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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I like this:
For, the truth is that a dogmatic respect for certain fundamental rights is what enables us to be easygoing about most other things.
“Us” being us libertarians. This is in connection with some row at Harvard about reserving the gym for women, for a bit, or something. Being, like Ravikiran Rao, a libertarian, I can be easygoing about the details, although a link from Rao would have been good.
To me, it seems like a good idea to make reasonable accommodations for people’s religious or other beliefs, where possible. Whether we should in any particular case depends on so many factors, so many costs, so many benefits and the conflicting interests of so many constituencies that it would be highly presumptuous of me to make blanket statements one way or the other. But what I can state is that letting property owners make the decision devolves the decision making to those who are closest to the decision and who have the most stake in the costs and benefits of that decision.
Or, you could turn this into a legal question involving esoteric principles. Well, good luck. When you are trying to make a law for this, you are moving the decision-making up to the top. Your quest for foolish consistency will inevitably lead to foolish decisions, because no law will provide for every nuance that would be involved in individual cases. There is still time. Come to Libertarianism my children!
Heh. Read the whole thing (which is not a lot longer) here. And while you’re there, wander around the rest of the blog, which is one of my favourites, aside from its regrettable habit of not supplying links, to such things as stories about Harvard gyms being reserved for women.
I particularly enjoyed an earlier posting that Ravikiran Rao wrote, some time last year I think, which I cannot now find (so no link to that from me – sorry), in which he blamed nuclear weapons for the miseries of the world. The argument went approximately like this. People are happy when progressing, and one of the easiest ways of making progress is to make the kind of progress involved in clearing up after a major war, by rebuilding buildings, baby booming, and so on and so forth. But, nuclear weapons have done away with major wars, progress has therefore become a lot more awkward, and people are consequently more miserable. I suspect that there may be quite a bit of truth to this surmise, but true or not, I enjoy the way that Rao’s argument arrives at a deeply respectable modern orthodoxy (nuclear weapons: bad!) via heresy (nuclear weapons have unleashed a serious modicum of world peace).
That last heresy is one that I agree with. I accept the orthodoxy about the niceness of world peace, and say: well done nuclear weapons. Seriously, I think that nuclear weapons have changed the world from a place in which major powers prepared for world war at all costs, to a place in which major powers avoid world wars at all cost.
There is an amusing article in The Observer magazine today called The world’s 50 most powerful blogs which deigns to list our crazed (but correct) rantings here, I am pleased to say.
Samizdata is one of Britain’s oldest blogs. Written by a bunch of anarcho-libertarians, tax rebels, Eurosceptics and Wildean individualists, it has a special niche in the political blogosphere: like a dive bar, on the rational side of the border between fringe opinion and foam-flecked paranoid ranting. Samizdata serves its opinions up strong and neat, but still recognisable as politics. On the other side of the border, in the wilderness, the real nutters start.
Least likely to post ‘I’d say it’s six of one, half a dozen of the other’
Such lists are of course highly subjective and whilst I am happy to see Samizdata numbered amongst new media’s Golden Horde, there is a howling error, indeed it is a glaring radioactive glow-in-the-dark omission… where the hell is INSTAPUNDIT?
If you do not regularly read Michael Totten’s Middle East Journal, you really are missing out on something you just do not see in the MSM. He delivers straightforward reportage not just of The Big Issues when they happen but of the mundane realities of what it is to be in the Slums of Fallujah with the USMC.
Lieutenant Lappe overheard our conversation. I think he was worried that I was getting nervous.
“No one can lay down an IED anymore without somebody calling it in,” he said.
Very revealing.
If you like his stuff as much as I do, consider dropping your mouse on his PayPal button and support truly independent journalism.
…All the wonderful tools of liberty. But… but… I see not a single example of that German-Swiss engineering marvel, the SIG-226, as featured on this blog’s masthead!
Seeing as we have been talking about Tom Cruise and Scientology earlier today, there is an interesting ruckus brewing on Gawker, who have posted a rather interesting (in a ‘huh?’ kind of way) video of Tom Cruise talking about Scientology. The Church of Scientology’s lawyers have demanded they take the video down and in response fearless Gawker VP Gaby Darbyshire politely invited them to go rotate, citing ‘fair use’ (Gaby is delightful and rather hot, by the way. I met her at Les Blogs in Paris a few years ago).
I take no conclusive view of the legal merits of the case (certainly if extracts of a proprietary video are used, it is a ‘fair use’ slam dunk… not so sure about using the whole thing), but I am much taken by Gawker’s sheer bravery going up against the deep pocketed Scientologists, who are prone on the slightest pretext to sue people who cast aspersions on, or even reveal the details of, their religion. Does that remind you of someone else?
The Scientologists deserve every brickbat they get for their strong arm tactics against detractors. However I do not really understand the intellectual animus directed at the Scientologists for their religious beliefs. Their key myths do not strike me as any more preposterous than those of other more mainstream religions. It seems to me that their only big mistake was going into too much detail, thus in their case it is harder to fog the issue with the ‘allegorical interpretations’ that help us avoid tears of mirth when reading the literal word of other holy texts, ones which were not written by L. Ron Hubbard but rather by his more time hallowed equivalents in antiquity.
…or should I say Ron Paul. The previous post makes the case against Ron Paul as a champion of the libertarian faction of the US Republican party.
However, I shall be speaking about the US primary system and what Congressman Paul’s campaign means at the Putney Debates tonight. I shall try to get a summary up over the weekend, either on Samizdata or here. The title of my talk is ‘Change at the Top: How the US Election Process Works and What are the Opportunities for Ron Paul?’ Details from here.
I shall also be continuing to cover the US primaries on my election blog.
I just heard that blogger and soldier Andrew Olmsted was killed in Iraq last Thursday. Very sad news indeed. I used to read him quite often back when he posted on his own blog, before DOD policy put a stop to that. I only knew him slightly (we exchanged a few e-mails) but he seemed like a great guy and he shared my long standing dislike of a certain left wing US blogger.
Heartfelt condolences to his family and friends.
Instapundit has linked to this story, but I am not yet wholly convinced. I am happy to add to the general blog-yell that may or may not now be going up everywhere in the non-pro-Islamic blogosphere, but suspect – although I could be entirely wrong in my suspicion – that this may turn out to be a bit of an exaggeration:
I am currently out of the Country and on my return home to England I am going to be arrested by British detectives on suspicion of Stirring up Racial Hatred by displaying written material” contrary to sections 18(1) and 27(3) of the Public Order Act 1986.
This charge if found guilty carries a lengthy prison sentence, more than what most paedophiles and rapists receive, …
At the risk of being pedantic, what precisely happened? Did Lionheart get a letter? If so, what, precisely, did it say? To be even more pedantic, the phrase “This charge if found guilty” It does not fill me with confidence. Nor does it that, on what is obviously such an important matter, Lionheart has allowed a pair of inverted commas to go awol. But maybe that is to read too much into what is merely some stressed-out grammar.
I suspect that, if any ruckus does now occur, there will in due course be an announcement to the effect that Mr Lionheart has entirely misunderstood the situation and has nothing to fear, free speech is sacred, blah blah. If that does happen, it may then be hard to know how much this official clarification will be a true clarification of what had, truly, been the attitude of the authorities, and how much it will be a tactical retreat in the face of an Instalaunch, and of any blogosphere and mainstream media fuss that follows from it. But whatever has been and turns out to be the true story here, I would now like to know a bit more.
Lionheart’s central claim, albeit floridly expressed, is one I have come around agreeing with, having started out (on 9/12) believing the opposite. The enemy is not “Islamic extremism”. The enemy is Islam. Although please note that this says nothing about the manner in which this enemy should be responded to. I daresay I might disagree somewhat with Lionheart’s ideas about that.
But even if I disagreed with Lionheart about everything, I still agree with Instapundit’s attitude:
I don’t know much about the blogger, but I don’t need to – people shouldn’t be arrested merely for blogging things that the powers-that-be don’t like.
If Lionheart’s claim that he faces arrest just for blogging his mind are correct, then of course it is everything-and-the-kitchen-sink time. Let battle be joined. But for now, I would like just a little more reconnaissance.
For I think there’s a fault line that runs through “political blogging” which isn’t in fact properly appreciated. There are those who blog for a specific group, for a party, for their tribe. And there are those who blog in support of certain ideas, or ideals. The former group will indeed be liable to capture by the centre (“don’t rock the boat old boy, not now we’ve got back into power again”) and the latter will continue to scream for their cherished goals whichever party is in power.
– Tim Worstall
Triticale (real name Tom Arnold), a blogger and commenter on more than 250 Samizdata articles, has passed away.
God speed, Good Sir, you were a welcome guest.
Glenn Reynolds points to an excellent way to help out blogger Mark Steyn in his battle against being muzzled by the Saudi’s: buy his book!
Besides sending copies to the Canadian Human Rights Commission, I can think of some other people who should read more of Mark’s work.
Bishop Hill has a couple of good postings on climate themes. We here cannot keep track of all the climate hysteria and anti-hysteria, but he tries do. First, there is this bit of stand-up making fun of Al Gore. Stand-up is cheap to do, cheap to film and easy to stick up on YouTube. Even if YouTube are lefties, they cannot hope to censor everything. Watch this and feel the political climate changing.
The good Bishop ended the posting before that one, a round-up of climate stuff with lots of good links – climate cuttings number 14, no less – with the following:
And that’s it for this time. Thanks to those people who have suggested that I get off my backside and do some more blogging. I will try to oblige, time permitting.
Surely blogging means sitting down on your backside, not getting off it. But, that was the only mistake I could spot.
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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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