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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Okay cricket. There’s a World Cup on, and it is focussing attention on Zimbabwe, and on Mugabe – extreme nastiness of. So cricket is worth explaining to people whom I wouldn’t normally bother to bother about it.
For example, in their first game of the tournament two of the Zimbabwe cricketers, Andy Flower and Henry Olonga made a protest on behalf of their fellow countrymen:
Before the Group-A match started Monday, Andy Flower and Henry Olonga donned black armbands and released a statement condemning the worsening violence and famine in their country, as they mourned what they called “the death of democracy.”
Brave men.
So anyway, I’ll assume you know roughly what baseball is, and I’ll assume I do, and I’ll describe cricket basically by saying how it differs from baseball.
First, the similarities, and (I’m guessing) the common ancestry. Both involve a guy propelling a ball in the direction of a batter, and the batter trying to hit the ball. → Continue reading: Cricket explained – as briefly as I can manage (i.e. not very)
The music industry has just been hit with a massive class action suit for price fixing. Fox News reported on the details today.
Glenn Reynolds, a law Professor at the University of Tennesee, has been expecting this for ages. He’s gone so far as to say even industry insiders feel they are vulnerable to a RICO.
Kudos to Glenn and his crystal ball!
Samizdata voted No. 1 Group Blog by a fairly large group of the great and the good of the blogosphere (or the mad and the bad, depending on your p.o.v.) Nice. True. Stiff competition, too.
Andrew Sullivan has some rather sharp things to say about George W. Bush and the ballooning budget deficit.
About time! Sullivan has tended, I think, to give the President a fairly easy time on a lot of issues, perhaps on the basis of natural loyalty to a conservative pol and hatred of the other side. But there’s no getting away from the fact that the US budget deficit is set to grow at an alarming pace.
At the core of the problem is the raft of domestic programmes Bush feels obligated to support or which the GOP in the House and the Senate refuse to kill off. At least the defence spending aspect to the budget can be justified by the war. But although I support Bush’s tax cuts, especially the abolition of tax on dividends because of the economic benefits, he could be storing up trouble unless some discipline is imposed.
Why am I, as a Brit, fretting about the US deficit? Well, given the enormous importance of a vibrant US economy, it is in my interests that Bush doesn’t fall asleep at the wheel on this issue. There are no excuses.
Apologies are due for my short sabbatical away from the Samizdata but I’m afraid the prosaic concerns of keeping a roof over my head required attendance.
Having returned this evening, I have had an opportunity to scroll through the items posted since my last visit and, also, the comments appended thereto. It is among the latter efforts that I discovered this outpouring of hysterical claptrap:
“You are evading the fact that the United States Government is the foremost terrorist organisation in the world at the current time and its war plans are not designed to protect yours and my liberties but rather to extend its own power at the expense of me and you in terms of our money, liberty and increased risk of attack and at the expense of the lives of the innocents in Iraq who are about to be bombed.
For a moment, I thought we had been honoured with a visit from Noam Chomsky, but the actual author turned out to be Paul Coulam who I had, until now, credited with a bit more common sense. I won’t go as far as to say that I am shocked but I am disappointed; not because Paul is clearly against any attack on Iraq but because he has elected to employ the ludicrous rhetoric of the far-left in order to express that opposition.
If Paul honestly believes the things he has written then there is probably nothing I can do or say that will serve to change his mind but I am inspired enough to conduct a little Q&A session in which Paul and everybody else is invited to participate.
- America is indeed on the warpath. Is this because:
- They just decided that they want to dominate everybody in the whole world and enslave them for ever and steal all their resources?
OR
- They might just be trying to prevent another 9/11 type terrorist attack on their country?
- Paul is quite right to be outraged at the erosion of his civil liberties and the plundering of his wealth but are these processes occuring because of:
- American warmongering and ‘bloodlust’ for power?:
OR
- Because the majority of his (and my) fellow Brits keep electing socialist kleptocrats into Westminster and they, in turn, are only answerable to even bigger kleptocrats in the EU?
- Thousands of Saddam’s ‘Republican Guards’ will be deliberately targetted by allied forces in any attack on Iraq. These are the men who have tortured, murdered and terrorised a nation at the behest of their tyrant boss. Should they be regarded as:
- ‘Innocent’ Iraqi victims of the American terror machine?
OR
- About as deserving of our sympathy as the Waffen SS?
→ Continue reading: If this is Rothbard, count me out
Imagination without skill gives us contemporary art.
– Tom Stoppard in his play Artist Descending a Staircase
The Cricket World Cup started today with the opening game, in which the West Indies narrowly defeated South Africa. However, as the Guardian reports, the big story for many concerns whether or not England will play their opening fixture in Harare next Thursday.
[England] Captain Nasser Hussain was said to be opposed to playing the game for fear of violent protests, according to a source accompanying the team. Vice-captain Alec Stewart is understood to be leading a minority ‘pragmatist’ faction, a group of players keen to go ahead.
The threats, issued by a previously unknown group called the ‘Sons and Daughters of Zimbabwe’ have pledged violence against the players and their families if they fulfil their fixture against the Zimbabwean national side.
Robert Mugabe, the president of Zimbabwe and of the nation’s cricketing body, is anxious to see the game played. A successful World Cup will be widely seen as an endorsement of his regime. Tomorrow Zimbabwe are due to play Namibia
This is all extremely depressing. These “Sons and Daughters of Zimbabwe”, by threatening violence to the England players (rather than merely disruption to the event) may perhaps have achieved their own purposes, but so far as British public opinion is concerned, they have done themselves no favours. At one stroke they may have turned the Zimbabwe issue, in British eyes, from “vicious dictator murders millions of his own people” to “those Africans, they’re all as bad as each other”.
Meanwhile, although the England players who don’t want to go may be having their doubts because of the support that they fear they may be giving to the detestable Mugabe, what they are actually saying is that his regime is insufficiently repressive. Their objection, or at any rate their excuse for objecting, is that their own safety can’t be guaranteed, because protestors may turn out to be insufficiently under the control of the Zimbabwean ‘authorities’, i.e. roaming gangs of murderous thugs.
Anything that keeps Zimbabwe on the front pages is worth something. But this muddle of messages, together with the preoccupation of the rest of the world with Iraq, could hardly have turned out better for Mugabe. His days in power will surely soon end, but how many other Zimbabweans will have to die before that end comes?
Martin Cole takes a Popperian cudgle to the deadening hand of the emerging Euro super-state
Pericles in his famous funeral oration for the slain warriors of democratic Athens, among many other ringing statements in favour of democracy, pertinently said the following:
Although only a few may originate a policy, we are all able to judge it. We do not look upon discussion as a stumbling block in the way of political action, but as an indispensable preliminary to acting wisely.
The above is quoted directly from Karl Popper’s book The Open Society and its Enemies published in paperback by Routledge Classics (ISBN 0-415-23731-9). It should be required reading for all members of the convention chaired by Vallery Giscard d’Estaing on the future structures of the European State.
Others following these debates are also recommended to the book, but for those unable to obtain a copy, or spare the time to read it, I give below a brief summary of what I consider to be the most salient points as concerns the dangers Europe now faces if the convention proceeds as seems likely. In my opinion, never will the outcome of such a debate be likely to affect so many millions of people, and rarely can there have been such reluctance to openly discuss the frightening implications of the decisions being taken.
Plato is the early villain in Popper’s analysis for the ever present drive against democracy and equalitarianism. The author describes, with detailed logic, the elitism, racialism and totalitarianism that can eventually result in a Society that follows the ‘chosen people’ concept, intrinsic to much of Plato’s writings.
Popper makes an excellent case that the critical divide in governance of a geographic entity, whether city, nation (and it follows, super-state) is between collectivism and individualism.
The argument made by Plato that the state be placed higher than the individual and the suggestion that justice is synonymous “for that which is in the best interest of the state” now apparent in the structures of the EU, must be refuted at, virtually, any cost. → Continue reading: Democracy or Pan-European Totalitarianism
As a dual national I have a French national identity card. As a British national who doesn’t have a driving licence and whose passport expired in December of last year, I have no state approved form of identifying myself.
Naturally I have never been asked to produce a form of identification in France by a state official except when crossing a border. Equally naturally I have been asked numerous times by police officers in the United Kingdom to identify myself (despite this being illegal without some probable cause, but then I suppose I have a shifty look).
Therefore I fear that a British identity card will become the pretext of even more bullying of white middle-class people by the low-life pigs that pass for law-enforcement officers in the UK today.
During the Second World War, I am told that a well known local dignitary in Ulster was chatting to a police officer at a railway station whilst waiting for a relative to arrive from Belfast. After twenty minutes the police officer said to the local businessman he’d known for years: “Mr Smith, please show me your identity card.” He then proceeded to arrest Mr Smith for failing to carry proper documentation. I suspect that a Gestapo officer would have shown more common-sense.
The chances are that the present loutish types will not behave better than the Royal Ulster Constabulary’s treatment of a Protestant businessman in 1942. Unfortunately, there is a genuine security advantage to identity cards (even when they can be forged). They provide an audit trail for car hire, bank accounts etc.
But of course in France, of course no self-respecting hotelier would dream of asking a single male for identification, unless they wished to cash a cheque…
I’m listening to Radio 3, and I’ve just heard a rather celebrated lady novelist (Elizabeth Jane Howard) and a slightly celebrated composer and broadcaster (Michael Berkeley), in between reminiscing about other celebrities (such as the late Kingsley Amis, to whom Ms. Howard was married) and introducing a very nice Scarlatti recording by a somewhat celebrated lady pianist (Nina Milkina), denounce the “Cult of Celebrity”. If I heard right in among embarking on this, the two of them are plugging Ms. Howard’s newly published autobiography.
I’m getting very sick of this. I’d love to be a celeb, and am doing the best I can to be one within the limits set about me by the indolence of my personality. My view of those who already are celebs is what many others (but not me) feel about those ex-officio hereditary celebs, the Royal Family. They earn their money! → Continue reading: Celebrating celebrity
On Thursday, February 06, 2003, Paul Marks of Northamptonshire wrote on Samizdata some views on the history of modern science fiction that I found very interesting (especially since they mentioned me). The following is not so much to correct him, as to add to what he said.
Modern science fiction began as little more than another way to popularize left wing socialism. Both H.G. Wells and Edward Bellamy wrote socialist Utopias, and Wells wrote allegorical attacks on capitalism and individualism. Ironically, they (and Ayn Rand) inspired me to do what I do.
I generally exclude Rand as a science fiction writer only because she didn’t know that Anthem and Atlas Shrugged are science fiction — and that science fiction is the “literature of ideas” that she erroneously believed detective fiction to be.
Anthem and Atlas Shrugged are science fiction, all right. But Rand — at least consciously — was not a science fiction writer. I realize I may be splitting hairs. For that matter, I’ve never been sure whether Kurt Vonnegut is a science fiction writer, more because of the way he’s marketed than anything else.
On the other hand, Frank Herbert was definitely a science fiction writer who, after many years of unspeakable struggle (after being rejected by every American house: Dune was eventually sold to an English publisher, for an advance of $1000) was finally published in the mainstream.
But I digress, as usual. → Continue reading: L Neil Smith responds
In the two weeks since I last wrote about the Ronald Dixon self-defence case pending in Brooklyn, New York, my blog seems to have become something of a clearinghouse for advocacy in Mr. Dixon’s support. Recall that I mentioned:
This is about as clear-cut a case of righteous home and family defense as I’ve seen recently in the U.S. This is also an unusual opportunity to overwhelm the Kings County (Brooklyn) District Attorney’s office with correspondance, demonstrating the reach of Anglosphere libertarian outrage.
Well, one of my blog commenters has reminded me of a brilliant solution which takes advantage of the free, no-registration TPC email-to-fax gateway service. To quote the annoying second-rate comic Carrot Top, presently featured in the DialATT adverts running on TV this side of the Atlantic, “it’s free for you, cheap for them”.
Politicians in all countries still pay much more attention to letters and faxes than they do email, if for nothing else than to weight the importance of the number of paper communications over that of electronic. I urge RKBA advocates to take advantage of this fact and deluge the Brooklyn DA’s office with polite but uncompromisingly non-grovelling support for Mr. Dixon.
Russell Whitaker
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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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