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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We occasionally get some pretty nutty comments on the threads but I often think that this blog’s comments are models of coolness and restraint compared with what else is out there. In response to a fairly decent article by Niall Ferguson, the historian, at the Daily Telegraph today, is this zinger from some character by the name of King O’Malley. Enjoy:
What a load of Tosh. Adam Smith is a discredited lackey of the Lord Shelburne camp who promoted the idea of a market based ‘hidden hand’ when in fact the ‘hidden hand’ was, as everyone at the time knew, the supranational elite banking/gold cartels that dictated policy to already indebted British governments. Smith lacked the moral courage and intellectual ability to address the control of money and its value, fractional reserve banking and fiat paper in his laughable diatribe ‘Wealth of Nations’.
As far as I know from reading Adam Smith, the great Glasgow professor was in favour of some form of gold-backed currency, although the exact details escape me. But no matter; what this splendidly nutty comment shows is that its author has heard words such as “gold”, “fiat money”, and “fractional reserve banking”, and is convinced that there was some dark conspiracy by the great economist and the UK establishment to obscure or suppress knowledge of these things, or that Mr Smith “lacked the moral and intellectual courage” to talk about them in his “diatribe” (WoN being in fact a calmly-argued piece, the very opposite of a rant).
The depressing thing is that is that is a bit of a debate – admittedly on the sidelines of the economics debate – about things such as the proper structure of banks, monetary systems, and the like. The danger is that if a person who has not heard of criticisms of fractional reserve banking, etc, encounters comments like the one before without first understanding a bit about the subject, they’ll be put off for life. “These guys are crazy”, he’ll say, and move on back to the same old complacent, wrong-headed consensus view. All the more reason, then, for such gloriously normal characters like Kevin Dowd to set the pace in arguing for free banking.
By the way, I make no apology for keeping banging on about this free banking issue. It is a subject where a steady stream of blogging commentary can make a difference, I hope.
This (which I just had trouble getting back to – it was linked to from here today, top left) is very strange:
The religion-as-an-adaptation theory doesn’t wash with everybody, however. As anthropologist Scott Atran of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor points out, the benefits of holding such unfounded beliefs are questionable, in terms of evolutionary fitness. “I don’t think the idea makes much sense, given the kinds of things you find in religion,” he says. A belief in life after death, for example, is hardly compatible with surviving in the here-and-now and propagating your genes. Moreover, if there are adaptive advantages of religion, they do not explain its origin, but simply how it spread.
Very strange because it seems to me that with about five seconds thought one can easily arrive at an evolutionary advantage associated with a belief in eternal life, and accordingly an evolutionary explanation of it.
Tribes of ancient humans often battled each other to death – literally to death, the losers being completely wiped out – and in these battles, a willingness to die might be the difference between victory and defeat, between your gene pool spreading, and your gene pool being wiped out.
Tons of stuff has been written about the prisoner’s dilemma associated with infantry battles. If you all stand together and fight, your side has its best chance of winning. Anyone breaking and running exposes all others to annihilation. Etcetera. Military cultures ancient and modern were and are suffused with ideas of honour and courage and self-sacrifice, all of which resulted and result in everyone in your army standing firm and holding the line.
In such a world, a belief in some kind of Valhalla of dead heroes is pretty much a certainty. Even now, effective military units do everything they can to ensure that their heroic dead-in-battle are treated with tremendous solemnity and never forgotten, giving them eternal life of a limited kind, and pour encourager les autres. Such notions have even greater force if eternal life is literally what everyone in the front line of battle believes in. I am amazed, absolutely amazed, that any academic could be unaware of such notions, or if aware, then unpersuaded.
It’s as if this guy Scott Atran has never seen a war memorial, and never even read The Selfish Gene, which is all about how our selfish genes cause us, in certain circumstances, to become raging altruists, sacrificing ourselves for the greater good of society.
You do not have to have to have any particular view of the truth of religion in order to see the force of this explanation. As an atheist, I am obviously on the look out for evolutionary explanations of the phenomenon of religious belief, given that I don’t think such beliefs are correct – so why do people persist in believing them or in their absence, invent them? But religious people often use such genetically-enhanced-altruism notions to argue for religion, on consequentialist grounds. In a similar spirit they also argue, perhaps rightly, that religious people are more inclined to have children, and hence to outbreed us atheists, childbirth being, for a woman, not unlike taking part in a battle, especially in earlier centuries. Religion makes your society stronger, because it make you more willing to sacrifice yourself for the collective!
Notice that if you didn’t care at all about the collective in the first place, the argument in the previous sentence would have no force for you.
It’s somewhat off topic, but this is one of the many reasons why I am, although an admirer of her in many ways, not a devotee of Ayn Rand. Her stated plan of saving the world by abolishing altruism flies in the face of the known facts of human nature. The trick is to do altruism well, not to try to abolish it. Which is easier said than done, as our current economic troubles illustrate well, and which is actually, I would argue, what most of Ayn Rand’s stories and heroic characters were really all about, despite what she and they insisted on telling us.
Following on directly from some of the things Johnathan says immediately below this, here is visual proof that surveillance cameras are not quite the innocent gadgets that some tell us:
The bloke who sent this in to Idiot Toys found it “somewhere on Amazon”, so we may never know where this scary camera is, who it is snooping on, and what its future plans might be.
Caption anyone?
Yesterday Chris Grayling unveiled a new Tory slogan, which must be the worst offered by a British political party for a while, despite the impressive competition provided by “Forwards, not backwards,” “British jobs for British workers,” and “The real alternative.” It is:
Fewer rights, more wrongs.
OK, so I am a bit of a weirdo, and I do not always take the same view of what is right and what is wrong that most people do, but when I say something is wrong I do not want more of it. I am fairly sure the general public is against wrongs, and expects politicians – however implausibly – to advocate reducing them.
Baconnaise Lite (for the health conscious).
Thanks to Glenn.
A large number of people, certainly the majority of the political looter class, think the best way to deal with the rapidly deepening economic crisis is via ‘stimulus packages’ with money plucked off the magic money tree… which is to say, by trying to re-inflate the credit bubble that actually caused the crisis. This is a bit like treating alcoholics by urging them to buy more whiskey.
So is this actually any more daft? Frankly I do not think so and it is at least a whole hell of a lot more funny.
When visiting China in October of last year, I found myself in a supermarket. I like visiting supermarkets in foreign countries, as despite globalisation, imports, and exports, there are still many products that are produced and only available locally, and a supermarket tells you far more about the culture and consumption habits of normal people than anything you would learn by (say) going to a restaurant.
For instance, China is now one of the world’s top ten (in terms of volume, at least) wine producers. Chinese wine is not generally seen anywhere outside China, but is very readily available in China. The producers have even mastered putting some mixture of faux-Frenchness and Chinese clicheness on the labels.
I suppose, at least, we were spared a panda. I suspect that they may not realise that “vin de table” on a French wine label means approximately “This is bad wine” (ie it failed the quality control tests that exist under French wine laws and which would have allowed the winemakers to put anything else on the label), but in the case of most Chinese wine it is for the moment fairly appropriate.
However, I digress. While Chinese wine can be made fun of a little, there are other products at which the Chinese are indeed the experts. It was not long ago that China was principally known in the west for its tea, and although China now produces and sells many other things, the country still produces and consumes truly vast quantities of the stuff. When I was in the supermarket in Shenzhen, I found seemingly most of an aisle devoted to the stuff.
This happened to be convenient, as my sister happens to enjoy interesting and exotic teas. My thoughts were immediately that I would buy a couple of packets of some of the more interesting teas in the shop, and ultimately send them to her as a Christmas gift. I purchased them, and took them back to England with me.
I rather failed to get my act together in December, and as a consequence, on December 31 I posted a package containing tea to my sister from Clapham Junction post office in London to the Blue Mountains near Sydney in Australia, along with various other parcels that I posted at the same time. I made a deliberately vague statement on the customs declaration sticker. Australia has amazingly (and at times idiotically) strict quarantine regulations, and it is possible that the unauthorised importation of tea is prohibited.
Thus when my sister told me last week that she had not received anything from me, I was not completely surprised. I had visions of Australian customs office going through enormous stacks of mail with large Alsations looking for illicit tea, and the package sent to my sister being confiscated by some stern official with a moustache.
However, as it turned out, I was imagining things. The truth, to the extent that I have discovered it, was far stranger than that. This morning, my sister received a package with my handwriting on the envelope and my return address on the back. One side of the envelope had been ripped open, and had been sealed again with plastic tape. Attached to the envelope was a sticker from Canada Post, stating (in both English and French)
Package found damaged, torn, or opened and officially repaired.
Adressee:
If liability coverage applies, please contact Canada Post on 1-800-267-1177 or www.canadapost.ca
Please note the packaging and contents may be required.
When my sister opened the envelope, it contained a data CD entitled ‘Canon Step Up Photography – Accessories to enhance your creativity’ for Windows and Macintosh, but no tea.
Okay, I can just about imagine that some mail was damaged and the postmen had difficulty figuring out what had fallen out of which envelope. But what in the name of Micklethwait was the package doing in Canada in the first place?
In all, I think this has to go down as my oddest experience since the time a French policeman called me in my flat in London from a village in the Pyrenees to ask if I was lonely. If people ask nicely, I will tell that story next week.
Also, I am intrigued as to what happened to the tea. Perhaps the mysterious world odyssey of this product that was never intended to leave China is continuing, and it has somehow, Teela Brown style, found its way to South America, or is somehow plotting its way to the far side of the galaxy in search of Arthur Dent.
I could not resist…
EIGHTEEN illegal immigrants attempted to smuggle themselves into the UK hidden in a lorry-load of lettuce heading for Merseyside.
UK Border Agency officers stopped the Spanish-registered lorry in the French port of Calais at 5.50am last Sunday.
A search revealed the eighteen men – fifteen Iraqis, two Afghanis and one Iranian – hidden in the load of lettuces.
I just love gadgets, and this has to be one of the funniest. Ideal for bloggers at breakfast.
I came across this eye-popping collection of strange building pictures here. Some of them are quite familar to me, such as the Lloyds of London building, but others I have not seen before.
Thanks to Stephen Hicks for the link. His site is definitely worth a visit.
This fellow, meanwhile, also has regular nifty pictures on architecture, with a strong enthusiasm for the works of Frank Lloyd Wright.
The weather has been cold this year, yet we did not take proper precautions for the likely consequences. These events should not have taken us by surprise. After all, it is in the data.
On the brighter side, the clear increase in the number of pirates indicates that global warming is receding as a problem. This is good to see.
The picture has been very respectfully stolen from the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I hope they do not mind.
Oh dear! It is not that the services the PCS is proud of having delivered will not generally find much favour with denizens of Samizdata, that prompts me to clip this. It is that this is a disastrous committee-driven ad. They end up showing their members as miserable, whinging, ugly and colourless petty bureaucrats, who want taxpayers to be grateful to pay them more.
Even a minimal government would need officials. And even a big bureaucracy will contain some witty, energetic and attractive people. Sir Humphrey was much closer to being the hero of Yes, Minister than Jim Hacker.
Were I a PCS member then I would want to be represented as someone normal and likeable who cheerfully keeps the wheels of the country turning regardless of all the political shit thrown at me. And I would be looking for the head of whoever signed-off this ad. (Preferably to be displayed on a pole outside the Department of Work and Pensions, though perhaps my view of the possibilities of staff organisations are too influenced by Terry Gilliam’s The Crimson Permanent Assurance.)
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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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