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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To those who are not au fait with arcane Australian military procurement debates – and those that wish to be so – I present to you a rather fascinating discussion of the merits of the F-22 Raptor (a most superior bird) versus the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (which the Australian government has plumped for). And those that do not give a tinker’s cuss about Australian defence procurement (hell, I do not blame you), I have some quite breathtaking footage of an Su-37 being put through its paces.
I believe this footage (also via Catallaxy) is of an Su-37 being exhibited at the Farnborough air show in the late 90s. Would not like to be facing this plane in a dogfight during daylight hours. According to the linked source, the Su-37 is not currently being manufactured for any particular client. Okay, Samizdata military talking heads – discuss!
To ask everyone to embrace everyone else is clearly absurd. Toleration is the best we can do, and what’s more, it works.
– Julian Baggini, encapsulating a much broader principle than that suggested by the context, an article in which he just stops short of telling Guardian readers that the categories ‘racist’ and ‘anti-racist’ are inadequate to cope with real, live human beings. Liberty requires only that we live and let live. It is made manageable by being civil. We do not need conformity. We do not need to love one another. We do not need to censor our opinions. Civility suffices.
The ‘private sector’ of the economy is, in fact, the voluntary sector; and the ‘public sector’ is, in fact, the coercive sector
– Henry Hazlitt, author of books including the superb Economics in One Lesson.
Moving past discussions of endlessly increasing government responsibility over our daily existence and on to the really weighty matters of the day!
Gentlemen. Do not be fooled by recent television commercials depicting comely young hetero chaps guzzling that horrendous, barely alcoholic, sweet, creamy, Celtic muck known as Baileys (girl’s drink). See this for what it is – a shameless attempt to broaden the demographic that consumes Baileys (girl’s drink). It will not work. I do not care how many advertisements are broadcast showing Baileys (girl’s drink)-clutching studly guys and their mates in bars catching the eyes of implausibly hot women. Baileys (girl’s drink) is a girl’s drink, and no amount of telemarketing sophistry can alter that fact.
We are having availability problems due to a major spammer attack… please bear with us.
Whilst having lunch the other day, I saw an attractive young woman wearing a tee-shirt with a slogan that made me laugh:
I’d rather wear fur than go naked
No doubt she was reacting to this campaign. And when she and her gentleman friend were finished, she put on her fur trimmed coat and they left. It reminded me of this. Bless.
It is easier to grumble than to get off one’s backside and do something if a disaster hits and the supposed emergency systems of the state prove to be a joke, as was the case when Hurricane Katrina hit the U.S. Gulf Coast over a year ago. In catching up on some reading, I came across this terrific and highly encouraging story of how assorted groups of volunteers, many of whom had a refreshingly dim view of officialdom, swung into action to help the people of New Orleans and others in the surrounding area. The article also reinforced my view of how the internet is helping fuel voluntarism in a way that feeds into the “Army of Davids” perspective of Glenn Reynolds recently.
The article contains this line:
“Here is a place where government failed absolutely, and as such it could be the perfect place to argue that government itself is a failure.”
I agree. I think the energy and neighbourliness of ordinary Americans as shown in this article are a welcome corrective to the cynicism many people may have felt when reading stories about looting or disorder in the aftermath of the disaster. (Some of these stories were questioned). I recall reading about the blackouts in New York a year or so ago and about how people banded together to ensure that folk got home safely. American civil society, precisely because of the still-strong ethos of voluntarism that so struck Alexis de Tocqueville 160 years ago, is in many ways in much better shape than here. I was particularly struck when I read the latest reports tonight of how looters scrambled to grab what they could from the cargo washed up on the English coast from the grounded container ship. I wonder how many ordinary people ever bothered to wonder how they could help protect the beach from pollution or ensure that no-one got hurt? Yes, I know that looting goes on after disasters around the world, but there seemed to be no countervailing examples over the past few days of people volunteering to help recover items for their rightful owners, for example. The idea of volunteers helping owners to sort out their property from the wreckage is just too bizarre for we Britons to contemplate.
Generalisations are always risky, but I get the feeling that if I was in a natural disaster, I would rather be in America than in Britain. It is a sad thing for a proud Briton like me to say, but I think that in this respect at least, the sort of neighbourliness and willingness to lend a hand has more or less died, although I may be a bit too gloomy here. To describe what might have killed that spirit would take me longer than a blog posting, so I will leave it to the commenters.
It appears that Britain’s finance minister, Gordon Brown, has timed his run to be our next Prime Minister just in the nick of time as the economic data starts to look a bit sickly. Even with all the usual health warnings about data that seeks to try to capture the complexities of an economy in numbers, the figures on inflation and productivity do not look good. (In the case of productivity, they are not disastrous, mind).
It is probably not grounds for great worry – yet. When an economy expands and more people join the workforce, this can have the perverse effect of reducing “productivity”, while if an economy stagnates but millions lose their jobs, then output per person can go up. Productivity growth is not the be-all or end-all of economics. But the ability of an economy to grow rapidly without triggering inflation is helped if the productive capacity of an economy grows. There is no doubt that after nearly 10 years of this hyper-active Chancellor, with his taxes, lust for regulation and control, that the arteries of the British economy have hardened.
Brown inherited a British economy in 1997 that was, by the standards of the 70s and early 80s, in remarkably fine fettle. The state took less than 40 percent of GDP; inflation was low, productivity was rising, the ranks of the rich and the decently-well off were rising fast. Yes, problems of crime and the weakening of civil society were serious and yet how optimstic so many people were at that time that some of the remaining social evils could be addressed. How long ago that now seems.
For years, I have heard it said that Labour’s ace card was its handling of the economy at the macro-economic level. I tended to go along with that in the main, and I think the decision to put the Bank of England in day-to-day charge of interest rates was sound. Brown’s move of the inflation measure to the less exacting euro zone measure of consumer prices – which does not capture housing costs like mortgages – and his sometimes dubious picks of BOE personnel to set interest rates, threaten to tarnish even that achievement.
There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say, “The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.” What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan. … Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children. … They hate us for letting our children have sex and take drugs – well, they’ve got to stop their children killing people.
– Martin Amis, quoted by Christopher Hitchens in his City Journal review of America Alone
I am back and have been lurking for a bit. I did not intend to post for another week or two. In my initial post I said that occasionally something would cause me to “blow a gasket”: Habeas corpus is that something. Since King John at Runnymede was compelled to accept the Magna Carta, the right of an individual to demand access to judicial process has been the foundation stone of constitutional government.
Dicey wrote that the Habeas Corpus Acts “declare no principle and define no rights, but they are for practical purposes worth a hundred constitutional articles guaranteeing individual liberty”
While I have been away, I have apparently missed some fun jesting about ‘meta-context’. This is a serious example of it.
In its simplest and most fundamental way, this is about tribalism. This is about who ‘we’ are. Who we see our selves as. Are we defined by our geographical boundaries? Is ‘American’ a tribal bond? Or are we the citizens of our constitution? Have we charged our government with protecting its own sovereignty and security by exchanging it for that of its citizens? Or have we charged it with protecting all citizens from violation of their personal sovereignty by all powers. Are we, the citizens, not the fundamental reason for our government? If it will not abide by its contract with us, is it truly still our government? At what point does it become an occupying power?
It is babies and bathwater. More than that, it is meta-context. Underpinning assumptions about collectivism vs individualism. Did you happen to notice that Attorney General Gonzales singled out individuals and citizens:
I meant by that comment, the Constitution doesn’t say, “Every individual in the United States or every citizen is hereby granted or assured the right to habeas.” It doesn’t say that.
→ Continue reading: A bolt between the eyes of constitutional government
Most of my old mates from Country Durham probably know how to download porn off the web (that’s what its really for after all) but I’d be willing to bet that to a man they think MySpace is where you part your car.
– Commenter ‘Albion’
I missed this the other day… The French government, the same people who gave aid and comfort the the instigators of the Rwanda genocide, and have done everything they could to thwart the arrests of mass murderous Serbian war criminals in Bosnia, have decided to ‘honour’ one of their own. They have awarded the Legion D’Honneur, France’s highest award, to Harold Pinter, that well know playwright, man of letters, literary colossus and apologists for mass murdering national socialist Slobodan Milosevic and mass murdering national socialist Saddam Hussain.
Vermin, one and all.
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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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