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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The ever splendid Natalie, once described as a ‘ninja librarian’, linked to a couple simply marvellous articles in the Guardian, and I really really wanted to leave a steaming, quivering pile of comment on them both. Alas… both have had their comments closed. So thank goodness we have Samizdata so that I can still share my thoughts with the wider world.
I was particularly taken with the ever dependable S.E. Smith’s article: ‘The people are so beautiful!’ That’s enough of the colonial tourism
While you’re drooling over Indian women in saris at the produce market, are you paying attention to the women organising against mining companies and western intrusions in India? Are you paying attention to the women opposing tourism and fighting objectifying activities in their communities?
Does this not SCREAM OUT for comment? My gratitude to Natalie for finding this positively buoyant paragraph knows no bounds. And so this is what I wanted to say…
It is essential to prevent anything that decreases the places that the ‘socially aware’ can go to feel good about themselves, thus tourism and the money it generates must be stopped. It must be replaced with tax transfers of course, sent directly to the Swiss Bank Accounts of the Mercedes Benz riding local ruling elite.
It should be clear that if poor brown skinned people start thinking they can lift themselves out of poverty via free exchange with willing visitors, they might start concluding they do not actually need the wise councils of the decaf latte drinking western bourgeois left and their NGOs, or even the bourgeois left’s associated third world auxiliaries.
This must not be permitted to occur. Bad things happen when the uppity lumpen proletariat (also known as ‘cashed up bogans’) are permitted to take high carbon cheap flight holidays away from the supervising catchment areas of their Guardian recruited social working betters. Take your eyes of them for a second and they start admiring the local crumpet, not for their picket line organising skills but rather for their agreeable curves! That will never do!
Let that happen and the next thing you know, they start intermarrying and miscegenating, greatly complicating the whole carefully constructed ‘identity politics’ balancing act that keeps statists of both left and right in power in oh so many places.
Whaddya think? Are either of these two articles from the Guardian Comment Network (i.e. lefty blogs to which the Guardian gives a larger audience) for real, or are they magnificent satire?
From SE Smith, a writer who “lives and works in northern California, covering social justice issues”: ‘The people are so beautiful!’ That’s enough of the colonial tourism
While you’re drooling over Indian women in saris at the produce market, are you paying attention to the women organising against mining companies and western intrusions in India? Are you paying attention to the women opposing tourism and fighting objectifying activities in their communities?
From Tom Whyman, a well-named PhD Philosophy student: Beware of cupcake fascism
…this has an effect on our culture that we can understand as being a sort of gentrification. The cupcake has always itself been a gentrifying force: after all, the “pop-up cupcake shop” is the paradigmatic pop-up shop. But what all these things do is assert the infantilised values of an increasingly infantilised middle-class world on general society. This is how the passive-aggressive violence of the infantilised twee fascist manifests itself: moving across the world with a cupcake as a cowcatcher, shunting out everything that does not correspond to the values manifested within it; a much more effective way of sweeping up the sort of (poor, working-class, black) forces that informed the 2011 London riots than any broom.
Assuming this data is accurate and sustained (a big assumption, and the usual caveats must apply), this sort of item is going to make the nanny statists out there feel very uncomfortable:
In recent history, the UK has liberalized its rules concerning the hours that pubs can operate. For example, the Licensing Act of 1988 expanded Sunday hours and no longer required pubs to close for two and a half hours in the afternoon. In 2005, the law in England and Wales was further liberalized such that pubs could remain open until 5 am instead of closing at 11 pm. An article in the latest issue of the Journal of Health Economics claims that the 2005 liberalization of pub hours actually decreased the number of traffic accidents.
So writes James Schneider, over at the Econlog economics group blog.
Here is another excerpt:
The reduction in traffic accidents for England and Wales are plausibly related to the change in pub hours because the largest reductions occurred during weekend nights and early mornings. The impact on young drinkers was particularly strong. Accidents involving young people on Friday and Saturday nights decreased by an estimated 32.5 percent.
So there is evidence, perhaps, to confirm a general, common-sense sort of view that if you treat adults like adults, they behave accordingly. It is interesting that the message of this article is as troubling for the paternalist Right as it is for the Fabians on the left. I remember reading some time ago the author Theodore Dalrymple, who has made something of a name by lamenting the alleged ghastliness of modern life in the UK, reticent past, having a pop at liberalised pub hours. The Daily Mail, for example, regularly has a go and rarely fails to write stories about how we Brits are living in a sea of booze.
And yet it turns out that there has been a coincident sharp fall in road accidents on one hand, and looser licensing laws, on the other. It should be borne in mind, though, that recent years have seen a continued strong enforcement of drink-drive laws; police are pretty tough on speeding in general; there may be, for demographic reasons, just fewer tearaways on the roads in general. On the other hand, our island is more crowded than it used to be and our roads are busier, so you might think there would be more risk of accidents, not less. And yet the number of accidents, including fatal ones, has fallen.
Correlation is not causation. It is, however, worth noting that had the number of road accidents risen significantly at around the same time as our drinking laws had changed, I think I can imagine how organisations such the British Medical Association, The Lancet, and other campaigners would have used such sets of data.
Here is part of slide number one of Christopher Snowdon’s talk at LLFF14 yesterday afternoon, entitled “How the state finances the opponents of freedom in civil society”:
That is from The Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, first penned, it would seem, in 1779, and actually passed in 1786.
Christopher Snowdon is described here as the “Director of Lifestyle Economics at the IEA”, which means he is their chief complainer about sin taxes.
His talk yesterday was based on the work he did writing two IEA publications, Sock Puppets: How the government lobbies itself and why and Euro Puppets: The European Commission’s remaking of civil society. Both those publications can be downloaded in .pdf form, free of charge.
Snowdon walked around a lot when talking, so although I took a lot of photos of him, only this one was any good:
Behind Snowdon is a long list of NGO’s which receive substantial funding from the EU. For legible versions, see Euro Puppets.
In the short run, all this money paying for leftist apparatchiks to lobby for more money for more leftist apparatchiks is good for leftism, but I wonder if in the longer run it won’t be a disaster for them. Another quote, about how all causes eventually degenerate into rackets, springs to mind. This is the kind of behaviour that even disgusts many natural supporters of leftism. As Snowden recounted, few people outside this incestuous world have any idea of the scale of this kind of government funding for “charities”, never mind knowing the extra bit about how the money is mostly used to yell and lobby for more money, and for more government spending and government control of whatever it is. In particular, Snowden recounted that when John Humphrys interviewed Snowden on the Today Programme, he (Humphrys) did not grill him (Snowden), he (Humphrys) mostly just expressed utter amazement at the sheer scale of government funding for “charities”, for anything.
What this means is that if and when a non-leftist politician gets around to just defunding the lot of them, just like that, he gets a win-win. He cuts public spending, even if only a bit. And he slings a bunch of parasites out into the street where they belong, who are then simply unable to argue to the public that they were doing anything of the slightest value to that public. Insofar as they do argue that they shouldn’t have been sacked, they do not further their own cause; they merely discredit it further and further prove that the decision to sack them was the right one.
Nicholas Dykes, someone I have known for many years, and who is the author of several excellent novels – as well as essays such as this pugnacious and scholarly piece about Karl Popper – emailed me the other day to make it clear that his absence from the airwaves did not mean that he was no more.
Over to you, Nick:
Sorry I haven’t been in touch. I had something called a subarachnoid haemorrhage, a rarish kind of stroke, at 6.30 am on Sunday 24 November, falling on the floor in front of my wife and making horrible noises in my throat. Happily she’s good in a crisis and with the help of a kindly neighbour had me in an ambulance pdq. I was taken first to Hereford, then to a new Hospital in Birmingham, the Queen Elizabeth, where I was operated on next day. The NHS has its moments.
I had 2 operations. Then I got pneumonia. Then I got an infection of the brain called ventriculitis. Some cheery medic said at one point I’m lucky still to be here. I was in and out of Intensive Care, five weeks in hospital altogether, then had to go back in again with a mini stroke called a TIA just a few days after being let out.
Anyhow, I’m home again now and recovering slowly. I was weak as a kitten to begin with, slept a lot, and had great difficulty with my balance — very wobbly walking. Things are better now but my short-term memory is not too good. Happily, my speech is alright and I have not been left with any physical disabilities other than weakness, which should improve. I do have a handsome scar on my forehead however, it looks as though someone hit me with a axe.
My poor wife Rachel had a miserable time for weeks, not knowing how I’d be from day to day and with tubes sprouting all over my body. As for me, I was largely unconscious and remember very little! When I first woke up and was told what had happened, all I said was: ‘what a bugger!’
The best of recoveries to you, Nick.
So relentless is this brainwashing that it percolates throughout the curriculum, so that even exam papers in French, English or religious studies can ask students to explain why the world is dangerously warming up, or why we must build more wind turbines. In 2012, I described an A-level general studies paper set by our leading exam board, AQA, asking for comment on 11 pages of propagandist “source materials”, riddled with basic errors. A mother wrote to tell me how her intelligent son, after getting straight As on all his science papers, used his extensive knowledge of climate science to point out all their absurd distortions.
He was given the lowest possible mark, a fail. When his mother paid to have his paper independently assessed, the new examiner conceded that it was “articulate, well-structured” and well-informed. But because it did not parrot the party line, it was still given a fail. I fear this corruption of everything that education and science should stand for has become a much more serious scandal than Mr Gove yet realises.
– Christopher Booker
This is from that haven of supercilious argumentation, the Financial Times:
Only The Ignorant Live In Fear of Hyperinflation. (Paywall protected). The article is by Martin Wolf, whose confidence in the benign force of central banking remains undimmed, nay, is enhanced, by the events leading up to and after 2008.
Here are a couple of paragraphs that I can extract for you:
Understanding the monetary system is essential. One reason is that it would eliminate unjustified fears of hyperinflation. That might occur if the central bank created too much money. But in recent years the growth of money held by the public has been too slow not too fast. In the absence of a money multiplier, there is no reason for this to change.
In other words, if the ignorant masses can be told about how spiffing modern fiat money systems are and how they are managed, we’d be all a lot happier.
A still stronger reason is that subcontracting the job of creating money to private profit-seeking businesses is not the only possible monetary system. It may not be even the best one. Indeed, there is a case for letting the state create money directly.
Put the state in charge of increasing/cutting the volume of money in the system. I am sure that will work like a charm. What could possibly go wrong?
Okay, enough of my sarcasm. Now, it may well be that fears of hyperinflation are unwarranted. It is entirely possible that in the West, we face a Japan-style multi-decade period of stagnation rather than hyperinflation. The structure of the economy, even demography, can have an effect on how quickly/slowly money moves around the system. Despite various central banks – particularly in the case of Japan – printing money in vast amounts, it may be that we should not be concerned about what the State is doing, and continues to do, to money.
But it is worth noting that since 1971, when Nixon severed the gold link to the dollar, although that link had been dead in all practical terms for a while, the dollar has lost about 85 per cent of its purchasing power. And much the same can be said of the fiat money systems in force around the world. No doubt the FT thinks this is nothing to bother about. Weimar? No chance of that happening again, old boy. Too many clever people working in the central banks to let that happen again. Trust us, stop worrying and it will all come out in the end.
The irony, of course, is that people who tell us to stop fretting about the central bank buggeration of money and the need to put even more State control over all this are the same as those who say it is folly not to be scared witless by AGW, or by whatever fashionable panic happens to be out there (particularly when it is associated with calls for governments to “do something”). But if people are fearful of something caused by states with their monopoly powers, then the FT’s reaction is a typical example of what we get.
This io9 piece reports that a musical based on Ayn Rand’s Anthem will open, in New York, on May 29th.
There is a website, where you can read this:
Anthem is told through the words of Equality 7-2521, in diary form. Equality 7-2521 is a young man who lives in the future after a time called the “Great Re-birth”. The city in which he lives is surrounded by an immense forest which is thought to be impassable due to the fact it is filled with wild animals. This is a simple and isolated society in which all technology is carefully controlled and in its most primitive state. All awareness and understanding of individualism has been lost and words such as ‘I’, ‘me’, or ‘mine’, do not exist in spoken or written language, therefore, nearly the entire story is told in the ‘first person plural’. Independent thoughts and/or actions are strictly prohibited by law and therefore, everyone lives and works in groups as a collective body also known as the “Great We”. …
It will be interesting to see how well it does.
Today’s big political story in the UK is the resignation, due to expenses she had claimed, of Maria Miller. Her ministerial post had been that of “Culture Secretary”; her brief had included the role of regulation of the media, and the whole wretched power-grab known as the Leveson Report.
It won’t have occurred to most of those in the Westminster Village who write and chat about such things, but for me, as a slash-and-burn small-government type, what I’d like to think of is that we get rid of such an Orwellian-sounding post as “Culture Secretary”.
The business of sport, media and the arts should not be under the control, or even vague oversight, of the State, in my view. Since when, for example, have the doings of Premiership footballers been the proper concern of politicians? In an age of crowdfunding platforms, and due to the continued philanthropic involvement in such matters, as well as plain good entrepreneurship, why should money be forcibly taken from people in tax to spend on art galleries or whatever? Why should a state interest itself in how the television industry is run (abolish the BBC licence fee, etc)? Getting rid of this ministry would be a part of a wider retrenchment of the State to what arguably are its core functions. At the very least, the scrapping of this post, and the associated quangos it deals with, would signal that we haven’t given up on the noble idea of rolling back the State.
Needless to say, I am dreaming impossible dreams. It may have something to do with it being such a gloriously sun-kissed April morning here in London.
The Heartbleed bug is one of the more serious computer security vulnerabilities I have seen. It was discovered yesterday and is just starting to hit mainstream media now, so I will summarise my understanding of it.
It affects some web sites that use HTTPS secure connections. The purpose of HTTPS is, among other things, to encrypt data sent between your computer and the web server, so that anyone who sees the data in transit across the internet cannot read it. So it is used whenever you log in to a web site or enter personal information. You know you are using it when your web browser displays a little padlock icon somewhere.
The bug is in a software library that implements HTTPS, called OpenSSL. Not all web sites use this library, but many do. The bug affects certain versions of the library. Importantly, though, the bug has been in the library since December 2011, and has only recently been detected and fixed.
During this time, an attacker who knew about the bug could send a request to a web server, and get back some random information from the server’s memory that should not be public. This information could be almost anything known by the web server software. It is a lucky dip: the attacker can not choose what information he will get. Importantly, though, it can include server certificates, and user names and passwords of the web site’s users.
Having obtained a certificate, an attacker could spy on data transferred from the user to the web site, including passwords and any information entered. This is not trivial, but can be quite easy in certain circumstances. For example, anyone can sit in a coffee shop and intercept WiFi traffic of other customers using WiFi in the shop, but they will only get information about the other coffee shop customers. On the other hand, the NSA can presumably spy on all data sent to any web site. There will be attackers with levels of sophistication between these extremes. Normally a web browser will shout warnings at you if a HTTPS connection has been intercepted. Having a web site’s certificate enables an attacker to silence such warnings.
User names and passwords can also be obtained directly using the Heartbleed bug. This only happens on certain web sites, and the details retrieved are random. It is not possible to quickly obtain all details of all users. Rather, every time the attack is made, one or two users’ details might be revealed. That said, the attack can be repeated, and in two years it can be repeated a lot. So a determined attacker could gather details of many people in this time. This is real. Users on Reddit were claiming to have seen Yahoo Mail passwords as recently as a few hours ago. Right now, Yahoo Mail is fixed.
So what can you do? Realise that you are affected, but don’t panic. There is a very good chance none of your details have leaked. You can not be certain, but you already were not certain. There are likely many more security holes that are not yet common knowledge. However, on services that you have particularly sensitive information, it would be wise to first check that the bug has been fixed, and then change your password.
You can check if the bug currently affects a given service with an online tool. If the service is at all high profile, it is a fairly safe bet that it is already fixed. But you can not tell if your details or a service’s certificate have been leaked in the past. Unless a service takes action, credentials and certificates obtained in the last two years can still be used by attackers to log in or spy on communications. Hopefully web administrators will communicate whether they have been affected and whether they have changed their certificates, so watch for announcements.
When you change your passwords, now is a good time to stop using the same password for every service you use. Start using a password manager such as LastPass, 1Password or Password Safe. All of these are acceptably safe in my opinion, but there is some interesting discussion on this topic. The great thing is that a password manager will generate a different, random, impossible to guess password for each site you use, meaning that if someone does find out your password to one service, the damage is limited to that service.
If a service offers two factor authentication, where you use a smartphone app which generates an ever-changing code, use that, because it means knowing your password alone is useless to an attacker.
If you run a web server that uses HTTPS and handles users’ information, educate yourself, upgrade, and inform your users.
More generally, if you can possibly arrange to live your life under the assumption that everything you have ever done on the internet could become public knowledge tomorrow, you could save yourself a lot of trouble. Keeping secrets is hard.
… or however that name would best translate into Korean… Just make sure there is not a thick table leg between the briefcase and the psychotic dictator in need of urgent removal from the material plane of existence.
I mean seriously guys, forget the wacko ideology for a moment… if you are anyone who is anyone in North Korea, and you would quite like to still be smelling the fragrant aroma of kimchi this time next year, how much of a hint do you need that it is long past time that Chubby Chops went to meet his ancestors?
It seems the prospects for Scotland to depart from its long standing political union with the UK (in truth one really can say ‘…with England’ as no one actually thinks this is about Ulster and Wales) has noticeably improved.
Indeed I cannot help wondering if the dawn of Scottish Independence, or as I prefer to call it, English Independence, will be followed by the thundering sounds of Scotland’s entrepreneurs driving their cattle south, as they decamp en-mass to London before Glasgow is renamed Havana-on-Clyde and they awake one day to find their Sterling bank accounts now denominated in Cuban Pesos, and not the convertible ones.
I foresee a considerable increase in the overall exuberance levels of the London Party Scene, and yet another (whiskey tinged) puff of air into the immense property market bubble currently floating over the Thames.
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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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