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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IN 2006 EMI, the world’s fourth-biggest recorded-music company, invited some teenagers into its headquarters in London to talk to its top managers about their listening habits. At the end of the session the EMI bosses thanked them for their comments and told them to help themselves to a big pile of CDs sitting on a table. But none of the teens took any of the CDs, even though they were free. “That was the moment we realised the game was completely up,” says a person who was there.
– The Economist reports on the decline and fall of the music studios.
…or should I say Ron Paul. The previous post makes the case against Ron Paul as a champion of the libertarian faction of the US Republican party.
However, I shall be speaking about the US primary system and what Congressman Paul’s campaign means at the Putney Debates tonight. I shall try to get a summary up over the weekend, either on Samizdata or here. The title of my talk is ‘Change at the Top: How the US Election Process Works and What are the Opportunities for Ron Paul?’ Details from here.
I shall also be continuing to cover the US primaries on my election blog.
Although I like a lot of its articles, I have to say I got irritated with some of the intellectual flabbiness of Reason magazine a few months ago and my subscription lapsed. I am also trying to save a bit of money and realise that I have rather lot of subscriptions as it is. The magazine spends too much of its time desperately trying to make libertarianism cool and funky by devoting so much stuff to drugs etc, for my liking; but I do check out its website and I enjoy reading its writers such as Brian Doherty. But something of its old hard edge has gone. Maybe I am just becoming an old git (I am sure readers will agree).
It appears one of its former editors, Virginia Postrel, is none too impressed by the judgement of some the magazine’s writers. This has to hurt:
I do fault my friends at Reason, who are much cooler than I’ll ever be and who, scornful of the earnestness that takes politics seriously, apparently didn’t do their homework before embracing Paul as the latest indicator of libertarian cachet. For starters, they might have asked my old boss Bob Poole about Ron Paul; I remember a board member complaining about Paul’s newsletters back in the early ’90s. Besides, people as cosmopolitan as Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch should be able to detect something awry in Paul’s populist appeals. (Note that by “cosmopolitan” I do not mean “Jewish.” I mean cosmopolitan.) I suspect they did but decided it was more useful to spin things their way than to take Paul’s record and ideas seriously. As for Andrew Sullivan, his political infatuations are not his strong point as a commentator.
The line right at the end about Sullivan is a devastating put-down for being so polite.
The incident reported the other day of Iranian Pasdaran threatening the USN has produced an Iranian rebuttal of the US version of events.
Press TV said the video, released by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards a day after the force dismissed the Pentagon video as fake, included a recording of what it said was the exchange between the two sides. Guards Brigadier General Ali Fadavi said Iran’s boats had only approached the US ships to examine the registration numbers as they had been unreadable, Press TV said.
My take on this? The incident probably did happen but from what I have read, unlike the Iranian regular navy and the army, the Pasdaran only has tenuous control over its own people, who are more or less by definition religious nutters. The incident in question may well have horrified the powers-that-be in Iran as much as folks in the west. If I am correct, the possibility of a war due to an incident that neither Tehran nor Washington wants is a very real one. Maybe a good time to have a few Crude Oil call options tucked away if you have some spare cash.
According to American Thinker, there is a move afoot to nationalise the ability of people to control the temperatures of their own homes (yes, really!) in, where else, the People’s Republic of California:
What should be controversial in the proposed revisions to Title 24 is the requirement for what is called a “programmable communicating thermostat” or PCT. Every new home and every change to existing homes’ central heating and air conditioning systems will required to be fitted with a PCT beginning next year following the issuance of the revision. Each PCT will be fitted with a “non-removable ” FM receiver that will allow the power authorities to increase your air conditioning temperature setpoint or decrease your heater temperature setpoint to any value they chose. During “price events” those changes are limited to +/- four degrees F and you would be able to manually override the changes. During “emergency events” the new setpoints can be whatever the power authority desires and you would not be able to alter them.
In other words, the temperature of your home will no longer be yours to control. Your desires and needs can and will be overridden by the state of California through its public and private utility organizations. All this is for the common good, of course.
Good grief. Presumably the same logic will be extended into all your household functions. As for the “and you would not be able to alter them”, has the political class’ dislike of so-called ‘assault weapons’ been extended to ban hammers and screwdrivers?
However I must say that American Thinker demonstrates what a big part of the problem is:
Building codes and engineering standards are generally good things.
By which I assume they mean politically derived and state imposed building codes and engineering standards (and if they do not, ignore all that follows). Well guys, all your are doing is reporting on the logical progression of these ‘good things’ that you like so much. Building codes and engineering standards demanded by insurance companies on the other hand are far less likely to have ‘mission creep’ built into the process. American Thinker makes the classic statist mistake of assuming that order can only be imposed by the state regardless of all the evidence to the contrary (or as Bastiat put it, “Paris gets fed” without any central planner). People want and need order. Order is at the core of what civilisation is about. But it makes little sense allowing a monopoly provider of order to decide how best to achieve that. When you do, you end up with shit like this.
(hat tip to Dropsafe)
If you are not a regular reader of Michael Totten’s truly outstanding Middle East Journal (and why not?), I recommend his latest offering The Rings on Zarqawi’s Finger.
Michael is going to be able to dine out on this time in the Middle East for a very long time, methinks. Damn, I wish blogs were around in the 1990’s.
This has been out a while and is now available in paperback so quite a lot of eminent historians have already gushed, justifiably, about this outstanding account of the religious turmoil that seized much of western, central and southern Europe between 1500 and 1700. Diarmaid MacCulloch, a senior Oxford academic, has written what I would chalk up as one of the best-ever accounts of this period. He is ruthlessly fair-minded and sympathetic, fighting the urge to make simplistic points (although there is a dry sense of humour throughout). He makes it clear that the Reformation should emphatically not be confused with liberalism; Luther, Calvin and Knox may have inadvertently set in train some of the moves that have led to a more individualistic society but that was not their primary purpose. And although he is justifiably scathing about the horrors of the Inquisition in Catholic Spain and elsewhere, he points out, for example, that the mania for witch-burning occured both in Protestant and Catholic lands (in my own native East Anglia, the witch-hunting obsessions of the 17th Century led to a lot of brutality, for example).
This is the sort of book I wished I could have read while reading history as an under-graduate. It goes without saying that it has relevance for our own time in figuring out what to make of Islamic fundamentalism, among other things.
There is an article on Pajamas Media which, if largely true, would have certainly been enough to tip me over the edge into not supporting Ron Paul. Admittedly I have always been rather equivocal in my support of him, but if some the statements attributed to him are indeed what they seem when viewed in context, then I have even more difficulty lining up behind him.
However…
A lot of the ‘damning’ statement attributed to him are things I have no problem with in the slightest and to describe them as evidence of racism or conspiracy theories is unconvincing and in a few cases actually absurd.
So let us fisk the statements offered up as evidence of Ron Paul’s wickedness by Daniel Koffler, starting with the ones described as ‘Racists Pull Quotes’… → Continue reading: When Ron Paul is wrong… and when he is not
I am covering the New Hampshire primaries over on my Election Watch blog.
So far, the fun is Ron Paul 4 votes, Hillary Clinton 3. OK so Dixville Notch and Hart’s Location are not representative of the whole state.
There is an outstanding article on the interesting new blog The Line is Here called I am no longer a child and I strongly commend it to everyone. It captures the essence of the New Totalitarianism in a very different way to my polemical approach to the subject and is perhaps all the more powerful for it.
How odd it is that we in the West seem to have only two ways of thinking about politics – either supreme cynicism or supreme credulousness.
– David Aranovich, who is not entirely impressed by the Barack Obama phenomenon. Count me in on that.
I’m proud to live in a culture in which I can go for a beer, shag a bird in the alley behind Spaggers’ Nite Spot, then go home and look at gay hobbit porn. These are western values. These are things our own ruling class despise.
– Commenter Ian B, who has probably set a local record by having his remarks made into ‘Samizdata quote of the day’ on consecutive days. Give that man a cigar!
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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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