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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For the last few weeks I have been trying to organise my home, and in particular the many papers – everything from hugely portentous to utterly pointless – piled up in it. But to derandomise and thin out the paper, I need space, and I have had no space. I also hope to be doing more entertaining in the months to come. So, where to find space?
Space is always achievable if you try hard enough, and I have now, at last, identified a spacially significant category of object which I will henceforth be doing without. Cardboard boxes.
Amd that’s just the ones I have already found. There are more, I know it.
Whenever a New Electronic Thing enters my home, as Things often do in these times of ever more miraculous and less expensive Things, I have felt the need to preserve the box in which the Thing came. I have done this in case I – or merely it – ever needed to move. Also, these boxes may come in useful to accommodate other things.
But Things can be moved without being in their original boxes, and actually, they usually are. Frequently to the dump, as will be the case with that huge television you can also see in the picture, now broken and worthless. Also departing in the same rubbish vehicle, my photocopier, and a chair the bits of which also appear in the photo above.
But it’s the boxes that really take up the space, which is why boxes always get chucked out eventually. The boxes are most unlikely ever to be as useful to me as the space they now occupy.
If, at some future moment, I need a big box, I will get get one, perhaps by buying one.
So now, there will be a great cull of boxes, even of boxes which contained Things purchased quite recently. This involves chopping and tearing them up into pieces small enough to fit inside rubbish bins. This will be quite a labour, and I would love to be able to say that this job will be done on Boxing Day. Sadly, I won’t be waiting that long.
Nothing is sustainable.
– Willis Eschenbach
You live in chains. In this awful century just passed, more than 150 million innocent people died in chains. And yet every person ever born was born free—unalterably, inviolably, immaculately free…
This is not the sort of thing I am used to finding in holiday tales, so I was delighted to discover these individualist holiday stories published for Kindle. Christmas at the Speed of Life (subtitle: Seasonal brutality – gift-wrapped) by William F. X. Connell focuses on what really matters, from a decidedly individualist viewpoint. I found this book thanks to Richard Nikoley, whose blog is a humorous mix of Paleo lifestyle content and anti-state, anti-religion polemic.
So if you are still searching for the perfect gift for a hard-to-buy-for individualist, or if you would like to gift your favorite stasist/statist with a subversive collection of short stories for the holiday, check it out.
As I head to London’s Heathrow Airport en route to Malta for the holidays, I see this item during a spot of web-surfing. It is a piece by Gerard Baker, in the Wall Street Journal. Baker has spent a fair while in the US, and clearly, he’s been infected:
“But I discovered football when I first came to New York in the late 1980s and my prejudices melted away. It was the era of New York Giants greatness and I was hooked instantly: Lawrence Taylor, Phil Simms, Mark Bavaro, Jeff Hostetler. Yes, I did just say Jeff Hostetler. That should tell you how hooked I was.”
“In its energy and complexity, football captures the spirit of America better than any other cultural creation on this continent, and I don’t mean because it features long breaks in which advertisers get to sell beer and treatments for erectile dysfunction. It sits at the intersection of pioneering aggression and impossibly complex strategic planning. It is a collision of Hobbes and Locke; violent, primal force tempered by the most complex set of rules, regulations, procedures and systems ever conceived in an athletic framework. Soccer is called the beautiful game. But football is chess, played with real pieces that try to knock each other’s brains out. It doesn’t get any more beautiful than that.”
I must say that “soccer”, at least in how it is played these days in the English Premiership, tests my loyalty due to the real and alleged antics of the players as much as anything. Further afield, I am still spellbound by such players as Barcelona’s residing genius, Lionel Messi, but in general, I am not as much interested in soccer as I used to be. As a result of my general soccer fatigue, I have become more interested in following rugby union and cricket (it helps that England is playing good cricket at the moment; not so the rugby guys). As for American football, I have never really watched it much (I went to a game in Texas in 2004 but that was about it).
As for other sports and events, I can admire the courage and physical endurance of those taking part, such as horse racing jockeys, Tour de France cyclists and the downhill skiers. I can admire a gladiatorial game of tennis between such giants as Federer and Nadal, or, for that matter, watch nervously as a great golfer slugs it out on the greens against a rival. And non-PC though it is, a great boxing match can hold me in its thrall. For me, there are a whole group of sports that I like, and for different reasons. I like watching certain motor sports, but that is more a “spectacle” where the whole event – scenery, noise, colour and adrenalin – come together (as in Le Mans, which I attended this year with a bunch of friends).
“I am not one of those who have ever flattered the people, or striven to win favour by telling them that from the Crown or from Parliament that could be got which could not be got from themselves, by themselves. I would impress upon you this. What the State gives to you, the State takes from you first; it further charges you with the cost of collection, and with the cost of distribution. Better by far that you should save for yourselves and spend for yourselves, than put into the purse of the State your earnings of which only part can at best come back.”
– Charles Bradlaugh, 19th Century British parliamentarian and campaigner on issues such as rights of non-believers, contraception, the case against the monarchy, and as this quotation shows, an opponent of socialism. The quote is taken from a review of a book about Bradlaugh by Bryan Niblett, who is known to some of us at Samizdata. Bryan is an Objectivist (as in an admirer of the philosophy of Ayn Rand) and has worked for many years as a private arbitrator concerning areas such as intellectual property. A very good and smart man all round, in fact.
We haven’t here done a Kim Jong Il is dead posting until now, probably because what else is there to say besides Kim Jong Il is dead? A new Kim Jong has been installed. Un. From Il, to Un. In English it sounds like going from sick to nothing. North Korea, presently terrible, will either get a bit better, or a bit worse, or a lot worse, or stay much the same. Or, if it gets really lucky, a lot better! Will paid North Korea watchers, experts in North Korean things, do any better than that? I doubt it.
I have called Kim Jong Il Kim Jong Il. Others call him Kim Jong-Il with a hyphen, or Kim Jong-il, with a small i for il. Until today I never knew of this confusion. Blog and learn.
My favourite of the Kim Jong Il is dead postings that I have seen so far is this one, at Mick Hartley’s blog, which features the very last Kim Jong Il picture: King Jong Il looking at toilet paper.
I wrote all that last night, but Mick Hartley now has another Kim Jong Il is dead posting up, in which he quotes somebody called Simon Winchester saying this:
India’s attempt to go it alone failed. So, it seems, has Burma’s. Perhaps inevitably, North Korea’s attempt appears to be tottering. But seeing how South Korea has turned out – its Koreanness utterly submerged in neon, hip-hop and every imaginable American influence, a romantic can allow himself a small measure of melancholy: North Korea, for all its faults, is undeniably still Korea, a place uniquely representative of an ancient and rather remarkable Asian culture. And that, in a world otherwise rendered so bland, is perhaps no bad thing.
Or then again, perhaps … not. No bad thing? Competition for commenters: concoct morally disgusting sentences which begin with “For all its faults …”. You’ll struggle to top that one. These obscene ravings are currently behind the Times pay wall, hence no link, although Hartley does supply one.
Says Hartley:
Better a starving slave state, it seems, than this ghastly modern Americanised culture.
Conservative romanticism raised to a truly idiotic level.
Commenter Martin Adamson adds:
And it’s not even remotely true on its own terms. The architecture of Pyongyang is Moscow 1952. The mass displays are China 1964. Painting is Soviet Academy 1936. Music is Gang of Four Operas 1974. Dress is Bucharest 1988 etc etc.
Assuming this is the Simon Winchester in question, it seems that:
Simon Winchester is a best-selling British author living in Massachusetts and New York City.
Heartfelt apologies from Britain to Massachusetts and New York City. Apparently American culture is itself sufficiently un-Americanised for Winchester to find it livable in. Winchester has a new book out, which looks rather creepy. Let’s all not buy it.
Usually in politics, we say one guy is great and the other guy is bad and the they’ll say their guy is great and our guy is bad. But can’t we compromise and agree they’re all awful? Treating all politicians with contempt is the first steps towards a smaller government, because when you hate and distrust them all, you realize how imperative it is to give them as little power as possible.
– Frank J
Let us imagine you are working on software for a mobile phone. When an SMS text message comes in you might think it would be cool to display it and highlight any email addresses or phone numbers in it. The user would tap an email address to add it to his address book, or tap a phone number to call it. It is a fairly obvious idea.
There are a few different ways you could implement it in software. I would probably have a bunch of regular expressions that matched phone numbers and email addresses, and for each type of match there would be a list of things that you could do. Have a think about what you might like to appear in a pop-up menu after you tapped an email address that appeared in a text message on your phone. I bet you can think of two or three things. Later you might think of new things to do with an email address, or new things that appear in a text message that could be highlighted so the user can tap them to perform actions on them. For example if someone sends a message saying “meet me at 7pm”, the user could tap where it says “7pm” and this time could pop up in the calendar to show whether there are already any appointments at 7pm. There are lots of things like this you could do.
To handle the possibility that you will think of these new ideas in the future, you write your software in a general way. You design general concepts like a pattern matcher that can look at some text and decide whether it is a phone number or an email address or some other text that you have not thought of yet. This sort of thing is done so often in software that the regular expressions I mentioned above were invented. This is a notation for describing strings of characters. For example the expression [0-9]+pm matches one or more of the digits 0 to 9, followed by the letters ‘pm’. Because this is done in software so frequently there are freely available software libraries that anyone can use and that given a text message and a regular expression will spit out a list of all the matching items in the text message.
There is some work in hooking up the various parts, but the point is that all the parts are known to programmers. We all know when regular expressions are useful, and we can all imagine how you would use lists of items that display actions such as “Add to address book” on the screen and then perform the action when activated by the user. I could write some code that would solve this problem in a general way in less than a day from first hearing a vague description of it.
The point is that it is obvious to anyone who writes software. Solving problems like this involves putting together some well known pieces in well known ways. I am emphasizing how obvious this sort of thing is.
The existence of patent 5,946,647 is not obvious. I can not really think of how I would find out about it without reading every single patent and I can not think of a guaranteed way to even know what to look for.
But if I write my obvious code in half a day, there is a good chance I would violate patent 5,946,647.
It is not certain. I have read the patent and it manages to convey the obvious idea in far too many words. So many that I would never be sure whether any given implementation fitted the patent. But there are only so many ways to do something this simple in software, and truly original ideas are rare. So the likelihood is high.
And Apple sued and a judge ruled that HTC has violated the patent and as a result will not be allowed to import devices with this software into the USA. This sucks.
Every so often, when I hear people tell me that the Cold War is a long-lost issue and that we need to “move on”, to use that cant expression, I remember that there are, unbelievably, people out there who still think that the Soviet Union and its empire was a benevolent force and no worse than that of the NATO alliance that successfully helped to bring it down, and who therefore regard people who helped thwart the Soviet regime, like Vaclav Havel, as bad men. Case in point is this creature by the name of Neil Clark, writing in the Guardian newspaper:
“No one questions that Havel, who went to prison twice, was a brave man who had the courage to stand up for his views. Yet the question which needs to be asked is whether his political campaigning made his country, and the world, a better place. Havel’s anti-communist critique contained little if any acknowledgement of the positive achievements of the regimes of eastern Europe in the fields of employment, welfare provision, education and women’s rights. Or the fact that communism, for all its faults, was still a system which put the economic needs of the majority first.”
Absolutely. Presumably, that explains why there were millions of downtrodden, poor people attempting to enter the Soviet Empire from such hellholes as West Germany. That explains why East Berlin erected the Wall, to contain the flood of people trying to enter it. Yes, that must have been the reason. (Sarcasm alert).
I guess the fact that the Soviet System created a two-tier society: the Party and Everyone Else, must have escaped Mr Clark’s gimlet-eye attention. Perhaps the Gulag, the shootings of political opponents, the construction of the White Sea Canal (with slave labour), etc, were in fact all features of ensuring that the “needs of the majority” came “first”.
For what it is worth, on a more theoretical level, the horrors of collectivism can be summed up in Marx’s dictum: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”. For if you believe that the needs of the majority trump such pesky issues as rights or liberties, then so much the worse for such liberal principles. But in practice, of course, the history of the Communist world was littered with stories of shortages, famines and shabby, crappily produced goods and services.
I had actually forgotten about Neil Clark’s existence. Alas, his ghastly prose now comes back to haunt me. I remember reading about this character about five or six years ago, when writers such as Oliver Kamm and Stephen Pollard tore this man’s sophistries to pieces.
Thanks to Michael Blackburn for the pointer. Christina Odone also rubbishes Clark.
And here is a useful roundup of links for deniers of socialist brutality. Clark makes the list, unsurprisingly.
When I heard Gordon Kerr speak in the House of Commons a week ago, I wished that he had done so with a microphone attached. Very early this morning he spoke in public again and this time he did have a microphone attached, because he was on Bloomberg Television. Turn up the volume on your computer and you’ll find it a lot easier to hear what he said this morning than I did last week.
Kerr confirmed my definite impression that the Austrianist team is now starting to win this argument. (By “this argument”, I mean, approximately speaking, this argument.)
Whereas regular academic economists talked about how this banking crisis was all over bar the recovery in 2008, the Austrianists have consistently predicted further disasters. As these disasters have duly occurred, the books and writers and ideas that the Austrianists keep referring to in their increasingly frequent public performances (Kerr mentions Hayek in this performance) are now breaking out of their academic-stroke-hobbyist ghetto and reaching the mainstream.
My favourite moment in this quiet little early morning Bloomberg TV conversation was when the man whom Kerr was arguing with said: “But if banks told the truth about the value of their assets, that would cause chaos.” His argument being that therefore making the banks tell the truth is a disastrous policy. Which it sort of is. But Kerr’s point, the point made by all Austrianists, is that disaster can’t now be avoided. The decisions that have made disaster inevitable have all now been made. By postponing the recognition of disaster, you only make it all the greater when it finally erupts.
Intellectual self-confidence is hugely important in a battle of ideas, such as we are witnessing now. The Keynesians, anti-capitalists, the more-of-the-samists, the borrowers-and-spenders and the rest of them, all want to believe that capitalism has to be managed by them if it is to work properly, in approximately the manner in which these people manage it now and have been managing it for the last few decades. Some of them still want to believe that capitalism itself ought to be smashed up, and entirely replaced by a planned economy. But how many people really think that this kind of thing would actually make the world more prosperous? The point is: the hatred of truly liberated, untramelled, uncontrolled, un-managed capitalism is all still there. But, the conviction that there is a superior statist alternative, not strong before this crisis became evident but briefly puffed up by the early stages of the crisis, is now fading away in front of our eyes.
Passionate and sincere belief in a viable, partly or wholly statist alternative to capitalism used to exist, in the early part of the twentieth century. Then, Marxists really believed that capitalism was colossally wasteful and inefficient, as well as colossally cruel and unjust and unfair, and that replacing it with a world run by small clumps of smart people with dictatorial powers, based in small but dictatorially powerful offices, would genuinely be a colossal improvement. They really and truly thought this. They believed it with the same certainty that naval tacticians, then and since, have believed (rightly) that vulnerable merchant ships are safer, during a merchant shipping war, if they all sail together in a convoy, rather than if every merchant ship sails alone. That being one of the arguments they used. This colossal Marxist and statist intellectual self-confidence was contagious and, when crisis hit Russia during World War 1 and the West at the end of the 1920s, it was hard to resist.
Now it is the Austrianists and only the Austrianists who have any genuine confidence in the correctness of their own ideas. Tiny in number but growing in number by the day, we Austrianists (I count myself a very junior member of this team – a fan rather than any sort of player) truly believe that we are right about how the world works, and about how it could eventually be made to work a lot better. This is why we are winning.
By winning, I don’t just mean convincing of our rightness third parties with no stake in how things are being done now and no power to make any difference, although that also will happen, in the fullness of time. I mean making our now hugely powerful opponents (powerful in the sense of having the power to go on doing huge damage) realise that they themselves are entirely wrong, and that we Austrianists, who until recently they had never even heard of, are right. I mean especially them. The bewildered onlooker tendency, vastly more numerous than any of the intellectual teams directly involved in this debate, is likely to remain confused about all this for a much longer time. They’ll only hear about this argument after we have won it. But the powerful people who presided over this long catastrophe, and who made and continue to make it ever worse with their ever more panic-stricken decisions, are mostly going to emerge from the wreckage with no doubt in their minds that their Austrianist critics understood everything far better than they did. They may not admit it out loud, still less formally surrender, although there will probably be some very public changes of mind. But most of these people will know in the privacy of their own minds that they were utterly defeated, by events, and by those who proved with their prophecies, observations and post mortems, that they understood these events, as they did not begin to until it was far too late.
It was like this with that earlier collapse of statist power, the fall of the USSR. The people who presided over that collapse had no doubt concerning the inferiority of their own economic arrangements, which was a big part of why those arrangements collapsed. It wasn’t merely that Soviet communism collapsed because it was hopeless. It collapsed because the Soviet communists who ran Soviet communism themselves came to realise that Soviet communism was hopeless.
Perhaps this is why Gordon Kerr talks so quietly. He is right. He knows he is right. He feels no need to shout.
Allow me also to remind you about Jamie Whyte‘s recent radio performance. He also spoke with utter certainty in the rightness of what he was saying, and he never once felt the need to raise his voice either.
LATER: Steve Baker MP comments.
The other day I had a pub conversation with a friend that went as rapidly from, “I favour reducing the size of the state” to “but poor people will starve” as any such conversation I’ve had before. There are certain things, such as roads, schools, health and welfare, that are so strongly connected in people’s minds to the state that intelligent thought about them is almost impossible. I wonder how this happens. It means that no shortcuts are possible. To be understood, you have to assume no shared knowledge with your interlocutor and start again from first principles. But this does not work well in a pub conversation or, for that matter, in a TV interview.
At one point I was told, “if you got your way, I would emigrate.” My friend was imagining a dystopian hell on Earth, which suggests, among other things, I had not properly made my motives understood. There is a tendency to assume that one’s political opponents want to enrich themselves at the expense of others. This may be a good assumption a lot of the time. When a socialist suggests taxing the rich to give to the poor, I might wonder how much he will cream off the top for himself. When I suggest that taxes should be reduced, it is obviously because I do not like paying tax and I am prepared to let poor people starve so that I can buy more gadgets. The universe is a zero-sum game: what else could I possibly mean?
So I need to spell out explicitly what it is that I want, because it turns out that it does not go without saying: everyone to be much richer, so that necessities and most luxuries are almost free; vastly increased life expectancy and improved health; less overall time spent on menial tasks and more time spent doing interesting things; in general more wealth, opportunities and happiness for all.
I know how to get there, too. A smaller state means faster economic growth. Nothing I want breaks the laws of physics, so the technology is just a matter of time and leaving people alone to get on with it.
What I want sounds to me like something that would sell. Maybe we should do what our opponents do and repeat it loudly, often and everywhere, and point out that anyone who opposes it is causing poor people to starve. It is the sort of approach that might work well in a pub conversation or, for that matter, in a TV interview.
“It was Havel who helped, as much as anyone, to put across the idea that Communism was built on an illusion and that, once people began to doubt the illusion, it would collapse.”
– Ed West
It says much about this great Czech that he had the signal honour of being sneered at by Noam Chomsky.
I still haven’t got round to visiting the Czech Republic yet, although I have relations across the border in Germany. I must get around to dealing with this oversight soon.
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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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