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]
|
Following last week’s ricin incident it seems that the British authorities have decided to come clean with the public:
“British ministers have been warned by their security advisers that a west European city is “likely” to be the target of a terrorist attack using a chemical or other non-conventional weapon in the short-to-medium term.
They have also warned that they cannot be sure they know the identity of more than 50 per cent of people in the UK who might carry out a terrorist attack on behalf of al-Qaeda.”
Just how long, I wonder, is that ‘short-to-medium’ term? And just how many is ’50 per cent’? Is that two people or ten thousand people? Any clue?
Is this true and we’re being softened up to endure the worst or is it hogwash because the authorities have a fairly good idea who these people are but don’t want to let on that they know? Beats me.
I will say, however, that if the claim in the second paragraph turns out to be correct then, leaving aside the possible ghastly consequences for a moment, it really does illustrate the extent to which the British internal security apparatus has been woefully misdirected these last few years.
We live in a country with more CCTV cameras per square mile than any other country on earth, our police and customs officials have surveillance and information gathering powers that the KGB would envy and, because of Money Laundering Regulations, it is almost impossible to function in our society without having to prove identity. If I failed to send in my VAT Form at the end of this month, the state will be all over me like bluebottles on a dog-turd. Yet we could, conceivably, be playing host to scores or maybe even hundreds of potential mass-murdering terrorists and the response of the security services is to shrug and say ‘sorry, guv, haven’t got the foggiest’.
Any chance of a re-assessment of priorities in future?
I have now been a non-smoker for seven days. A week. Nearly a fiftieth of a year! It is my sad duty to report that I don’t feel any better for having quit. In fact, I feel worse.
The cravings, though fewer and less severe, still lap tauntingly at my nervous system. It’s like having an itch between the shoulder blades. My temper is, shall we say, far from even. I no longer have anything resembling a sleep pattern. Oh I do sleep. At least, I think I sleep. I find myself standing in the bathroom, scratching my arse, yawning and wondering what happened to the last seven hours. That’s sleep, isn’t it? I hope so.
I no longer eat, I graze. Strange hungers afflict me at unorthodox hours. Oh Lord, why don’t cheeseburgers come in packs of twenty? I am accumulating fat like a bear preparing to hibernate.
The mood swings are the worst. Last night the BBC Weather reported roads blocked by snow in the West Midlands. I was on the verge of tears. Euphoria to desolation in the space of half-an-hour is about the norm.
People say stupid things when you’re trying to quit smoking. ‘Hey, David, it’s all in your mind’. ‘No kidding??!! And there was me thinking it was all in my foot. Of course, it’s all in my f*cking mind, you stupid c*nt. If it was all in my computer’s hard-drive I could just delete it and have done with.’
Testy. Did I mention that I was a little testy? Well, I’m a little testy.
About once every blue moon, Blogosophical Explanations springs to life, and there was another posting there as recently as December 14th of last year. It included this, from Herb Gintis, Emeritus Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts:
… Economists are fond of using the Folk Theorem of repeated games and the Tit-for-Tat simulations to argue that human cooperation can be understood in terms of long-run, enlightened self-interest, but we will argue in chapter 11 that this view is profoundly incorrect. There are two major problems with the idea that cooperation can be understood in terms of long-run self-interest (charitably interpreted to include regard for kin). The first is that self-interest results in cooperation only when agents are sufficiently future-oriented (i.e., the discount rate is very low); but in situations where a social system is threatened and likely to be destroyed, cooperation is most central to survival and agents are likely to be very present-oriented, since the probability of future interactions is low. Therefore, societies in which cooperation is based on long-run self-interest will invariably collapse when seriously threatened. The second problem is that there is sizable evidence that we are considerably more prosocial than is predicted by the long-run self-interest models.
Except in the context of anonymous market interactions, the idea that human beings are self-interested is particularly implausible. Indeed, some of the major predictive failures of game theory stem from not recognizing the positive and negative aspects of preference and welfare interdependence. Homo economicus might be reasonably described as a sociopath if he were to be set loose in society.
There are many more tangents there to fly off at than one little Samizdata posting could possibly have space for, but allow me to indulge in just one.
As a description of the full panoply of human society, Tit-for-Tat is surely every bit as inadequate as Gintis says it is. All humans, provided only that they are allowed to, train each other to be more axiomatically cooperative than that, in societies which expect to survive past their next big collective crisis.
But how about Tit-for-Tat as a description both of the nature of actually existing “Soviet man” and of the collapse of the Soviet system? → Continue reading: Tit-for-Tat doesn’t explain us but it does explain Homo Sovieticus
No, I don’t mean some figurative ‘holy grail’, nor do I mean Monty Python & The Holy Grail, I really do mean the real purported The Holy Grail.
A group of modern day Knights Templar will be using modern thermal imaging and ultrasound technologies to search Rosslyn Chapel, in Scotland, long thought to be final resting place of what is said to be the real Holy Grail.
I love snow, but in London we often get none at all and only very rarely does it snow heavily, which is to say, actually leaving a nice white carpet (yes, I know… that hardly counts as snow at all by some standards).
Yesterday however, I got my wish, with the heaviest snowfall in London in 12 years…
The view down my street
It will be mostly gone by tomorrow in all likelihood but it at least I get a day to enjoy the ephemeral splendours of winter.
To all those who believe that first-world farming cannot survive without the theft of subsidies, please then explain how New Zealand seems to manage with hardly any help from the state.
I second the suggestion by Ross Clark in The Spectator… let’s have a buy-cott of New Zealand’s theft-free farm produce: the Kiwis puts British, European and North American agriculture to shame.
One of the reasons people used to pay so much attention to politics was that it offered cheap entertainment at a time when entertainment was scarce. Now entertainment is plentiful, and much of it is more entertaining than politics.
– Glenn Reynolds
I have long wondered whether anti-Americanism can be regarded as the last acceptable form of racism among our chattering classes. Of course, “racism” might be stretching things a bit far but when it comes to reflexive bigotry, anti-Americanism fills the space once reserved for non-whites, Jews, Catholics, dissenters, atheists and others. Of course anti-Semitism is still around these days, as many bloggers have sadly had cause to state.
Michael Gove in the Times on Wednesday says the toughest challenge of Tony Blair’s rule would be to challenge and face down the anti-Americanism of the Left.
Because the Times’ website archive is a paid-for one, I will quote one of his most telling paragraphs here in full:
Why then do the myths of America the Hateful take such powerful hold? Because anti-Americanism provides a useful emotional function which goes beyond logic and reaches deep into the darker recesses of the European soul. In centuries past those on the Left who wished to personalise their hatred of capitalism, who sought to make it emotionally resonant by fastening an envious political passion on to a blameless scapegoat people, embraced anti-Semitism. It was the socialism of fools. Which is what anti-Americanism is now.
Gove makes a number of excellent points, although I would add that hatred of the U.S. is sadly not a monopoly of socialists, since there have sometimes been elements of knee-jerk dislike of Uncle Sam from the political Right. There is a generation of conservatives (either of the lower or upper case C variety), mostly in their middle age, who dislike America for its post-Englightenment secularism, entrepreneurial gusto, popular culture and challenge to the old British Empire. But in the main these days hatred of America is a left-wing phenomenon.
I am not sure how to attack this prejudice. But for my part I tend to adopt a deliberately reflexive support for the U.S. in most things, even to the point of giving the U.S. the benefit of the doubt in cases where a strictly dispassionate person might not. This can take trivial forms. I make a point of marking the Fourth of July, proudly tell my friends that I have American relatives serving in the U.S. Air Force, and will often stick up for George Bush in pub chats about the world at the slightest opportunity. (I once caused a lady at a dinner party to go very red in the face by saying how pleased I was that Dubya had stiffed the Kyoto Treaty).
The America has a lot of noisy enemies. No harm in making some noise on its behalf. And may God rot Harold Pinter and other opponents of Jefferson’s Republic.
My good friend and now literal comrade-in-arms Tom Burroughes visited me in the U.S. a few months ago, centering his visit around a side trip to Front Sight Firearms Training Institute in Las Vegas, Nevada. Tom has written up his impressions from his attendance at a 4-day Defensive Handgun course on my blog site.
Tom nowhere mentions this in his blog article, but I will: a few years ago, he wrote a nice little piece for the Libertarian Alliance called The Joy of Shooting: Preserving Freedoms by Making Regular Use of Them (pdf file). Re-reading his earlier piece, I’m particularly happy for him that he took the opportunity to get much more training. He acquitted himself well in the rigorous 4-day course in the desert, and I look forward to his next visit: I fully expect him to re-visit Front Sight… the next time, to become a rifleman. Good work Tom!
Russell Whitaker
The Royal Society of Chemistry is to honour author and critic of scientists George Orwell with a search for the perfect way to make his favourite drink.
Orwell was an expert not only on the Big Brother but also on tea – another important aspect of the British society. His 1946 essay A Nice Cup of Tea laid down 11 steps to the perfect brew, and was a reaction to a lack of guidance on tea-brewing in cook books: “This is curious not only because tea is one of the mainstays of civilisation in this country.., but because the best manner of making it is the subject of violent disputes.”
According to Orwell tea should be drunk strong, without sugar and from a cup with a round bottom. It should be poured before adding milk, he insisted, entering a debate that has caused acute controversy within the tea-etiquette world.
When Oxford-based poet and professional bore Tom Paulin advocated the shooting of West Bank Jewish settlers he probably expected nothing more than the appreciative plaudits of his academic colleagues. But I daresay he had not even heard of the blogosphere. If he had, he might have kept his mouth shut. As it is, he was catapulted overnight from obscurity to ‘Global Moron’ status and assigned a transatlantic reputation as a virulent anti-semite. Paulin got a maulin’
Personally, I don’t think Mr.Paulin is an anti-semite. More likely he was caught up in the wave of anti-Israel sentiment that has swept right through the academic and media classes; a sort of fashion-induced rush of blood to the head. However, the details barely seem to matter now because, judging from his response in the Guardian the whole affair has unhinged him:
“The first answer is Beckett’s
in another context – to “Mr Beckett
they say that you are English?”
he answered “au contraire”
– he didn’t say “I am not dot dot”
which plays their game
– in this case the ones who play the a-s card –
of death threats hate mail talking tough
the usual cynical Goebbels stuff
so I say the same
and say that peace it must be talked
re Palestine and re Iraq
– Israel has got the bomb
but that’s not why
no one in their right mind
says Israel should be swept into the sea…”
Hey daddy-o it’s, like, so far-out, man. In fact, it’s so far-out I can’t see it. I can, though, imagine one of the Guardian’s editor’s accompanying him on the bongos while he read it.
I think I shall compose a response in similar poetic vain. Ahem…(clears throat):
“First Michael Moore,
Now Tom Paulin,
One by one,
The idiots are fallin’.
Thank you. Thank you.
There is no margin for error about a monstrosity that was created for the alleged purpose of preventing wars by uniting the world against any aggressor, but proceeded to unite it against any victim of aggression. The expulsion of a charter member, the Republic of China [Taiwan]—an action forbidden by the U.N.’s own Charter—was a ‘moment of truth,’ a naked display of the United Nations’ soul. What was Red China’s qualification for membership in the U.N.? The fact that her government seized power by force, and has maintained it for twenty-two years by terror. What disqualified Nationalist China [Taiwan]? The fact that she was a friend of the United States. It was against the United States that all those beneficiaries of our foreign aid were voting at the U.N. It was hatred of the United States and the pleasure of spitting in our face that they were celebrating, as well as their liberation from morality—with savages, appropriately, doing jungle dances in the aisles.
– Ayn Rand (at the top of the UNisEvil.com website)
|
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.
|
