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 response to Fraser Nelson’s article about a recent book and TV series by Niall Ferguson, I came across this classic comment, from “Daniel Maris”. It blends self-loathing, bigotry, “fixed wealth” fallacies, Greenery, and other pathologies in a magnificent, take-it-with-ice, blend:
“Your praise is overblown. It was (the parts I saw) a good and interesting series, but it was hardly original stuff. Calling success factors “killer apps” doesn’t really take you much farther forward does it, however arresting the phrase?”
“However, unless I missed it, he didn’t really address the fact that the most successful economy on the planet at the moment is one that rests on a communist political dictatorship, firm rejection
of Christianity, oppression of its people, no free market in labour, no idea of private property as we would understand it, centralised planning and absence of academic freedom.”
But China has embraced elements of the free market, hence its current prosperity. Duh.
“Incidentally what does the mass immigration thing mean? Solvent can be taken to mean something that dissolves OR paradoxically it is commonly used to mean a glue.”
I think Fergon’s meaning is pretty damn obvious.
“IIRC Ferguson was claiming that it was a low figure? Is that right? Well that is absurd, because behind those 100 plus people lie 1000s of close associates and beyond them hundreds of thousands of general supporters – the sea in which they swim.”
“Mass immigration is nearly always favoured by capitalists who benefit from cheaper labour and are insulated from the negative effects (their children don’t go to the schools where 50 languages are spoken).”
Oh yes, all those evil foreigners causing trouble again.
“I suppose Scots feel they have to justify our imperial past given you find them in the forefront of the imperial project: colonisation, slaughter of natives, the slave trade and slave management (including of the women of course). It’s a dirty disgusting past and we should be ashamed of it. We should always ask how we would feel if the tables were turned (and some of us to now know how it feels).”
It is all the fault of those evil Jocks! (In fact, quite the opposite).
“Thankfully, I think the age of trade is probably coming to a close. We see the signs everywhere. Now with renewable energy, a country can have its own energy industry wherever on the global, no need to import energy. With advanced hydroponic and polytunnel agriculture we in the temperate zones can grow crops associated with the tropics. With improved recycling and use of novel materials, the need for imports is decreasing as well.”
Oh god, never mind the division of labour (Adam Smith was another Evil Scot!), we can make it all ourselves with recycled vegetables.
Have a good week.
This is a funky-looking camara from Sony – one of its “Alpha” models. When I first saw this picture over at Engadget, I thought it was an underwater camera – I am planning on doing more scuba diving later this year. Then I realised it was just a transluscent design.
I like this selection of odd-looking cameras. Some of them look as if they were whisked up by Q Branch. “Now James, this is something I am particularly proud of……”
We have a fair number of aviation and photography enthusiasts at this blog and readership, so here is a nice little “two for the price of one”, courtesy of that haven of wackiness, Boing Boing.
One of my favourite blogospherical institutions is David Thompson’s Friday Ephemera. No matter what else may be happening in the world, there, every Friday, they are. The world’s financial system may be going to hell. My life may be a perpetual disappointment, doomed in not very may years to end, probably in pain. But meanwhile, never fear, every Friday, a couple of clicks will get me to things like … a horse in a car … spiral staircases … whisky barrel flooring … the credit crunch in the form of aerial photos of Florida … a sex toys chess set … cool bookshops … a cat with bionic legs … a high rise tennis court … secure parking … an oddly shaped football pitch (that was on a Sunday but look at it anyway) … a fish with hands … bookshelf porn … Japanese travel posters … or a scary trick like this (not for those with heart problems).
Ninety five bloggers out of a hundred with a taste for such trivia would give each of these oddities a posting to itself, and add a paragraph or two of superfluous waffle (although that’s what I usually do, so maybe I am projecting there). But David Thompson is merely sprinkling a little weekly seasoning upon what is basically a very serious blog. His more typical meat and two veg posting is something like a fisking of some piece of leftist nonsense, or maybe several such pieces.
Last Friday, I had the honour of providing not one but two of David’s chosen ephemera. One was a cat seeing off some alligators, and the other was a video taken with a mobile phone from the inside of an airplane of its propeller, in motion.
I promised David Thompson that I would ask Samizdata’s notably educated commentariat to explain the strange effect with that propeller, and this is me doing that.
Can anyone say what is going on at the other end of that last link, in a way that makes it seem less than totally bizarre?
Bangkok, Thailand. October 2010
I’m not quite sure what the moral of this report might be, but here is how it starts:
More than 230,000 Japanese people listed as 100 years old cannot be located and many may have died decades ago, according to a government survey released today.
The justice ministry said the survey found that more than 77,000 people listed as still alive in local government records would have to be aged at least 120, and 884 would be 150 or older.
The figures have exposed antiquated methods of record-keeping and fuelled fears that some families are deliberately hiding the deaths of elderly relatives in order to claim their pensions.
It’s an interesting way of looking at countries to ask: What statistics do they get wrong, and in which direction? (Also, which countries admit they got things wrong? Good for the government of Japan for noting their own error.)
For instance, it is now a cliché of Russia-watching that life expectancy there has nosedived, especially among men. Rather than move on straight away to speculating about why that might be (alcohol being the usual suspect) I find myself wondering if at least part of that story might be that the incentives to report deaths, conceal deaths, invent deaths, and so on, have changed, while the death rates themselves have changed rather less. Is there now perhaps some government scheme in Russia to “support” those who have lost a breadwinner, with a cash lump sum, which causes many families to become, as it were, impatient? Did communism cause people to claim the dead to be still alive, like in Japan, and has that incentive now been switched off?
I definitely recall reading about how, in India, before they allowed something more nearly resembling a free market, the tendency was for everyone to claim to be poorer than they really were, to avoid tax, which skewed poverty calculations dreadfully, and made the rest of us feel even sorrier for Indians than we should have.
Publicly acknowledged suicide rates are definitely going to vary according to how much pressure doctors face to call suicide something that is less of a reproach to those who were caring for the deceased. A higher “suicide rate” could accordingly mean that, in that particular country, suicide is considered less of a scandal.
We in Britain keep being told by our rulers that property crime has gone down, and we tell each other that we don’t think it worth reporting crimes any more. Hospital waiting lists, and all the perverse incentives associated with them, are another current British bone of contention.
My preferred moral is that one of the good things about free societies is that they are somewhat less likely to perpetrate permanently bogus data sets, because falsehood is, eventually if not immediately, bad for business. Government, unchecked by power centres beyond government, is liable to emit such falsehoods for far longer.
But it could just be that governments, by their nature, just love to gather statistics and to publish them, as proof that, one way or another, government is necessary. And more published statistics inevitably means more mistakes.
 Bucharest, Romania. August 2010.
Here, via the Flickr blog, is this charming photo (click on that to see it as big as you want), which combines an ancient agricultural procedure with some much more modern civil engineering, somewhere near Treviso, in north east Italy:
Ideal circumstances, all here will surely agree, for a James Bond car chase. Goldeneye, which was shown on ITV2 last night and is on ITV2 again tonight, has a car chase early on, on just such a road. No sheep are involved, but there are cyclists. Bond didn’t drive into them, like this, but he did drive past them and they all fell over.
Sadly, I think that the above road is probably too narrow for cars, and is actually a bespoke sheep track. I guess that sheep, in Italy, are objects of political worship, much as cyclists are here.
I came across this article, which reads like a plotline from a Robert Ludlum thriller. Gloriously bonkers.
(H/T, David Thompson).
 Constanta, Romania. August 2010
The Controller’s Monthly Note from Radio 3 informed me of a new role that may fail a test of utility. They have appointed the artistic director of Music and the Deaf to sign a prom.
This Prom will be the first ever ‘signed Prom’. Dr Paul Whittaker, artistic director of Music and the Deaf will guide the audience in the hall through the music of Stephen Sondheim in the company of the BBC Concert Orchestra conducted by David Charles Abell (above).
Music and the Deaf is a worthwhile charity that aids deaf pupils who wish to learn how to read music and play instruments. Supporting this minority endeavour through private philanthropy and voluntary contribution is admirable for those who are interested in this cause.
One must ask if private encouragement requires public support: and if it does, whether a ‘signed prom’ meets that requirement. Music is enjoyed by people who can hear, not by the deaf. This is a fact. Allowing the Orchestra of the Deaf to play gives public evidence that the deaf do not need tobe prevented from studying music.
A ‘signed prom’ is a sop to the irrational and a waste of public money.
Indeed. Bulletproof custard. Thank you Instapundit. The spirit of Q lives on.
This reminds me of a Winston Churchill story that Stephen Fry likes to tell. During Churchill’s last stint as Prime Minister, in the fifties, he was regretfully informed that one of his backbench MPs had been arrested the previous night for exposing himself on Hampstead Heath. After a pause, Churchill asked about the weather. Was it not very cold last night? Indeed sir, one of the coldest nights on record. Said Churchill after another thoughtful pause: “It makes you proud to be British.”
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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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