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 bureaucratic mind at work, from the WSJ Political Diary:
“Before deploying from Savannah, Georgia to Iraq by a chartered airliner, the troops of the 48th Brigade Combat Team, a National Guard unit, had to go through the same security checks as any other passengers. Lt. Col. John King, the unit’s commander, told his 280 fellow soldiers that FAA anti-hijacking regulations require passengers to surrender pocket knives, nose hair scissors and cigarette lighters. ‘If you have any of those things,’ he said, almost apologetically, ‘put them in this box now.’ The troops were, however, allowed to keep hold of their assault rifles, body armour, helmets, pistols, bayonets and combat shotguns” — reported in the Air Finance Journal.
Take note: Michael Barone has a blog. And its just as good (so far) as you knew it would be. Takeaway line from his first few posts:
All of which only illustrates my First Rule of Life: All process arguments are insincere, including this one.
And he hints at the problem that will bring the GOP down, if not next year then very likely in 2008: the lackluster-to-disastrous domestic performance of the Bush administration and the Republican Congress have given most Republicans no reason to turn out and vote for them. As Virginia Postrel said recently (sorry, can’t remember where), now that the Republicans have given up on economic freedom and markets, they are basically just the party of social/religious conservatism after all.
And if that’s all you got, you won’t win many elections in this country.
Fascinating entry in the daily email Political Journal (subscription only from the Wall Street Journal, no linkee):
How come the French all think alike?
Well, OK, the French don’t really all think alike: In May, 56% of them wisely voted “no” in the referendum on the European Constitution, which enjoyed the support not only of every major political party but also all of the major media outlets, from the leftist Le Monde to the right-wing Catholic paper La Croix. But if most French voters opposed the Constitution, why was their view reflected nowhere in the media? Surely there must have been a market for anti-Constitution sentiment, which any canny publisher or broadcaster could have exploited to boost circulation or ratings. But there was zippo.
This puzzle was recently solved for us by a well-placed French source. Part of the answer, he reminds us, is that much of the French broadcast media is state-owned, as is the venerable news agency Agence France-Presse.
But that’s not all: Even the “private” French press is massively subsidized. It enjoys lower tariffs for freight transport, a postal discount, a reduced value-added tax rate and a complete exemption from local taxes on investment. Government also subsidizes secondary printing facilities and helps pay for the distribution of French papers abroad. If you’re a journalist — or just a “journalist” — you also pay income taxes at a lower rate. And the best part: If a newspaper faces revenue losses because of declining advertising or circulation, the government will help make up the difference. The only catch is that, to benefit from this munificence, publications must officially register with a state agency (the French call it an organisme) run by a committee of editors and government functionaries.
The ostensible rationale for all this madness is that the government wants to avoid capitalistic media concentration and foster a plurality of viewpoints. The effect, of course, is the exact opposite: Unlike in the U.S. or Britain, in which various publications tend to represent some segment or other of market opinion or taste, French journalists are utterly indifferent to the views of their readers. Instead, they tend to write articles with a view to impressing their colleagues, a classic media echo-chamber that’s as conformist as it is insular. No wonder the French public tunes out: Le Monde, the biggest and most influential daily in a country of 60 million, has a circulation of only 400,000.
Who knew?
“If there ever IS an armed rebellion against the Federal government, I do hope the bastards at LEAST have the decency not to act surprised.”
Commenter independent worm, in a Hit & Run post concerning some idiocy or other by members of Congress.
Peggy Noonan, former Reagan speechwriter and current Wall Street Journal columnist, often serves in my mind of an example of how even East Coast conservatives share a mindset that is parochial, elitist, insular, and irredeemably statist. However, in today’s column she steps back from the Bos-Wash bubble to marvel at the bloviating egomaniacs that populate Washington.
What’s wrong with them? That’s what I’m thinking more and more as I watch the news from Washington.
Welcome to the club, Peggy. Too bad it took you so many decades to join up.
How exactly does it work? How does legitimate self-confidence become wildly inflated self-regard? How does self respect become unblinking conceit? How exactly does one’s character become destabilized in Washington?
And, bless her, she even takes on the fair-haired boy of the elites, Barack Obama. Barack is widely heralded because he is young, a Democrat, reasonably articulate, and, of course, because he is black. He has also revealed himself to be a first-rate egomaniac. Although in the Senate he doesn’t even make the A team for self-importance, what with such colossi as Roberty Byrd and John McCain to contend with, he is certainly putting himself forward as a bloviator to be reckoned with.
This week comes the previously careful Sen. Barack Obama, flapping his wings in Time magazine and explaining that he’s a lot like Abraham Lincoln, only sort of better. “In Lincoln’s rise from poverty, his ultimate mastery of language and law, his capacity to overcome personal loss and remain determined in the face of repeated defeat–in all this he reminded me not just of my own struggles.”
Because this kind of inflated self-regard is part of the molecular make-up of politicians, there is no such thing as “good” government, instituted through any kind of ethical or institutional means. There is only “limited” government.
In another of the cases dumped on an unsuspecting public today, the last day of the US Supreme Court’s session, the High and Mighty Nine reiterated that a municipality cannot be expected to provide competent police protection for its residents. The only twist was that this time the plaintiff was trying to hold the local coppers liable for failing to enforce a restraining order issued by a court.
The bad guy in question violated a restraining order to kidnap his daughters from his ex-wife’s front lawn. After being informed that the perp had announced he was taking the girls to an amusement park in Denver, the local constabulary neglected to call the Denver police or go to the amusement park. Their effort was limited to trying to contact the perp on his phone, and “keeping an eye out” for his truck.
Ultimately, he was killed in a shoot-out with police. After they had tracked him to his mountain hideaway? Not exactly. He was shot in front of the police station. One suspects that he was double-parked, and had blocked in the cruiser detailed with making the morning donut run.
Oh, the three little girls? They were found dead in his truck. Heaven forbid, though, that the municipality should be held to standards of ordinary care.
From the New York Times op-ed pages, of all places, confirmation of a number of libertarian ideas, including the axiom that an armed society is a polite society.
These revisionists’ history, unlike the one now fashionable in academia, is not a grim saga of settlers exploiting one another, annihilating natives and despoiling nature. Nor is it like the previously fashionable history depicting the settlers as heroic individualists who tamed the frontier by developing the great American virtue of self-reliance.
The Westerners in this history survived by learning to get along, as Terry Anderson and Peter Hill document in their new book, “The Not So Wild, Wild West.” These economists, both at the PERC think tank in Montana, argue that their Western ancestors were usually neither heroic enough to make it on their own nor strong enough to take it away from others.
Always gratifying to see the NYT take a slap at the PC bilge being ladled out in institutions of higher learning, of course, but what is perhaps more interesting is the nod given to the voluntary ordering of civil society on the frontier.
Roger McGrath, a historian who studied dozens of Western mining camps and towns, found a high rate of homicide in them mainly because it was socially acceptable for young, drunk single men to resolve points of honor by fighting to the death. But other violence wasn’t tolerated, he said.
“It was a rather polite and civil society enforced by armed men,” Dr. McGrath said. “The rate of burglary and robbery was lower than in American cities today. Claim-jumping was rare. Rape was extraordinarily rare – you can argue it wasn’t being reported, but I’ve never seen evidence hinting at that.”
One suspects that the presence of substantial numbers of prominently displayed large caliber handguns would have a certain pacifying effect. I submit that this would appear paradoxical only to animists or people infected with an irrational fear of inanimate objects.
“It seems to be the general opinion, fortified by a strong current of judicial opinion, that since the American revolution no state government can be presumed to possess the transcendental sovereignty to take away vested rights of property; to take the property of A. and transfer it to B. by a mere legislative act. A government can scarcely be deemed to be free, where the rights of property are left solely dependent upon a legislative body, without any restraint. The fundamental maxims of a free government seem to require, that the rights of personal liberty, and private property should be held sacred. At least, no court of justice, in this country, would be warranted in assuming, that any state legislature possessed a power to violate and disregard them; or that such a power, so repugnant to the common principles of justice and civil liberty, lurked under any general grant of legislative authority, or ought to be implied from any general expression of the will of the people, in the usual forms of the constitutional delegation of power. The people ought not to be presumed to part with rights, so vital to their security and well-being, without very strong, and positive declarations to that effect.”
-Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story. (With thanks to Professor Reynolds.)
Failed Presidential candidate and negligible Senator John Kerry claims to have released all of his military records to the public. It is unlikely that this claim is entirely truthful.
Lets be clear: he did not release anything to the public. He released some records to his homies and long-time supporters at the Boston Globe, who have written an article glossing over the gaps in what they got from him, but have not made the records available to the public in any way, shape or form.
It seems pretty clear that the Globe did not get the full records, for reasons summed up in this rather pithy post. There is good reason, in short, to believe that the full record described prior to the election, was not released even to the Globe.
It is always dicey to reach a conclusion in the absence of full information, but when the people involved refused to release that information, well, they invite speculation. I think the reason it took Kerry so long to “release” his “records”, as he promised on national television some months ago, and the reason they were not released to the public as promised, is because he was playing games with (a) who he requested records from and (b) what records he actually released.
But let’s not allow our annoyance at the perfectly ordinary dissembling from this perfectly unexceptional man to cloud our glee at the release of both that picture and the fact that George W. Bush, reviled across the Democratic Party as a moron, got better grades than Kerry did.
I rarely fly these days, but will be buzzing off to New Mexico in a few days for our annual fishing expedition to Vermejo Park Ranch. (Note: Ted Turner may be a loony tranzi goofball, but he runs a fine ranch, and for that alone gets an indulgence in my book.)
Last time I flew, I had a perfectly good and utterly useless-for-highjacking cigar lighter confiscated, which still rankles. Given my impending trip, Christopher Hitchens’ rant about the idiocy of our airport security was both timely, and dead on target.
We learn that there is no real capacity to detect explosives, for example. And we learn that, “If, say, a handgun were discovered, the terrorist would have ample ability to retain control of it. TSA screeners are neither expecting to encounter a real weapon nor are they trained to gain control of it.” Who hasn’t worked that out?
What we are looking at, then, is a hugely costly and oppressive system that is designed to maintain the illusion of safety and the delusion that the state is protecting its citizens. The main beneficiaries seem to be the pilferers employed by this vast bureaucracy—we have had several recent reports about the steep increase in items stolen from luggage. And that is petty theft that takes place off-stage. What amazes me is the willingness of Americans to submit to confiscation at the point of search.
Hence, my “disappeared” lighter. Imagine my irritation at learning that said lighter was only added to the confiscation list last month, so that when it was lifted over a year ago, there was no basis for confiscation at all.
A prediction: when we get hit again, and we will, there will be one almighty and well-deserved backlash against the Republicans who were in charge of this farce, and wasted everyone’s time on the irritations and idiocies of “homeland security” rather than doing something real to meet the most basic obligation of the nation-state – the safety and security of its citizens.
The tabloid Dallas Observer bangs another one out of the park with its ongoing coverage of the corruption and incompetence of the Dallas police force. What’s fascinating in this rendition of the age-old story of extortion and protection rackets is the way this one operates out in the open, in the light of day.
Dallas has quite a crime problem in some of its neighborhoods – enormous amounts of violent crime orbiting the black market drug trade. Because people in the drug trade don’t give a crap about laws making it illegal, such laws are understandably less than efficacious in getting rid of the black market and its ills. Thus, with impeccable legislative logic, since criminals aren’t deterred by the law, our betters decided that laws imposing penalties on law-abiding people, such as the owners of property where the criminals live or hang-out, might have some effect. The so-called “nuisance law” was born, and one of the more astonishing tales of unintended consequences of the law began. → Continue reading: Public nuisance
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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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