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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The Onion does not always crack me up like it used to, possibly because it grows more and more difficult to effectively satirize an increasingly bizarre world. But this piece, Housemates Reject Third-Roommate Debt-Relief Plan, is just devastating. They manage to sneak in a reference to virtually every conceivable critique of the IMF, from both the left and the right, from moral hazard to environmental degradation. They even address the topic of “conditional” loans whose conditions have nothing to do with improving debtworthiness or economic performance:
Although the donor roommates supplied additional aid in the months that followed, the AMF placed strict conditions on the loans. These conditions were designed to accomplish three goals: to prevent corruption and misuse of funds, to ensure that the monies were spent wisely, and to reduce third-roommate economic isolationism, integrating the debtor’s personal economy more fully into the interdependent apartmental community.
“We only asked for three things, man,” Huygens said regarding the structure of the loan. “First, that Chad quit partying so much. Second, that he open a checking account so he can budget his cash. And third, that he bring his kickass stereo system out of his bedroom and into the living room where we can all enjoy it. It was only fair.”
The only way this could have been improved upon might have been to lampoon the “debt for nature” swap; Chad’s debt might be forgiven in exchange for certain herbal products, for example.
Well done, gentlemen. More like this, please.
I well recall how, on the first day of the serious, large scale, televised bit of Gulf War 2, I watched, in Cracow (in Poland), the unfolding story on BBC News 24 and on nothing else. At first I was uncomfortable, as the allied forces were sucked forwards from catastrophe to catastrophe into the beckoning quagmire, like horror film extras emerging from their graves. It took me an hour or more to work out that what the pictures were actually showing (as opposed to what the BBC said they were showing) was an astonishingly rapid and almost completely casualty free (on the allied side) advance on Baghdad. The allied soldiers were not being made fools of by the ever-so-cunning Iraqi army; it was simply that the BBC were making fools of themselves.
But although the quagmire that the BBC prophesied, a cunning ambush in the streets of Baghdad, did not materialise, there was enough of a different sort of quagmire to keep BBC spirits up, in the form of lots of suicide bombings and rebellions and ructions.
At least this time it is being acknowledge that the USA is doing whatever it is that it is doing in Iraq just now on purpose. However, this time the anti-USA spin is that a significant proportion of the fighters who were supposed to be holed up in the place the Americans are taking possession of have already slipped away, and are causing mayhem elsewhere. Plus, of course, civilians are getting it in the neck too. Both claims make sense to me. But how true are they? I will be interested to see what, if anything, the Belmont Club says about this. They are covering the set-piece battle with enthusiasm. What, I wonder, will they say about the bigger picture, as the Independent is now describing it?
And if there is now a particular burst of mayhem, how long will it last? What I know about insurgency and counter-insurgency would fit snugly into one of these postings (without any MORE involved), but it is my understanding that insurgency is harder if you do not have a nice safe base, and the USA is now engaged in overrunning just such a base. So even if people are getting away and causing mayhem, it will be harder for mayhemmers to operate in the future. Yes? Or maybe: yes, but they will still find a way.
One other thing puzzles me which I have not seen mentioned elsewhere. There seems to be no agreement about how to spell the focal point of all this drama. Should we spell it Falluja or Falujah?
The Vlaams Blok is the largest political party in Flanders, the Flemish speaking half of Belgium… and the Belgian high court has just in effect required it to disband. Now I hold no brief for an ethnic nationalist political party (though they are the closest thing to a free market party in Belgium, which I certainly approve of), but it is hard to see how the nation which hosts the key institutions of the EU can now claim to be democratic in any meaningful way.
To ban the Vlaams Blok because it is allegedly racist, and yet not ban communists or socialists from running for office, means that only certain types of enforced collectivism will be tolerated, namely the type which is imposed equally on all, but not any form which is only imposed on immigrants. Repression is only acceptable if everyone is repressed. Keep in mind that the Vlaams Blok is not some tiny lunatic fringe of neo-fascist moonbats like the BNP in Britain but are a major political party. Yet the political establishment have just used the courts to put there opponents out of business.
I eagerly await a series of fierce denunciations of the wholesale disenfranchisement of a significant proportion of the Flemish electorate. Given the importance attached to democracy by the Guardian and Independent, I expect at least a week of outraged headlines and calls to action to defend democracy in Europe by Robert Fisk and George Monbiot.
Ok, I am waiting  .
According to recent reports, Yasser Arafat is in a state of superposition. Palestinian and French sources state he is dead and alive at present. If true, this represents the greatest breakthrough in applied quantum physics of the still youthful 21st century.
Professor Unzer N.T. Katz, a Quantum Mechanic, told reporters: “This is the most amazing event in the history of Quantum Mechanics! We experimentalists have managed to superpose an electron here and there, or perhaps a few measly atoms… but to superpose an entire human being! The implications are staggering! They are beyond imagining!”
French doctors were unavailable for comment.
While idly surfing around the net thanks to the marvels of Google (what a wonderful thing Google is!) I had a look at a few stories about the worrying state of French cuisine, like this one.
I yield to no man in my love of French food, or indeed food generally. I love French food as much as I loathe the French political establishment. And it will surely be a tragedy of Napoleonic proportions if France, wedded to such economic absurdities as the 35-hour work week, were to drive many of its finest restaurants out of business or lead them to cut corners in their work. The irony, of course, is that if France does crush its wonderful restaurants through such nonsense, it will encourage the very fast-food big chains that the French intellectuals despise, since such chains have the economies of scale to shoulder red tape more easily than a small bistro. It would be a cruel irony indeed if MacDonalds spread its grip on the market thanks to French socialism. I guess the great French classical liberal economics writer Frederic Bastiat would have savoured the irony.
There is a silver lining to all this. Some of the best French cuisine is now being made in grey old London, which means I can indulge my tastebuds without making the trip across the Channel. The Law of Unintended Consequences strikes again.
I have been waiting for final results on the 2004 election at the county level before writing about them, but Brian beat me to it. The map at Freedom and Whisky is an early one with a number of ugly black holes for incomplete returns. Yesterday’s USAToday map is marked ‘final’ and has very little politicus incognito.
If you flip back and forth between the USAToday 2004 and 2000 Presidential election by county maps, you will see small but significant differences. The ‘Yankee’ vote is going more and more solidly Democrat. Counties north of New York City are becoming bedroom and retirement communities, a part of Greater Boston and Greater New York. New Hampshire in particular has been solidly colonized by New York City. Notice that almost all the State of New York went Republican and perhaps would have been carried by Bush but for the huge Democratic majority in New York City.
The rest of the country appears to show the Republican vote is growing in virtually all of the non-Urban counties. There is a significant decrease in blue-dominant areas in the non-New England States.
Also of interest is the Princeton map. While less dramatic, it is probably of more importance to an election campaign team as it shows much more clearly where the 2008 battle ground areas will be.
I would love to see this re-done as a pseudo-topographic map, and I’d love to see it for 2000 as well. That would give us a much improved view of long term trends. While blue usually does mean depth in such maps, that may annoy the more oversensitive amongst the bluish, so we will perhaps need both blue-deepest and red-deepest maps to avoid offending a victimized minority.
The smoking debate is, to me, too depressing for me to want to go on about it. This Telegraph leader does go on about it approximately as I would if I could force myself, so read that instead.
The Scots, in the Gadarene sense, are leading the way towards a total smoking ban.
Says the Telegraph:
Over-mighty politicians, in Scotland as in the rest of the country, need reminding that they are elected to do the will of the people, and not to cure our bad habits.
The problem with that being: what if that “will of the people” is, precisely, to cure a bad habit? Once again, we observe democracy being equated with niceness and sensibleness, something we regularly complain about here.
With luck, the same story as has occurred with devolution will play out with smoking. The Scots go crazy, it all blows up in their faces, and the English get the chance to learn from Scottish error. I hope so.
David Farrer reports on Scottish devolution disappointments, from which the North of England learned, and on how the Scottish smoking ban is working out.
Changing the subject, but to emphasise what a continuingly good read David’s Freedom and Whisky blog is, here are two political maps of North America, both very diverting in their very diverse ways.
Blogger, film scriptwriter and novelist Roger Simon notes that there have not been many sounds of disgust from his Hollywood backyard at the murder of Dutch film-maker, Theo Van Gogh (a descendant of the artist) on November 2nd.
I must say there has not been a huge amount of noise from our own British film-makers, documentary producers and big shot journalists, either. I get the distinct feeling that a lot of folk in the artistic community are simply scared or uninterested that a man who made a film about the treatment of women in Islamic culture was shot in broad daylight in Holland, that most laid-back of nations.
I find that there is something rather shabby about this silence. I hope to be proven wrong and that all those who have cause to value freedom of speech and the right to challenge certain ideas will speak out at the brutal murder of Mr Van Gogh.
Style is usually all that matters, when you have no control over the substance.
– Adriana Cronin, in conversation about French culture
In the leafy suburb of Clamart to the South-West of Paris, the rumor is breaking that Jacques Chirac’s second favourite Arab (after Saddam Hussein) is dead.
CNN reports that Yasser Arafat has passed away this afternoon after spending a week in a coma.
Meanwhile in the Ivory Coast, demonstrators are parading banners that exclaim:
“Chirac is an assassin” and “Chirac= worse than Bin Laden” [thanks to millena at les libertariens, the French Libertarian newsgroup]
I thought the rednecks were all in the red states of the USA? 😉
I agree with Virginia Postrel and Tim Worstall, and no doubt with plenty of others, that it is a nice giggle that 7-Eleven had the best on-the-day polling for that Presidential Election they had in the USA the other day. 7-Eleven coffee purchasers that day were asked to choose between Bush cups and Kerry cups, and it went Bush: just over 51; Kerry: just under 49, which was better than anyone else seems to have done on the day.
Is this the first time 7-Eleven have tried doing this? And, crucially, did they announce a rolling score throughout the day? If they do announce the score throughout the day (and I suggest that they should next time if they did not do it this time – see below), and if the news gets out big that they did well with their coffee cup polling this time around, the story will not end there, because the next step will be for political fanatics to drink gallons and gallons of 7-Eleven coffee on the day of the next election, in order to influence the 7-Eleven results. The fanatics will not, I think, necessarily buy coffee in the cups of their own team, because if their guy is reckoned to be well ahead, they might want to make the race seem closer than it is, to get all of their vote out and win bigger. Then again, they might drink gallons of their own guy’s cups of coffee, to demoralise the opposition vote, and to say to it: you have lost, there is no point in you voting. It depends on what time of day the various Karl Roves reckon their voters and the other guy’s voters will be voting.
If 7-Eleven do as I suggest, they will either (a) get the result spot on, again, or (b) get it totally wrong but sell an extra billion gallons of coffee. Win-win.
“Just imagine that instead of urging householders to barricade themselves inside their homes if a burglar attacks, a group of senior police officers were to write a joint signed letter to the Times saying that in such a case, fight the intruder, to the death if necessary. Imagine what impact this would have on the public debate about self defence and crime.”
Brian Micklethwait, speaking at a recent one of his regular Friday evening soirees.
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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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