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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Good news! Samizdata.net is still accessible in China, at least as of this morning! A few months back we did get a couple e-mails from Chinese readers, so it is good to know that the Great (Internet) Wall of China has some holes in it, no thanks to collaborators Cisco and Oracle (may the great EMP from the sky strike them down).
- Communist China: GDP per capita (2001) $4,300 per year
- Capitalist Taiwan: GDP per capita (2001) $17,200 per year
- You are four times better off under capitalism
So here are a few things you are not supposed to see in China. Now stop messing around on the Internet and go out and conspire with someone to overthrow the state, willya!
Or even if their isn’t, either we have free will, or we do not and are just deterministic biochemical meat puppets dancing to some unfathomable script… God playing with himself. If the latter is true, then what the hell, nothing, and I do mean nothing actually matters. Morality? Truth? Life? Death? Meaningless.
Even if you do not believe in God, the same questions are relevant. I would argue that we do indeed have free will (for an excellent discussion by an atheist on that, see sections of David Deutsch‘s remarkable Fabric of Reality). And if we have free will, the very notion of submitting to the slings and arrows of life when an arrow-proof shield can be fashioned with our own hands is surely unreasonable… and to forcibly require that a person do nothing when the means to build that shield exist is not just unreasonable but monstrous.
In the print edition of New Scientist, Tom Shakespeare, the co-author of Genetic Politics: From eugenics to genome advocates outlawing parents from using ‘sperm selection technology’ which can allow the sex of a child to be chosen. He sees this as a precursor to parents eventually selecting desired traits for unborn children:
On balance, then, I believe that sperm sorting will in the long run do more harm than good. And this seems doubly true of sex selection via pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. Even if there is no “gene for” intelligence, sporting prowess or artistic talent, few scientists doubt that gene-chip technologies will one day provide considerable information about genetic variations. Letting parents choose embryos on the basis of sex now, for no good medical reason, will make it harder in the future to say no when they ask to choose embryos on the basis of other traits.
This thinking is actually quite close to that used by socialists who argue that ‘private’ education should not be allowed because it should not be up to mere parents to decide what is best for ‘their’ children. Not only can private individuals not be trusted to make such decisions (it should be left to ‘experts’), it is also unfair to others if those children are better educated. Similarly, if physically more capable disease resistant children can be ‘created’ by parents, this is somehow seen as ‘bad’ for everyone else. → Continue reading: If there is a God…
I think we may have finally found a justification for burqas. 
Sunday 1st December starting 2:30pm from the place de la Bastille, a hundred French Libertarians intend to march on the Ministry of Finance at the quai de Bercy (about 2kms). I intend to join them and will be making a collection for the costs of the demo (hand-bills, megaphone, banners, hire-cars, etc.).
Last year 60 were expected and over 200 sympathisers turned up, after the Paris daily “Le Figaro” had carried a mention of the march on the front page the day before. The event is part of the world-wide walk for capitalism. I’m unaware of any plans for a march in London on that day, perhaps organisers could post details to Samizdata.
Want to buy a robot mini-dragon to watch out for fires and intruders? Got lots of money? Then what you need is a Banryu.
It looks like something from Appleseed or Ghost in the Shell. Very cool indeed.
There is a new film called 28 Days Later, which to summarize extremely briefly, involves Britain in the very near future laid waste by a bio-engineered plague released by animal ‘rights’ activists. This plague, called The Rage, turns people into feral zombie-like killers.
Although the film has gained some rather good reviews, why bother shelling out your hard earned and heavily taxed money to see zombies up on the big screen?
Britain is already full of zombies tramping somnambulantly under the CCTV cameras, past the voting booths in which they can meaninglessly vote for ‘worst choice one’ or ‘worst choice two’ and only moving at all due to the sensory stimuli provided by the carcinogenic stench of greasy fast food dispensaries and the flickering light cast by sub-moronic Pavlovian response inducing game shows.
So why bother going to see a film about them when all you have to do to see zombies is look out your well barred and burglar alarmed window?
I am not usually this bleak-of-view, but to see the protections of both habeas corpus and double jeopardy doomed by a currently unassailable government… and yet to then see this greeted not with rioting on the streets but for the most part with a collective ovine shrug, does rather lead anyone who values liberty to dark sentiments.
When words lose their meaning, people will lose their liberty
– Confucius
For example the term ‘liberal’… once meant (& to some, prefaced by ‘classical’, it still does) a supporter of individual liberties against both force backed custom (paleo-conservativism) and force backed allegedly rational planning (socialism). It is now generally used as a euphemism for ‘democratic socialism’.
I don’t know who Johnathan Galt is but his name has a certain resonance round these here parts for reasons which don’t need a great deal of explanation.
I do know that he has a website that contains a number of video clips which most certainly look and sound authentic. (You will need some sort of reliable media-playing software to view).
Of particular interest is the footage of a man called Abu Hamza who preaches at the Finsbury Park Mosque situated but a few miles from where I live. According to Mr.Hamza, ‘kuffirs’ (er, that’s us, gentle readers) are fair game for robbery, enslavement and murder. Charming.
…and tough on the causes of crime
This meme hack was brought to you by Alan K. Henderson. See here for the inspiration.
This meme hack was brought to you by Alan K. Henderson. See here for the inspiration.
Tonight three North African Muslims were arrested by MI-5 and charged under Section 57 of the Prevention of Terrorism Act, with conspiring to release cyanide gas in the London Underground (the subway train system).
The arrested men were said to belong to an organization that is part of Al Qaeda.
If only the British State would spend a great deal more of its appropriated money on this sort of legitimate operation and building up our highly professional but vastly under-funded military… and spend vastly less time and stolen money distorting our economy, abridging our liberties and generally screwing things up, we would be a great deal safer than we currently are.
I was just reading an article about the “space parasol” idea. That’s the concept of placing a sunshade at the Earth-Sun L1 point1 to intercept perhaps 2% of the solar flux before it reaches Earth. This would counter the projected temperature changes on Earth due to a green-house effect.
It struck me there is more to it than that. It is known the Solar Constant2 has risen slowly over the aeons of our star’s life and will continue to do so. At some point in our distant future we will have no choice but to either move our planet further outwards, abandon it for a new home or build sunshades. The evolution of the solar system gives us absolutely no choice in the matter. We will be forced to take complete control of the energy balance of Earth or else we and all other life will be on our way to extinction.
I’m confident our “greens” will by then have mutated into “browns” who will believe we should allow events to run their natural course from parched bare rock to parched bare rock.
Whether we take up the reigns of control now or our descendant species do so millions of years from now is not relevant to the purpose of this article however. Somewhere in the Universe there are civilizations which have faced the choice already. Some of them will have chosen to control the stellar flux on their home world.
We have two methods of detecting extrasolar planets currently. One is by the doppler effect caused by a stars’ dance about the changing center of gravity of its’ planetary system; the other is by watching the light curve for dips due to planets passing across their star’s disk from our perspective.
It is quite possible for us to see doppler effects without seeing eclipses. It happens if the plane of the alien solar system is tilted with respect to us such that planets never pass directly between us and their star. This is the most likely scenario.
But what if we were to see the opposite effect? What if we see a significant dip in the light curve at predictable intervals and yet do not see any doppler effect?
I’ll expand on this for those who have not said “Aha!” yet.
It should take a fairly significant sized body to make a dip we detect: almost certainly one with a disk size from which we would infer a substantial, Jupiter class, mass. Such an object would almost certainly cause alternating redward and blueward doppler shifts of the stars spectral lines as it orbits the star. If that is not the case, we have an anomaly. An object in orbit about its’ star which is large enough to block substantial light and yet is very low mass relative to its’ size should strike one as very odd.
It could be a parasol built by intelligent life.
1 = Lagrange points are where the gravity between two bodies creates a “balance” point such the pull from each tends to keep the object where it is. The Earth-Sun L1 point is on a line directly between and a couple million miles inwards. You can either read about it or calculate it yourself.
2 = The Solar Constant is the average total energy flux at Earth orbit, currently about 1.37 kw/m^2 flat on to the Sun. It is reasonably constant over a human lifetime but is not constant in the long term. The Sun was hotter in its’ earliest years until it stabilized somewhat cooler than it is now. It has slowly grown hotter and will continue to do so for billions of years to come. Life will be impacted long before our star leaves the Main Sequence in the far future. At that time it will expand to red gianthood and will become large enough to absorb or at best turn Earth into an orbiting cinder.
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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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