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 the anointed we find a whole class of supposedly “thinking people” who do remarkably little thinking about substance and a great deal of verbal expression. In order that this relatively small group of people can believe themselves wiser and nobler than the common herd, we have adopted policies which impose heavy costs on millions of other human beings, not only in taxes but also in lost jobs, social disintegration, and a loss of personal safety. Seldom have so few cost so much to so many.”
Thomas Sowell, the Vision of The Anointed, page 260.
His analysis applies – with the odd exception – to the political/intellectual elites responsible for the expansion of government for the past 100 years or so.
What would you choose for your epitaph?
Via the wonderful Boing Boing site, I came across this rather, ahem, interesting luggage. And the website is French. Quite what the airport security people will make of this is anyone’s guess. I suspect that many airports will not see the joke.
I thought this ought to be shared here:
Dear Ms Featherstone
I think the people who should truly say sorry for such events are the opinion leaders of the Guardian. Please allow me to explain.
Last week I visited (as a doctor) a family in a council estate. The mother was concerned about her 12 year old son. She was very pleased that her older son was now on incapacity and would therefore do well for himself in terms of money. There is nothing wrong with this older boy that makes him incapacitated, but that is another story. She also had a 14 year old daughter, who while I was there, constantly argued with her mother demanding money for cigarettes. The three children had three different fathers, all absent. The kids, while I could see were still children, gleamed with malignant insolence. I can see them turning into damaged adults. I feel sorry for the trap they are in – the trap created directly by the welfare state whereby the family, and all those in the neighbourhood, see welfare as a lifestyle option. They live in squalor but have more wealth than most people I knew in India; they certainly have more material comforts than I ever had growing up in Delhi.
The Guardian describes such families as poor. The Labour party wants to throw money at the family. The Guardian readers blame Margaret Thatcher for this state of affairs, smug in their modern pieties, their intellectual laziness, and their stupidity masquerading as sanctimonious concern. I used to work with slum children in Delhi; they had very little, but even the most physically disabled amongst them made an effort.
There is no hope for Britian. Civilisations dont die, they commit suicide. And before they commit suicide, they read and believe the Guardian.
I truly and deeply feel sorry for all the children who are the victims of the welfare state. Things are much, much worse for the slum children in India, I saw more dignity among them and certainly greater hope.
I am not sure if you will understand this message. I am too tired to explain further. Either you will get or you wont. Either way, it will make no difference to anything.
I think I know how he feels.
via Old Holborn
The Sunday Times today reports that certain celebrity TV license fee refuseniks are not being harassed, on account of being too famous and too keen on getting the splurge of publicity that they would get if arrested, taken away in chains, thrown into a government dungeon, etc.. Vladimir Bukovsky, noted dissident against an earlier evil empire, thinks the BBC is too biased. Charles Moore doesn’t like Jonathan Ross.
Noel Edmonds thinks the TV licence televised threats are too threatening. Personally I don’t see how those threatening ‘adverts’ could do their job if they were not threatening. After all, their purpose is to threaten. If, instead of threatening, and as Edmonds would apparently prefer, they emphasised what very good value the BBC is, and then only slipped in as afterthought that, oh-by-the-way just-thought-we’d-mention-it, you have to pay the license fee whether you agree with all that or not, this would be at least as obnoxious. The threatening messages Edmonds objects to at least tell the story as it is. But, he doesn’t like them, and objects to being made to pay the license fee. Fair enough. He shouldn’t have to, no matter how unreasonable his objections may seem to others. And nor should anyone else, whatever their disagreements with the BBC may be.
Meanwhile, guilty but too famous is an interesting verdict, nicely calculated to elicit contrasting reactions. On the one hand, one law for the famous and another for the rest, and that’s bad. But, at least someone is making this point, and at least some of those doing this are not just getting away with it, but willing to say so in public. I am sure that we all await the BBC’s response to this public defiance with great interest.
If the BBC does nothing, then here, surely is a great opportunity for people not just to get more famous, but to get famous from a starting point of more or less complete obscurity. It will not have escaped the attention of obcurities thinking along these lines that one of the refuseniks the Sunday Times reports on is a UKIP guy by the name of John Kelly whom you have probably never heard of in any other connection.
In particular, here is a great opportunity for a blogger. All it needs is for one of our tribe to say, there, I am still watching my telly, but have not paid the license fee, and screw you BBC, and get his mates around to video everything that then ensues, and for the rest of us to link to all the hoopla and make sure that Instapundit and Guido link to it also (the latter being a certainty because it was at Guido that I learned of this Sunday Times piece in the first place), etc. etc., and, well, … there is surely a big slice of anti-authoritarian pro-libertarian anti-nationalised-industry fun to be had here.
Personally I like the BBC and feel that I get rather good value from it, much as people on the dole (at my expense) and bankers whose jobs have just been saved (ditto) must likewise feel satisfied. I like the classical music. I also like to copy telly movies onto DVDs and much prefer the BBC’s output, because it is so much easier not to have to edit out all those annoying adverts. I even like Jonathan Ross. I regard his regular outbursts of rudeness as the price we who like him must all pay (and people like the unfortunate Gwyneth Paltrow especially) for the sake of the less tasteless and more interesting conversations that his wacky/rude style also precipitates.
I do not think that there is much future in the notion that the BBC might one day become less biased. It is a nationalised industry. Only those who favour or at least tolerate that are likely to apply to work for it in any numbers. And those who do not fit that mold but who do show up in the BBC’s output are more likely to be caricatures of pro-capitalism than the real thing. No, the only answer is to dump the whole principle of compulsory payment for telly, and in the meantime for all who despise that principle to stir up as much trouble around it as we can. And here is a fine chance to do that.
Oh dear! It is not that the services the PCS is proud of having delivered will not generally find much favour with denizens of Samizdata, that prompts me to clip this. It is that this is a disastrous committee-driven ad. They end up showing their members as miserable, whinging, ugly and colourless petty bureaucrats, who want taxpayers to be grateful to pay them more.
Even a minimal government would need officials. And even a big bureaucracy will contain some witty, energetic and attractive people. Sir Humphrey was much closer to being the hero of Yes, Minister than Jim Hacker.
Were I a PCS member then I would want to be represented as someone normal and likeable who cheerfully keeps the wheels of the country turning regardless of all the political shit thrown at me. And I would be looking for the head of whoever signed-off this ad. (Preferably to be displayed on a pole outside the Department of Work and Pensions, though perhaps my view of the possibilities of staff organisations are too influenced by Terry Gilliam’s The Crimson Permanent Assurance.)
To the authoritarian mind, freedom and chaos are synonymous.
– Commentator Ian B, er, yesterday. My guess is that ‘Ian B’ does not stand for Ian Blair, nor is it a pseudonym of Liam Byrne MP.
Many people have said that the internet is like the wild west in the gold rush and that sooner or later it will be regulated. What we need is for it to be regulated sooner rather than later
– Barbara Follett, Minister of Kulture.
The US motor industry seems about to fail. Credit insurers are now withdrawing their support as the firms burn through cash, with faltering sales and outstretched hand for charity. But, with their size, their number of jobs and their Main Street history, these car firms have been deemed too important to fail.
If the Democrats do decide to rescue the US car industry via a bail-out, they will rationalise and reorder. Perhaps they will even wish to intervene as to which models and which research should be undertaken. Think of the opportunity for renewables…renewing jobs, renewing pork, renewing votes. By the end of this process, it is doubtful if there will be any US car industry at all. Congress will have undertaken a wonderful role in clearing out the undergrowth for more efficient rivals and Detroit will go the way of Morris, Austin and the Triumph marques.
Ah, the children of the night! What sweet music they make:
Plans by Gordon Brown to make everyone a potential organ donor unless they actively “opt out” will be roundly rejected by the Government’s official advisory body next week, The Times has learnt.
The Prime Minister and the Chief Medical Officer for England believe that thousands of lives could be saved by introducing “presumed consent” – where everyone is automatically placed on the organ donor register unless they or their family object….
The recommendations are not binding on the Government and ministers may still bring legislation forward.
Of course they will. They must feed.
I like gadgets like the best of them but for the life of me, what is the US government doing creating flying cars? I cannot quite see this as a priority item in defeating Islamic terror, somehow.
That’s not to say I do not want a flying car, of course.
Guido Fawkes, in a break from his usual occupation of digging up scandals on our political class, instead focuses a bit more on the underlying policies of the UK government and the opposition. He rightly notes that sterling’s falls against the dollar undermine Gordon Brown’s attempt to frame the crisis as something that has hit Britain from afar, like the impact of a meteorite or SARS virus. Many of Britain’s problems are home-grown. Guido also reminds us of that little-noticed adjustment to the Bank of England’s inflation target back in the early ‘Noughties. Brown removed housing prices from the index of inflation that the BoE targets. Result: house prices no longer figured as a reason for setting interest rates. Brown, in a word, helped make the property price bubble worse than it might otherwise have been.
Now, I know some of us hardline defenders of free market banking will say that this is a quibble about how to run state monopoly money, and they have a strong point about that. But clearly, even the supposed wondrous Brownite creation of an independent central bank turned out to be an illusion. No wonder sterling is falling against the dollar and the euro. As I work for an export business, I guess I should be grateful.
Brown, in his current efforts to create a narrative as “Gordon the statesman who fixed the crisis” reminds me rather of the late Lord Louis Mountbatten, the UK Royal Family member and disastrous military commander and Indian Viceroy who managed, at least for many years, to create the idea of him being some kind of hero. Sooner or later, Brown is going to get, and deserve, the Andrew Roberts treatment. (Roberts helped to annihilate Mountbatten’s reputation).
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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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