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 19th century, the British would have answered Mr Riley-Smith’s question “What has trade to do with human understanding” very readily. It has a great deal to do with it, we would have said. Commerce is the main means of peaceful intercourse with other people. It is the circulatory system of the world. It is part of the constitution of liberty which, as the author rightly says, we exported to America. If we have forgotten this, it is we, not the United States who are – both metaphorically and literally – the poorer.”
Charles Moore, writing about what he regards as an interesting but in some ways wrong-headed book about America by Tristram Riley-Smith.
Well, the days are getting longer, I have even seen quite a bit of the yellow thing in the sky, and I was woken up this morning by some randy pigeons on my terraced roof, so let’s take it away, Mr Tom Lehrer:
Spring is here, a-suh-puh-ring is here.
Life is skittles and life is beer.
I think the loveliest time of the year is the spring.
I do, don’t you? ‘course you do.
But there’s one thing that makes spring complete for me,
And makes ev’ry sunday a treat for me.
All the world seems in tune
On a spring afternoon,
When we’re poisoning pigeons in the park.
Ev’ry sunday you’ll see
My sweetheart and me,
As we poison the pigeons in the park.
When they see us coming, the birdies all try an’ hide,
But they still go for peanuts when coated with cyanide.
The sun’s shining bright,
Ev’rything seems all right,
When we’re poisoning pigeons in the park.
Lalaalaalalaladoodiedieedoodoodoo
We’ve gained notoriety,
And caused much anxiety
In the audubon society
With our games.
They call it impiety,
And lack of propriety,
And quite a variety
Of unpleasant names.
But it’s not against any religion
To want to dispose of a pigeon.
So if sunday you’re free,
Why don’t you come with me,
And we’ll poison the pigeons in the park.
And maybe we’ll do
In a squirrel or two,
While we’re poisoning pigeons in the park.
We’ll murder them all amid laughter and merriment.
Except for the few we take home to experiment.
My pulse will be quickenin’
With each drop of strychnine
We feed to a pigeon.
It just takes a smidgin!
To poison a pigeon in the park.
Jack lost his iPhone last night. He has therefore been stuck at home on his Playstation 3 all day.
– An (early twenties, male) customer overheard in a coffee bar in the East End yesterday afternoon. I can understand how the world outside the front door is a scary, scary place if it is just you, completely unaugmented.
The late Chris Tame, whom I used to assist in the running of the Alternative Bookshop and of the Libertarian Alliance, used to say, of blogging, that it was “here today and gone tomorrow”. Well, indeed, most of it does pretty much fall off most of our merely mental radar sets by around the middle of the following week, but most of it is still there, and if you want to remember and refer back to an ancient internet essay or blog posting, you can usually find it. And actually, as the internet gets older, what is striking is how much better it remembers things than did the old print media, or even than did the pre-internet apparatus of print-based scholarship. Why? Basically, because anyone (you don’t have to spend the entire day in some newspaper library in North London) can type a few vaguely remembered words or phrases into Google, and up it comes. So long as you have even a vague recollection of whatever it was, then you can dredge it all up again, and tell the world all about it, again.
I was reminded of all this by a posting yesterday by Mr Eugenides, which is basically a quote from something written in 1995, which is about – please forgive how self-referential this is becoming – how the Internet wouldn’t ever amount to anything:
Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data.
The author now admits he was quite wrong. He has had to, however much he might have wished that his unwise words could just have been forgotten.
The central point is that the power of the internet to entertain, inform, and by and by to change the world for the better, is not derived from the average quality of the average internetter, but from what the best internetters manage routinely, and from what us more routine internetters manage at our best. And that power just grows and grows.
The internet adds up to a brilliant bunch of reviewers, a brilliant bunch of critics, and a brilliant bunch of editors, brilliant meaning whatever you think brilliant means. It corrects errors. It draws your attention to things that on your own you would have entirely missed. It plants numerous flags and banners in that “wasteland”. It filters data relentlessly, to suit all intellects and tastes. A “wasteland of unfiltered data” is exactly what it is not.
It helps that almost all persistent internetters, as a natural consequence of what we do and of how others respond, also learn and learn.
Which reminds me, I must dig up an ld posting that Mr Eugenides did a few months back about what a useless git Richard North is. Ah yes, here. This took me about ten seconds to find. I wonder what Mr E thinks about that now.
My old friend, Andrew Ian Dodge, now residing in the chilly US northeastern state of Maine, has a book out, And Glory, which is set in a near future where the EU superstate is in full power (not that far off, then, Ed). He mashes up a a bit of political speculation, SciFi and good rollocking drama to make an interesting read. (As if my reading list was not long enough, aaagrrrh).
I have been thinking about who else has written books where the EU is treated as a sort of malign feature of a novel. One that springs to mind is Andrew Roberts’ novel, written a few years ago, called The Aachen Memorandum. I am a fan of Roberts the historian, so this hopefully would be a good read. Sometimes the EU crops up in the science fiction books of Ken Macleod, as in Cosmonaut Keep. And I recall that Peter Hamilton made some glancing, and unflattering references, to the EU in this recent novel, which was quite enjoyable, albeit with a rather unpleasant central character.
Of course, writing any speculative novel about the European Union carries the risk that reality keeps overtaking the story line. I mean, I wonder if either the two Andrews mentioned here or Ken would have envisaged the idea of a German politician suggesting that Greece flog off some of its islands to pay down its debt?
And as an aside, Henry Porter, the British journalist and scourge of this government over its dreadful civil liberties record, also had a novel out recently that I can recommend for mixing a powerful message and a cracking good storyline.
If commenters can think of other novels where there is an EU angle, let me know.
Oh Jesus wept, just put the leadership of the Tory party out of our misery and get it over with. The ‘secret weapon’ of the Tory Party is a pro-Euro corporatist whose ability to alienate actual conservatives has been proven every time the bastard has rolled out over the last couple decades.
The Tory party is facing a widely detested and demonstrably failed government and the fact they are not forty points ahead in the polls shows just how far they have their heads up their own collective backsides… and now, just to dispel any lingering doubt, they dust off Ken Bleedin’ Clarke. Unbelievable.
The only security men can have for their political liberty, consists in keeping their money in their own pockets.
– Lysander Spooner
“By God, The Guardian is a loathsome newspaper; a local north London morning daily for Stalinist metro libtards, perpetually arrogant, snobbish, self-righteous, humourless, dull, relentlessly middle class, cowardly and cheap.”
– Rod Liddle
As regulars know, I am not Mr Liddle’s greatest fan but when he is on form, he really hits it out of the park, as they say in baseball. The whole piece is an exhilerating piece of invective, all the more delicious in that its targets deserve everything they get.
Rob Fisher, another occasional commenter at our threads who has his own blog, has this to say about a new TV show about border security guards (yes, that’s right). On the basis of his comment, I think I will be watching the rest of Mad Men instead.
Of course, when I say that that is what Strathclyde Fire and Rescue (“making our communities safe places to live work and visit”) preferred, I do acknowledge it cannot have been pleasant to sit around listening to her desperate cries for the last six hours of her life while rescue equipment that could have brought her out from the mine shaft into which she had fallen stood inactive. But it was that or disregard a memo.
According to the Times,
An injured woman lay for six hours at the foot of a disused mine shaft because safety rules banned firefighters from rescuing her, an inquiry heard yesterday. As Alison Hume was brought to the surface by mountain rescuers she died of a heart attack.
A senior fire officer at the scene admitted that crews could only listen to her cries for help, after she fell down the 60ft shaft, because regulations said their lifting equipment could not be used on the public. A memo had been circulated in Strathclyde Fire and Rescue stations months previously stating that it was for use by firefighters only.
Tough call. We must hope that the eighteen firefighters present (according to an account in the Scotsman) supported each other.
I am a little confused by the fact that the this rope equipment was specified for use by firefighters only. I suppose this restriction is to avoid untrained people being rescued.
Gordon Brown must have read Oscar Wilde when he was studying as he has spent his entire career implementng one of his aphorisms in government:
It is only by not paying one’s bills that one can hope to live in the memory of the commercial classes
For this reason, he will be remembered for a very long time
Personally, I’d like to see some Congressmen forced to testify before a panel of car dealers, about the budget deficit’s Sudden Acceleration Problem.
– Instapundit reflects on the travails of Toyota.
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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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