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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Have you ever been more than a little aggravated by the snotty moral superiority of vegetarians? I know I have. I also know that I somewhat dismayed by growth in popularity of this fetish, especially among women. These days I cannot find a single restaurant in London that doesn’t have a ‘Vegetarian Section’ on the menu.
This shouldn’t be a political issue, merely a matter of personal preference. But, while a vegan society remains the aim of the Animal Rights movement, it is a political issue.
Thus far, in defence of my firmly carnivourous ways, I have always used the freedom of choice arguments against the accusations that I am promoting cruelty to animals, harming the planet and ruining my health (although why these people should concern themselves with my well-being is a mystery to me).
However, thanks to anthropology there is another, and better, rebuttal available. Thanks to recent discoveries about the early history of our species we have learned of the contrasting fates of two different but concurrent sub-species of early hominid; Robust Man (Australopithicus robustus) and Gracile Man (Australopithecus garhi).
Robust Man was a vegetarian. We know this because of the extraordinarily prominent sagittal crest found on its skull. This crest could only have evolved in order to provide an anchor for enormous jaw muscles of the kind required for rumination. That, coupled with large, flat teeth, lead anthropologists to the conclusion that Robust Man ate roots, tubers and plants.
Gracile Man remains, on the other hand, consist of a smooth skull and lots of sharp teeth. He was a carnivore.
The trouble with eating vegetables is that they are difficult to digest and require a large gut in order to do so. Meat, however, is easy to digest. So Robust’s metabolic energy went into the development of his huge gut and Gracile’s metabolic energy went into the development of his brain.
As a result, Gracile went from picking the marrow out of bones to develop hunting skills and eventually become us while poor retarded old Robust wallowed around on the floor of the forest and farted himself into oblivion.
So, the next time somebody tells you that meat is murder, you can reply yes, but vegetables are suicide.
I’ve been catching up on my essential reading this evening – or rather this AM – and was annoyed to the point of blogging by a recent DOD news briefing. The fantasy mistreatment of prisoners at Guantanamo seemed to be the only item on the press agenda that day.
I, too, have a question about the prisoners’ treatment. One that is not being sufficiently addressed. One I suspect resonates with others from the same planet as I, ie normal people.
How are we going to keep these bastards off the street permanently?
I want assurances these people will never, ever again have the freedom and opportunity to crash an airplane into a skyscraper, release a bio-agent, smuggle radiological weapons, poison a cities water supply, machine gun a crowd, blow up an embassy or nuke Chicago and LA. I’m really not much interested in whether they’re getting the proper sun block in their Club Gitmo tanning butter.
These prisoners are excessively dangerous men. They are trained, drilled, lethal killers… every one of them. They will seek death for the opportunity to take some of us with them. No normal prison or prison guards will be capable of holding them. If it meant 50 of them had to die so one could grab a soldier’s weapon, they would do so. They will quietly wait 3,5,10 years for a guard to slip, to forget what sort of people they are, to become complacent. They will revolt and kill and revolt and kill again until there are none of them left. So exactly how the hell are we going to neutralize these arseholes? That’s the kind of investigative journalism I wish I were seeing.
I still prefer baseballs in Yankee stadium, but if push comes to shove I’ll settle for a good ol’ fashioned necktie party à la Nuremberg.
Over on National Review On-line, sometimes inspired and sometimes confused Jonah Goldberg describes the new NRO blog Corner for those unfamiliar with the format:
For those of you who don’t “get it,” here’s what it’s about. Various NR editors and members of our extended family get to comment on anything we like, including each other’s comments. We try to keep the posts short and the most recent appear on top.
There are no editors, no rules, and no master plan. Yes, as many, many, many readers have pointed out, it’s very much like a blog along the lines of AndrewSullivan.com or Instapundit.com. The difference, however, is significant. Those guys run one-man operations. If you can’t see the distinction, look at it this way. Sex with one person is very different than sex with more than one.
Someone needs to spank that boy with a rolled up copy of National Review and set him straight on a few things: Firstly “Corner” is not “very much like a blog”… it is a blog. Secondly, it is bad form not to link to Andrew Sullivan and Instapundit if you are going to mention them. We are not competitors, Jonah, we are actually a resource for each other and “Corner” is no different. Unlike dead tree media, which is chasing the same dollar, cross links actually feed readers at the people we comment on and visa versa. In fact, the more of us there are and the more cross links there are, the more readers we all get by virtue of the increased content and broader catchment… people who might not be seen dead with a copy of NR or ever think of typing www.nationalreview.com (i.e. quite a few libertarians) might nevertheless follow a link they find here to NRO just to see what we are talking about, which is surely what NRO would want.
Bitching aside, “Corner” is actually quite a fun blog. We are glad they liked our multi-contributor format so much that they copied it. It is even nicer to know that when Jonah thinks about blogs, he thinks about sex. I’d like to think we can take credit for that too.
We are of course well aware that the cognoscenti like Jonah only come to Samizdata for Natalija’s “go for the throat” articles.
I will be a bit provincial today. It has been a few days of mixed news in my corner of Europe. Very good news is that filthy war criminal Rade Vrga has been arrested in Hungary, which is splendid.
Not so good news is that the idiots governing Croatia have folded under pressure from the farmers political faction and given up trying to abandon the ridiculous policy of agricultural support that takes tax money from everyone and gives it to farmers because they are, well, farmers. Are farmers the only cyclical business that they should need special treatment? Yet an idiotic coalition of HSS and other economically ignorant not-so-reformed socialists think it is perfectly alright to act like vampires on the rest of the economy.
Even worse news is that yet another agreement was signed that is crawling Croatia closer to that ‘haven of fluorescent idiocy’ called the European Union.
And even worse news than that is that a certain Samizdata editor has yet another picture of me for the blog. I am going to have to wear a burqa next time I see that boy!
To robbery, butchery, and rapine, they give the lying name of government; they create a desolation and call it peace.
– Tacitus quoting the Celtic chieftan Calgacus
Pakistan has a very large expatriate community scattered across the world, particularly in the UK and the USA. The peoples of the sub-continent also have a deeply engrained and entirely laudable distrust of governments poking around in their affairs, which is why the hawala system of moving money around globally is so popular with people from that part of the world.
In recent weeks there has been a huge inflow of capital from the Pakistani diaspora back to Pakistan due to the scrutiny of US investigators looking ostensibly for Al Qaeda funds. Of course there is widespread and quite justified belief amongst Pakistani businessmen that where the anti-terrorist investigators tread, the IRS will not be far behind looking to see what they can confiscate. Sub-continent businessmen have been on the receiving end of shakedowns like that from potentates, princes and nations for centuries and have well honed cultural reflexes in such matters. The simple solution: move your money where the US authorities cannot see it, by bank transfer if possible or via the invisible hawala system if not.
Networked distributed capitalist systems like this are extraordinarily resilient and are fueled by deep seated and entirely admirable non-deference to state authority. Just as the justified fight against Al Qaeda is also being used to fulfil an unjustified a wish list of civil liberties abridgements, so too are the statist enemies of free trade on both left and right using it to move against the sort of small scale (though large in aggregate) trans-border capitalism at which people from the Indian sub-continent so excel. It is for reasons of control that Big Capitalism and The State get on so well: bureaucrats can meet with a few hundred CEOs of vast companies and reach understandings to their ‘mutual benefit’ (though not to anyone else’s). Hundreds of thousands of small scale truly capitalist ventures with trans-border cash flows however are impossible to even monitor, let alone control: which is of course why they are such a good thing.
[Tentatively attributed to William DeBuvitz]
The August 2000 fire at the Los Alamos Laboratory had one significant consequence. A secret scientific document, discovered in a bunker whose security systems were mostly destroyed by the fire, was leaked to the public last weekend. Actually it reveals nothing that we didn’t already suspect. But it does show that the government has known all along that, besides arsenic, lead, mercury, radon, strontium and plutonium, one more extremely deadly and pervasive element also exists. This startling new discovery — the heaviest element now known to science — has been tentatively named GOVERNMENTIUM (Gv).
Conspiracy theorists speculate that Governmentium has been in existence since the time of the Manhattan Project or even the Philadelphia Experiment, and kept top-secret by the CIA. Perhaps its existence accounts for the explosive growth of bureaucracy over the last half-century. This astonishing element has no protons or electrons, thus having an atomic number of 0. It does, however, have 1 neutron, 15 assistant neutrons, 35 deputy neutrons, 80 vice neutrons, 145 supervisory neutrons, 165 team leader neutrons and 225 consulting neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 666.
These 666 particles are held together in the nucleus by a force that involves the continuous exchange of meson-like particles called “MORONS”, themselves surrounded by vast and undeterminable quantities of lepton-like particles called PEONS. Since it has no electrons, Governmentium is INERT. However, it can be detected chemically as it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact. According to the discoverers, a miniscule amount of Governmentium causes a reaction which would normally take less than a second over four days to complete. Unlike all other known elements, Governmentium does not decay measured according to its half-life, but instead undergoes continuous reorganization in which assistant neutrons, deputy neutrons and vice neutrons exchange places, causing a sample mass of Governmentium to actually INCREASE over time since with each reorganization some of the PEONS inevitably become MORONS, and, finally, neutrons, thereby forming entirely new isotopes. This characteristic of PEON-MORON promotion leads some scientists to speculate that Governmentium is formed whenever MORONS anywhere reach a certain quantity in concentration. This hypothetical quantity is referred to as the “CRITICAL MORASS.”
Governmentium has been found to concentrate in certain key locations such as governments, large corporations, and especially in universities. It can usually be found polluting the best appointed and best maintained buildings. Scientists warn that Governmentium is known to be toxic and recommend plenty of alcoholic fluids followed by bed rest after even low levels of exposure.
I don’t often have time to respond in any depth to e-mail about articles I have posted. I’ve so many “irons in the fire” I barely have time to post, let alone debate. However reader and fellow blogger Swen Swenson of A Coyote at the Dog Show made some valid points:
FYI, there are still a lot of polygamists in the Rocky Mountain states and you rarely hear about one of them being prosecuted. Tom Green’s mistake – ‘marrying’ a 13-year-old and bragging about it. The first is statutory rape regardless of your religion, the second just plain asshole stupidity. With Green you could also make a case for chatel slavery. His ‘bride’ apparently had little choice in the matter.
I agree that the government has no business limiting the number or gender of those who would enter into a marriage contract. But in this situation you’d as well bemoan our attack on the religious freedom of the poor Taliban. They too were acting on their religious beliefs..
That is not the story Opinion Journal chose to emphasize. The titles weren’t of the form “Utah resident takes child bride in forced marriage“. They centered on the old Morman lifestyle. Had the former been the headline, I’d not have given the article a second glance. I’d have left it for someone like Karl “Defending The Indefensible” Hess.
Even the email replies Opinion Journal received and reported on focused on post-sellout (You vill sign ze papers old man!) Morman beliefs rather than the particulars of the case Swen pointed out.
Ace bloggista Alex Knapp of Heretical Ideas points out that somewhere between the original Star Trek of Jim Kirk (23rd century) and the Star Trek of Jean-Luc Picard (24th century), something went horribly wrong… but it didn’t start out that way.
Now, it’s hard to defend the namby-pamby neo-liberal Federation of Star Trek:TNG, (though there’s a good case to be made from DS9 that the Feds aren’t as bad as TNG makes them appear to be), but I’m not concerned with them.
Let’s talk about real Star Trek. I’m talking about the NCC-1701, which cruised around the cosmos not only exploring new worlds, but finding new tyrannies – and crushing them. Is your world controlled by an over-intelligent super-computer? No problem–Kirk and co. will destroy it. Been trapped in a never-ending cycle of war because you fight by computer instead of the real way? Kirk and co. takes care of it. Are Klingon’s arming your rival clan’s? Not to worry–Kirk will give you guns, too, so you can protect your families. Benign interventionism, favoring democracy.
But hey, the original Trek wasn’t just about freeing enslaved peoples. It was about mutual tolerance–so you can make a few bucks. Case in point: “Devil in the Dark.” A strange creature is killing miners? Klingons would’ve just killed. Not the Federation. Kirk and Spock learn to talk to the creature, which ends up contracting with the miners–enabling them to make a greater profit. And the 23rd century Federation wasn’t cashless, either. It’s clear that Kirk and co. were paid for their work, and they spent their money in very non-PC ways. (My, I do love the green-skinned dancers…)
But in addition to bringing democracy to Third Galaxy worlds and making the universe safe for capitalism, the 23rd century Federation had a tough-minded foreign policy. When the Romulans developed a new cloaking device, did the Feds beg for a non-proliferation treaty? Did they impose economic sanctions? Hell no! They had the Enterprise go in and just steal the damn thing with a beautiful deception.
Somewhere between the 23rd and 24th centuries, maybe the Federation lost its way. But don’t forget that at the beginning, the Federation was composed of tough-minded freedom fighters who enjoyed the finer things in life (like alien babes) and appreciated money. But they weren’t just decadent–they were devoted to liberty. Don’t forget that Kirk gave up his one great love in order to prevent the Nazis from winning World War II. And, as the movies showed, they recognized the great truth of individualism–“The needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many.” Because only by focusing on the individual do you prevent him from being trampled by the demands of the mob.
Alex Knapp
I am trying not to laugh as I watch rock musician Bono hold forth on satellite television about issues of Third World debt and so on at the World Economic Forum held in New York. Perhaps we can look forward to getting Britney Spears on the fight against terrorism, Mick Jagger on Aids and Tiger Woods on global warming. I guess I am being irreverent, but what the heck, it’s Friday!
…has collapsed during a speech. I received an e-mail pointing this out to me which asked if I cared? Yes I do care. I hope they bury her in Waco. Yes I realise she is not dead yet, which is why I wish someone would bury her in Waco.
French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin has demanded an end to free(ish) trade in favour of a global system of ‘managed trade’ called mastered globalization. In a typical stream of anti-life economics and adulation of force based resource allocation, Jospin states that he, and people like him, should have a say in what Americans or British or Japanese or Nigerian or Lebanese or Croatian people can trade with each other across borders and under what conditions. When he says “mastered globalization”, no prize for guessing who he has in mind to be the ‘master’.
Jospin is a man who is responsible more than any other political figure in the EU (and that is saying something) for people like me being fined and harassed by EU states for trying to do business within the EU because I am an outsider, just another Slavic white nigger girl. Naturally he takes much the same view of Africans and Asians who try to do business in the EU.
He called for donor countries at the Economic and Social Council in Paris to commit to “reduce poverty by 50 per cent until 2015”. He could of course do this at a stroke by resigning from office along with all the other lying Socialists, Social Democrats (socialists), Democrats (socialists), Liberals (socialists) and Christian Democrats (socialists) across Europe who prevent so much of the world from making a living due to their trade barriers that discriminate against us. If that happened, I guarantee poverty would be reduced by 50 percent by 2015.
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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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