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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It seems almost unbelievably crass that attempts to take down Julian Assange should revolve around such a patently obvious ploy as concocting ‘sexual assault‘ charges against him.
It reminds me of some other oh so obvious black bag operations, i.e. the patently absurd planted media articles to link Saddam (a secular socialist) to Al Qaeda (Islamists) in the run up to the allied attack on Iraq.
I have grave misgiving about Wikileaks releasing operational military information but the fact the governments of the world are all baying for his blood and starting to cooperate with operations to discredit him speaks volumes about the damage he has done to the leviathan state everywhere… as was always his intention…and for that Assange has already assured himself a very special place in history. I suspect people will be talking about him long after the current crop of political leaders have been consigned to the mundane sections of historical record.
John Crace of the Guardian writes about someone totally cool.
Max Hardberger makes his living by stealing back stolen cargo ships, beating pirates at their own game from Haiti to Russia.
In 2012 there will be a US presidential election using a new distribution of the electoral college. This will use the population data of the current US census. After last night’s elections, there has been a dramatic change in what happens if the Democrat and Republican candidates end up with a tie (for example 269 votes each).
Short answer is that, assuming the politicians stick to their party, the Republicans win the presidency, but the Senate would pick a Democrat for Vice President. Details at my election blog.
[Update: correction made from comments, thanks Lone Ranger!]
This gave me a bit of a laugh:
“Vampire Diaries” star Ian Somerhalder, an outspoken critic of the BP oil spill in the Gulf, appeared at Thursday’s Washington Post Live conference on energy policy in the nation’s capital. The actor, who was “chill” about speaking in front of members of both houses of Congress, fit in so well in his suit and tie that some wondered about possible future political aspirations down the road.
No, I had never heard of Ian Somerhalder before either… and that was not what made me giggle… it was one of the comments on this article:
It is just wonderful that being an actor gives you such profound insight into the world that politicians actually want hear what you have to say in person.
Certainly when I ponder energy policy or any of the other difficult issues, the first thing that comes to mind is “Now I wonder what Ian Somerhalder’s take on that is?”
I really wish that instead of grinding that economics MA I had gone to acting school as maybe people in DC might actually decide to ask me what I think about energy policy or the economics crisis. Oh well.
– Bell Curve
Hehehe.
Byron remarks in his Journals that Berne is “the district famous for cheese, liberty, property and no taxes.” He took liberty quite seriously. And also cheese.
The problem is that hipsters are nothing like their namesake predecessors who attempted to operate outside convention with distinct agenda of cultural and social change. Nothing about the modern hipster is anti-anything. Rather, hipsters now are a manifestation of late capitalism run amok, forever feeding itself on the shininess of the Now: an impatient, forgetful mob taught to discard their products as quickly as they adopt them. They are not a cultural movement, but a generation of pure consumers. If capitalism were to really be altered in any way, the hipster as we know it would lose its raison d’etre.
And I thought hipsters were knickers that came up to your hips. Now I know better. Chap in the Guardian says that because this clothes company called American Apparel went bust it just goes to show what he always said about capitalism.
Death spirals of a co-opted public relentlessly co-opting itself, knowing acceptance of our generation’s role in the capitalist meta-narrative, knickers losing their raison d’etre… I tells ‘ee, one of these nights we’ll all be murthered in our beds.
Over at Instapundit (and at various other places), Glenn Reynolds has recently spent a lot of time discussing the question of whether Higher Education (and particularly Higher Education in the US) is essentially yet another debt fueled bubble in the process of popping. His reader Peter Galamga recently said the following, implicitely condemning quite a few fields of study and the academic departments associated with them
I think the days of spending the equivalent of a mortgage on one of the many two-word degrees (the second word is usually “Studies”) are coming to a close.
Although the second word might often be “Studies”, I think “usually” is too strong. In particular, one should also be extremely suspicious of courses and fields where the second word is “Science”. These are very seldom worthwhile, and are even less often actually science. “Biology” is good. “Plant Science” is bad. “Statistics” is good. “Political Science”, less so. “Meteorology” and possibly even “Climatology” is likely good. “Climate Science”, I will leave to you.
That said, I think things are much more likely to be okay of the second word is “sciences”. In particular, I can think of one or two truly formidable “Natural Sciences” programs. Does anyone else have any thoughts on this?
I just did a posting about iScream at my personal blog, iScream being a type of ice cream which I tasted earlier this evening when I dined at Chateau Perry. And then I thought, why confine the news of this delicious dessert to such a tiny demographic? The whole world should be told about this superb dining experience.
I guess one reason why people make things like this, concentrating entirely on making them tasty rather than making stuff that tastes like cardboard, and spending all their time, money and tender loving care on a lot of ridiculous and expensive advertising, is that word of whatever it is will now spread far and wide at no cost, provided the product tastes good. In my opinion, this iScream ice cream tastes wonderful, and word of it will surely spread fast. I suspect that “iScream” may prove to be a rather silly name, but better a silly name for superbly tasty ice cream than superbly named frozen mediocrity.
The website is here, but is not that informative about iScream ice cream. So if you live in or near London, or if you are ever in London, why not visit the Artisan du Chocolat shop in Lower Sloane Street, just to the south of Sloane Square, where the above supply of iScream ice cream was purchased.
I’m told their chocolate is very good too.
Many thanks to Glenn Reynolds for pointing this out.
My husband thought this webpage, produced by three ladies from the state of Texas, might be of interest to Samizdata readers.
I always go to the polls. I dutifully scrawl some libertarian slogan on the ballot. Some vote-counter reads it, puts my paper in the “spoiled” pile, and – who knows? – maybe has their life changed by a Damascene conversion to the cause of liberty, years later.
A pitiful exercise? Perhaps. But I could not bear to stay away and be thought apathetic.
I have given up trying to make my nearest and dearest understand. She says I am opting out – or sitting on the fence – or I think I don’t make a difference.
I try to explain that my vote makes precisely as much difference as hers: namely, infinitesimally more than zero. Her vote and mine are symbolic acts.
My explanation is useless too.
Suppose there were a “None of the above” box on our ballot papers? Should I use it? Or would that be validating the whole rotten system? Do those who stay right away and watch the movie channel making a more valid protest?
Abstaining even from a “None of the above” box would be an act of exquisite hyper-rejection. Hmmm … attractive.
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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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