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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There has been some laughs about Linda Ronstadt getting kicked out of a casino for her anti-Bush tirade. This happened because of confusion about the right to free speech and the right of private property to be enjoyed as the owner sees fit.
Casino owner Bill Timmans explained that:
We hired Ms. Ronstadt as an entertainer, not as a political activist. She went up in front of the stage and just let it out. This was not the correct forum for that.
This is all quite proper in my view. I have nothing against anti-Bush tirades, and I might make one myself soon (although I’m unlikely to dedicate it to Mike Moore), but there is a place for everything, and I would suggest that if you are paid as an entertainer, when you go to work, you entertain.
And the casino owners were right to evict her. It is like having a blogroach in Samizdata comments. A casino is private property, and the owners can admit whoever they like, and set guidelines for how guests should behave.
As many will have read by now, the British government has made substantial cuts to parts of the country’s armed forces, such as disbanding Royal Air Force Squadrons, cutting frigates, and reducing headcount across the board. As I would have guessed, this has prompted a lot of criticism from various quarters and no doubt some, if not all of it, is justified.
However, rather than get into fine details of whether Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon is a strategic genius, sensible manager or weak fool (I report, you decide), I want to pose the question as to what sort of armed forces a libertarian-leaning government ought to have in place. (Use of mercenaries, perhaps?). Well, given that the first responsibility of any government is defence of the realm against attack, it is at least debateable whether an island nation like Britain requires, for example, a big army, an extensive airforce, or even a large navy with lots of aircraft carriers, and so on. So one could argue that the kind of armed forces envisaged by Blair’s government might be appropriate for one restricted to a self defence role. (In reality I expect commenters to point out the many flaws in these plans. Please do).
However what is obviously strange about the timing and nature of the cuts is that they come from a government not exactly shy of projecting force overseas for its liberal internationalist ends. For example, at times Blair’s position on Iraq has been more to do with overthrowing thuggish regimes that attract his scorn rather than do so on the basis of Britain’s long-term self defence needs. Such a view surely requires rather a big army, navy and air force. It also makes me wonder whether Britain any more has the ability to act as an independent military power in any meaningful sense. I doubt it. A friend of mine who has recently left the RAF says it is almost unthinkable that a Falkland Islands operation would be possible with today’s force levels. Others I know who have served in the military tell me the same thing.
There is also, one final long-term worry that I have. These cuts will further deter bright and capable young men and women from seeking a career in our forces, which require ever-higher levels of technical know-how while also drawing on the permanent need for courage and endurance. The message from these defence cuts is hardly going to get young folk to think about a career. I dreamed once of following my father into the RAF as a flyer. Now I am glad I did not. A shame. I’d have looked pretty nifty in that flying suit.
I followed a link from Mark Steyn‘s site to a sad story from Oklahoma.
TULSA – Blake Champlin, a Tulsa lawyer and environmental activist, died Monday at his home when a tree supporting a hammock fell and crushed him.
Obviously, hammocks must be prohibited and all trees within 500 yards of human inhabitation must be chopped down, on public safety grounds. Blake Champlin’s death must not be in vain!
This is one scary, scary animation… It may seem exaggerating and a bit on the cheesy (or sprout submarine combo) side but it is certainly my impression that things are moving in that direction.
via Dan Gillmore and cross-posted from White Rose
This is one scary, scary animation… It may seem exagerating and a bit on the cheesy (or sprout submarine combo) side but it is certainly my impression that things are moving in that direction.
via Dan Gillmore
This is the New York Times quote of the day, from Stephen Hawking, he of the technologically enhanced vocal chords:
“I’m sorry to disappoint science fiction fans, but if information is preserved there is no possibility of using black holes to travel to other universes.”
Until now I have taken it for granted that any idea that black holes might ever make a contribution to long haul transport was black pudding in the sky. But now I am not so sure.
I do not know exactly what Hawking means about information being preserved, just as I am seldom completely clear what he means about most things, but the rest of this quote reads so very like those it-will-never-float it-will-never-fly only-six-computers-will-ever-be-needed electric-guitar-groups-will-never-catch-on prophecies which are periodically gathered together into anthologies of Things They Wish They Had Not Said, that I suddenly find myself becoming more optimistic about the possibility that one might one day be able to hail a Black Hole Cab and take a trip to another universe.
It seems that you can make a very popular movie (apparently it was described in the New York Times as his best so far – could well be) without it being popular everywhere:
When singer Linda Ronstadt praised Michael Moore’s anti-war movie Fahrenheit 9/11 during a concert at the Aladdin hotel in Las Vegas, the audience walked out.
What’s more, hotel president Bill Timmins was in the audience and took action himself.
Says a spokeswoman: ‘Her suite was cleaned out, her things were collected and security escorted her. She wasn’t happy, but we were very polite.’
She might have been wiser to say a few nice things about Spiderman 2, which has been described by Mark Steyn as:
… the spinning, squirting, swinging antidote to the stunted paranoia of Fahrenheit 9/11 …
Showbusiness. You can please all of the people some of the time, and you can please some of the people all of the time, but …
…but not all the time. If you don’t look at the listings page and life’s busy schedule halts the urge towards the sofa, then television may take up two hours tops a week, unless Euro 2004 is on. The invasion of reality programming provides no real attractions. Big Brother, Survivor and the Sex Diaries of Ayia Napa don’t entice. (The last one is made up but the outline is on my desk, if there are any budding producers out there!)
The only time that couch potato indulgences come into play is on holiday. A recent vacation in Visby provided insights into the enthusiasm of Swedish tv for US sitcoms. Square eyes are developed after a couple of snifters before hitting the clubs (pre-season doubles of scotch are obligatory given Swedish beer prices). It was during these preparations that I came across the programme, Swag.
The series was first introduced on porn-lite, history heavy Channel Five in 2003, under the auspices of Guy Ritchie, and involves enticing the criminal element and potential lawbreakers to demonstrate their stupidity on camera. Some of the celebrity stunts are clearly staged but others demonstrate a naive verisimiltude that only chavs could provide. In the first series, one likely lad was so enraged at being trapped in the car, he stabbed a cameraman with a screwdriver.
Two examples of the programme will suffice: an open lorry with boxes of goodies, tempting for the greedy, and transforming into a cage which is driven around calling upon onlookers to look at the imprisoned thief; or the driver, who took a disabled spot, and returned to find her car encircled by a chain of wheelchairs.
Reality television has included a number of themes over the past decade: preying upon the self-indulgence of the would-be famous, manufacturing celebrities out of the public and wielding the intrinsic voyeurism of documentaries. Ritchie has demonstrated that this medium can also tap into other basic human reactions: the anger that people feel when they see a clear transgression such as theft, and a sense of justice at the comeuppance of a budding criminal.
There is a stirring of campaign groups to oppose the EU constitution ratification in France. My latest posting on Combat links to the ‘acceptable’ opposition groups. To these we could add the far-right, who will no doubt be excluded from the ‘official No campaign’.
Our biggest problem at the moment is the total lack of a mainstream anti-EU press. This is not that different from the Maastricht campaign of 1992, and at least the Internet is reducing the organisational advantage to the political establishment. We may also have funding problems, though this is not the concern right now.
At the moment, the main job is trying to establish who can vote and where. The big questions concern foreigners. Can they vote? Can they donate funds to the campaigns? I shall keep posting.
The good news today is a rumour of dissent in the French Socialist Party. The leadership has committed the Party to voting ‘Yes’, wheras many members would have liked to wait until the text was actually available in September before deciding.
Now where did that come from?
Japan’s economy is actually growing at more than a statistically obvious rate for the first time properly since the 1980s. The fact that a heatwave is being credited with boosting business leads to the obvious conclusion.
Global warming is Good for Capitalism. Light those brown coal fires now! Chop down those hedgerows! Hunt those whales! Bring back leaded gasoline!
Trade union members in France and Germany are becoming conscious of the need to break the law if they are to keep their jobs.
At present it is illegal to ask any worker in France to work more than a 35 hour week, except in special cases determined by political lobbying. Not surprisingly this has led to the closure of low-paid jobs at an accelerating rate with relocation to Eastern Europe the current favourite.
When I was last in Slovakia in May this year, a deal had recently been struck to move a Peugeot factory from France. On my previous visit in 1993, unemployment threatened to hit 80 per cent in some towns.
The power struggle between Finance Minister Nicolas Sarkozy and President Jacques Chirac now encompasses the scrapping of the 35 hour week. Chirac did not veto the measure when the Socialist government passed the law, no doubt under the influence of his then influential leftist political advisor – his daughter.
So now Chirac cannot face anything more than cosmetic reform of a job-destroying law, without looking the cretin that he his. Of course, leaving things as they are makes him look thick-headed, or a “veau” (calf) as we say in France.
So in the marketplace the obvious solution is emerging: factory workers are agreeing to work an extra hour a week without pay. How this is better for social justice than letting people work and get paid for the hours they want beats me, but if it makes them happy…
How many of you grew up playing ‘RISK’? Yes, I see a bunch of hands up… no less than I would expect from a bunch of Samizdata readers. So… with everyone’s mind now in the proper context, I give you the before and after maps of the middle east and central asia created by American Digest.
Many of us have had this image in our minds as we wrote on the current world war over the last few years, but many in the general public have failed to put this together. This is not their fault. It is in the nature of headline news to lose connectedness betwixt events separated in time and space. Afganistan is one story, now fading; Iraq is another story; the war on terrorism is yet another story. Except they are not.
Let us imagine for a moment we are military attache’s from Epsilon Eridani. We know nothing about human politics. We have not evolved for religious belief. But… we do know our warfare. We know our tactical and strategical levels.
Now look at the map from before. Look at the map afterwards. Can anyone imagine a better move to more thoroughly disrupt one’s enemy?
I certainly can not.
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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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