Samizdata
A blog for people with a critically rational individualist perspective. We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. URL
http://www.samizdata.net/blog/
Last update
4 hours 58 sec ago May 15, 2008
03:26
"Two substantive political issues are the federal budget deficit and the war in Iraq. Now, if you're electing Democrats to control government spending, then you're marrying Angelina Jolie for her brains. This leaves the Democrats with one real issue: Iraq. And so far the best that any Democratic presidential candidate has been able to manage with Iraq is to make what I think of as the high school sex promise: I will pull out in...
03:26
Anatole Kaletsky is usually good value for his economic analysis. In a pretty scathing column today about the collapse of Brown's political reputation since becoming Prime Minister last year, Kaletsky tries to contrast Brown the bumbling PM with Brown the masterful Chancellor of the Exchequer. He writes: Indeed, he was probably the most successful chancellor in modern history, notwithstanding his muddled tax reforms, his badly timed gold sales and the fatal damage he allowed the...
May 14, 2008
21:11
Finding myself uncharacteristically unable to give a flying fuck about what is in the news today and then murder helpless pixels merely to write about politics or world events, I took advantage of my inamorata being away on business to escape the Ivory Tower and go bathe in the blood and beer of popular culture... yes, I just saw Doomsday, a post-Apocalypse Mad Max-meets-28 Days Later action splatter flick. It is a movie that sets...
21:11
My thanks to Shane Greer for alerting me to what, on the face of it, seems like very good news, from Northern Ireland: The education minister has said she is very disappointed by grammar schools planning to set up a company to run independent entrance exams. I was not disappointed at all, when I read that. If there is one thing that really, really needs to be got out of the clutches of the state,...
21:11
I just came across this. What's happened is that they've discovered another Vivaldi opera, and classical music blogger Jessica Duchen is less than thrilled: Vivaldi was an astonishing character with a hugely colourful life. But isn't there a limit to how many of these rattly, twiddly baroque things the market can take? After all, most of them feature either a one-name title (eg Tomasso, Soltino, etc) or a massively long one (Il trionfo del blogorissimo...
21:11
Tim Worstall has interesting things to say about the difference between social status and economic inequality, pointing out that the two things only occasionally map onto each other, a fact which does rather undermine the egalitarian argument that reducing economic inequality will reduce differences in status. A good point indeed: in the former Soviet Union and in heavily statist countries today, for example, there was and is a gulf between the citizenry and the cliques...
May 13, 2008
17:55
Samizdata has now been going for more than half a decade, and since what I am about to say has been becoming ever more true throughout that time, I may have said what follows before. So if you have already read, marked, learned and inwardly digested all of this, apologies, and on to the next posting. I want to make a point about the nature of voting in British general elections. It now looks as...
05:00
This story in the Daily Telegraph today about Burmese officials allegedly pilfering foreign aid and selling it just reinforces any prejudice one might have about the efficacy of sending aid to a country governed by thugs. It is not obvious to me what, if anything, the major powers could or should do about this. Outright military intervention seems unlikely and given the stretched resources of western powers, unwise. However, given its rapid economic ascent, one...
05:00
Actually, it is even worse than that. - An unnamed BBC news journalist with whom I unexpectedly found myself drinking on Saturday, when asked if the BBC really is the Stalinist bureaucracy it is reputed to be....
05:00
Glenn Reynold's has a review at Pajamas Media of Ron Paul's best selling new treatise, "The Revolution: A Manifesto". He has beaten me to the punch as my copy is waiting for me in New York City and I will not see it until Thursday, No problem though: Glenn seems to have almost exactly the same opinions I expect I will have. This is not so strange after all. We are both Heinlein Libertarians with...
05:00
Like the diarist and blogger Diamond Geezer (now that's what I call a brilliant name), I have come to value much of the scenery in the southeastern pocket of ours in England. If you are planning a daytrip and cannot face a long drive but want something that just about gets you away from the capital without being all precious about it, there is a lot to be said for Whitstable Bay in Kent's north...
05:00
"If the BBC was given charge of a three star Michelin restaurant, it would puree all the food and feed it to its customers through straws." - Stephen Pollard....
May 11, 2008
05:00
Some splendid person, writing pseudonymously in the obscurity of an open thread on the Guardian's Comment is Free semiblog, has provided a parallel text translation of the Report of the Independent Scheme Assurance Panel. His discussion begins here. It deserves a wider audience. Excerpt: DAMN, I really must get back to work, but this is just so wonderful... 3.3 Identity management within Government Early on, the Panel challenged the assumption that existing sources of identity...
May 10, 2008
20:37
We have witnessed two weeks of unravelling. A fortnight where the socialist foundations of New Labour were exposed by the electorate after Brown's redistributionist endeavours foundered upon the rocks of his middling class taxcut dogwhistle. And their unionist pretensions were undercut by Wendy Alexander's referendum put option. Salmond will never buy. The disaffection with New Labour is a confluence of favourable attitudes and pernicious circumstances. The expansion of clientelism widens the contacts between the state...
May 9, 2008
23:05
Gordon Ramsay, the 'outspoken' celeb chief wants the state to outlaw out-of-season vegetables. I kid you not. That the man is an arrogant little shit has always been apparent from his TV shows but this sort of national socialist volkish crap really does mark him as truly authoritarian. The TV chef said it was "fundamentally important" for chefs to provide locally-sourced food. "Fruit and veg should be seasonal," he said. "Chefs should be fined if...
05:00
Leaving aside the practical objections (such as decline in the quality of the UK legal system) is capital punishment justified for murder? Note, this is not a question on whether capital punishment is effective, but is it just?...
May 8, 2008
11:17
The monster who locked up relatives in his Austrian home for many years - at god knows what cost to their psychological state or physical health - is trying to defend himself by blaming it on Adolf Hitler. Oh well, makes a change from blaming it all on video games, globalisation or George Bush, I suppose....
11:17
To any non-Muslim reader of the Koran, Islamophobia - fear of Islam - seems a natural reaction, and, indeed, exactly what that text is intended to provoke. Judged purely on its scripture - to say nothing of what is preached in the mosques - it is the most viciously sectarian of all religions in its heartlessness towards unbelievers. As the killer of Theo Van Gogh told his victim's mother this week in a Dutch courtroom,...
11:17
One writer I rate pretty highly is Ross Clark. As well as being a regular newspaper and magazine columnist in places like The Times (of London) and The Spectator, he is also the author of several good books. He has written a fine piece, with deliberate echoes of George Orwell, about the current mania for surveillance in Britain. His liberal views seem to be pretty robust. He has also written a short satire on life...
11:17
Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner and I love London town, but from where I sit by far the most newsworthy winner in the recent round of British local elections was the new Mayor of London, Boris Johnson. However, unless I am very much mistaken (which is entirely possible), the Boris Johnson blog, far from being at the centre of the Boris campaign, was put on ice for the duration, and looks like staying there....
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