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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This observation by Big Trunk at Powerline certainly took the shine off of my morning:
When the electorate rejected George McGovern in 1972 and Walter Mondale in 1984, it did so on each occasion by a margin of roughly 20 percent. The McGovern/Mondale/Kerry view of the United States has made enormous inroads in the past twenty years. It is less than three percent short of a majority and the trendline seems to be moving in its favor. Shouldn’t we be asking what we need to do to roll it back before it crosses over to majority status?
Well, that was painful. Although it must have been a whole lot more painful for those who wanted Kerry to win. First, the good news:
The least bad alternative won.
The Islamists were denied the moral and propaganda victory of a Kerry win (what did you think bin Laden’s last video was all about anyway?)
The victory appears to have been beyond the “margin of lawyer” (in Mark Steyn’s priceless phrase), although several states were close, and nothing exceeds the ability of a lawyer being paid by the hour to cook up a marginal claim.
The establishment media were made to look like fools, mostly because they acted like fools.
The odious and unspeakable Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle lost.
The Democrats, running (again) on a nanny state/class warfare platform, were driven a little further into the wilderness. Perhaps they will reach the point soon where a major restructuring can occur and I can start voting for mainstream Democrats.
The bad news:
Ohio is still contested, as Kerry hopes for salvation from that mother lode of fraudulent voting, the provisional ballot.
I was wrong about Wisconsin – I was sure Bush could flip it.
And my prediction? Pretty much on target. Bush won by a small margin, Kerry topped in the high ’40s, Bush lost one state that he carried in 2000 (New Hampshire), and I believe he picked up a few (New Mexico, for one).
Oddly enough, for someone who was up until all hours four years ago, I was out like a light at 9:30 last night, before anything had been decided. I have a tiny niggling qualm about the ability of the Dems to manufacture enough votes to flip Ohio, but the margin there is into the six figures, so this should be a wrap.
I was paging through the new issue of American Rifleman, the monthly magazine of the National Rifle Association, when I came across an interview with General Tommy Franks, who led the brilliant assault on Baghdad last year. (Sorry, no link available).
In the interview, the retired General is asked a couple of questions about his preferences in guns, and I found his answers surprising.
First, he said he prefers the current Beretta 9mm handgun to the .45 he carried in Vietnam. He couldn’t really point to anything concrete, just a generalized (so to speak) preference. He did note that it had to be shooting the right loads to be an adequate combat weapon, but that was the only concession he made.
Second, he said he considered the M-16 to be a superior battlefield weapon to the AK-47 in every way. Period. Based on his comments about the M-16 earlier (he was in basic training when they were first issued), I think there is an unspoken assumption here that that it is a better weapon in the hands of well-trained troops who know how to maintain it.
The idea that you can increase taxes and stimulate the economy is pretty damn stupid.
– Edward Prescott , Arizona State University professor, shared the 2004 Nobel Prize for economics.
Thanks to Instapundit.
…about my manhood have just been reinforced. And how:
Perez, 21, lost his leg to a roadside bomb in Iraq more than a year ago, but despite the phantom pains that haunt him, he says he is determined to prove to the Army that he is no less of a man – and no less of a soldier.
“I’m not ready to get out yet,” he says. “I’m not going to let this little injury stop me from what I want to do.”
Perez is one of at least four amputees from the 82nd Airborne Division to re-enlist. With a new carbon-fiber prosthetic leg, Perez intends to show a medical board he can run an eight-minute mile, jump out of airplanes and pass all the other paratrooper tests that will allow him to go with his regiment to Afghanistan next year
When he arrived at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., for his rehabilitation, Perez asked a pair of generals who visited his bedside if it was possible for him to stay in the Army.
“They told me, ‘It’s all up to you, how much you want it’,” he says. “If I could do everything like a regular soldier, I could stay in.”
He wasted little time getting started. At one point, a visitor found him doing push-ups in bed. He trained himself to walk normally with his new leg, and then run with it.
Perez has to rise at least an hour earlier than his fellow soldiers to allow swelling from the previous day’s training to subside enough for his stump to fit into the prosthetic.
I am glad he is on my side.
After a hard day of wearing a new butt-crease in my chair in our conference room refereeing various committees drafting policies and procedures, allow me to unburden myself of a few pet peeves regarding the use and abuse of the English language:
“Utilization” and “utilize” are a blot on the English language. They are polysyllabic abominations spawned by the regulatory/consulting complex, suffering, as well it should, from an inferiority complex that renders it too insecure to use the perfectly good word “use.”
“Literally” is never used to mean literally. Rather, it is universally used to mean “figuratively,” its exact opposite (e.g. “He literally tore my head off for utilizing bad data in my report”).
Serial commas, by contrast, are God’s gift to careful draftsman, and are scorned only by those too illiterate to comprehend that they do, in fact, serve a purpose.
When, and why, did people stop using two spaces after periods? For that matter, when, and why, do people use apostrophes before every single frickin’ terminal “s” regardless of whether it is possessive? Or should that be irregardless of whether it is possessive?
No peeve too petty, that’s our motto. Readers are, of course invited to submit their own peeves in comments.
It is not at all uncommon for libertarians to boast about not voting in political elections. The rationale behind not voting varies, from “it is pointless, my single vote cannot affect the outcome,” through “I don’t like any of the candidates on offer, so why should I vote for any of them,” to “voting only ratifies the cult of the state.” (I abbreviate for brevity’s sake, but not unfairly, I hope).
I disagree with those who do not vote, not because any of these arguments are wrong (indeed, they are each correct in their own relatively narrow sphere), but because elections and some degree of ‘democratic’ accountability are an essential part of any society that hopes to retain a sphere of personal liberty beyond the reach of the state. I say this based on a broad reading of current events – those nations that are the worst offenders against liberty lack democratic accountability, and those nations that maintain a sphere of liberty, however beleaguered, have some degree of democratic accountability.
Voting and democracy are, in a nutshell, a necessary but not sufficient condition of liberty. Those opposed to voting focus on the ‘not sufficient’ part of this formulation, and say that therefore it is worthless, or at least not worth doing. I freely admit that democracy is not sufficient to maintain liberty, and that a number of other conditions also have to obtain; to conclude, however, that what is not sufficient is also not necessary is to fall into a logical fallacy.
I think the broad correlation of functioning democratic institutions and personal liberty is solid, and the inverse correlation of lack of democracy and tyranny is absolutely undeniable. From this I draw the conclusion that, regardless of the value of your individual vote, the institution of voting is important. This institution is dependent on people actually voting, and so refusing to vote on principle amounts to undermining one of the pillars of personal liberty.
There is nothing to be gained from not voting, as there is no chance whatsoever that voter apathy or nonparticipation will ever spur any reform or change. However, there is something to be lost. Not voting concedes the field to a narrow class of political activists who uniformly want to turn the power of the state to their own ends rather than limit it (as illustrated by primary elections in the US, which have low turnout and all too often result in the nomination of party hacks). Not voting may also, over time, undermine the principle of democratic accountability altogether; is it just coincidence that, as voter participation has declined, state power has expanded at the behest of unelected judges and bureaucrats?
To my libertarian brethren and sistren I say, then, vote. Hold your nose if necessary, “throw your vote away” on the execrable Libertarians if you wish, but vote. Like so much in life, it may not be a panacea, but it sure beats the alternative.
It seems as though I have not really paid much attention to domestic issues in quite some time. Perhaps its because the domestic front has been locked into near-total stasis, with little movement, much less progress, of any kind.
The political scene has resolved itself into the party of 80% hostility to a libertarian agenda (the Republicans), the party of 95% hostility to a libertarian agenda (the Democrats), an irrelevant fringe, and a legacy media complex to whom anything other than the cult of the the state is simply incomprehensible. Frankly, I do not see any significant changes in the relationship between the state and the citizenry in the offing, just a long expansion of the state sphere until something catastrophic/revolutionary occurs. What that might be and when it might happen, I have no idea.
On the domestic political front, I am left rooting for the slightly less bad option, which is not exactly energizing.
All the action and energy seems to be around foreign affairs, and specifically how we stop the Islamic world from oozing its toxic Wahhabist/fascist effluent into our societies. I find the current debate in the US on this issue to be less than enlightening. The Bush campaign has done a terrible job of explaining why they are doing what they are doing, and the Kerry camp is too busy straddling and flopping to make any contribution at all. Suffice it to say that I remain convinced we will not see the end of this without nuclear weapons being used.
A couple of months ago, I went on the record with my prediction of the US Presidential election would come out. Because so far it looks to be spot on, I am pleased to post a status report.
As I predicted, Kerry has lost ground since early August, and shows every indication of having, indeed, tested the top of his market for votes somewhere in July, somewhere in the high 40s. Current polling shows him with support somewhere in the mid to low 40s.
Bush has made up ground since August, having tested the bottom of his support in mid-August, and is now polling in the high 40s. My market timing was off a trifle on Bush – I thought he had hit bottom in late July/early August, but there was a bit of a lag before he started moving up to his current, fairly stable 5 – 6 point lead.
The Kerry campaign tried to ramp up a new negative attack on Bush (coodinated with CBS) based on allegations that he got special privileges as a National Guard pilot during the Vietnam war. Lost in the kerfuffle over the forgeries that were supposed to drive this story is the fact that this is well-plowed ground – this is at least the third time the Dems have tried to hang Bush with this one. Similarly, Kitty Kelly’s book supposedly detailing Bush’s wastrel past is merely an attempt to sex up a story that has already been put to the voters, and has indeed been coopted by Bush as a tale of sin and redemption. As I guessed, it appears that the Dems have nothing new to try to stick on Bush.
With five weeks until election day, I see nothing on the horizon that can fundamentally change the dynamic of this race (all caveats from my original post apply, of course). I will confess that my prediction of a narrow Bush victory appears to be a little pessimistic at this point.
An awesome glimpse at the potential for distributed intelligence is occurring right now in the blogosphere. A series of ‘newly discovered’ memos purporting to show that George W Bush failed to fulfill his national guard duties has, in the matter of a few hours, been subjected to the distributed intelligence of the blogosphere, and have been pretty conclusively shown to be forgeries, as far as I can tell.
The speed and apparent quality of the analysis of these memos is stunning, as the blogs allow the assembly of the observations, recollections, and thinking of dozens of people in real time. The mainstream media must feel the Polish horse cavalry trying to stop the blitzkrieg in WWII.
Warning: Powerline is getting buried with hits from a Drudge link right now, but keep trying.
Update: Just to reinforce the point, commenter Dave Sheridan points out that its not just distributed intelligence, it is actually a glimpse of the face of the true god of liberty, spontaneous order.
The old saying is that “dog bites man” is not news, but “man bites dog” is.
Well, how does “dog shoots man” fit in?
Austin Bay is right up there with Wretchard when it comes to good analysis, hard common sense, and good info on the current war. He’s back from the front in Iraq with a column on how the current war really is a fight for freedom.
If there is one mistake I think we’ve made in fighting this war, it’s been the way we’ve soft-pedaled the ideological dimensions. This really is a fight for the future, between our free, open political system and the unholy alliance of despots and Islamo-fascists whose very existence depends on denying liberty.
Our enemies are the enemies of freedom within their spheres of influence. In the modern world of jumbo jets and international networks of all kinds, they have already succeeded in reducing our freedom, and seek to do so even more. Because they have chosen to attack us with violence, we are in a war of self-defense with the enemies of freedom. Fighting this war is, in my view, entirely consistent with a libertarian world-view.
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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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