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]
|
After the bite, after the infection has taken hold, Brad Pitt surrenders his earthly coil and joins the ranks of ‘The Undead’.
Tom Cruise commands him to “Look at the world with your vampire eyes”. He does. It is not the same world; it is not the world that others see. He sees a different, hidden, ‘other’ world of signs and symbols and secrets to which the living are not privvy. He moves through this new world and ‘turns’ others of his choosing. But there is no going back; no return to the life he had before, spent in peace and semi-blindess.
Brian Micklethwait is not a number; he is my ‘Lestat’
For me it is like walking through some exhilarating global weather system, an interactive one at that. I see some article that does not particularly interest me and it is like a raindrop against my skin or a passing breeze: I am aware of it but in a moment it is gone and forgotten.
And then I see something that interests me, like light from some distant sun touching my face through the shifting clouds of data. Or then suddenly I stumble upon something that angers or startles me, like a lightning bolt hurtled up into the sky from New York or Wellington or Belgrade or Delhi or London, only to strike the ground near me, illuminating everything for a moment and shocking me with its force.
The Internet makes me feel like I am some luminous being working a magic device that transports me up from my little corner of the Balkans until I can not only look down over the sound and fury of the whole world, but like some pagan goddess with my shimmering wings powered by Blogger.com, fling my own thunderbolts back down at it, watching them strike in London and Warsaw and Calgary and Athens and Pretoria.
The Internet is so much more than the slow moving dead text of yesterday, something remote from yourself held at arms length figuratively and literally. It is the seething, howling, singing, snarling voice of the global gestalt that surges through you and carries the sound of your own voice away with it to unseen ears on the other side of the world. It is utterly intoxicating.
My experience is quite different from Brian’s. For me the Internet has “always been there”. I had access to its earliest form when I was a grad student at CMU in the early 70’s. Although I became a card-carrying Libertarian during a time when I lacked access to the university computers, that soon changed. I’ve been continuously on the internet from 1983, and a researcher who digs hard enough will find my very libertarian oriented Space Digest postings from that period.
This brings me to a point it has long been my intention to make. Blogs did not come out of a vacuum. Many writers like myself have been debating, arguing and posting for two decades. That’s a lot of practice. We’re not people who sat down one day and said “Oh, I think I’ll start writing about current affairs”. Some of us have been writing for every bit as long as the “mainstream” journalists. Our editors were not our bosses but our peers; they gave us the harsh critique of people who knew the facts and were unafraid to let you know it. You also learned to withstand attacks that could be harsh and personal. Libel? Hah! You just returned fire. Courts were for wimps!
I do understand a little of what Brian says, because I can remember a time when I could say I knew all of the key people on the internet. That is certainly no longer true. I feel honoured to have been in the circles of those early days and that ring of acquaintances is one I still find valuable to me professionally and otherwise.
If there are journalists reading this who have spent their working lives in the traditional print media, the blog phenomena must be quite disconcerting. It seemingly appeared from nowhere around September 11th. Things do happen fast on the net, but I assure you many of us have been writing for as long as yourselves. The format has been different, the rules have been different, but we are really quite as experienced (and blooded) in our media as you in yours.
Back to Brian’s Lament (sounds like an Irish trad song title, don’t it?)… we each add our small contribution. Being the most read or the top rated isn’t what matters. The Internet is our home and its residents are our friends and neighbours. It takes a bit of getting used to, this non-territorial territory we live in, a “place” where your neighbors may be physically anywhere that humanity is to be found and proximity is defined by shared interests and values rather than place.
But it’s a good place and it is where the history of this century will be written.
Great Moments in Capitalist History: on this day in 1824 J. W. Goodrich introduced rubber galoshes to the public.
I note a state of mind which I have detected in myself, and wonder if any others share it?
Once Upon A Time, I was a happy libertarian. I knew only about a dozen other libertarians at all well and I was one of the cleverest and most dedicatedly productive of them. The rest of my little world consisted of the Great Unenlightened, the Statist Masses, all of whom I outranked. I knew of other libertarians, in far away countries of which I knew little such as America, but they didn’t loom large in my mind. Occasionally they sent us little bits of writing through the post, but nothing impressive enough to threaten my sense of my own libertarian magnificence. I and my little gang of friends, we few, we happy few, were shining the torch of liberty in little England. I thrashed out Libertarian Alliance pamphlets, secure in my own libertarian splendour. I was a Big Fish in a Small Pond.
Then came the Internet. Suddenly I am becoming acquainted on a daily basis with the clever – often very clever – thoughts of as many dozen libertarians as I can make myself attend to. Worse, Little England no longer needs me to tell it about libertarianism, for it too can plug into the great Magic Filing Cabinet in the Sky, the Great Conversation Machine. In such a world, does my little voice, my little computer keyboard, count for anything? What do my Libertarian Alliance pamphlets signify, when set beside the thousands upon thousands of other libertarian writings out there? I still crank out Libertarian Alliance pamphlets, because it’s what I do. It’s what I am. But what I now am is a Small Fish in a Big Pond. I feel melancholy.
This experience is not confined to libertarians. I am suffering from a universal syndrome caused by better global electronic communications. (I’ve even read a book about this, by, I think, someone called Oliver James.)
Because of daily TV broadcasts of the best club and international football matches in the world (which he knows others are watching even if he can’t bear to watch such things himself), a man who was happy when thinking of himself as the second best footballer in Doncaster, is now forced to contemplate the fact that he is the 9,673rd best footballer in the world – a depressing demotion indeed. Ditto in every other area of human endeavour.
It sounds to me as if most of my fellow bloggists here at Samizdata found their first voices, so to speak, as contributors to the Great Global Conversation, and are making steady, satisfying progress up the relevant, if huge, pecking order. “Last week I was the 934th best libertarian” (or however exactly they classify themselves). “Now I’m the 919th best. Next year, if I keep it up, I’ll make it below 900”, etc. I’m talking subjective experience here and my guess numbers are just that, pure guesses. I am aware of no rating system for libertarian writers and activists of this kind, of the sort which now says that Sachin Tendulkar of India – for I think it is he – is the now the best test match (i.e. international cricket) batsman in the world (thereby depressing all other batsmen everywhere). Thus, the other bloggists do not feel melancholy. But then again, maybe if you are starting out at the bottom of the global libertarian pecking order, the prospect of that long trudge from 900 to a probably peak of, I don’t know, about 300, and then back down to 1,000 followed by oblivion, depresses them too.
Serious confessions of unhappiness are not cool, coming from libertarians, and especially not if the cause of the unhappiness is something so triumphantly capitalist as modern electronic communications. Trivial snarlings about the annoyances of the latest version of Windows or non-trivial snarlings about politicians and their many misdeeds, yes, fine. But confessions like this one cross some kind of line.
Which of course is why I choose to write thus. Good writers regularly cross such lines, and I’m still bashing on, trying to write well. So don’t worry everyone, everyone who cares that is to say. My confession is serious, but the unhappiness I confess to is not overwhelmingly serious. I’m not talking suicide here. I’ll soldier on, and all the better if this piece of confessional therapy does its job and helps to reconcile me to my new (small) place in my new (big) world.
But, does anyone else out there know what I’m talking about?
The dependably interesting John Weidner at Random Jottings has a wonderful article on the daddy of all bloggers.
[He] was a lousy writer. At least when he wrote books and articles. His books are cranky hotch-potches; formless and almost unreadable. He was very combative; he was at his best in the quick give-and-take of argument, and was very successful as a lawyer. But he rarely took the time to organize his (often excellent) ideas into reasoned discourses.
However, unknown to the world, he spent much effort writing in a different style. He owned the best library in North America, and the books he read most often were those whose arguments he hated! He would fill the margins of those books with comments and refutations. He would tear them apart line by line. Does this sound familiar?
If you want to know who this mystery proto-blogger was, you will just have to go take a look at John’s article.
Ever heard the secret to boiling a frog? Throw the frog in a pot of boiling water, and he jumps right out. But, put him in cooler water, and slowly heat it up, and he’ll stay in until he’s cooked. People, we are almost well done!
– Unknown
[Yes, we know it is an urban legend but it is still a great slogan! A tip of the kevlar battlebowler to Rajat Datta. Ribbit.]
But certainly not a site for the weak! The curiously named Rantburg is a tightly focused geopolitical warblog with a robustly anti-idiotarian view of things. I do not always agree with Fred Pruitt’s particular spin, though I frequently do, but it is nevertheless a good and and often quite detailed read. He has a fine grasp of the regional players about which he writes (unlike a few blogs I could mention) and he understand real-world political dynamics (unlike a few other blogs I could mention).
Visit daily.
Our very own Tom Burroughs has long complained to me about the consistently venal and ugly way in which businessfolk are portrayed in TV drama. His highly meritorious complaint is picked up and expanded upon by Rand Simberg
Having spent a few years of my life as a jobbing scriptwriter, I have moved amongst these people and, from my experience, the anti-capitalist theme of much of their writing is no surprise given their almost universal woolly socialist outlook. I know that, in Britain at least, this is so overwhelmingly the prevailing paradigm that it is, to all intents and purposes, a hegemony
I have tried to examine the reasons for this and the one that I find most compelling is that their socialism is a reflection of their life experience.
Most of those who spend their lives pursuing artistic success will do so fruitlessly. Very, very few make it and, even those that do, have spent years in struggle and poverty. The cliche of the artist starving in a garrett is a cliche because it is largely true. The simple, seemingly eternal, truth is that there are way too many people wanting to earn their living from artistic endeavour than the market can viably support and possessing talent guarantees nothing
Yet, there is no paucity of effort on their part. A writer may spend years of his or her life pouring their heart and soul into a magnum opus that nobody wants to publish or buy. Nor are they lacking in cognitive faculties. Most writers are highly learned and articulate and many feel that, for that alone, they should be rewarded in some way but are not. It is easy to imagine just how rudely offensive they find it when a monosyllabic, uncouth market trader can go off to the City of London to ply his share-dealing skills and earn more money in a month than most artists will earn in any decade of their lives
That is what they find so wrong about capitalism: its indifference. It cares not a jot for sincerity and effort and craft and endows its riches upon those who fulfil the often flimsy and evanescent wishes of consumers. The dedicated artist whose fingers have bled in learning to play Shostakovich on his cello, but can’t afford to give up his day job, knows that something needs changing when Gerri ‘Spice Girl’ Halliwell (who gave consumers what they want, what they really, really want) builds another palatial home on the Cote D’Azur. It’s all so unfair
Just how much more attractive to any writer or artist is the warm embrace of socialism with it labour theory of value, its promise to support and succour artists regardless of their output, to banish harsh wordly concerns of homelessness and unemployment and build a society based on status rather than contract
There are, of course, exceptions. There are always exceptions but they are the exceptions that prove the rule. And, for sure, there may be other factors involved, most notably good, old fashioned peer pressure. Success as a writer depends upon acceptance by the notoriously cliquey world of the Literatti and either you lockstep or step out (I stepped out)
But it is my view that, lying behind all of it, is the almost unchallengeable belief that Mistress Capitalism is cruel, capricious and immoral and so are those who feed at her breast
An article in the Sierra Times describes a Canada sharply at variance with what I had thought existed.
Gordon Campbell and the Liberal government swept to power last year (winning 77 of a possible 79 seats in the BC Legislature) on a mandate to set British Columbia back on the road to prosperity. Prosperity – as the Liberals promised – would be built on a platform dedicated to freeing the private sector from crushing taxes and burdensome regulation. Indeed, this last move by the Liberals to help cut 1.9 billion dollars from the budget by 2004 is just one thing in a list of many that has some wondering if the Liberals are actually Libertarians in disguise.
Well that certainly is one hell of a majority! But call me cynical if you like: talk is cheap… except for political talk, which is usually very expensive indeed. But then when I read what the BC Liberals have actually started doing, I almost fell off my chair! Way to go! Read the Scott Carpenter article and be amazed yourself. Methinks I shall be visiting the Sierra Times and the various Canadian blog sites more often to see what is in the air over there.
See how eager people are to demand that they have a right to your money? Polish farmers are upset because they are not going to get to steal tax money from the rest of Europe the moment they join the European Union. They will have to wait until 2013 to join the undead legions of European subsidy vampires.
Poland�s agriculture minister Jaroslav Kalinowske has declared “It is about ensuring guarantees for an equal partnership for Polish garniture. If we don�t all play under the same rules then our farmers will vote against European Union membership,” reports the Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten.
Yes! It would be wonderful if that happened and Poland did not sign away its future. Of course if the farmers do indeed scupper Polish EU membership, they will be doing so for all the wrong reasons but as anyone who has lived through a war will tell you, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Whilst nothing the EU does ever surprises me, it often amazes me that even in the USA the farmers can rob the rest of the country not only in terms of subsidies but in terms of artificially inflated prices. How can the ‘left’ who claim to have the interests of the common people at heart accept that food should be made more expensive by government action? For rich and bourgeoise people, the cost of food as a proportion of their wealth is utterly trivial. Yet for the poor, that is obviously not the case and so various forms of state assistance becomes important to avoid going short of food. In a democratic nation or super-nation, this naturally produces a dependent class who will always vote for the people who provide that state assistance, even though in reality those self same people are actually the ones responsible for the food being so expensive in the first place. The vampire bites and produces a mindless legion of bloodsucking followers.
About this funny vampire picture: I think I might have gone out with this guy a few years ago. I find this on Communist Vampires website that Perry mentioned in earlier posting.
I have always felt second to none in my detestation of former NY mayor Ed Koch, who was for me the unalloyed stereotype of pragmatic municipal amorality. And yet, I found the following Ed Koch quote on the sublimely named Communist Vampires Newswire regarding the WTC twin towers:
I think we should rebuild them exactly the same way that they were. They are the symbol of New York. In a way, we crush the terrorists by rebuilding them. They thought they had destroyed us. I think this shows we are crushing them.
– Ed Koch, former New York mayor (1978 – 1989)
Absolutely true. Even better would be to build the largest building(s) in the world. To keep the site as some maudlin garden of remembrance would be a colossal mistake. We must indeed remember the fallen but let us also remember that they fell engaged in World Trade and in doing so made the world a better place more than any ten NGO’s you might care to mention.
|
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.
|
