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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A bit of a buzz has generated around the idea of Jonathan Haidt, with his notion that some people are born more “conservative” or “liberal” (in the US usage of those terms) than others, and that we can use genetics to explain, or partly explain, why people hold the views they do. It is easy to see why a lot of people might be wary about this sort of thing, as it might smack of determinism, but I think Haidt tries to be very careful to avoid falling down that particular rabbit hole:
“Innate does not mean “hard-wired” or unmalleable. To say that a trait or ability is innate just means it was “organized in advance of experience.” The genes guide the construction of the brain in the uterus, but that’s only the first draft, so to speak. The draft gets revised by childhood experiences. To understand the origins of ideology you have to take a developmental perspective, starting with the genes and ending with an adult voting for a particular candidate or joining a political protest. There are three major steps in the process.”
My own take on all this is that yes, it might well be very useful to know more about why we hold the views we do, act as we do, and so on. To know thyself is the beginning of understanding and all that. I am struck by this paradox: we are, as humans, a species that, unique among all others, has the desire to “look under the cover”, so to speak, to see how we got to be what we are and why we are the creatures we are, and then, hopefully, overcome whatever shortcomings and problems we find to become, well, hopefully better. In other words, we may not be a blank slate, but we are not prisoners of some sort of ruling, all-powerful genetic code, either. I sometimes worry that some people become beguiled by these new forms of Darwinism to such an extent that they forget that pesky, and awkward thing that we seem to have in us: volition, or Free Will.
Another point I’d make about Haidt’s idea is this: if it is true that people have certain traits like a predisposition to hold certain views because of their genes, how does he deal with those children who rebel against their parents’ views? I know of several libertarians, for instance, who clearly took against their parents’ hard socialist/other collectivist opinions. And in some cultures, children are more conservative than their parents out of rebellion – I am sure this is something that has happened among parts of the Muslim community in the UK, for example.
Anyway, food for thought. Here is a TED lecture by Haidt.
We are in the top four of the annual Classic FM Hall of Fame, in which listeners, aided by diligent wretches paid a pittance to post on Twitter, choose their favourites and they are played in reverse order of popularity. Currently something by Beethoven is playing. Don’t ask me. I quite like classical music but know almost nothing about it, being only slightly better off than Ulysses Grant who knew two tunes, of which one was the Star Spangled Banner and one wasn’t. However, better educated members of my family were ranting about which pieces of classical music should be expelled from the Top Twenty for being over-rated, boring, associated with the European Union or similarly cursed.
My daughter, a musician, threw a particular wobbly at the appearance of Pachelbel’s Canon in the list.
What else would you suggest? And no complaining about that Final Fantasy thing being there; I thought that was nice.
Update: I have the beginnings of a Sociological Observation to make this post respectable. It is that the compère seemed very relaxed about the fact that the diligent wretches paid to post on Twitter were having an effect. He seemed to quite admire the internet campaign that got the Final Fantasy VII music into the top twenty. I am sure that in the old days organised campaigns would have been seen as cheating; now it is just the way things go.
Ineptocracy – A new word for our times
*Ineptocracy (in-ep-toc’-ra-cy)* – A system of government where the least capable to lead are elected by the least capable of producing, and where the members of society least likely to sustain themselves or succeed, are rewarded with goods and services paid for by the confiscated wealth of a diminishing number of producers.
This via a comment by our local neighbourhood ‘ukipwebmaster’.
I have though for a while now that this term deserves wider currency and to be used in all seriousness.
Arinsal, Andorra. January 2011.
Bourg Madame, France. January 2011.
Roses, Spain. January 2011.
Lisbon, Portugal. February 2011.
Istanbul, Turkey. March 2011.
Slunj, Croatia. April 2011.
Bihać, Bosnia and Herzegovina. April 2011.
Fez. Morocco. May 2011.
Ceuta. May 2011.
Algeciras, Spain. May 2011.
Banwar Seri Begawan, Brunei Darussalam, May 2011.
Coolangatta, Australia. May 2011.
Labuan, Malaysia. May 2011.
Sepilok, Sabah. June 2011.
Lawas, Sarawak. June 2011.
Meden Rudnik, Bulgaria. August 2011.
Bucharest, Romania. August 2011.
Comrat, Gagauzia. August 2011.
Balti, Moldova. August 2011.
Chernivtsi, Ukraine. August 2011.
Kraków, Poland. September 2011.
Bratislava, Slovakia. September 2011.
Brno, Czech Republic. September 2011.
Prilep, Macedonia. September 2011.
Elbasan County, Albania. September 2011.
Prizren, Kosovo. September 2011.
North Stradbroke Island, Australia. October 2011.
Tianjin, China. November 2011.
Vale de Telha, Portugal. December 2011.
It may be Christmas, Cthulhumas or Whatevermas for you.. but Samizdata wishes all friends of liberty peace and prosperity over the festive season and for the coming New Year.
For the last few weeks I have been trying to organise my home, and in particular the many papers – everything from hugely portentous to utterly pointless – piled up in it. But to derandomise and thin out the paper, I need space, and I have had no space. I also hope to be doing more entertaining in the months to come. So, where to find space?
Space is always achievable if you try hard enough, and I have now, at last, identified a spacially significant category of object which I will henceforth be doing without. Cardboard boxes.
Amd that’s just the ones I have already found. There are more, I know it.
Whenever a New Electronic Thing enters my home, as Things often do in these times of ever more miraculous and less expensive Things, I have felt the need to preserve the box in which the Thing came. I have done this in case I – or merely it – ever needed to move. Also, these boxes may come in useful to accommodate other things.
But Things can be moved without being in their original boxes, and actually, they usually are. Frequently to the dump, as will be the case with that huge television you can also see in the picture, now broken and worthless. Also departing in the same rubbish vehicle, my photocopier, and a chair the bits of which also appear in the photo above.
But it’s the boxes that really take up the space, which is why boxes always get chucked out eventually. The boxes are most unlikely ever to be as useful to me as the space they now occupy.
If, at some future moment, I need a big box, I will get get one, perhaps by buying one.
So now, there will be a great cull of boxes, even of boxes which contained Things purchased quite recently. This involves chopping and tearing them up into pieces small enough to fit inside rubbish bins. This will be quite a labour, and I would love to be able to say that this job will be done on Boxing Day. Sadly, I won’t be waiting that long.
You live in chains. In this awful century just passed, more than 150 million innocent people died in chains. And yet every person ever born was born free—unalterably, inviolably, immaculately free…
This is not the sort of thing I am used to finding in holiday tales, so I was delighted to discover these individualist holiday stories published for Kindle. Christmas at the Speed of Life (subtitle: Seasonal brutality – gift-wrapped) by William F. X. Connell focuses on what really matters, from a decidedly individualist viewpoint. I found this book thanks to Richard Nikoley, whose blog is a humorous mix of Paleo lifestyle content and anti-state, anti-religion polemic.
So if you are still searching for the perfect gift for a hard-to-buy-for individualist, or if you would like to gift your favorite stasist/statist with a subversive collection of short stories for the holiday, check it out.
I am sure there is some anti-EU moral to be squeezed out of this strange song of worship for a big (and apparently real) German excavator built by Krupps, possessed of a artificial mind, feared even by Beelzebub and used for fighting Godzillas.
My title comes from a comment by one crashstitches79.
Perhaps there is more of a pro-EU moral? Or an anti-Godzilla moral. Awesome, regardless.
Rudy Guede gets 30 years for the murder of Meredith Kercher.
On appeal he incriminates Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito, in contradiction of his own first testimony. This claim buys him a reduction of 14 years in his sentence.
Knox gets 26 years, Sollecito 25, on the basis of Guede’s evidence – and bungled police forensics.
After Knox and Sollecito have lost four years of their lives, the courts admit there was never any significant evidence against them and acquit them.
In Seattle a crowd cheers. In Perugia a crowd howls.
The British redtops are beside themselves. All gibber that Meredith Kercher has been “forgotten”. One puts a headline over Knox’s picture: “Meredith Who?”; as if these words come from her. One shows a photo of Knox, elated at getting her life back, and describes her as “grinning from ear to ear” – which, as we know, is something bad people do when they’re gloating over some undeserved gain.
Amanda Knox is home in Seattle. She has to live with the lingering ghost of a possibility that the Italians may yet demand that she go back. But at least she doesn’t have to worry about a European Arrest Warrant.
What an insane, vicious farce.
We tend not be very nice about the BBC around here. It is a state-created broadcaster that forces everyone to pay for it, etc. (Boo, hiss, throw rotten tomatoes, etc). But it does occasionally put up programmes of some value. In view of the popularity of shows in which the rich, famous or infamous track down their ancestors, such as “Who Do You Think You Are?”, there is a show that runs in the dead-zone of daytime TV, called Heir Hunters. It shows how various financial/legal professionals earn a living by trying to track down people who could inherit money from the deceased but who don’t know about it because there was no will signed. The actual commission or fee that these people charge for this work is not disclosed but the general effect of what these businesses are doing is positive, in my view. The reason for my saying that is that at present, if a deceased person’s estate has not be carved up in a will, then it is grabbed by the state.
A friend of mine who works in this area reckons that in his own, modest way, he is keeping private wealth out of the hands of the state by making sure that those who could inherit the money actually do so. Anyway, the popularity of the show suggests that inheritance of wealth is something that Brits of many backgrounds are comfortable with. Most of the people highlighted in the programme are not exactly the Duke of Westminster type.
The popularity of this sort of programme also, of course, speaks of the enduring interest people have in history, family traditions and roots. Like certain other passions and enthusiasms, it appears to be ineradicable, and woe betide the politician who attacks it, however indirectly, via taxes.
I like this, towards the end of a long comment from Michael Strong, on this piece by Clay Shirky:
Democracy is a fabulous way to prevent the most horrible errors such as the massive famines, death camps, and large-scale wars of aggression that are characteristic of totalitarian regimes, but one should no more imagine that democracy is a finely-tuned instrument for determining the public good than that a hack saw is suitable for brain surgery.
“Deliberative” democracy, i.e. the sort less like a hack saw, doesn’t work beyond about 10,000 people, he says.
See also Amartya Sen, who also admires what the hack saw can do.
Being an American with a knowledge of history, Strong does not claim that democracy prevents civil war. But I would say that democracy does make civil war far less likely, provided certain other conditions are also met, like a relatively static political entity and not too much tribal voting (i.e. a willingness of at least some voters to vote this way or that way, depending).
In many ways (but not the most important ways), democracy is civil war. Which is precisely why it works as well as it does as a substitute for civil war. Whoever wins the democracy civil war would probably also have won the real thing, using not unrelated methods – bribes, threats, propaganda barrages, opinion polls, friendliness towards turnable enemies, treachery towards dependable friends, and so on and so forth. That being so, the losers take their defeat. Instead of contesting the result of the election by force (i.e. starting a real civil war) they wait for the next round.
Which, by the way, means that the reasonable certainty that there will be a next round is crucial to democracy’s effectiveness. It is often said of Hitler that he was impeccably democratic. He was indeed democratically elected, but promptly cancelled all subsequent elections. At best, democratically speaking, he scores one out of two. Other political strong-arm men, who got power by old fashioned civil warlike methods, but who then left a democratic legacy, that is, they contrived (or at least permitted) the circumstances which would allow elections in the future, get denounced as “totally undemocratic”, when they also score one out of two. And which election matters more, the last one, or the simple fact of the next one, when it comes to how safe and sound life would be right now?
None of which means that I love democracy, merely that I prefer it to civil war, famine, concentration camps etc.. Cue clichés about democracy being the worst system, except … More to the point, here’s what looks like another quite good link to the sort of notions I and Michael Strong agree with.
One of the many reasons why I would like to live for more like the next two centuries, rather than the mere two decades which is my likely best shot, is that I would love to see what happens to democracy in the next little clutch of decades. Currently, it is just growing and growing in strength, for all of the above reasons. I’m not the only one who wants a quiet life, and will settle for a disappointing one if that’s the price to be paid. But, will democracy last? Will it, for instance, attach itself to the emerging government of the world which I believe we are now witnessing in our time? If it does, will it then do anything to prevent global civil wars? If democracy fades, what might replace it?
When I say “democracy” please understand that by that I mean big noisy elections deranging regular television for weeks at a time, political parties, legislative assemblies of self-important bores, lying, cheating, thieving, grandstanding, moral self-aggrandisement and relentless disappointment for almost all concerned, bar only a tiny few particularly rapacious and particularly lucky winners. I do not mean that fatuous construct of political malcontents known as “real democracy”, as in: everything the malcontent wants from democratically elected politicians, however far fetched, such as financial security for all (especially him), equality for all (ditto), openness of decision-making (by others rather than in the unlikely event that he is deciding anything of importance), environmental perfection, and immediate answers to his mad letters or emails to politicians, telling him that his mad arguments, no matter how numerous or how many CAPITAL LETTERS they may contain, have all triumphed.
Speaking of political malcontents, what I want is free markets in everything, a cheap internet connection, a cheap digital camera with a twiddly screen which takes perfect pictures with just the one (mega-mega-zoom when I want it) lens, and to stay comfortably alive for at least the next two centuries (see above). But, I never refer to these desires as “real democracy”.
“Johann Hari, you are a plagiarist!” I shoot those words at him and let them hang in the air between us.
He shifts uneasily, but when he replies his voice is surprisingly unapologetic.”When dealing with an inarticulate interviewee, or one whose English was poor,” he confides, “I have sometimes substituted a passage they have written or said more clearly elsewhere on the same subject for what they said to me, so the reader understands their point as clearly as possible.”
“Yeah, right,” I say, my outrage rising, “but when you talk about what they said more clearly elsewhere what you really mean is what they said more clearly when interviewed by someone else, huh?”
He furrows his big, broad brow, pats my knee, and tells me about the night he knew he was going to die unless he got his copy in on time. “It depends, ” he says, looking away, “on whether you prefer the intellectual accuracy of describing their ideas in their most considered words, or the reportorial accuracy of describing their ideas in the words they used on that particular afternoon.”
“Intellectual accuracy,” I cry, grabbing his patting-hand in a jiu-jitsu lock and hurling him over my shoulder, “cannot exist independently of reportorial accuracy.”
Floored equally by my logic and a martial arts technique taught to me by a secret order of fighting monks living in the high passes of Chingford, he apologises to a lampshade for having once supported the Iraq war and hobbles away.
This interview was true in spirit.
It was also almost entirely an excuse to say something that I had been meaning to say for ages, but was too short to be a post on its own: never mind all this twitter and email and communication-y stuff, the underreported way the internet changes everything is the way that everything anyone writes is still there years later. I cannot even safely assume that you have forgotten that I said this before, on Tuesday March 1st 2005.
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UPDATE: Today’s Guardian carries an interview (which I am fairly sure really happened) in which Stuart Jeffries talks to Viktor Mayer-Schönberger: Why we must remember to delete – and forget – in the digital age. Much there to disagree with, in particular the way Mayer-Schönberger chucks around the word “should” in “He argues that digital storage devices (cameras, mobiles, computers) should automatically delete information that has reached its expiration date”. Does “should” mean “it would be nice if manufactures put this in” or “let’s have a law to force them to”? When a professor of internet governance and regulation fails to make this distinction it strikes me as sinister. Nevertheless the interview is fascinating, particularly when Mayer-Schönberger talks about how “the Panopticon now extends across time and cyberspace”.
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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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