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]
|
According to the great leader’s physician, Fidel Castro can live to “at least” the age of 140 years old. His proof? Castro still has the strength to go on protest marches. God help us if participation in moonbat gatherings is all it takes to guarantee more than a century of life on this planet; if you think old people are crazy these days, just wait until they’re all sporting “Not in my name” badges and spouting communist rhetoric.
Speaking of which, how long do we reckon it will it be before Fidel’s fans start trotting out this doctor’s expert opinion as further evidence — along with the country’s literacy rates and supposedly world-class, “free” healthcare — that Cuba is a great nation from which we could all learn so very much?
On my way to meet Samizdata’s own Perry de Havilland and Adriana Cronin this morning, I treated myself to a few chapters of Parliament of Whores by PJ O’Rourke. I first read this superb book when I was 13, but it won’t surprise anyone who’s read it to learn that I appreciate it much more as a beleaguered taxpayer.
I wouldn’t advise reading Parliament of Whores on public transport, though — one would have to be made of stone not to giggle (if one is a giggler) or laugh out loud at some of O’Rourke’s turns of phrase. Perry suggested that I post some of these, and who am I to disappoint? From the chapter on environmental moonbats (“Dirt of the Earth”) comes this passage — see if it reminds you of anything affecting the current global political climate.
Mass movements need what Eric Hoffer — in his book The True Believers, about the kind of creepy misfits who join mass movements — called a unifying agent.
“Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying agents,” said Hoffer. “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.” Hoffer goes on to cite historian FA Voigt’s account of a Japanese mission sent to Berlin in 1932 to study the National Socialist movement. Voigt asked a member of the mission what he thought. He replied, “It is magnificent. I wish we could have something like it in Japan, only we can’t, because we haven’t got any Jews.”
[…]
Business and industry and “their friends in the Reagan administration and Congress” make easy and even appropriate targets. Nobody squirts sulfur dioxide into the air for a hobby, after all, or tosses PCBs into rivers as an act of charity. Pollution occurs in the course of human enterprise. It is a by-product of people making things, things like a living…
Business and industry — trade and manufacture — are inherent in civilization. Every human society, no matter how wholesomely primitive, practices as much trade and manufacture as it can figure out. For good reason. It is the fruits of trade and manufacture that raise us from the wearying muck of subsistence and give us the health, wealth, education, leisure and warm, dry rooms with Xerox machines that allow us to be the ecology-conscious, selfless, committed, splendid individuals we are.
Our ancestors were too busy wresting a living from nature to go on any nature hikes. The first European ever known to have climbed a mountain for the view was the poet Petrarch. That wasn’t until the fourteenth century. And when Petrarch got to the top of Mount Ventoux, he opened a copy of Saint Augustine’s Confessions and was shamed by the passage about men “who go to admire the high mountains and immensity of the oceans and the course of the heaven…and neglect themselves.” Worship of nature may be ancient, but seeing nature as cuddlesome, hug-a-bear and too cute for words is strictly a modern fashion.
The Luddite side of the environmental movement would have us destroy or eschew technology — throw down the ladder by which we climbed. Well, nuts (and berries and fiber) to them. It’s time we in the industrialized nations admitted what safe, comfortable and fun-filled lives we lead. If we keep sniveling and whining, we may cause irreparable harm to the poor people of the world — they may laugh themselves to death listening to us.
Journalist Nancy Rommelmann writes, after a surprisingly (to me, anyway) pleasant evening spent with feminist writer Susan Faludi, of sitting on the back steps of her home with her husband and a glass of wine:
It must be hard-wired into humans to want a little patch of earth and grass, a peaceful place to sit at the end of the day, or the beginning, and think, ours.
So true, so simple, and yet anathema to so many.
Read the rest of Nancy’s post for some unsurprising-but-fun gossip that she and Faludi exchanged about a certain tiresome feminist whinger extraordinaire.
Well, no prizes for having seen this one coming. From the Sunday Times headline: When you’re £30,000 down, ID cards look good. So says Sara Smith, a victim of identity theft.
Of course, nowhere in the article does the journalist, Rachel Cooke, make even a halfhearted attempt to explain the reality of ID card technology. Instead, she writes, “For [Sara Smith], a national ID card cannot arrive too soon.” Yes, a national ID card, any national ID card — don’t tell us if it can actually do what it says on the tin, just introduce one and make us feel a bit more falsely secure, please.
Cooke’s article does reveal, though not in so many words, exactly why it was so easy for Sara Smith’s identity to be used without her consent: Sara Smith let it happen.
Smith’s troubles began when she moved home. She arranged for her post to be redirected but, for reasons that are still uncertain, this was never done: her post continued to arrive at her old home, which was why she did not notice when her new Harrods store card failed to materialise. “If only I had,” she says. “That little piece of plastic was the start of it all.”
Some weeks later Smith received a telephone call. On the line was a man who purported to be from Harrods. “We are upgrading your card,” he told her. “Would you mind answering a few security questions?”
At first Smith protested, saying she had no need of more credit. However, she found herself telling him her date of birth and her mother’s maiden name.
Oh, it’s happened to us all. You know how it is — a stranger rings up, you get chatting about the weather, the snooker, or the state of your credit, and the next thing you know, you find yourself giving your most vital security information, for no reason you can really discern.
It’s not that I have no sympathy for Sara Smith; I certainly do. But when you consider her amazing new way of managing her most confidential business — not automatically trusting anyone who calls up asking for personal details, keeping a vigilant eye out for financial documents that fail to arrive in the post, actually looking at the statements for her “few accounts” — is really the way she should have been doing things all along, it does drive home the point that a bit of common sense is the best protection we all have against identity theft. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and when it comes to ID cards, the “cure” is flawed both inherently and practically.
|
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.
|
