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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I don’t know what to make of this, but it is surely interesting. The story, in case this link to it goes dead for some reason or another, is that some French-based (it would seem) Muslim entrepreneurs have contrived something called “Mecca-Cola”. It presumably tastes pretty much like the usual Clona-Cola stuff, but it has an Islamic spin to its marketing.
I’ve just caught a British Channel 5 TV report about this, and they made it look as if the “average Muslim” is all for it. And the sales pitch C5 were reportng was: buy Mecca-Cola and demonstrate against the USA and its vicious anti-Muslim war, a troubling combination of messages.
I don’t know if this is us infecting them or them infecting us, or what the hell is going on here, beyond the obvious of some people trying to make lots of money. Is Mecca-Cola making its way in the USA? Comments anyone?
Glenn Reynolds‘ latest TechCentralStation piece is up, and in it there’s a link to one of those Famous Articles you know you should have read, in this case Garrett Hardin‘s 1968 piece called The Tragedy of the Commons. I went to it, and since it’s not a piece I actually know very well (I may or may not have read it, and if so how thoroughly I can’t remember, a long time ago), I decided to have a read of it.
And I immediately, without further conscious thought, whistled up a complete print-out.
This was, I feel, one of those revealing moments. Well, maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t, but here’s my surmise.
The much famed “collapse of attention span” that we’ve all been suffering from lately is mostly no such thing. All that we are suffering from is the limitations of the computer screen compared to paper, which (to recycle a very old joke), if it had been invented after the computer screen rather than several centuries before it, would have been hailed as a huge advance.
When I am thinking about reading something – anything – I need to know when I start what I’m getting myself into, so that I can decide now if I have the time and the effort ready for the job, and so that I can generally work myself up into the correct state of determined receptivity, like a sportsman psyching himself up at the start of a long race or a big fight. That’s maybe over-dramatising it a bit but that, in a mild form, is what’s going on when you “settle down” to read something.
When I have my read in my hands, on paper, I can immediately tell approximately what I’m in for. But the computer screen, despite all kinds of software trickery that’s been devised to help with this exact problem, only really tells you what you are facing if you can see all of it on your screen, or at the very least can scroll down very quickly to the end. (Am I the only one who often finds a brief moment of scrolling a wildly inaccurate method of guessing length?) If I stop this blog posting very soon, I’ll just about be in under this particular bit of wire, and I will in fact try very hard to do just that.
Another way to answer the length question for the reader is to establish a pattern that readers are familiar with, the way samizdata does. Our readers know that even if it says “MORE” on one of these things, they’ll only be troubled for a certain sort of length of time, and thus they can embark on the reading with that vital part of “settling down” process having been done for them. (And by the way, clicking on “MORE” has the effect of “separating out” the piece from all the other bloggage here present, and thus making an assessment of the length even of the not-so-short samizdata pieces that much easier to do. At the end, there’s not more bloggage, there’s just empty space, which makes length-guessing a lot less confusing. At least you know which piece this ending is the ending of.)
Computers have created a new niche for pieces short enough to be “settled down to” very quickly, without you having to scroll down carefully or go to the bother and expense of a print-out. But because our attention spans have not in fact collapsed that enormously, computers have created a very big niche, for a lot of such pieces. In short they have created the blogosphere.
I could, I’m sure, say a lot more here about all this, but that would obviously be a very foolish thing for me to do.
There has been much discussion lately how assorted snooping organizations of assorted governments are creating the infrastructure of the Big Brother state as fast as their evil little hands can do so. Fortuneately for those who love Liberty more than Government, there are ways to defeat them. Long ago I said to some friends: “The hacker giveth and the hacker taketh away”, meaning what one programmer designs for a government or corporation, another programmer can bypass or subvert. It is, after all, nothing but patterns of ones and zeroes.
The advantage of numbers falls to our side. Whatever number of bright people any government collects for some nefarious project, there will be larger numbers of even brighter and perhaps more committed people out to undo the damage. There is a near certainty someone, somewhere on this large hunk of rock and water will find the work around. Minutes later, everyone will have it.
This brings me to the point of this ramble: those who are seriously interested in the technology of privacy may find of interest this talk from the 1999 Ottawa Linux Conference on “Linux and the Freedom Network” by Zero Knowledge of Canada. Right click and download. It’s a largish mp3 but well worth the effort. The sort of thing to drive Statists mad…
And that can’t ever be a bad thing.
Through a family connection, my eldest brother Toby has got himself involved in the cake business. He used to be an accountant and a management consultancy hotshot, and the widow of his late wife’s brother used to run a cake-baking operation. So when she also died, Toby was one of the people who rallied round to help. That was a few years ago, but the resulting enterprise, Columbine Cakes, is still very much in business. Everything depends on how the cakes are baked, and the cook, the human hinge of the whole enterprise, is still going strong.
Columbine gets most of its business from already satisfied customers who come back for more, and from those lucky people with whom those customers share their purchases, often on special occasions like weddings when only the best will do. Columbine also has a nice new website, which will supply you with all the details if you want to purchase any of their products or get onto their mailing list.
Toby gave me a Columbine fruit cake for Christmas. It wasn’t quite as good as the cakes our mother used to make at Christmas time, but it was the nearest thing to such a miracle that I’ve ever tasted, that you can buy in a shop or through the post. If this fruit cake was anything to go by, then any Columbine product – and there are now quite a few – would be worth a try. None of them are cheap. These are not cakes for the penny-pincher, or, I imagine, for the calorie-phobic. But if you give any of them a go, I truly believe you won’t regret it. Enjoy.
President Bush has announced a proposal to abolish the Federal tax on dividend payments.
This proposal is defended partly on the grounds that reducing taxation (i.e. letting people keep more more of their own money) is generally a good thing, and partly because taxing dividends is ‘double taxation’ (the money that companies make already being taxed via Federal Corporation tax – which is actually quite high in the United States).
However, there is another factor to be considered. Financial institutions such as Pension Funds do not tend to be taxed as highly on their share holdings as individuals are (if indeed such trusts are taxed at all), so the effect of taxing individuals on their share holdings (not just the dividend tax but capital gains tax) is to concentrate a higher and higher percentage of stock into the ownership of financial institutions.
In short a group of hired managers in financial instructions ‘owning’ corporations managed by another group of hired managers. This may well be unhealthy (with a ‘magic circle’ of managers having developed, who tend to sit on each other’s ‘remuneration committees’ and lobby for State and Federal laws to make takeovers [if they are a threat to managers] more difficult and …)
In Britain the government also considered the difference between the regime of personal and financial institution taxation a problem. However, here the government responded by increasing the taxes that the pension funds (etc) had to pay – thus undermining further people’s incentive to save.
For all its many problems the United States is still a better country than Britain.
Fellow bloggers and cricket nuts Brian Micklethwait and Antoine Clarke may have their own reasons for why Australians are currently vastly better than the English at playing cricket, notwithstanding the fifth and final Test match, which England won by a canter.
I reckon this story could explain why Aussie cricket fans are, well, able to get fully behind their team, and hence cheer their heroes to victory on a depressingly regular basis.
I hope that this won’t be a surprise to the reader, but a whole generation has grown up in which lying, deception, and manipulation are just part of the game; a generation where too many people think that responding to a question with, “That depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is” under oath is a sign of cleverness.
– Clayton Cramer (in his article What Clayton Cramer Saw and (Nearly) Everyone Else Missed for History News Network yesterday, about the Michael Bellesiles affair – link via Instapundit)
It’s final. Instapundit reports DeCSS (a DVD encryption unscrambler) is legal… if you live in the free world.
We send our heartfelt congratulations to the author of DeCSS, Jon Lech Johansen, on his acquittal and total victory over the forces of evil.
How fortunate we are to be British. Just how may we count our blessings? While other nations are wracked with chaos and their peoples suffer the vicissitudes of lawlessness and anarchy, we blessed citizens of this Sceptered Isle can enjoy our peaceful lives knowing with cast-iron certainty that our brave and determined public officials are working night and day to ensure that we live in comfort and security.
Ever-vigilant, there is no threat to our national fabric on which they will not pounce:
“Two children in Lancashire have been told they need planning permission for a playhouse they have erected in their garden.
Hours after the wooden house was erected, planning officers told them it would have to be taken down if the permission is not secured.”
Did these miscreants honestly believe that they were going to get away with this? Did they imagine that their flagrant disregard for order was going to be tolerated? Did they think, for even a second, that such delinquent behaviour would not be noticed by our eagle-eyed and steely-nerved planning officers?
“However, the council said the wendy house, which is on the side of the family home, is an “unauthorised development”.
“As the wendy house borders a highway, the law states that planning permission is required,” a spokesman said.”
There is no need to thank our faithful council officers. As they would be the first to point out, they are only doing their jobs. But let us spare a moment in any event, to savour the gratitude they have so selflessly earned with their sterling defence of our way of life.
“Eight-year-old Ben and his sister Katie, six, are said to be devastated that their playhouse, given to them as an early Christmas present, may be moved.”
How sad that criminality should afflict those so young. But tenderness of age should not deflect the righteous wrath held ever-ready to be visited upon those guilty of trying to sabotage our placid and convivial society. Who knows if this allegedly harmless toy was not, in reality, to be used as a stash of illegal weapons? Does anyone need to be reminded of the well-established ‘link’ between wooden playhouses and international terrorism?
But let us not dwell on the morbid consequences of this kind of wild insurrection. Let us, instead, pay a simple homage to our fearless public officials who have saved us, yet again, from civilisational catastrophe. We may now all sleep safely, in the prescribed manner, in our properly regulated beds.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu has attacked Tony Blair for his “mind-boggling” support for the US over a possible war in Iraq. He was shocked and saddened America was being “aided and abetted” by Britain as the British Government is expected to announce later this week that it is planning to deploy troops to the region, reportedly numbering 27,000. When does compassion, when does morality, when does caring come in? The dissident frogman has an excellent take-down of such idiotarian rhetoric.
A commenter, who might otherwise buy a moral case for making war on communist regimes, has pointed out that the local citizens should do their ‘job’ and overthrow the nasty regimes. The argument seems to be that the locals should do it, if they are in favour of freedom and democracy, and thus demonstrate that they are worthy of our support. Such suggestion can only be made with certain assumptions. As a self-appointed champion of the individual facing a totalitarian state, I shall respond to them.
It has been said, and I believe it to be the case, that the people of a nation are only as free as they want to be. The Cubans have long had the power to overthrow Castro, but have simply chosen to live with him and the poverty he brings.
With respect, that is utter nonsense. The assumption here is that ‘the people’ are a collective entity with the ability to act unanimously. In reality, it is a large number of individuals against whom monopolised and institutionalised violence is used on a regular basis. After a couple of decades of propaganda and control of information by the state, the system needs only an occassional tweaking and a careful monitoring of the non-conformist elements of the castrated society.
Same with the Iraqis. As vile a creature as Saddam is, he would be out of power if the Iraqis were willing to make sacrifices for rebellion. Sure, the terror tactics used by Saddam (chopping up bodies and delivering them to homes in body bags, killing his own relatives, etc.) serve to scare the populace into submission. However, the power and the choice is there. What is needed is enough patriots to give their blood to plant the seed that will grow into tree of liberty.
No, the power is not there, the choice is not there. You can have as many Iraqis as possible, individually knowing that Saddam is a vile creature and yet not be able or ready to fight him. Unless there is an organised resistance, it is impossible for a ‘nation’ to ‘free itself’ from tyranny. The more brutal a regime is, the more difficult is to dislodge it. You need a critical mass of individuals each one of them willing to make the ultimate sacrifice. The more brutal a regime, the more it has to loose and the more determined and vicious those supporting it are.
The Iranians seem to be realizing this. There are actually true Iranian patriots willing to die for freedom. The roots of liberty are spreading within the hearts and souls of each individual Iranian. This is the best way to overthrow tyrants – from the ground up, not the top down.
Hmm, if the roots of liberty are spreading within the hearts and souls of each individual Iranian, then I’d better move to Iran because it is the only country where this is happening. Don’t you think that Iranian resistance has something to do with the Western life style and freedoms it offers, such as mixed-sex parties and alcohol and other goodies that the islamic kill-joys don’t want young Iranians to have. The professor, who may be prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice, is doing so in a situation that puts the government at the disadvantage. Why has the situation arisen in the first place? Because the Iranian regime doesn’t want to look illiberal to the western world. And so we have the external influence again, getting in the way of the neat image of ground-up liberty blossoming in the heart of each Iranian patriot…
You can point to Germany and Japan all you want, but the tradition of freedom was already prevalent in their cultures prior to hijacking by fascists.
Yes, I will point to Germany where there was the tradition of freedom as much as any other European country at the time. But the Germans did not overthrow fascism and the internal opposition to Hitler had been squashed ruthlessly well before the war. Japan on the other hand, had no tradition of freedom before fascism, hence the need for 7-year US ‘presence’ in the country. The Soviet Union did not collapse because of its citizens rising against their oppressors. The country had never had a tradition of freedom, they went straight from serfdom to er, communism… Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, on the other hand, had been democracies before communism. Dissident movements existed and none of the old-style communists resurfaced in post-Cold War governments like in Russia.
…suppose the US makes war with N. Korea and Iraq, and overthrows the communists and Saddam. Then what? Will that magically create freedom? Will the people recognize individual natural rights that lead to a spontaneous societal order? Will they realize the benefits that a respect for property rights brings?
Yes, overthrowing the communists and Saddam will create freedom. No magic, just logic. If you take away the root of oppression, you get freedom. The question is what the people will do with it. If you expect nothing less than recognition of individual natural rights and a spontaneous societal order, that seems rather harsh. I don’t think it’s fair on the poor oppressed population to hold them to a standard much higher than that reached by the assorted lefties polluting the Western societies. One thing you can be sure of, though, is that their will love property rights…
Or will the N. Koreans simply create another socialist government, like the former Soviet republics have chosen to join the socialist EU?
Are you saying that the socialism of the EU is comparable to the Stalinist totalitarianism of the North Koreans?! No one can accuse Samizdata.net to be pro-EU but such suggestion is preposterous. All statisms are not equal. Some are bad and some are even worse.
And will the Iraqis see the US not as the great liberator that saved them from oppression, but as the Great Satan, much like the ungrateful Kuwaitis see the US today?
I don’t see why it is such a tragedy that Kuwaitis are ungrateful. Perhaps they realised that the US ‘liberation’ was not out of love of Kuwait but because it was in the US national interest. Nothing wrong with either.
Can armies and government, the very wellspring of statism, achieve a top-down conception of liberty?
Why should they? I certainly don’t expect them to! Their role is to protect their citizens and remove tyranny if it threatens their liberty. They are to uphold the framework within which freedom can flourish. To remove tyranny from top down means just that, it does not mean an imposition of freedom. I advocate the use of the army and the state to do the former and reserve the latter for the individual.
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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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