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 did a few postings on my Education Blog at the beginning of this month, but these aside I’ve taken the whole of the month off from blogging. And now, my Internet Connection willing, I am back.
It was not so much that I was fed up with blogging, more that there were other things that needed doing, seriously, with the kind of concentrated attention that daily blogging was making impossible.
My home needed new shelves for books and for classical CDs, and it needed old shelves, laden with Libertarian Alliance pamphlets that nobody now needs, to be emptied and taken down. Mounds of papers needed to be sorted and classified, and space had to be created for them then to be stored in such a way that they didn’t just get muddled together again. Two notorious no-go areas (the big cupboard and the space under the desk in my bedroom) were … gone into, and cleansed.
I did do one radio spot about … oh, something or other, and at the end of the month I hosted my usual Last Friday meeting (thank you Paul Marks – excellent talk and an excellent evening). Oh yes, and I did a talk about Classical Music for Tim Evans’s Putney Debate on the Second Friday. But basically I took a holiday from pontification more profound than I can ever remember having enjoyed since I got started as a politificator at the beginning of the nineteen eighties. I did carpentry, sorted through papers, and in between times I socialised with friends (including some of my fellow Samizdatistas), undistracted by the self-imposed duty to tell the world what it should be thinking, or even to think about it.
It was a blessed relief suddenly to find myself in a world where the only problems that mattered were my own, and my own to grapple with and to solve. Yes, I have had Internet Connection problems, but I can deal with them, provided only that I get seriously stuck into them. And yes, carpentry can be exhausting. As was taking out about three dozen black plastic bags of rubbish, with about another two dozen still to go. But what a joy to be obsessing only about things that I could personally do something about.
My kind of politics is very anti-political, as is a lot of the politics here. But it is still politics. And there is a world of difference between sneering and jeering at the buffoons who rule the world, or who think they do, or who pretend that they do, and truly not giving these people the time of day, for day, after day, after day. It really was very refreshing, and not, I believe, an experience I will soon forget.
I even stopped reading Samizdata.
Now that I have resumed reading it, I am glad to see that I was not essential to its continuing success. (I would not want to be writing for a group blog that depended on me.) I did read a book or two during August, and I did inevitably do the odd spot of abstract thinking, about this and that. So I return to blogging action with a mind that is not completely blank. Meanwhile, my deepest thanks to the Samizdata editorial team for not nagging me, and for letting me rest in peace.
It would be fair to say Conrad Black’s spectacular and much publicised difficulties are being presented by him as a struggle between a capitalist libertarian (yay!) versus evil regulatory statists (boo!)…
The name-calling between the parties has been ugly, however, with Lord Black filing a libel suit in Canada against Mr Breeden and other Hollinger International directors, accusing them of waging a “campaign of defamation”. He was being persecuted by “truly evil people”, among them “Breeden and his fascists”, who represent “a menace to capitalism as any sane and civilised person would define it”, he complained in court documents.
But is that indeed the case? I am in no position to judge the truth or otherwise of the specific allegations but it seems to me what is at issue here is did Black (et al) fail in their fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders for whom they were actually working? Moreover, did were those shareholders actively defrauded by Black and his colleagues?
Again, I have no idea but I would be very leery of assuming this matter has any first order ideological dimensions at all.
There were two articles on the Rittenhouse Review which rather interested me:
Firstly the blog’s author, James Capozzola, displays what I can only describe as a very healthy disdain for democracy (which I certainly share) by applauding the fact that people in Pennsylvania will not be allowed to vote for Ralph Nader for President of the USA. I have commented on this subject before on Samizdata.net.
Now if only Kerry and Bush could also be disqualified…
Secondly, there is an article which mentions that the 427th Transportation Company (based in Pennsylvania, hence being of particular interest to Philadelphia based Rittenhouse Review) was deployed to Iraq with insufficient body armour and GPS sets. He approvingly notes that after he reported on this, one of his readers privately purchased a GPS set and intends to mail it out to Iraq for the unit to use. I too heartily approve of this and would love to see a significant proportion of the military’s funding gradually replaced with voluntary subscriptions, something I would happily contribute to myself. However I must take issue with the phrase:
Imagine it: The U.S. military, notably reservists, relying on family, friends, neighbors, and perfect strangers to fill gaping holes in the Pentagon supply chain.
I would prefer to think of it as ‘members of society with a vested interest in survival and an affinity for the people defending them’, rather than the more pejorative ‘perfect strangers’, filling the spaces left in the Pentagon’s supply chain which are theirs to rightly fill.
Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of jackals by jackasses.
– H. L. Mencken
On the very first occasion that I saw the advert on my TV, I knew, I just knew that is was going to set the fur flying. I was right.
Scenario: a man picks up his car keys and leaves the house to get into his brand, spanking, new Land Rover Freelander Sport motor vehicle. A woman (presumably his wife) spots him leaving. She rushes up to the bedroom, opens the dresser drawer and pulls out a starting pistol. She rushes downstairs again and runs outside just as her husband is getting into the car. She points the gun up to the sky and fires a single shot, thus giving him signal to get started.
Pretty innocuous stuff. But still far too traumatic and disturbing for some people:
A television advert for Land Rover featuring a woman firing a gun has been banned by watchdogs for glamourising gun culture….
The agency behind the advert said it was intended to promote the message “that the Freelander Sport triggered sporting behaviour”.
But 348 viewers complained to media regulator Ofcom, meaning that the advert is in the top 10 of the most complained about commercials.
Most viewers were concerned that the commercial glamourised or normalised gun culture despite the fact handguns are illegal in Britain. Many also pointed out that the gun was stored irresponsibly.
Yes, you are reading that right. People might be encouraged to store the guns which they do not possess irresponsibly. Priceless!
The right to keep and bear arms is not a debate in this country. Nor is it an issue or an idea or an argument. It has all been subsumed into a deep national psychosis for which I see no prospect of any cure.
What would make you think we are trying to provoke?
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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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