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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Britain is hot today. Scorching. It’s hot, it’s sticky, it’s steamy and, for the Guardian that means….it’s Kyoto time:
Evidence increasingly points to a weather system shaped more and more not by nature but by humanity. The pattern of industrial development of modern day society appears to be producing too much pollution for the world to cope with. The effects will irrevocably remake the climate for the worse.
And we all know who to blame for this, don’t we? Yes we jolly well do.
On gaining office, the Bush administration, with its roots in oil and big business, withdrew unilaterally from the biggest international commitment to cut greenhouse gas emissions – the Kyoto protocol. To gain some scale of how reckless this act of political vandalism was consider this: if US states were independent nations they would comprise 25 of the top 60 nations that emit greenhouse gases – Texas’s emissions alone exceed France’s.
The Guardian runs this same editorial rant about once a fortnight regardless of whether it’s hot, cold, tipping down or a white-out. In the summer, though, they just turn the volume up. They probably call it a social conscience. I reckon it’s a bad case of sunstroke.
Adriana sez: “Statism is enough to drive a girl to drink”.
Granny sez: “Don’t you have some flavour other that ‘samizdata.net flavour’?”
But what do you think the captions be?
Far be from me to try to tell HMG how to run their nationalised industries, but if I was ever to be charged with such a thankless task, I would not go about it like this:
Fitness tests for police recruits are being made easier in an attempt to increase the number of women officers, the Home Office has announced.
Recruits’ speed and agility will no longer be put to the test as this is where most of the women have been failing.
Tests of strength and endurance will be made easier and the speed and distances recruits have to run will be halved.
This may actually be a blessing. As we watch the apparatus of a police state growing around us we can take some comfort that the police may get set on us for all the wrong reasons but at least we will be able to run away from them.
Yesterday I came across an interesting op-ed piece by Adam Nicolson of The Daily Telegraph in which he bemoans the decline of the art of conversation.
It has started happening to me all the time. I say something, probably going on too long, never happy to use one word where a hundred would do, but trying to persuade someone to see it all in a different way, to see it, let’s be honest, my way, and at the end of this long spiely speech that I give them, they say, “Yeah, whatever,” and turn off on to the thing that, as far as they’re concerned, really counts.
And then he really lays in to “whatever”:
“Whatever” wafts a contemptuous and disdainful hand in the direction of everything he has had to say. As a saying, and an attitude, it goes beyond the confrontational. A few years ago, more aggressively but at least more engagedly, someone who felt equally sceptical might have replied “So what?” in the same circumstances.
He tracks down the culprit – the origin of this degenerate phenomenon lies with modern marketing:
What is the source of this new, casual, bypassing contempt and impatience? At least one of its origins, I think, is the appallingly degenerate language of modern marketing. We are swimming in a soup of the near-meaningless. On a plane the other day, I was given a box full of unguents called “Origins In Flight Comfort Kit”. “For those who don’t know about Origins,” the leaflet began, “it’s all about caring for yourself in different ways. Choices. Alternatives. New Experiences. Finding unusual answers to every-day problems.” Among which were lip-grease, skin-cream, a water spray for your face and then “brush your teeth with Rembrandt Whitening Toothpaste for a healthy, brighter smile”.
The sentimentality and cynicism, inflated into a puffball of what hopes to pass for charm, that make up the modern language of salesmanship has made us all impatient with blather. It has created “whatever” as a reaction to the over-elaborated or overstated, because ingrained in us now is a recognition that the marketing surface is not to be trusted.
[…]
If the “whatever” phenomenon signals the approaching death of the marketing culture, it is likely to bring other things down in its train. “Whatever” loves only the minimal. It will have no time for the enriched or the inherently complex. “Whatever” thinks that everything should be reduced to essentials, which is a recipe for crudity and philistinism…Poetry, for one, can’t really survive in a whateverised world. To be or not to be, that is the question. Whatever. Is this a dagger I see before me? Whatever. The rest is silence. Whatever.
Bravo! I agree wholeheartedly. I agree so much that I have quoted the piece almost in its entirety. The language of marketing is ludicrous and preposterous at best, crude and insulting to its audience at worst. My impression is that many companies are now stuck with costly marketing techniques, simply of out fear that if they do not spend a fortune on glossy brochures, flash animated websites, extortionately priced logo designs and re-designs, expensive advertising etc, they will not be taken seriously. Marketing as we know it may still be around not because people actually believe that such marketing works but because everyone does it as a token sign of a Serious Business.
One thing I always hated about Big Companies was their increasingly disconnected and uniform marketing. When The Cluetrain Manifesto come along a few years ago, I breathed a sigh of relief. A breeze of fresh air, a tornado of common sense, it unveiled the Emperor’s naked and bloated body underneath the threadbare designer clothes.
I am not holding my breath waiting for the end of marketing but I do hope that more and more businesses will see it for what it is and stop throwing money at the advertising industry and insulting their customers and employees with its meaningless marketingspeak.
Not even for a fleeting moment do I believe that President Bush and his cabinet need me to jump their defence. Indeed, jumping to the defence of any politician is not an activity that generally sits well with me.
However, I am prepared to set aside my customary reluctance in the case of George Bush but only because he seems to have become an Aunt Sally for every loud-mouthed class-war agitator who is looking to make a name for themselves with the woolly-hatted, mushy-brained, stapled-face brigade.
A case in point is the current (and I am so ashamed to have to type these words) Mayor of London, Mr.Ken Livingstone. Livingstone is veteran political shape-shifter who has spent the last thirty or so years hitching himself to every po-mo leftist bandwagon that rolled into town and maybe even invented a few of his own. Having been shoved back under his rock by the Thatcher government of the eighties, wily old Ken has since re-invented himself as a cuddly ‘man of the people’; an image that he has assiduously cultivated as a base from which to launch a political resurrection.
Thanks to his favourable media coverage and a severe outbreak of Memory Deficit Disorder (a condition endemic to this country) ‘Ken Il Sung’ managed to get himself elected to this high-profile office that enables him to regale the world with what I suppose he regards as his words of wisdom:
Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, was widely condemned yesterday after comparing George Bush to Saddam Hussein.
Oh well, I suppose it makes a change from comparing George Bush to Hitler.
The Left-winger described the American President as a “coward” who was at the head of a “venal and corrupt administration”.
Anyone who accepted large sums of cash from Colonel Qaddafi in order to set up a trotskyite newspaper has got some nerve calling other people ‘venal and corrupt’.
Addressing an audience of schoolchildren…
I don’t suppose adults would want to listen to all his tiresome bollocks.
“This really is a completely unsupportable government and I look forward to it being overthrown as much as I looked forward to Saddam Hussein being overthrown.”
Yes, which is why ‘cuddly’ Ken was at the head of every ‘Stop the War’ march.
Mr Livingstone is used to courting controversy. Shortly before being elected mayor he appeared to endorse anti-capitalists rioters when he said: “Every year the international financial system kills more people than World War Two. But at least Hitler was mad.”
But, Ken, Hitler’s views on the ‘international financial system’ were remarkably close to your own. What are you trying to tell us?
Yesterday he played down his latest remarks, saying that he had made the same point at an anti-war rally in February and that no one took much notice.
No doubt because they were all stunned to hear that you wanted Saddam Hussein ‘overthrown’. You did tell them that back in February, Ken?
Asked about the row, Ari Fleischer, Mr Bush’s spokesman, said: “I’ve never heard of the guy.”
The perfect response. Ken Livingstone: the nobody’s nobody.
I have only just noticed a really quite interesting and lengthy essay by Bill Whittle on Eject! Eject! Eject! called Victory:
This nation has been for many decades under direct and coordinated attack by fanatics whose failure to gain respect and attention through the force of their arguments have turned their level of rhetoric to such a shrill and hysterical pitch that years of it have seemingly driven some of them quite insane — insane to the degree that they cannot see that acid baths, state rapists, children’s prisons and daily torture and execution are not mere rhetorical flourishes — roughly equivalent to hanging chads and bulldozed Dixie Chicks CD’s — but a desperate and ever-present reality.
They did everything in their power to deny this reality, these Champions of Compassion, and Not In Their Name did these daily horrors come to an end. That is what six decades of freedom, security, tolerance and prosperity will do to some people: isolate them from the brutal reality of horror and torture to the degree that “evil” must be accompanied by sneer quotes and the motives of 300 million free and decent people are suspect while those of a small cabal of psychopathic mass murderers are not.
Whilst I think it is not a ‘coordinated’ attack and should be more realistically described as widespread but unsynchronized petulance, the toxic nature of these attitudes are no the less real for their lack of coherent direction. Bill’s essay is a lengthy but thought provoking read. Check it out.
If you want something cultural to read, I recommend postings numbers one and two of Nikos Salingaros week, over at 2Blowhards.
The postings are interesting. But even better, in my opinion, are some of the comments. I’ve posted tangential comments of my own about the “New Urbanism”, briefly on Transport Blog, and at somewhat greater length at my Education Blog. Meanwhile here are bits from two of my favourite of the Blowhard/Salingaros comments, so far.
First, here is “Tom”, replying to something Michael Blowhard had said about suburbs:
You are so right about the zoning, transportation department, fire department rules ossified since the 50’s creating inevitable horrible suburbia. I have done work in suburban areas and the results are completely predetermined by setbacks, maximum lot coverage areas, single use zoning, minimum parking space numbers and transportation department road standards. This is where the problems with modern architecture really are – a socialist/utopian attitude towards city planning. Even in many areas where they object strongly to this kind of thing, the solutions are always increased regulation – appearance reviews, stricter zoning, etc which just makes the problem worse. The reason all suburbs in america look the same is because there are two (i believe) companies that publish model codes for towns that they just buy off the shelf. The role of new urbanism should be fighting these standards.
→ Continue reading: Comments on Salingaros
Okay, enough about Iraq. Something even more unpleasant – the sheer din experienced these days while shopping. I am not talking about the noise caused by the clack of shoes on a floor, or the natural bustle of a busy marketplace. This is all part of the deal and can often create a buzz which is almost pleasant. No – and I sense this is my old age creeping in – what gets on my nerves is the loud pop music din which seems to be a standard feature of shops these days.
Example. At lunchtime today your humble scribe went to a shop in central London to get a new mobile phone. Okay, the staff were no more surly, badly dressed or inarticulate than most, but that was not the problem. The problem was that it was if I had strayed into a particularly bad nightclub by mistake. I could hardly hear myself think as I went through the options of a mobile phone deal. Craziness.
My grouches besides, what motivates the owners of shops to blast out music like this? Is there some philosophy which has worked through the shopping world in the UK – I cannot vouch for other nations – which says that the more loud music we have, the more we will buy? I don’t honestly know about that, but for me, the sheer loudness of some of the music played these days often encourages me to leave a building as soon as possible. I guess I am not the only person to feel this way. Maybe some shrewd shopping entrepreneur could steal a march on his rivals by setting up calm, music-free shops.
If anyone reading this actually works in the retail business and can explain the current fashion for piping loud music in shops, your comments would be most welcome.
I was supposed to be in Milan on Friday. But instead, I ended up spending a night in a tiny Austrian village and having to cancel my meetings in Italy.
I was heading through the Austrian Tyrol on Thursday when after rounding a corner on a descending road, my car started skidding on ice and began spinning uncontrollably, somewhere vaguely near Bischofshofen. After several terrifying seconds I came to rest with a gentle bump against a flimsy metal barrier between me and about a 100 metre drop. And then a few minutes later, while I was still sitting there trying to calm down, a woman in an ancient Skoda with German plates did the same thing and I thought she was going to shunt me over the edge. I jumped out of my car as her slowly spinning vehicle came closer and closer… and I immediately slipped on the icy road and went sprawling. Just to add to the fun, I didn’t even have my shoes or big coat on, just a tee shirt and a little skirt. But like me she just bumped into the barrier, which was obviously stronger than it looked, missing my car by about 2 metres. I have to say I felt my lapsed Catholicism flickering back to life at that moment.
My German is rudimentary and she did not speak any of my languages, but I think we were both trying to calm each other down for a few minutes and I am pleased to say that she burst into tears and not me. Her name was Hanna and while my car had only a teeny little dent on the rear bumper (I hit the barrier backwards), her car was more damaged, with both front lights broken, as she hit the barrier straight on and a bit faster. Additionally, neither her wipers nor one of her rear lights was working and her engine was making alarming spluttering sounds. → Continue reading: Unexpected detours and Austrian chivalry
So we are told the year 2002 is significant because it reads the same beginning to end as end to beginning. We are somehow fortunate, if we are a certain age, to be alive for two of them (1991 being the other one). 2002 is significant for those of us of a libertarian ilk, however numerology has nothing to do with it.
We face a world in a flux, no more than usual, but in flux nonetheless. As I sit here writing this missive, Tony Blair is heading off to prevent a war on the Indian sub-Continent, convinced that his “president of the world” trick will prevent a 4th war between the two countries. Is Blair, even while still in office, to become the Jimmy Carter of the new century? Just the mere threat of his being sent to some far off land will make both sides question their motives for war. Blair will be appointed upon his retirement from Downing Street, UN “Meddler in Chief.”
No doubt the blind-man of justice, Blunkett is even now thinking of ways to ever erode Britons personal liberties. Is it me or is not odd that the Sheffield socialist now has more in common with a fundamentalist Christian mid-westerner than he does with his former socialist comrades.
One wonders if Blunkett and Ashcroft are in constant email contact regarding tactics on how to put their authoritarian plans in place. The only thing that is no mentioned is the punishment that dare not speak its name: the death penalty.
We live in a situation in the west, where to question the laws brought into help stop terrorism is to be seen as an appeaser. At the same time the sainted left in the media are allowed to be actual apologists for the terrorists. These people claim that the attacks on the 11th and since then are self-inflicted and deserved. The real apologists are allowed to operate, quite rightly, under the banner of a free press, yet free speech is being curtailed under awash of legislation.
2002 will no doubt see virtual countries coming into their fore, not for financial purpose,s but in order to protect one from prosecution. Data havens will become information havens where those who do not wish to follow the party line will be able to express their opinions freely outside the realms of persecution. Of course Europe and the UK now have the addition of Euro wide “arrest warrants” meaning that one can offend a Greek and be arrested in the UK, and sent there for trial. In case the Greek government wished to re-assure us, they spent the later part of 2001 harassing a bunch of airplane-spotting nerds. These spies would be some of the most incompetent in existence, sticking out like a black man at a Klan rally. If they are spies they could only be CIA, for no other intelligence service is that gormless.
It will be interesting to see if the EU uses these laws to start to shut down criticism of their utopian experiment Europe wide. No doubt this is more likely if the Euro has the wings of a turkey. Under the guise of “a threat to the economy of Europe” anti-Euro campaigners will be threatened with being dragged to Brussels for prosecution in Belgium’s notoriously speedy judicial system.
But I have gone off message. With all this going round in the world, what is the role of the libertarian activist? Are we to return to our sitting, chat and smoking rooms to ponder more theory? Are we to return to the underground and ponder when next to show our faces in normal political circles? Or do we have a role in attempting to hold back the authoritarian urges of both the traditional right and left? The socialists are seemingly impotent, more concerned with defending the “misunderstood” Islamists than defending their own liberties. In the extreme, Jack Straw has been heard boasting that his son has become a convert to Islam, a religion they both claim to be “inclusive” despite both Koranic verse and recent events.
I leave with this thought dear friends. What exactly are we the libertarian activists of the world to do in the coming days and months? What is our role in the post 9/11 world?
Of course in my case 9/11 is irrelevant, I carry on hammering on about classical liberalism until I die or Cthulhu rises from his slumber in R’Leth.
Andrew Ian Dodge
“What Sucks? Statism Sucks!“
Must say I admired David Carr’s ability to get hold of a transcript of the BBC broadcast of the first day of the euro note and coin (January 1). For a moment I thought it was a spoof, but it just looked too real for me!
“This is the news from the BBC. Today witnesses the launch of the Euro as the official currency of the twelve Eurozone countries. There are reports coming in from all over the Eurozone of joyous celebration and free, happy citizens spontaneously embracing each other in a new spirit of unity and brotherhood. Our leader, Citizen Prodi, has formally announced that the Euro will herald in an everlasting era of unprecendented peace, prosperity and complete fairness for every person. Already, the grain harvesting figures are confidently predicted to reach their highest ever level and tractor production has officially doubled! It is the Great Leap Forward our leaders have promised us. Meanwhile, however, in Britain counter-revolutionaries and extreme right-wingers continue to conspire with American capitalists to keep the Euro from liberating the oppressed British people. That is the end of the news”
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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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