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 claims of the Saudi government that is has ‘modernised’ their state mandated educational system so that it does not encourage violence against non-Muslims is debunked in the Washington Post. The article also includes a few choice translations of current ‘educatiional’ texts, such as:
As cited in Ibn Abbas: The apes are Jews, the people of the Sabbath; while the swine are the Christians, the infidels of the communion of Jesus.
How fortunate we are that the Saudis are the West’s allies. Read the whole articles.
I have been travelling and swamped with work since the space development conference in Los Angeles – so much so I have not even had time to post articles I have already written. From LA I went to NY and on to DC where I spent a week trying to working on a new product for an Internet Service Provider. Then I returned to Manhattan for one day: a day which by chance coincided with the opening of ‘The Da Vinci Code’ in Times Square.
I just had to go.
I went down in late afternoon after prepping for my next trip (I am as I write this at the gate for a San Francisco flight). Unfortunately, it was already sold out until near midnight.
 Photo: Dale Amon all rights reserved
Near the theatre there were a handful of religious picketers. This included some little old ladies handing out flyers but the biggest group appeared to be a Catholic one.
 Photo: Dale Amon all rights reserved
Evidently God was not quite on their side as a gust of wind knocked their large steel framed sign over, nearly hitting some passing pedestrians, not long after I took the photo.
I have never really grokked what makes Apple loveable to people – their style is attractive, sure, but it strikes me as very 50’s “modern.” And it all looks so identical, little rows of computers all looking exactly the same, little iPods all exactly the same, little stores all with exactly the same arrangement, etc. It all seems so mindlessly conformist, these endless plastic rounded boxes all in antiseptic white. It looks totalitarian.
This insight into Apple Computer’s design was made by the reader Balfegor, in response to a post by Ann Althouse on the merits or otherwise of the offerings of that computer company.
I myself am so frustrated with the erratic performance and system bloat of Windoze XP that I am resolved to not purchase another item of software from Microsoft, and I am tossing up between buying an Apple or building my own Linux based system. I have heard great things about Apple’s recent offerings, but I had always had an objection to the company’s products which I could never put my finger on until I read Balfegor’s comments.
Some wonderful photos and informative writeup here about the lost, and now found, treasures of Alexandria, which at one point ranked as one of the wonders of the world, boasting the world’s tallest lighthouse.
The photographs are outstanding. Enjoy. (Thanks to Stephen Hicks for the link. Stephen has written a fine book debunking that steaming pile of intellectual hocus known as post-modernism, incidentally.)
acronym/trademark. An acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.
A ‘Captcha’ is form of a Turing Test (qv) used to differentiate humans from computers programs. Their primary blog related use is to defend a blog’s comment sections from automated spam (qv). The term ‘Captcha’ a trademark of Carnegie Mellon University.
There is an article in the Guardian blog ‘Comment is Free’ by Peter Singer calling for Oxford University to stop trying to use the courts to prevent disruptive protests in the City of Oxford by ‘animal rights’ activists.
Although I agree that it is dangerous when the law is used to stifle freedom of expression (in other words, using the threat of violence in the form of arrest by the Boys in Blue to prevent protests), clearly most of those protesters would love to see laws prohibiting animal testing (i.e. they would be happy to see the threat of violence in the form of arrest by the Boys in Blue used to prevent animal testing) as Singer says in his article “In a democracy, those who advocate change can only achieve their goals by winning over the majority”… so clearly he is talking not just about making the protester’s views heard and therefore socially exerting moral suasion on people to stop doing what they are doing to animals, he is talking about ‘democracy’, i.e. politics, and therefore he is talking about violence backed laws.
I am sure that Peter Singer would reply to such an observation that if a law was passed prohibiting animal testing, that would just be ‘democracy in action’, assuming that to be self-evidently a good thing. And yet…even the courts are subordinate to the laws passed by Parliament so if a judge was to limit the scope of those demonstrations, surely if the protesters objective is to gain support for using getting coercive laws they approve of passed, they are just receiving what they are trying to do to others (i.e. subject them to coercive laws).
I do not know if the demonstrations in Oxford have passed the boundaries of reasonable protest and moved into the realm of violent intimidation (given the ‘animal rights’ movements long and current association with terrorism, it is not hard to imagine they may have done) but as a general rule it is indeed a very dangerous thing when the law stops people expressing themselves. However although I agree with Singer courts generally should not be used to suppress demonstrations, I will loose little sleep over one group of people using the regulatory state to impose their will on another group of people whose objective is to use the regulatory state to impose their will.
How can I disagree with A C Grayling on British values when he sums up Blair’s agenda so succinctly:
Motivating the illiberal policy of Blairishness is a huge and poisonous fallacy. It is that the first duty of government is the security of the people. This is a dangerous untruth. If it really were true then we should all be locked into a fortress behind the thickest walls of steel and concrete, and kept still and quiet in the dark, so that we can come to no harm. Or the government should be prepared to allow us to stay home behind drawn curtains, and to pay our mortgages and deliver our groceries under armed guard, to protect us form venturing into the streets where (so government fear-mongering might have us believe) thousands of bomb-carrying lunatic fanatics lurk.
To sum up, Blair would prefer us to be sheep, compliant, uncomplaining and stoical. These are the values that he would instill in new immigrants for his legacy: the great and glorious socialist millennium. That part of our history which has ensured our survival would be lost:
To this end they are to learn about our empire, our industrial revolution, our agrarian revolution, our Glorious Revolution of 1688, and so on back to Magna Carta and Simon de Montfort (the sanitised version) and the demand for, and founding of, Parliament.
This will gloss the fact that all our “revolutions” (after the Civil War at least), which by being so called give us a faint aura of past flair, were very pragmatical affairs, and like the empire almost accidental ones, driven from below by thoroughly banausic impulses and only retrospectively embellished, Boys’ Own style, by a sense of the heroic.
Their pragmatism is no doubt a virtue, and it would do no harm to anyone to learn as much; but Mr Blair wants it to be understood as the pragmatism of the ox under the yoke – an ox with an ID card, surrounded by CCTV cameras, stoutly resisting the temptation to have opinions, and certainly not to voice them if by chance one should form between its safely capped horns.
Indeed, we would no longer be part of the Anglosphere.
On a recent trip to the English city to Sheffield I was reminded of the cause of our problem with the growth of statism – and the threat it poses to civilization.
The purpose of my visit was to meet up with an old friend, be shown round the centre of the city (some interesting buildings, and good parks in walking distance – offering a fine view of the city) and to go out into the hills over the Yorkshire border in Derbyshire (fine hills right next to the road).
However, there was a sale at the central library in Sheffield and we visited it. Library sales are a common thing in Britain, to “make space for new books” – but also to get rid of books that are no longer tolerated, without having to actually destroy them (book burning is still considered a thing to be avoided). One of the works on sale was the four volume ‘The Science of Society’ produced by William Graham Sumner Associates at Yale in 1927 (Sumner himself having died in 1910). The four volume work was on sale for a Pound (no surprise – I was got a 1949 edition of Human Action for ten pence from a British Library sale).
In those days, even at an elite University like Yale, it was still not uncommon for academics to be free market folk and Sumner had been the best known pro freedom sociologist in the United States. The Sumner club carried on Sumner’s opinions and was to provide resistance to President Roosevelt and the other “New Dealers” in the 1930’s. So one would expect a scholarly examination of the customs of various societies (in those days the lines between sociology and anthropology were less rigid), but an examination from a pro private property point of view. Just as modern examinations are scholarly, but written from a point of view which favours violations of private property.
Well what is there?
The first thing I noticed I was expecting – the evolutionist philosophy. Just as with Hayek, private property is not supported as a matter of metaphysical (by ‘metaphysical’ I mean something that does not depend on material advantage, i.e. something that is supported on principle – Hayek’s talk of rights in the Road to Serfdom is lip surface, Hayek neither believed in metaphysical rights or even free will).
Private property is supported because it is good for society – a larger population can be sustained over the long term, and all sorts of development can occur. Cultural evolution is an older idea than biological evolution. Work on the evolution of such social institutions as language goes back to at least the 18th century. → Continue reading: How a trip to Sheffield reminded me of the cause of our problem
The BBC mentioned a small section of something I said to one of their reporters on the subject of more armed police in the UK. I am somewhat bemused to find myself nominated by the Beeb as a spokesman for the Libertarian Alliance, a worthy organization for sure but although I am a member, I do not speak on behalf of it.
The broader sense of my remarks to the journalist was not that I oppose the notion of armed police per se but that I supported the right of everyone to be armed. However my reservation regarding more plod with guns in the UK was that the shooting of that hapless Brazilian demonstrated that when they use force in error, far from a policy of transparency and accountability, all we will get is lies and fabricated accounts of what occured. As a result, the fact the institution which fosters and protects these liars deserves neither our support nor more guns as they clearly cannot be trusted with the ones they have.
Moreover the notion of ‘what has gone wrong with society’ was referring to the idea that does not seem reasonable to leave fixing societies ills to the very people and institutions which are most responsible for those ills… i.e. the regulatory state, and that includes its armed officers.
Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent.
– Louis D. Brandeis
Some inconvenient facts surfaced in yesterday’s Pennsylvania primaries. I will let the good folks from the Wall Street Journal’s Political Diary (available by subscription only) tell the tale.
Over a dozen Pennsylvania legislators lost party primaries yesterday in the biggest bloodbath in 40 years. Among the casualties were the top two GOP leaders in the state senate. “We have had a dramatic earthquake in Pennsylvania,” concluded Senate President Bob Jubilirer, who lost his bid for a ninth four-year term in a landslide. Because of the public mood, he says, his election “frankly just was not winnable.”
“The pay raise was the fuse that lit this whole explosion we are beginning to see,” former Lt. Gov. Mark Singel told reporters. Indeed, as an act of legislative chutzpah the pay raise had few equals. Last July, the GOP-controlled legislature, in cahoots with Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell, raised legislative salaries by between 16% and 54% without public debate, notice or review. They passed the raise in a 2 a.m. vote and evaded a constitutional ban on midterm pay raises by pocketing much of the increase immediately as “unvouchered expenses.”
Voters furious with the “Harrisburg Hogs” forced the legislature to repeal the raise with only a single dissenting vote. In the resulting turmoil, 61 challengers filed to run against incumbents in their party primaries — the highest number in a quarter century.
The incumbents fought back. Mr. Jubilirer and his allies raised nearly $1.5 million to defend his seat, versus the $200,000 that challenger John Eichelberger was able to collect. Similarly, Senate Majority Leader David Brightbill outspent his challenger, Mike Folmer, by some ten to one. It didn’t help. Both leaders wound up winning only 36% of the vote, a crushing defeat.
So for whom are these facts inconvenient? Proponents of campaign finance reform, that’s who. State controls on campaign finance are premised (or at least sold) on the idea that money distorts elections, that without state controls elections will be bought by the candidate with the most money, that the gentle hand of the state is needed to ensure a level playing field and a fair outcome.
Yet here we see well-connected machine politicians, who raised between 8 and 10 times as much as their opponents, turned out. Not the outcome one would expect from the campaign finance reformers, is it?
Damn bottom-up facts. So inconvenient to grand top-down theories.
In the Daily Telegraph there was a story about the decay of Ilkley Moor in Yorkshire. Paths worn out, litter, and general decay. Even the purple heather is being overwhelmed by bracken (perhaps a lesson to all those who think that ‘Mother Nature’ will always make things nice if she is left in charge). As usual ‘underfunding’ from the government (national and from the local government of the city of Bradford) got most of the blame.
But there were some other things mentioned. The pressure of the number of visitors was pointed to (no price of entry, no real owner… ‘tragedy of the Commons’ anyone?).
The removal of power from the local town to the city of Bradford back in the early 1970’s (by Edward Heath and Peter Walker the Conservative party ‘modernizers’ of their day – people much like David Cameron and Francis Maude in our own time). Was attacked by some people. Some people wanted to copy the ‘Malvern Hills Conservators’, a voluntary group in Worcestershire (or whatever it is called these days) which has been protecting the Malvern Hills since the 19th century – rather than trust either the city of Bradford or the local town council. And some local people pointed to something of interest.
Anne Hawkesworth (now that sounds like a Yorkshire name), from the local town council is quoted as saying “If you stand in the centre of Ilkely and look up, on one side you see the purple of the Beamsley and Devonshire estates, but on the Ilkley side you just see bracken”.
J.S. Mill (not a man I admire, as some readers here may know) said that private ownership of great estates could only be justified by the owner acting as a guardian for the people. I believe that such private ownership needs no ‘justification’, any more than Mr Mill should have had to ‘justify’ owning his house or his boots.
However, there is no denying that private ownership has proven to be a better guardian of the environment than the state.
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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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