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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Matt Devereux has some very sensible views regarding the clamour in the media about the latest notorious computer game
The recent US furore over Rockstar Games Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas serves to expose the real agenda behind moralist media censorship in the 21st Century: sex. On July 27th it was announced that 85 year old Florence Cohen of New York is taking the games manufacturer to court over a hidden modification for the game entitled “Hot Coffee”. The file, downloadable over the Internet, inserts a new element into the game allowing players to have graphic sex, including a variety of positions. Cohen claims that this new element is unsuitable for her 14 year old grandchild and therefore contravenes the terms on which she bought the game. The insinuation is that had she known the game contained sexual material she would never have bought it in the first place.
Yet this is a game in which shooting innocent people in the head is actively encouraged. Drug dealing, prostitution, stealing, criminal damage, assault and affray are all part and parcel of all three GTA games. As any self-respecting GTA aficionado will tell you some of the most enjoyable activities include decapitating police officers and repeatedly driving over the elderly. How can it be that this sort of material is acceptable for a 14 year old whilst sex (in which no-one is harmed) is frowned upon? Hopefully, the District Court will see the irony.
Furthermore, the file needed to unlock the pornography was illegally hacked and distributed over the internet. In other words Ms. Cohen’s grandchild would have had to have voluntarily downloaded the unsactioned file in order to access the sexual material. If she really wants to protect her young relative she might more sensibly start by checking his internet history. Predictably, Congress has jumped on the outrage bandwagon, issuing statement after statement brandishing Rockstar as “pornographers” and “out of control.” On July 15th the Federal Trade Commission announced it would investigate the “Hot Coffee” modification.
Who is spearheading this investigation? None other than Hilary Clinton – the woman whose husband is largely responsible for the words “oral sex” being introduced to every American living room. In reality, this is just another case of business and the media being blamed for poor parenting and parental control. Rockstar Games are not responsible for keeping kids in check. Neither is the government. Do we really want our choices to be taken away by people who can not control their own children?
I implied here that I would let Samizdata readers know when a new, more inclusive 😉 anti-ID-card pledge was up and running. It is now.
We are lucky to have the charming former stand-up Franky Ma as the pledge leader. As the covers of more consumer magazines, in more countries, than it is comfortable to imagine attest, you cannot go far wrong associating an attractive young woman with your product.
You can give your word to support the nearly 11,000 ID refuseniks here and you can support NO2ID itself, as ever, here.
Sometimes talented, sometimes monumentally untalented assailants of one’s ears: yes, the phenomenon of the public “busker” seems to be alive and well on the London Underground. A guy at Chancery Lane station this evening was dressed in what must have been a hot and thick red jacket, with a sort of Elvis haircut and was belting out Sinatra hits. (Not bad, actually). The sound of Old Blue Eyes followed me down the Stygian depths of the platform until the racket of the train overwhelmed it. A strange evening. The station was full of police with their yellow jackets on on high alert four Thursdays on from the mass murders of July 7. Cops and Sinatra on a Thursday night. A rum combination.
Take note: Michael Barone has a blog. And its just as good (so far) as you knew it would be. Takeaway line from his first few posts:
All of which only illustrates my First Rule of Life: All process arguments are insincere, including this one.
And he hints at the problem that will bring the GOP down, if not next year then very likely in 2008: the lackluster-to-disastrous domestic performance of the Bush administration and the Republican Congress have given most Republicans no reason to turn out and vote for them. As Virginia Postrel said recently (sorry, can’t remember where), now that the Republicans have given up on economic freedom and markets, they are basically just the party of social/religious conservatism after all.
And if that’s all you got, you won’t win many elections in this country.
South Korean scientists have cloned the first dog, succeeding at a project where laboratories and firms in the United States had been beavering away for years. This is a salutary lesson for Europe, more than for the United States, that research in biotechnology and stem cells is increasingly taking place in the ‘Wild East’.
An Afghan puppy, called Snuppy, is now alive after this process:
The process of dog cloning remains highly inefficient, a reflection of how much scientists still have to learn about how to make mammalian offspring from single parents and without the help of sperm. Multiple surgeries on more than 100 anesthetized dogs and the painstaking creation of more than 1,000 laboratory-grown embryos led to the birth of just two cloned puppies — one of which died after three weeks.
Animal rights activists were unimpressed.
Snuppy’s birth announcement, published in today’s issue of Nature, was greeted with scorn by some animal care activists, who decried the work as inhumane and wasteful, given the global glut of unwanted dogs.
“The cruelty and the body count outweighs any benefit that can be gained from this,” said Mary Beth Sweetland, a vice president at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals in Norfolk.
Cloned pets remain unviable for some time yet.
Fascinating entry in the daily email Political Journal (subscription only from the Wall Street Journal, no linkee):
How come the French all think alike?
Well, OK, the French don’t really all think alike: In May, 56% of them wisely voted “no” in the referendum on the European Constitution, which enjoyed the support not only of every major political party but also all of the major media outlets, from the leftist Le Monde to the right-wing Catholic paper La Croix. But if most French voters opposed the Constitution, why was their view reflected nowhere in the media? Surely there must have been a market for anti-Constitution sentiment, which any canny publisher or broadcaster could have exploited to boost circulation or ratings. But there was zippo.
This puzzle was recently solved for us by a well-placed French source. Part of the answer, he reminds us, is that much of the French broadcast media is state-owned, as is the venerable news agency Agence France-Presse.
But that’s not all: Even the “private” French press is massively subsidized. It enjoys lower tariffs for freight transport, a postal discount, a reduced value-added tax rate and a complete exemption from local taxes on investment. Government also subsidizes secondary printing facilities and helps pay for the distribution of French papers abroad. If you’re a journalist — or just a “journalist” — you also pay income taxes at a lower rate. And the best part: If a newspaper faces revenue losses because of declining advertising or circulation, the government will help make up the difference. The only catch is that, to benefit from this munificence, publications must officially register with a state agency (the French call it an organisme) run by a committee of editors and government functionaries.
The ostensible rationale for all this madness is that the government wants to avoid capitalistic media concentration and foster a plurality of viewpoints. The effect, of course, is the exact opposite: Unlike in the U.S. or Britain, in which various publications tend to represent some segment or other of market opinion or taste, French journalists are utterly indifferent to the views of their readers. Instead, they tend to write articles with a view to impressing their colleagues, a classic media echo-chamber that’s as conformist as it is insular. No wonder the French public tunes out: Le Monde, the biggest and most influential daily in a country of 60 million, has a circulation of only 400,000.
Who knew?
The key to the intricate and massive system of thought created by Karl Marx is at bottom a simple one: Karl Marx was a communist
– Murray Rothbard (via Mises Economics Blog)
Home Office minister Hazel Blears has met with certain Muslim leaders and some rather ‘interesting’ things have emerged. In order to assuage Muslim fears, she has said that racial profiling will not be used and all stop-and-searches will ‘intelligence led’.
So a nervous looking Asian man with a backpack who is wandering around on the London Underground will not be examined more closely because there might be no special intelligence? Hopefully that is not what Ms. Blears means, though I am not really sure what she does mean.
Now on one level, racial profiling can actually be dangerous if that criterion is over-emphasised: Muslims are not a race and although somewhat unlikely, a blonde haired blue eyed Muslim convert could indeed be a potential suicide bomber. Yet the reality is that the vast majority of Muslims in Britain are non-white and logic therefore indicates that in order to maximise the effectiveness of scarce resources, a degree of racial profiling in entirely appropriate. In fact, contrary to the Home Office Ministers claims, Ian Johnston of the British Transport Police has made no bones about the fact his officers intend to make race one of the criterion they use when picking people to examine closer, noting: “We should not bottle out over this. We should not waste time searching old white ladies”. Very sensible.
A news segment on television this evening (I think it was SkyOne but I am not sure) even spoke with an Asian man on the London Underground with a backpack who was not unsympathetic to the fact he likely to be searched given the prevailing circumstances. Perhaps that is not so surprising as he is just as much at risk as anyone else if a bomb goes off on his train. Yet I cannot help wondering of this government really grasps the gravity of the situation and how attitude really need to change.
Another interesting and all too expected thing to come out if this meeting with Muslim leaders in Britain is their annoyance that the government will not discuss foreign policy and Iraq. This seems to answer the question I asked earlier if there are any really moderate Muslim ‘leaders’ in Britain. The fact they cannot see how the terrorist acts London, far from making it necessary for the government to discuss foreign policy with the leaders of the very community from which the terrorist have sprung, it make its impossible for them to do so or the terrorist attacks will have succeeded in the most clear cut way possible, inviting only more of the same any time the UK decides to do something that displeases some community.
Rather encouragingly, on the same news programme there was a Muslim ‘activist’ whose name I wish I had caught (was anyone else watching SkyNews?) who said it was a waste of time for Hazel Blears to talk to a bunch of largely foreign born religious leaders in Britain whose mosques had done exactly nothing to combat the extremist memes since July 7th. Judging from his remarks, it is well past time that British Muslims take a hard look at who their purported leaders are and decide if these are the people they really want speaking in their name.
After watching this I just had to do a hatchet job on an old standard:
500 Pounds
If you miss the plane I’m on,
I will know that you are gone.
Cause I’ve dropped 500 pounds upon your head.
Five hundred pounds, Five hundred pounds,
Five hundred pounds, Five hundred pounds,
Cause I’ve dropped 500 pounds upon your head.
Lord it’s one, Lord it’s two,
Lord it’s three and Lord it’s four,
Lord it’s five hundred pounds upon your head.
Not a shirt on your back,
Not a penny left intact.
Oh, I will blow your arse to hell this-away
This-a way, this-a way,
This-a way, this-a way,
Oh, I will blow your arse to hell this-away
If you miss the plane I’m on,
I will know that you are gone.
Cause I’ve dropped 500 pounds upon your head.
Five hundred pounds, Five hundred pounds,
Five hundred pounds, Five hundred pounds,
Cause I’ve dropped 500 pounds upon your head.
Economic freedom begets political freedom. Democracy alone, a la elections are not enough, we need a liberal democracy that circumscribe the domain of government to what Martin Wolf says “Under liberty, the state protects everybody from predators, not excluding itself”. Property rights begets individual ownership and that in turn promotes individual as well as economic freedom
– Franklin Cudjoe discussing what Africa really need.
I suppose most readers around these parts would reckon that actors should stick to acting, and keep their political opinions to themselves.
But what about these opinions?
“People think more aid will help, but it won’t,” said Ms. Driver, an actress who is working on her second music CD. “Trade is the surest way of decreasing the savage amount of poverty in our world. These countries have got to be able to trade fairly.”
And the point is, by “fairly”, she does not mean being paid artificially high prices; she means getting rid of agricultural subsidies in the rich countries.
It was never a practical project to silence the acting profession. These people are famous. Having acquired their fame, they then want to use their fame to do good, and in the process to become even more famous. This is only natural, especially when you consider that doing good and being heroic is what, according to the entertainments these people spend their lives making and acting in, life is all about. Trying to stop famous actors from expressing what they consider to be virtuous and heroic opinions in public is like trying to stop the wind from blowing or the sea from being wet.
No, the task that faces us is not to silence the acting profession from ever opining about goodness. That would be impossible, to say nothing of censorious and unpleasant. Rather is our task to change the definition of goodness that actors of sufficient fame to care about such things reach for when they get to the public virtue stage in their careers, and to make goodness really mean goodness.
Ms. Driver’s pronouncements concerning the superiority of trade over aid as a means of rescuing the world’s poorest people is evidence that some progress is being made along these lines.
Many actors surely already believe such things, on the quiet. But it is still a fine step forward when one of them feels able to say such things in public.
UK authorities may be faced with a bit of a struggle in extraditing a man, now in Rome, for his alleged involvement in the failed July 21 terrorist attacks on the London transport system, according to this report.
So could some nice person remind me what the EU-wide arrest warrant is suppose to achieve, exactly? Oh, er, wait a minute…
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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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