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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Here is a story suggesting that employees might use the outbreak of swine flu as an excuse to extend their summer holidays. I guess this is inevitable, given that some people will try anything on, although in a recession, it does seem rather dumb for staff to risk a disciplinary warning or outright sacking to lie about their health in this way.
Talking of holidays, in a few days’ time, yours truly is heading off to Normandy, northern France, for a week’s holiday with family, including, I am very happy to say, my father, who has recently made a recovery from a serious illness.
There will be lots of Calvados consumed. My blogging is likely to be slow next week.
“I’m nobody’s conservative, but I’m pretty sure if I was telling conservatives how to think I wouldn’t admonish them for failing to champion limited government within two sentences of praising FDR’s pragmatism. It’s like, I dunno, lecturing the Labour Party about demonstrating their pro-union bonafides while praising Margaret Thatcher’s centrism. Sounds a bit off.”
Matt Welch on the hapless Andrew Sullivan.
Liz Hunt of the Telegraph talks about the “politically correct zealotry” that we have witnessed under the command of Harriet Harman. In the last few days, she has risibly, and to much contempt, stated publicly that the Labour Party should always be governed by women and that the banking crisis would not have happened with Lehman Sisters (surely Lehwoman, or Lehperson, the semantic digression that this line of thinking discourages). This has accompanied direction that the government should champion feminist issues and an Equality Bill demanding quotas and positive discrimination to women in the middle of a recession.
Yet, her statements have been greeted with contempt: a damaging eccentricity that we can shrug off and return to common sense. Like any poisonous ideology that crosses the grain of humanity, political correctness is gradually being rejected by the political corpus, including its bases such as feminism and multiculturalism.
Harman’s outbursts are made from weakness, not strength. Forthcoming electoral defeat sharpens the ideological zeal as they have less time to achieve their goals. And yet, if no startling conversion to social justice has embedded itself in the natural acceptance and tolerance of ourselves (a trend which New Labour halted and reversed, like social mobility), NuLAb is forced to turn to its coercive tool: law, law, more law and quango.
As this rabble float towards their Niagara, we can foresee that the fundi zealots will hasten their demand for more radical surgery to achieve their ends, whilst the realists prepare for defeat. The movement itself is dying, unpopular, unmourned, though the command and control culture will take many years to pass through the governmental anus, showering its detritus over the fleeced taxpayer.
August 4th was one of the good anniversary dates of the French Revolution, argues our own Paul Marks. Here is his comment from a year ago, explaining why.
Regular consumption of between 3 and 4 units a day by men of all ages will not accrue significant health risk.
Regular consumption of between 2 and 3 units a day by women of all ages will not accrue any significant health risk.
– ‘Sensible Drinking: The Report of an Interdepartmental Working Group’ (Department of Health, 1995) My emphasis.
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See your doctor or practice nurse if you are drinking above the safe limits and are finding it difficult to cut down.
What are the recommended safe limits of alcohol drinking?
- Men should drink no more than 21 units of alcohol per week (and no more than four units in any one day).
- Women should drink no more than 14 units of alcohol per week (and no more than three units in any one day).
– Patient UK
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There is a desperate desire for binary certainty in the authoritarian mind. ‘Safety’ is not just small risk; it is the absence of any known or projected risk. What is not defined as safe is dangerous. No possibility of a risk is permissable because if anything goes wrong the system could be blamed for not preventing it. That would be a threat to order. What is not expressly permitted is forbidden.
You have to hand it to him for sheer, brass neck: George Monbiot, uber-Green, is trying to claim that those calling attention to what he claims is Man’s disastrous impact on climate are being censored, while those nasty, capitalist running dogs, climate change “deniers”, are bully boys:
One of the allegations made repeatedly by climate change deniers is that they are being censored. There’s just one problem with this claim: they have yet to produce a single valid example. On the other hand, there are hundreds of examples of direct attempts to censor climate scientists.
As evidence, Mr Monbiot says:
Most were the work of the Bush administration. In 2007 the Union of Concerned Scientists collated 435 instances of political interference in the work of climate researchers in the US. Scientists working for the government were pressured by officials to remove the words “climate change” and “global warming” from their publications; their reports were edited to change the meaning of their findings, others never saw the light of day. Scientists at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and the US Fish and Wildlife Service were forbidden to speak to the media; James Hansen at Nasa was told by public relations officials that there would be “dire consequences” if he continued to call for big cuts in greenhouse gases.
Well, such outrageous events are entirely possible, but Mr Monbiot, in trying to claim that the Green movement is some sort of vulnerable, weak grouping ranged against the forces of evil big business, is surely testing the reader’s patience and intelligence. The thesis of Man-Made global warming is widely promoted and repeated in the MSM. To argue against it, even to argue that such warming must be mitigated rather than reversed, can often land the arguer in hot water professionally. Consider, for example, the treatment of skeptical enviromentalist, Bjorn Lomborg. Note the use of the word “denier”. Anyone who goes against the standard party line on Man-made global warming can expect to be dubbed by the Monbiots of this world as a “denier”. Consider how even the word, “skeptic”, which once may have implied a sort of admirable refusal to take certain big claims on trust without the most rigorous testing, is now almost a term of abuse in the mouths of some, if not all, climate change alarmists.
So in truth, while Mr Monbiot may have some merit in his argument, for him to claim that the green movement is operating against forces of censorship is laughable. As far as I can see, the force is very much with the alarmist case, albeit perhaps less potent than a few years ago. There is only so much panic that flesh and blood can stand.
I am an agnostic on the climate change issue, and not being a scientist, do not presume to know what the position actually is with regard to whether such warming is man-made, or not. However, my political and economic views lead me to favour approaches that work to enhance prosperity and freedom, and my suspicions about some of the alarmists is drawn very much from the fact that their agenda seems to be incorrigibly statist. Sometimes you have to go with your gut instincts.
“As for politicians’ personal conduct, I doubt it is much worse, relative to other professions, than it has always been, and it is not — or should not be — the main cause for concern. Personally, I would much rather MPs had numerous extramarital affairs, their hands in the till, or lucrative second jobs exploiting inside knowledge, than that they cavalierly abolish yet another civil liberty that took hundreds of years to establish. As far as I am concerned, politicians are welcome to be not only greedy, but also dull, unapproachable, ugly, pompous, clubby, elitist or socially inept, just as long as they do not consider it their job to reform society by making up a few more laws and rushing them through parliament as quickly as possible. Sadly, the people who agree with me appear to be a very small minority.”
Fabian Tassano. His blog is required reading, in my view.
One of the most evil books I ever read was a quite short Penguin paperback that I inherited from my father. It was written not long after World War 2, when the pre-war trickle of honest reporting about the horrors of Stalin’s USSR was becomimg a post-war, Cold War, gush. But the author of that Penguin paperback argued that, since very few of these reports were first-hand and in writing, they could be dismissed as merely malicious gossip. Beautiful. The Soviet Government shifts heaven and earth to obliterate all first-hand, written reports of its crimes. It then, echoed by persons like the evil writer of that evil paperback, declares that, in the absence of the very written reportage which it has laboured so hard to suppress, these crimes are imaginary, invented by malevolent enemies of the inevitable and noble tide of history. After I had read that evil paperback, I understood far better Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s obsession about getting the Gulag story, with its wealth of first hand accounts, into print in such voluminous detail.
I cannot now locate that evil paperback, although I believe I still own it. Such is the disorder that is my library that if I do still own it, the book is hidden from view. Contrary to the argument made in it, this does not mean that it does not exist or that its author never said what he said, or that him having said it is of no significance. On the other hand, neither does him having said what he said automatically make what he said true, for in fact what this particular writer said was evil lies.
It may seem odd to be starting a piece about medieval history with this uncertain recollection of a book which I have not recently set eyes on, concerning the recent and recently collapsed USSR. But not long ago I stumbled upon a debate about how to write medieval history which reminded me of the claim made in that evil book.
My recent interest in medieval history was provoked by the purchase of a book about a man called Mortimer, by a man called Mortimer. The overlap is potentially confusing, but surely not surprising. Had a man called Micklethwait been the ruler of England between, say, 1327 and 1330, I would have been more than casually interested. Well, Roger Mortimer did rule England between those two dates. No wonder historian Ian Mortimer got interested, and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that this interest was what turned him into a historian in the first place.
I hugely enjoyed that book about Roger Mortimer. All previous attempts by me to put flesh on the bare bones of my schoolboy knowledge of those times, mostly consisting of a few history dates, had been engulfed in tedium. Yet now, I was suddenly engrossed in the fourteenth century. Partly, it must have been because I was at last ready to be fascinated by it. My historical knowledge had finally, tediously, arrived at the state where a bit of medieval detail finally had a bulky enough structure to get attached to. But there was something else going on in Ian Mortimer’s book about his namesake besides my mere readiness to take it it. I found the book to be, as they say, a page turner, something I had never experienced before with a book about medieval history. When I learned that Ian Mortimer had written a follow-up volume to his Roger Mortimer book, about the king who toppled Roger Mortimer, Edward III, about whom (not least because neither Marlowe nor Shakespeare had written any plays about him) I knew pretty much nothing apart from his presumed involvement in a couple of those schoolboy history dates (Battle of Crecy 1346 and Black Death 1349), I bought that, and immediately became engrossed in that book also. A further book by Ian Mortimer about Henry IV wasn’t quite the thrill that its two predecessors had been, if only because Henry IV did marginally less exciting and surprising things than Roger Mortimer and Edward III, but that too was pretty good, and contained many fascinating titbits. (For instance, did you know that when Henry IV ascended the throne of England, he was the first English monarch to proclaim his newly monarchical status in a document written in English? Well perhaps you did know this, but I didn’t.) And now, I am looking forward to reading this, which will flesh out another big history date. And after that one, there will be yet more. To get a sense of what Ian Mortimer is all about without buying any books, try reading one of these. (Some of these pieces I like, others not so much.)
But what was it about Ian Mortimer’s writing that so fascinated me, when so many other writings about the same historical era had failed to strike any sort of spark? → Continue reading: Ian Mortimer on the medieval biography debate
He is far from perfect, being happy to run a railway business that takes state funds, but my goodness, one has to admire the entrepreneurial brio of Richard Branson.
If true, this story suggests that his commercial space venture could be soon involved in taking up satellites. There is a distinct buzz around such ventures at the moment, which might have something to do with lessons people are hopefully learning about the flawed, if magnificent Moon landings of 40 years ago. For some extended reading, this long article by Rand Simberg is a good guide to some of the issues involved in spacefaring. In particular, I liked the way he addresses the issue of getting fuel into space and making it possible to set up the equivalent of a gas station network.
Here is also a good book on how spacefaring get back on track.
BREAKING NEWS
It has just been reported that the head gardener at The White House has been dismissed after 28 years of loyal service to the many US presidents.
When interviewed the elderly, Caucasian gardener protested his innocence and said:
All I know is I was walking past the Oval Office and I yelled out to my assistants, “Has anyone seen the spade and the hoe?” The next thing I knew I was fired.
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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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