand outside the frat house with signs. That is what a free society is all about.
What a free society is *not* about is heavy handed enforcement of behavior from above. I would sincerely hope that should that be the course the University takes against these kids, that they get a good civil liberties lawyer and sue the pants off you.
As Russell Means said at the 1987 Libertarian National Convention, “Freedom is For Everyone.”
Tony Blair addresses the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) on the 5th of Novermber and says his policies of ‘restraint’ and ‘prudence’ are going to continue. Yet we are in the middle of an explosion of non-military public profligacy. Government spending is increasing at a much faster rate than the economy is growing and surely every member of the CBI knows that.
Now I realise Blair is a statist politician and thus dissembles by profession, yet the ‘great and good’ of British capitalism just sit there and listen politely. Was it something about the acoustics that nobody except the TV microphones actually heard what he said? Why were there not hoots of derision and gasps of disbelief from the bovine CBI members, given that it is their companies that in large measure will actually have to stump up the money for this spending binge?
And now I hear that our political ‘masters’ are maybe/maybe not planning to ‘raise taxes’ but will most likely be increasing National Insurance ‘contributions’ (i.e. a tax on employment). So let me get this right… the LABOUR Party wants to make it more expensive to employ people’s labour just as the economy is starting to go into recession.
On that day of all days, Guy Fawkes Night, the 5th of November, the people listening to him should have been making a bonfire of their conference programmes and telling Tony Blair the best thing he can do for the economy is to go fight his war in Afghanistan and leave the business of creating wealth to the people who actually create it.
Please, someone. Wake me up!
|
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.
|
