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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Prof. Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago opines against the Internet in his article The Daily Me, due to its ability to present ‘customised’ news that is pre-filtered to suit the readers preconceived ideas.
Of course the power to personalize makes life much more convenient and in some ways much better. But from the standpoint of democracy, the rise of “The Daily Me” is a mixed blessing. For democracy to work, people must be exposed to topics and ideas they would not have chosen in advance.
[…]
In short, good citizenship requires far more than countless editions of the Daily Me. Democracy is undermined when people choose to live in echo chambers of their own design. The task for the future is to find ways to ensure that the Internet reduces, and does not increase, the risk of social fragmentation.
This does indeed raise some interesting points and I too have sounded off about how unwise it is to reside in a news-ghetto in which one is fed a diet of insular pabulum. Yet the ghetto that I had in mind is actually the mainstream media which, even more in the USA than in Britain, is in reality a near intellectual mono-culture of recycled received wisdoms presented within a profoundly statist meta-context. Nothing in print or on TV even approaches the variety of superb insights, loopy conspiracy theories, pedantic disections and pointers to obscure stories that can be found on-line.
Thus I would argue that there is a subtext to Sunstein’s remarks. Perhaps the source of his disquiet is that people will no longer choose to allow themselves to be propagandised quite so easily as was the case when BigMedia(tm) ruled the ink and airwaves unchallenged. I suspect that customised news from the established media’s on-line outlets is not all that perturbs the good Professor. Although news collection remains the realm of well resourced established media companies, the oligopoly of interpreting what the crude news data actually means has been broken forever. Just refer to Glenn Reynold’s article on instapundit a few days ago announcing his millionth visitor (1). I suggest to you that in our own small but growing way, the newsblog movement is contributing to this disquiet in academia who are, even more than the media companies themselves, the distilled essence of the ‘qualified’ purveyors of opinions. Yet the Internet can, and indeed has, provided a true market place for punditry that is aggressively non-deferential, fact-checking and dissecting the ‘experts’ in near real time… and some people out there do not much like it.
The new wave of ‘instapundits’, for Glenn is indeed the one who started humming the note picked up by the ever growing swarm, are saying things the main stream media would regard as commercial suicide regardless of what they actually believe to be true. For example how many mainstream journalists would admit to being profoundly ambivalent about democracy or admit to rejecting the very concept of exclusive national citizenship that Prof. Sunstein thinks so important? Yet that is what I think and I can say so without incurring the ire of a media proprietor. You do not have to agree with either of these views and that is the beauty of it all: I don’t really give a damn either way because I have no pecuniary interest in your views as a reader. I am not selling your eyeball time to advertisers or worrying about ratings, so if you decide the articles on the Samizdata are just so much pixilated flatulence and thus decline to come back, we will still be propounding our views of the world come what may. Regardless of whether or not Cass Sunstein approves, new and controversial voices are indeed being heard: after all, you are reading this!
Thanks to Basia Jedrzejowicz for pointing out the orginal article.
(1) = Editors update, September 2003: Instapundit had its 25 millionth visitor & Samizdata.net is well past one million visitors ourselves
Some people ask:
“Why shouldn’t our government keep out products from third world countries? We don’t owe them a living.
That is right, we don’t. What we owe to them, and to our own people too, is the ordinary right to buy and sell what they please, along with all the other ordinary rights to life and respect for property. Tariffs against African imports mean that we in Britain pay more than we ought and the people in Africa are arbitrarily forbidden from bringing their wares to our attention – it’s up to British individuals whether they buy or not.
So the European Union, having stopped Africans making a respectable living as producers and traders by denying them access to us, then bestows a lesser largesse via ‘Third World Aid’. Adding insult to injury, the EU then expects gratitude from the very people they have discriminated against. Of course what happens is that Africans, now being dependent on largesse rather than their own efforts, take on the character of beggars, whiny when desperate and sullen when temporarily a little better fed. We in our turn take on the character of patronising social workers-cum-lords of the manor. What a pity, when we could be interacting as equals and fellow human beings.
Over on The Fly Bottle blogista Will Wilkinson writes about Totalitarian Chic.
Resistance is futile. You will be commodified. Attack us with ideology and we will sell it as nostalgia.
It reminds me of someone catching sight of my collection of pretty enameled Soviet Political Activists Pins, Red Army Hats and ‘Heroic Soviet Worker’ posters. As he was well aware of my anti-communist background, I saw his eyebrows raise. Heading off his question I interjected.
Headhunters keep the severed heads of their enemies as trophies.
He understood immediately.
In an EU Observer report, the authoritarian nature of the European ‘Union’ is demonstrated yet again as Swedish citizen, Per Johansson, has been expelled from Belgian and can no longer travel in 14 European countries after pasting up an anti-EU poster at a Belgian police station.
The Belgian police in Brussels arrested the Swede, who is an active member of a legal Swedish left wing party, just three days before the Laeken summit. The police expelled the man for only one reason: he had been helping friends putting up the poster, announcing an anti-EU meeting.
Hopefully such cack-handed suppression of dissent will just encourage more resistance against the EU by people who value freedom of expression, free association and reject unaccountable socialist diktats governing every aspect of civil life.
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury
– Sir Alex Fraser Tytler
“On Friday about a thousand European citizens, representatives of the organisations of civil society and elected representatives at the local, regional, national and European level participated in a human chain around the Rond-point Schuman, right in the heart of Brussels “quartier européen”.
This event was organised by the Union of European Federalists in collaboration with the Intregroup European Constitution within the European Parliament on the occasion of the European Council meeting in Laeken.
There cannot be a strong Europe with weak institutions, and there cannot be strong institutions if their democratic legitimacy is not reinforced, the organisers stated afterwards in a press release.
“If the EU does not manage a qualitative leap of its political system, Europe will be condemned to institutional paralysis – be incapable of governing the Euro, acting on the international scene, efficiently contributing to maintaining world peace, fighting against terrorism and defending Europeans’ security. It will be left to the financial markets and incapable of facing the challenges of globalisation,” the organisers stated.
Among the participants were Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Co-President of the Group of the Greens/EFA in the European Parliament, Virgilio Dastoli, Spokesman for the Permanent Forum for Civil Society, Andrew Duff, MEP (ELDR, UK) and Fernand Herman, President of the U.E.F.-Belgium, Jo Leinen, MEP (PSE, D) and President of the Union of European Federalists, Cecilia Malmström, MEP (ELDR)”
The comrades are taking to the streets! From every slum and factory the oppressed of the earth are pouring forth onto the blood-spattered cobbles of Belgium and putting up the barricades. This is revolution and the air is thick with popular slogans such as:
“If the EU does not manage a qualitative leap of its political system, Europe will be condemned to institutional paralysis”
How cleverly it rolls off the tongue and sears into the heart of every visionary as they storm the steps of the Winter Palace.
Bureaucrats, lobbyists, statisticians and office-holders unite! You have nothing to lose but your weekly column in the departmental newletter
“WHAT TO WE WANT?”
“MORE FOOD SAFETY LAWS”
“WHEN DO WE WANT THEM?”
“NOW!”
The European Union (all please stand up and salute) has ‘declared war’ on junk mail.
Legislation will be enacted within the next 12 months to outlaw unsolicited e-mails, letters and phone-calls which, according to Grand European Panjandrum for Consumer Protection ‘costs EU businesses about 9.6 billion Euros (about 40 pence) per year’.
So there we have it, boys and girls. The New World Order is taking shape before our very eyes: the US is going to war on Bin Laden and the EU is going to war on binned letters.
Prankster Samizdata reader James Bennett wrote in with a suggestion that was alarming and amuzing in equal measure:
Excellent post on Sammy’s Data (as I think of it) about the Star Trek Federation. I think Rodenberry and the original Star Trek writers didn’t think very much about the future they were creating; they just took some cliches from pop science fiction that ultimately go back to H.G. Wells and Things to come. I have always thought of, as a prank, submitting a script for a show involving the Ferengi (which is, by the way, an Arabic term for “Westerner”) which would be a straight steal from some Nazi anti-semitic story from the 30s, maybe “The Jew Suss”, substituting one stereotyped money-loving minority with a oversized facial attribute for another. Then if it got produced, reveal the source. The Ferengi meet almost every element of the Nazi stereotype about Jews, they even lust after our women.
Now that is funny. Pulling that off would be a superb cultural ‘hack’ of the highest order.
Just the other day I saw a Next Generation episode and already in my mind I am seeing cringing, hand wringing Ferengi runts (Nazi ‘Jew’ image) contrasted with tall lithe Tasha Yar (Denise Crosby: Nazi Aryan ‘superwoman’ image) along with broad shouldered small brained Will Riker (Johnathen Frakes: Nazi Aryan ‘superman’ image) declaiming about the Federation’s cultural superiority (kulturkampf) to the capitalist Ferengi (Jew).
Appalling. Damn you, Bennett, I will never be able to see that show again without feeling rather uncomfortable.
Prominent Libertarian Alliance member Sean Gabb has just produced a very useful and quite lengthy missive called Arguments Against British Membership of the Euro.
Also by Sean Gabb, see A Case Against the European Union and Uniting Europe without the Union
Highly recommended to anyone who refuses to accept the accelerating rate at which authoritarian European principles and institutions are being forced on British society. What is being done by our ‘masters’ with breathtaking extra-parliamentary manoeuvres in the name of European integration would, in less dissembling times, have been called treason.
Natalie is quite right that there is a noticeable lack of real religions in Star Trek. The only two sets of religious beliefs seem to feature prominently:
First there are the Bajoran in Deep Space 9, who follow an (invented) organised national religion that, it must be said, is presented extremely plausibly and without either sentimental support or anti-religious bias: some of their religious leaders are shown to be wise and honourable, yet others (Kai Winn) are portrayed as venal and corrupt. Significantly, the Bajorans are not, however, part of the Federation.
Then there is Chakotay (Robert Beltran), whose ultra-PC North American Indian spiritualism must appeal to the California ‘liberal’ (meaning socialist) sensibilities of the script writers. It is useful to note, however, that Chakotey is not in fact a member of Star Fleet even though he has been co-opted by it. Quite the contrary: he is an anti-Star Fleet Maquis rebel! There is an interesting subtext there for sure.
I would not include the Zen-like Vulcan philosophy shown in the shows as ‘religion’ as it is little more than a sophisticated and somewhat ritualised form of self-control with a set of attendant logic based ethics.
Yet I must disagree with Natalie that Star Trek’s lack of religion in the Federation will cause “less sympathy with the Samizdata crowd”. Libertarian views are in no way antithetical to religious ones and I find the complete absence of overt Christian, Jewish, Muslim or Hindu influences (let alone obvious adherents) indicative of a society that must surely be suppressing them. Even an atheist such as myself must accept that the religious impulse will not completely disappear quietly into the night unless forced there at the point of a loaded phaser…hardly something calculated to bring the smile of reason to libertarian lips. As evidence of it is completely absent in what is posited as mankind’s sole military service, the implications are clear.
Even if Star Fleet is aggressively secular ‘at work’, in many episodes we are shown the private quarters of crew members…can anyone recall an episode in which a crucifix is seen on someone’s table or a mezuzah by the door? You do not have to be religious yourself to find seeing religion completely edited out of the human experience more than a little sinister. As Natalie points out, Babylon 5 had a great deal of fun with real world religion, even to the extent of showing peevish squabbling between the leader of the resident Catholic monks and a prominent Jewish scholar. Likewise, Commander Susan Ivanova (Claudia Christian) on several occasions referred to her Jewish identity in various episodes. Although religion was not central to the show, it did not deny its very existence.
Next time I see a Star Trek show, I will scrutinize the credits for any references to Leon Trotsky.
Lots of high octane posts on Samizdata today, covering many issues of topical importance. That’s why I’d like to talk about a thirty year old TV show. According to Phil Farrand’s Nitpicker’s Guide, these top 10 reasons for violations of the Prime Directive include No. 10 “The Stupid Machine that ran the planet didn’t allow any touching and kissing”, No. 6 “The inhabitants were using a bunch of stupid computers to fight their wars like pantywaists”, culminating in No. 10 – Kirk’s personal No.1 – I noticed my hairline receding that day.”
I knew I had become a real hard-core libertarian when I started getting genuinely outraged on behalf of the right of the inhabitants of gangster-obsessed Sigma Iotia II not to pay protection money to the Feds in “A Piece of the Action.” I reckon that episode indicated subliminal acceptance by Rodenberry of the Federation’s real nature, that of a protection racket that breaks its own rules whenever convenient.
Farrand also takes Star Trek (both Classic and Next Gen) to task in a way that will find, perhaps, less sympathy with the Samizdata crowd: their attitude towards religion, which is that it will have no place in their nice clean universe (unless it’s PC American Indian religion, that is. There are no Christians, Moslems, or Hindus to be seen – and nearly all the alien religions turn out to be covers for a ruling elite of some sort *. Babylon 5, though written by an agnostic, treats the subject far more plausibly.)
* = That’ll get the comments coming about present day religions.
The lastest blog to be listed is Moira Breen‘s interesting Inappropriate Response. I had been meaning to add it to the list for a while as it is well worth a daily visit. She points out in my diatribe against Star Trek’s Federation that I had missed some important facts, such as that Worf’s teeth are clear evidence of socialist healthcare and there is something deeply sinister about Deanna Troi. Eminently tupable but sinister nonetheless, I would agree.
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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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