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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We had 25 people show up to the Second British Blogger Bash and the party has been hailed as a great success.
Below can be seen (L to R) Ben Sheriff of Layman’s Logic, Mike Solent (back turned), Steve Chapman of Stephen Chapman (formerly ‘Daddy Warblogs), Tom Burroughes of Samizdata.net (back turned), Andrew Dodge of Dodgeblog, Brian Micklethwait of Samizdata.net, Alex Singleton (barely visible) of St. Andrews Liberty Log, Peter Briffa of Public Interest UK and Natalie Solent of Natalie Solent.
Steve Chapman and Peter Briffa were disappointed when
they discovered what ‘having a little pot for desert’ actually meant Below are Nikki Brandt, Luisa Gutierrez and Adriana Cronin of Samizdata.net.
The ladies discuss the aerodynamics of a
Frisbie with and without salad dressing Below are Perry de Havilland of Samizdata.net and Patrick Crozier of CrozierVision and UK Transport.
Perry shamelessly advertises Samizdata.net tee-shirts Below are David Carr of Samizdata.net and Adriana Cronin of Samizdata.net.
David and Adriana make jokes about why they had
to drink Brendan O’Neill’s share of the booze Below are Patrick Crozier of UK Transport and Dale Amon of Samizdata.net, uncharacteristically shown wielding a beer.
Dale demonstrates the correct stance for
accurately hurling a beer can at a passing politico Below are Natalie Solent, Alice Bachini of A Libertarian Parent in the Countryside and Perry de Havilland.
Alice, having eaten the collar of Perry’s shirt (with some
fava beans), washes it down with some nice Chianti Brendan O’Neill was unable to attend due to prior obligations… you missed a good one, O’Neill.
Is it just me? Apparently yes. And of course it must be very clear to all our readers what is causing this. All the others Samizdatistas are still recovering from the blogger bash. Lots of photos of people doing embarrassing things. Two bits from Perry and David before they succumbed to unconsciousness. Then silence for 48 hours from almost all of them apart from me. It’s obvious.
No doubt in the hours and days that follow, the others will slowly emerge in ones and twos from their sickbeds and from behind the sofas and out of the various closets and small rooms in Chateau Perry behind which and within which they still now groan and toss and roll about in a purgatorial state between sleep and wakefulness, pain and nightmare, and others besides me will eventually again be telling you things. But for now, mine are the only hands at the blogpump, and if you don’t like me, well, I don’t really know, being too polite, what to suggest about that.
But I know what you’re thinking. Why am I the only conscious and functioning Samizdatista? Did I not drink any alcohol? Did I drink lots of alcohol but am I unaffected by alcohol, immune from dizziness, vomiting, violent headaches, and so forth?
Strangely, it’s the opposite. I am no better at resisting pleasure than anyone else, or even postponing it, and my constitution is made not of iron but of balsa wood. And that, ladies and gentlemen of the sober world, is what gives me my competitive advantage when it comes to blogging only a few hours after participating in a blogger bash. Alcohol affects me immediately. I get my hangovers straight away, within minutes. Thus I immediately switch to girlie drinks like Pepsi and Orange Juice. I am not teetotal. But I genuinely drink only in moderation, even at parties where everyone else is chucking it down like there’s no tomorrow. With the result that when tomorrow does come, they all wish there really was no tomorrow, but I’m still operating at my usual steady if indolent rate.
My late father was just the same. He too would refrain from excessive drinking, not because of any great strength of character – although unlike me he was quite a strong character – but because of the same genetically inborn instant aversion therapy that curbs any inclination I ever have towards alcoholic excess. I’ve only ever been properly drunk once in my entire life.
I just thought you might like to know.
A piece in yesterday’s Sunday Times (Sept 8 2002 – page 1.24) deals with the creepy subject of children having computer chips implanted into them, so that their parents can keep track of them and stop them being abducted and murdered by mad sex-fiend serial killers. The technologist at the centre of this is Professor Kevin Warwick of Reading University, and maybe we ought to plant a chip in him to keep track of him, because he’s a rather strange person himself by all accounts.
On the face of it, planting chips in people is a clear violation of liberty, fraught with the danger of many further violations of liberty, especially when governments start planting chips in criminals, and then in people suspected of being criminals, and then in people, and then finally (checkmate) in all people.
But I don’t think that’s the whole story. I don’t think children nowadays have nearly as much freedom of movement as they might have. They are now mostly expected to show up at the same place, day after day for months at a time, whether that makes sense or not.
Time was when schools really were educational institutions first and surveillance operations only incidentally, but that balance is shifting all the time. Put it this way: if there were a massive year-long strike by the teaching profession, which of their contributions to society would be most missed? Their teaching of children or their mere keeping of tabs on children. Parents and other responsible adults want children to be “educated”, but what they really really want is to know where their children are and that they aren’t getting into evil company, if not second by second then at least hour by hour.
This is surely why portable phones are now so popular as gifts from parents to children. But they’re hardly foolproof for this job. Portable phones can be stolen by other children. They can just be lost. And there can’t be a great missing child panic every time that happens. (A wrist watch portable phone might work better, and no doubt the techies are working on that.)
To put it another way, the choice for children is not so much between children being kept track of by some kind of electronic communications device, or not; it is between children being kept track of, or being made to stay put in one or a few known-in-advance locations. And being made stay in fixed places is not exactly what we libertarians call “freedom”. Paradoxically, childr-tracking technology is what may make freedom of movement for children much more common in the near future.
Of course this kit can be used by parents and teachers to drive children crazy. But children are already at the mercy of adults. For those adults who want children to have freer and happier lives than they do now, this sort of kit, used with humanity and with common sense, will surely be part of the answer.
Maybe Professor Warwick isn’t such a creep after all.
I’m going on the radio this (early) evening for a few minutes to talk about this stuff, and happily they’re not expecting me to come crashing down on only one side of the argument. The radio station is Ondacero International, which is basically Spanish but which also does English language broadcasts for Anglo expatriates living in Spain, of whom there are at least a million. I couldn’t find any hint of English at the Ondacero website, but maybe you can. If you do contrive to tune in by some magical means or another, the show goes out at 7 pm Spanish time, which is 6 pm London time, and whatever that might be your time. Who knows? – maybe some Samizdata readers are themselves Anglo-Spaniards within regular radio range of this. I’m fixed to be on for a few minutes at around twenty past the hour. My thanks for making the contact to my good (and good libertarian) friend David Botsford, who’s been on this show several times himself.
Last week I had dinner with Alex Singleton of Liberty Log so I took a look at what he’d been saying there, and found this:
One American reader of this site recently disagreed with something I wrote about American foreign policy. He wrote: “It’s interesting to have foreigners telling us Americans what WE ought to do. Why don’t you confine your efforts to mobilizing the British military to do your international crusading for you?” Well, the reason is that I don’t want to. In a free society, individuals are free to express their viewpoints as often as they want. Clearly, there are times when it is best not to voice an opinion (especially when in the company of people whose fists don’t value negative rights!), and individuals should also be free not to take any notice of opinions expressed, but there is nothing inherently immoral from a libertarian standpoint in telling others what to do.
Ah but there might very well be. It all depends what you tells them. Libertarianism says that Alex should be legally allowed to say what he wants, but not that anything he says is therefore morally right or even excusable.
This distinction constantly gets blurred. Phoners-in to the radio shows I’m sometimes on routinely glide from the claim that something is wicked to the claim that therefore it should be illegal, no further argument being regarded by them as necessary. Insisting on this distinction, as I always try to do, is central to libertarianism, not some merely incidental nitpick.
This distinction applies also to my somewhat frivolous potato crisps dilemma. Commenters reassured me that I don’t have to like, or even morally defend, everything that I nevertheless think capitalists should be legally free to do. Quite right.
My worry, however, is that Walkers Crisps are straying – I agree only a very small step – beyond mere tastelessness into the realms of compulsion. If the children that Walkers are aiming their crisp adverts at were totally free to ignore them, fine. The trouble is that Walkers are doing their business not just with the children directly, but with their school as a whole. The children are unfree. I agree, they’re not very unfree (not when it comes to ignoring adverts), and I don’t actually believe that Walkers and the schools in question should be forbidden to do this kind of deal, just jeered at. Nevertheless, somewhere between selling crisps to rather unfree children and selling poison gas to Adolf Hitler, a line gets crossed. To take more up-to-date examples, if someone is selling armaments to Mugabe or to Al-Qaeda, would “but I’m just a capitalist doing business” count as a complete defence in our eyes? Clearly not.
I’m appalled. Yesterday morning (and my excuse is that it must have been very early in the morning) I read a posting on Freedom and Whisky and then later that morning I here accused David Farrer of responding to the whole griefometer thing very tastefully and seriously, to make some portentous point about, you know, how terrible communism was. But in the paragraph just before the ones I re-posted here, he did do all the cuteness, Dando, Diana calculations that I accused him of neglecting, just as if he were a Samizdata writer.
Nobody told me this. There were comments on what I put, but none that noted this elementary blunder. I found it out when I looked at F&W again just now. That’s when huge cock-ups are really humiliating. When no-one notices them.
As soon as you have read the above either burn or eat it and speak of it to no one. Perry: kill the comments.
One thing I have learned from this horror: that when those big bad mainstream media get things totally rectum over mammary, as they do, a lot, I am now even readier than I was to believe that it’s incompetence rather than malevolence. (This paragraph reflects the American influence on us Samizdatista. What we in the UK call a cock-up is called in America a “learning experience”.)
The party last night was excellent. I did lots of pleasure and also some major blog-related business, which I’ll tell you about when it’s ready to tell about which it isn’t yet.
“Good evening, this is the news from the BBC. Peace Activists are still besieging the Saudi Arabian embassy in London to protest at Saudi Arabian funding of violent terrorist organisations and aggressively exporting Wahhabist Islam. Although there are no reports of any violence, the activists have been handing out sample bottles of Vodka and girlie magazines to passers-by as a symbol of their disapproval of the Saudi regime.
A spokesperson for the activists said that the American military campaign will not stop until the root causes of American anger had been addressed.
Root causes of American anger Meanwhile at a meeting of European Heads of State in Strasbourg, Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder issued a joint statement again condemning Al-Qaeda as a gang of ruthless savages and a threat to the entire civilised world. They also issued a warning to Saddam Hussein not to indulge in any aggressive, unilateralist behaviour that would lead to more conflict and cause even more anger in the West. Monsieur Chirac was particularly forthcoming, describing the Iraqi regime as ‘simplistic bedouin warriors’. His words were warmly welcomed by Church leaders and trade union representatives. Now over to Caroline for the weather…”
When glamourous, leggy women in figure-hugging clothes are being wooed with statistics about the European Central Bank and it works; when people are toasting the imminent demise of the House of Saud; when the urgent intensity of gin-soaked geo-politics is interrupted only by the furious munching of habanero-flavoured nachos; when the sound of polite laughter at a really good joke about Tony Blair fills the air; when a man lurches up to you and says something that sounds like:
“Aarg ftmch nt’elly ‘ckin gbment shh blettin narg like fuff, cos ee dregs ding tchil oil vusso (burp) shlyinng gug nuvern else”
…and expects you to answer him, you know you’ve probably been invited to a British Blogger Bash. One could scarcely believe that these bold, shining, fearless Warriors of the Great Western Way could be transformed into a semi-amorphous mass of gibbering, leering primates merely by the application of sufficient quantities of alcohol but that is the stark truth of the matter.
But the truth, as well as setting you free, can also be a lot of fun.
04:30am The Second British Blogger Bash has finally run out of steam as its participants have started dropping like flies…
…I suspect there may be somewhat less blogging on Sunday from the London Samizdata HQ.
02:15 am The Second British Blogger Bash continues and the tone of discourse has become more ‘interactive’ with the arrival of Andrew Dodge…
Leather trousers should be tight because they are to men what ‘Wonderbras’ are to women
– Andrew Ian Dodge of Dodgeblog fame, at the 2B3 tonight.
10:45 pm: The Second British Blogger Bash in London is in full swing and as the picture below indicates, things are sober and sedate.
Claire Berlinski and Alex Singleton
Readers concerned with Big Brother’s intrusive gaze or those who simply desire a little more privacy while surfing may find a recent article in the International Herald Tribune of great interest. Not to be confused with the game sometimes played at Blogger Bash parties, Peek-a-booty is a variation on the file-sharing peer-to-peer (P2P) networks popularized by Napster and kazaa. Instead of swapping music files, however, Peek-a-booty uses its P2P network to swap restricted web pages in encrypted format around firewalls.
The site has been in the works for quite a while, but a refined version has only recently become available. The idea is to give those with oppressive governments (i.e. China, North Korea, Britain) a means to view those web pages the state has placed off limits. If you happen to live in one of those more actively repressive places you better check out this article before joining the peek-a-booty network.
One other caveat: at last report, Peek-a-booty had not turned on the encryption bit so discretion is still advised.
Other censorship evading sites exist. SafeWeb and one of their products Triangle Boy are the most famous. So famous, in fact, that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) apparently already has some hooks into them. Rumor has it (surprise, surprise) the CIA is also interested in Peek-a-booty. The spooks will find it more difficult to wield economic influence this time since the booty code was not created by a single private firm but by the hacker group the Cult of the Dead Cow. Instead, the CIA would appear to have some kind of blocking method up its electronic sleeve.
Stay tuned.
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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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