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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Glenn Reynolds, over at Instapundit, has pointed out this Aviation Week story on the deep black space plane that has been under test at Groom Lake through the last decade.
I have long suspected such a vehicle was flying, partly because of logic. I could not imagine there has been nothing new since the design of the 40 year old SR-71 and the US would retire that fleet of spy planes without someting newer and better. No matter what was said about satellites, they are just not as generally useful and do not have the immediacy of a launch on demand and maneuver on the way aircraft.
I know for a fact that the USAF was studying space planes in the late eighties and early nineties because I knew the guy running the study. It was called Black Horse, an H2O2 fueled aircraft which topped up from a tanker after take off. That officer moved on in to private space but the idea of being able to, as he put it, “put precision holes in the ground anywhere in the world within 90 minutes” was one I assumed had just gone totally black.
Another small piece of information came from a friend with a classified job title back in the early 90’s. A spacer like myself, he told me that his real job would not be public for decades but people would be quite surprised and it was important… and he added that it took him three airplanes, the last of which was a light plane to get to where he worked. I immediately thought of Groom Lake but kept it to myself then and ever since. I have always assumed the Groom Lake sightings were of an at least suborbital SR-71 replacement.
The other item which clued me that something was going on happened last summer. A number of persons I spoke to were pushing a technology called ‘hot structures’ which was about to come out of the black and they were afraid that the technology and all of the money expended on it was about to be lost simply because no one knew it existed. While interesting, it turned out to be far too pricey for anyone I know to employ at this time.
Hot structures have to do with hypersonic airframes of the blended bodies sort. This is stuff you build if you are working on spaceplanes as there is little other use for it. I did not however put the final piece together as AWST did with its far greater resources and contacts. My guess is this technology is about to be lost because the SR-3/XOV is being cancelled.
Does anyone else have any interesting scuttlebutt?
Have you ever had trouble explaining to someone why libertarians are neither a funny sub-species of conservatives nor an odd sort of neo-liberal? People are so stuck in the Left/Right paradigm you can hardly get through to them about a different direction, one that is not left or right but…. up. [Apologies to Flatland!]
I have tried pointing out issues on which any libertarian will disagree with a conservative; and then of like issues on the other side. I have tried showing my “World’s Smallest Political Quiz” card with the Nolan chart on it. That helps a little, but you still rarely see the light of real understanding.
A week ago, in conversation with a very liberal friend in New York, I found a parable that rewarded me with a look of sudden comprehension. I again tried it with someone on the airplane back to Belfast and was similarly rewarded. It was a parable-ized form of something which happened to me about twenty years ago in the Skibo Hall student union building at CMU:
If you put a Democrat, a Republican, and a Libertarian alone in a room together, the Republican and Democrat will eventually team up against the Libertarian. This is because both of them believe the power of government could be used for enormous good… if only they were the one controlling it.
The libertarian wants to destroy the machine.
I think this makes it clear why, in the end, both Democrats and Republicans are our ‘enemies’. They like the machine, they believe in the machine… and they both will defend it to the death. Make no mistake: if we become powerful enough to be a real political threat, they will both turn on us.
The Oscars are nearly upon us. (Okay, please try to keep reading) One thought prompted by this circus and what goes on in films is how films can carry messages very different from the intentions of the film-maker. A classic example is the 1987 film, Wall Street, in which Michael Douglas gave what I thought was his greatest performance as Gordon Gekko. Gekko is what your average lefty Hollywood producer imagines is a capitalist: incredibly greedy, callous and crooked, stamping the lives of good honest hardworking people, blah, blah, blah. And yet we know that in the course of the speech, Gekko gives his tremendous “greed is good” speech, which I sometimes think reads like Ayn Rand on acid.
A friend of mine, Libertarian Alliance founder Chris Tame, once told me that during this stage of the movie, he burst into applause, much to the surprise of the other cinema-goers. I wonder how many other folk have had the same reaction to a speech or line in a film where without realising it, a pro-capitalist point has been made in a way the director probably had not intended? Has anyone got any examples?
A few weeks ago during a talk hosted at the Institute for Economic Affairs, I picked up a pamphlet written by Lawrence W. Reed of the Mackinac Centre about the life of Thomas Clarkson, a man who, in the late 18th Century, campaigned in print to ban the slave trade. While characters such as William Wilberforce or T.B. Macaulay may be more widely recognised for their role in outlawing this vile business, it was Clarkson who in many ways provided much of the intellectual ammunition. (His name is probably not greatly known and the first thing that sprung to my mind was whether he was the ancestor of British motoring journalist and TV personality Jeremy Clarkson.)
Clarkson wrote an essay for a prize at Cambridge University, and chose to write on the subject of slavery — then a booming industry enriching many a Briton. For the remainder of his life, he campaigned tirelessly, sometimes even to the point where his own life was put in physical danger. But as we know, victory was eventually secured.
Why do I mention this tale? I do so because it is fashionable amongst a certain type of person to decry the importance of ideas, of individual campaigners against injustice and oppression, and to claim — with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, of course — that slavery, and other monstrosities, only declined because of economic or other forces. But even though there is some truth in ascribing changes to these things, as this Wikipedia entry accepts, it still requires the energy and commitment of actual people to force the pace of change. We do not know, for instance, how long slavery might have persisted under the British Empire had people like Clarkson not bothered to campaign against it. It is fair to assume, however, that it ended a good deal sooner than otherwise and hence millions of people probably owed what freedoms they had to people such as this fellow.
It is sometimes a bit depressing to be a libertarian in a country where freedoms are being stamped on as they are at present but frankly I have no time for self-pity, and stories like that of Thomas Clarkson are an inspiring example of how good people with ideas in their heads and fire in the belly can make a difference. Clarkson is a great British hero.
“Government provision in water has overseen millions of deaths through lack of sanitation and unsafe water. Bringing in private sector expertise and investment is needed, both to meet the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, but to actively contribute towards social justice the world over. In the vast majority of cases, where the private sector has been called upon, it has delivered the goods – even in cases decried by critics as ‘failures’.”
– Mischa Balen
Sadly I have had to block all trackbacks from blogspot sites as we are getting hundred of spam trackback from spam sites using them for hosting. Bloody annoying. Blogger needs to find some of the people behind this and sue the crap out of them.
My experience of racists is that they are race based collectivists who are so utterly without anything to redeem them (and know it), that they pick out something they didn’t have to earn (race) and claim that as their most valuable asset.
Regular commenter VeryRetired, skewering one of those rather sad individuals who are upset that libertarian bloggers do not devote more time to writing about inherited genetic characteristics or the supposed political implications thereof.
What European unity really means to most people.
Harry Browne, former Libertarian Party Presidential candidate, writer on business and the author of the very interesting book, How I Found Freedom In an Unfree World, has died. Here is an article about his life and contribution to the libertarian political cause in the United States.
I think his book cited above is the thing I am most grateful to Browne for. It points out the many ways in which, right now, you can make your life freer, less dependent on the State and open your eyes to making the most of life without waiting for someone’s permission. At a time when the prospects for liberty seem rather gloomy in some ways, that is a good message to spread around.
I am sure those closer to the coalface of U.S. politics might have less kind things to say about Browne’s activities in the LP, but I’ll leave that to others if they are so inclined.
Increasingly in Britain people are punished for who they are; but it is not a completely new trend. Here, from today’s London Evening Standard is a sad, and to me disturbing, instance of a thoughtcrime that’s been on the books and zealously pursued for over a decade:
Paul Thomas, 45, a former Hackney councillor, had more than 60 CDs of child pornography in his Bow Home, many showing underage girls in swimwear, Southwark Crown Court heard. Damian van Duyvenbode, prosecuting, said: “This defendant has stored large numbers of images of children in swimwear which the prosecution say is part of his sexual gratification.”
Thomas, who did have previous convictions, admitted 14 counts of “making indecent photographs of children” and was jailed for 18 months.
We don’t know from the account what the pictures were that didn’t feature girls in swimwear. But it is pretty clear that the swimwear is being offered as an aggravating factor. Why?
Holiday supplements of magazines and newspapers, clothes catalogues, travel brochures, and family albums are all full of children in swimwear. Though perhaps they ought to fear it, since there appears to be no defence, at least half the households in the land must therefore possess similarly “indecent” photographs without fear of prosecution.
But they aren’t downloading them from the internet and storing them on disk – which is all that “making” means in this context. They aren’t presumed to be getting sexual pleasure from seeing them. Nobody thinks that children are injured merely by being photographed in swimwear, do they? That man is being prosecuted and punished, or at least his punishment is being increased, for what he might be thinking.
This is the chain of magical contagion at work, an arpeggio of tendentious definitions: The man’s a textbook middle-aged usual suspect; the pictures he collects are indecent because he collects them; indecent pictures of children are child pornography; child pornography is child abuse, by definition. Note that it has a doubly magical property… the presumptive equivalences turn a sad case into a mass rapist and they work both ways at once. Everything in the chain is bound by taboo and high emotion. We’re not allowed to ask, “Was anyone harmed?” It’s irrelevant. The existence of indecency is sufficient to convict. And the court, taking the advice of prosecution experts, will decide what’s indecent.
So be careful what you think. Be careful, in fact, what others might think you think. That you aren’t hurting anybody, that nobody has in fact been hurt, is no excuse.
The British pub chain JD Wetherspoon has decided to postpone a ban on smoking in all its pubs, although a nation-wide ban will come into force at the start of 2007, due to the government’s new law. A rather ironic tale.
How odd. In many ways, JDW was a good example of how, in a free market, people who wanted a quiet pint without breathing cigarette smoke or listening to loud music could do so. In my own area of Westminister, there is a large chain called the Willow Walk which I and a number of friends use from time to time. Everyone is happy, smokers and non-smokers alike. Considering that the majority of the adult population do not smoke, one would expect plenty of entrepreneurial pub and restaurant owners to cater to the tastes of said public, and indeed many such businesses have developed.
But of course, markets are messy and full of tradeoffs. And for our tidyminded masters, that is unacceptable.
Perhaps it is the little things that gradually turn people against the priggish, curtain twitching statists who cannot bare the idea of people doing as they please.
People generally shrug wearily at the annoying impositions and regulations that grow by the year but that is why it is important that folks like us and journalists like Tom Utley let it be known that it is not alright that these things happen. We also need to convince people that those who enforce and apologise for the endless regulations are not alright either, they are psychologically twisted by compulsions to impose their will on others. Perhaps it will be when enough of society see the idea of prohibiting people from doing peaceably doing consensual things as the psychologically disordered behaviour that it is will real progress be possible.
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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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