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 conversation with a business associate, Alan Moore of SMLXL, yesterday, we got on to the topic of how the UK really is lagging behind when it comes to anticipating and preparing for the seismic shifts that are happening in business. I’m not sure if it was Alan or me who came up with this line, but it is as if they are standing at the foot of the volcano, having a picnic and drinking champagne. Maybe if they pretend everything is going to be okay, they won’t have to change. (See, on this note, SMLXL posts passim, including yesterday’s Another business model under threat.) Yes, we have covered this ground with Alan before.
Similarly, the UK market is way behind when it comes to blogging. I met in Paris last week with Guillaume du Gardier of PR Planet, and he was surprised to hear that France is much more developed on the blogging front than Britain. Does that make sense? On the surface, no, it doesn’t. The UK, sharing a common language with the US, should be much more up to speed on these things.
I am sure it can be annoying for a Brit to hear it from an American, but I suspect that one of the reasons for the slow uptake of blogging in the UK is that in general it is quite unlike Brits to get overly excited about anything. It is almost something of a sin to be wide-eyed and evangelical about anything, no matter how worthy that thing may be. Brits excel at cynicism and being understated and controlled; they are not entranced by the sort of hype that excites people in the US. (I again emphasise the generality, as I know and work with many Brits for whom the appearance of cynicism is not a concern.) In Britain, it is far more the done thing to be looking the other way when the bandwagon rolls up, and then scoff and roll your eyes when you finally see it, as it goes past…and then run run run to jump right on it, usually about 18 months behind the rest of the developed world.
Indeed, I remember as far back as a year ago, observing many conversations in British blog comments and on UK-based blogs, wherein bloggers themselves were turning their noses up at the buzz being whipped up in the US about blogging. Sure, it is good enough for them and they spend hours a day in the blogosphere, but God forbid they appear genuinely enthralled by this ‘phenomenon’! No, it is far easier to seem cool towards blogging. A shrug of the shoulders and a yawn would suffice…and then back to updating the blogroll and commenting on their daily tour of their niche of the blogosphere.
And so it goes. In the end, all you can do is shake your head and smile at such people – they can appear as unfussed as they like, and the bandwagon will roll on with or without their enthusiasm. But it is a shame for Britain that it once again is playing catch-up with the rest of the world when it comes to blogging and to the shifts in business that will be necessary for success in the coming decades. At times like these, that usually charming cynicism costs – big-time.
This post has been cross-posted to the Big Blog Company blog.
I do not believe that this excellent rant against clueless corporate drones’ plans for the internet can be linked to enough. There is lots of juicy goodness there, and the entire thing should be read, but this is certainly worth keeping in mind:
If you actually had even the faintest glimmering of what reality on the net is like, you’d realize that the real unit of currency isn’t dollars, data, or digicash. It’s reputation and respect.
Learn it, live it, love it. As the author says, If you don’t understand right now, don’t worry. You’ll learn it the hard way. We’ll be there to help you learn, you filthy corporate guttersnipes.
And for those who are reading this and scratching their heads, wondering what a Samizdatista might have against big business, here is some worthwhile background reading: Big Business is often the enemy of capitalism.
Via Catallarchy, here is something you do not hear every day from a legislator:
Folks have got to take personal responsibility for their actions.
So said Michigan Representative David Palsrok, sponsor of a bill signed into law today in that state by Democratic Governor Jennifer Granholm – a law which bans people suing food companies and restaurants for ‘making’ them fat.
And here is another quotation from the same article which is not quite as much of a shocker:
The Legislature and society should focus on preventing the sale of fatty, sugar-laden products in our nations [sic] schools or requiring that fast food manufacturers provide nutritional information on the food they sell.
Says who? The Michigan Trial Lawyers’ Association, of course.
It is a sad reality that racism and xenophobia have not yet been totally eradicated from our planet. To that end, Ofcom – the regulator for the UK communications industries, which claims that it “exists to further the interests of citizen-consumers as the communications industries enter the digital age” – has admonished a sports commentator for daring to suggest that a non-native English speaker might not speak English perfectly. According to a nameless Ofcom spokesperson:
We believe the experienced presenter should have been more alert to the implications of his comment.
The implications being that some ridiculous government super-regulator will inevitably smear you with the intimation that you are a racist, and your employer will be forced to impress upon you the importance of “the careful use of language”. And gosh, isn’t our country and our planet all the better for this speech monitoring service our government provides at our expense?
Libertarian types are all over the blogosphere, but you never actually meet any in real life, of course. So claim many people who have felt the need to inform me that the blog to which I occasionally contribute does not conform to mainstream thinking. I am not sure whether these people expect me to weep softly, wail loudly, or recoil in shock and horror when they share this revelation with me, but if they do, no doubt they walk away from our exchanges disappointed.
To me, the fact that individualists are thick on the ground in the blogosphere is no bad thing. I am not totally surprised that people whose views are not represented in mainstream media would take to their own media in droves, be it to connect to those like them or to communicate their ideas and beliefs to those who may not be familiar with such thinking. Usually, such blog-based conversations involve both of those objectives. For example, I would not liken Samizdata to a recruitment drive, but neither is it mere preaching to the choir. At the same time, Samizdata is not a love-in for those who share the same metacontext. When I read people writing about “what Samizdatistas believe,” I have to laugh: Some of the most fierce, raucous debates I have ever witnessed have taken part between Samizdatistas.
But a conversation I had this week got me thinking – and no, I am sure it is not an original thought – that the reason individualists may seem so hard to detect in day to day life is because many of them have decided to assign politics and related discussions to the circular file of their lives. To them, the system is broken and they do not wish to spend their lives talking about how it got that way, figuring out how to put it back together, or contemplating how much worse things are going to get. Beyond jaded, they just do not get involved in any way. These people may never have heard the terms individualist or libertarian, but they may well qualify for either of those classifications. And because they do not go around wearing any party’s badge on their lapel, or touting any party line that comes down the pike, it is easy to imagine that they do not exist.
And imagining as much is probably quite comforting to those who strictly adhere to party politics. As long as they are certain that their thinking is in line with some large consensus of public sentiment, then they have some hope and some delusion of accuracy and relevance to hold on to. Forced to choose between that and shunning political matters altogether, how much of a dilemma would any of us actually face?
There are more instances of the abridgment of freedoms of the people by gradual and silent encroachment of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.
– James Madison
Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal well meaning but without understanding.
– Louis D Brandeis
Compassionate conservatism is as insubstantial a notion as the Third Way — a circumlocution to avoid having to choose among conflicting values and competing claims to scarce resources. To talk of a compassionate or caring society is to turn a noble personal virtue into a destructive political affectation.
–Oliver Kamm
One of the downmarket rags that sullies the newsstand on Sunday mornings here in Britain, The People, reports on a story that is so absurd that I would think it an urban legend if I had not read the official reaction to it. A man who works for Southern Railways and scrawls a daily joke on a whiteboard at Hove Station in order to cheer up miserable commuters has been suspended from his job, pending an official investigation. Why? Because one of his jokes was about a dyslexic who went to a toga party dressed as a goat. According to a Southern Railways official:
We had three complaints in two hours. Certain people do find things offensive and you have to be very careful these days. Some people might have found it amusing but we have to cater for all our customers.
Yes, “certain people” definitely make it their business to be offended by things. Howsabout ignoring them and catering for the customers who find it offensive that Southern Railways could be so incredibly silly? Another rail official tried to justify the suspension and investigation thusly:
It is something that could contravene our equal opportunities policy.
This is not “political correctness gone mad”. It is madness masquerading as corporate responsibility.
Newsflash time, people: Little girls like to play with makeup. Shocking stuff, at least if you read yesterday’s Guardian.
The inappropriate sexualisation of young children is, of course, nothing to encourage. But the predictable calls for government intervention to prevent female children from being exposed to the radical ideas that girls often like to make themselves look as pretty as possible and girls often like boys that way are as ludicrous as they are predictable. Once again, we are told, it is not acceptable to entrust parents with the care of their children – we must step in and make new laws to restrict commerce. The likes of Bliss magazine should only be purchased with proof of ID and age. If we can just keep these magazines out of the hands of our (and other peoples’) daughters, we can raise a generation of females who do not think about their physical appearances or their feelings for the opposite sex. And if we can achieve that, then we will be a little closer to “equality”.
The Guardian also files this first-person account of a 10-year-old’s experiences with cosmetics and perfume. All of it is the same standard stuff that I remember from my childhood in the ’80s: hijacking mummy’s lipstick, ill-advised experiments with blue eyeshadow, spending pocket money on pink nail varnish and playing beauty salon with friends. Perhaps not finding any of this quite shocking enough to spur Guardianistas into joining the fight against big, bad commerce, the piece concludes with little Joanna’s confession that:
I like Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears and I’d like to be one of them. I like the way they dress. I’d like to walk down the catwalk. I’ve got Christina Aguilera on my wall.
Finally, something truly disturbing – and yet also not up to the state to control. Even if the idolatry of trashy pop stars or the normal, healthy female enthusiasm for boys and lipgloss could be legislated against, who would dare suggest that we should do so? Scarily enough, more people than one might think. In a nation where parents do not think it unreasonable to demand the state foot the bill for their child’s minding, healthcare, and education right through university, is it any shock that even those who themselves have no children expect the government to do yet more to raise them outright?
Today’s edition of Britain’s Sun tabloid features five readers who demand: “End our childcare misery, Mr Blair“. That so many middle and working class people in this country turn to the state to solve any challenges they face in life is, if depressing, unsurprising when one considers the prevailing British attitude towards government’s role in individuals’ lives. This comment from PM Tony Blair sums it up succinctly enough:
Some mothers will want to stay at home and look after their children, and that’s fine. But if they don’t we have to support them.
Actually, Mr Blair, we do not have to support financially any person who chooses to have children and then chooses to rely on others to look after them while they go out to work. (You may feel you need to ‘support’ them in order to be re-elected, but let us not confuse what you do in the interests of your career with what is right.)
I understand the dilemma – one may want to have children but not be able to afford to do so without earning a certain income, which may require full- or part-time work – but one makes such choices and then deals with the consequences. I doubt seriously that any of the women in the Sun asking Mr Blair to ‘end the misery’ of having to struggle to raise children on limited budgets, whose ages range from 31 to 39, went into parenthood without realising that making ends meet would be a concern. Kids are expensive, and although there are ways to make them less expensive (even the wealthiest parents I know buy and sell baby gear and other children’s stuff on eBay or in consignment shops or at NCT sales), people decide to have them with the full realisation that this life they are creating will need to be looked after and cared for. With that comes expense, and the need to work out how to meet that expense. All pretty basic stuff, one would think. But reading the complaints of parents who think that the state should be easing their burdens – brought about by choices they have made – with other peoples’ money, it becomes clear that we have in this country bred a population of adults who think and behave like children. I will do what I like – it will be fine! (But somebody better be there to rescue me and kiss my boo-boos better if it is not.)
Perhaps it is a shame that life is not so easy that we cannot always have everything our hearts desire (children, enough money in the bank, personal fulfilment outside of stay-at-home parenthood, trendy, slightly politically subversive t-shirts for our babies), but that is not a situation that the state can change with any amount of money they may take fom you and me.
“But think of the children!” comes the usual plaintive wail. To do so is terrifying: a nation of babies raising babies can only end in tears. How much will we be expected to spend on cleaning up this spill before the idea that individual choices matter ceases to be answered with a “Yes, but…” and a tax demand?
Islamists oppose us not because of what we do, but because of what we are: secular, pluralist and tolerant.
–Oliver Kamm
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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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