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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
The Initial Teaching Alphabet was a radical, little-known educational experiment trialled in British schools (and in other English-speaking countries) during the 1960s and 70s. Billed as a way to help children learn to read faster by making spelling more phonetically intuitive, it radically rewrote the rules of literacy for tens of thousands of children seemingly overnight. And then it vanished without explanation. Barely documented, rarely acknowledged, and quietly abandoned – but never quite forgotten by those it touched.
I just missed experiencing the delights of the Initial Teaching Alphabet. I knew of it; a few of the Ladybird ITA books, including, if I recall correctly, “Peepl at Wurk: The Poleesman” as illustrated in the article, lingered in cupboards and crannies at my primary school. I remember asking what those funny letters were and being given a fairly good explanation. I was quite old before I realised that most people didn’t know about it.
Looking at the Guardian article to which I link above and at the Wikipedia article on the ITA, the choice of letter forms seems to have been amateurish. Some of them resemble the letters of the International Phonetic Alphabet, but many of characters and pairs of characters used to represent vowels and diphthongs in the ITA contradict the way those same characters are used in the IPA. And what in the name of Paul Passy’s sainted aunt was the point of borrowing the “long S”, ʃ, from the IPA but then not using this character on its own to replace the digraph “sh”, as the IPA does? The ITA spelling of “ship” appears to be “ʃhip”, which is the worst of both worlds – the children had to learn the difficult concept that two letters can represent one sound, but still had to unlearn the funny S before they could read the word as it was written outside school.
The Guardian article, and even more so the comments to it, make much of the fact that the creator of the ITA, Sir James Pitman (the grandson of the man who invented Pitman’s shorthand) was a Conservative MP. In fact he was the sort of Progressive Conservative that socialist charities like to have on the Board of Trustees to prove they are not irredeemably partisan. “As a member of parliament, he championed many notable causes, notably nationalisation, education, and world security.” He was one of a long line of would-be reformers of English spelling and comes across as motivated only by a well-meaning desire to help the children of the English-speaking world cope with our famously odd orthography.
Pity the ITA was a flop. Well, probably a flop – though it certainly disappeared from schools quickly enough, and most of those who remembered it speak of the difficulty of having to learn to read twice, no systematic survey of its results was ever made, so we cannot be sure. A few brave voices in the comments say that it did them no harm and one or two even say it helped them.
However the majority view (which I share) is that it was one of many foolish experiments carried out on schoolchildren by bright-eyed educationalists throughout the 1960s and 70s because parents in those days were far too trusting of authority. Some of the Guardian commenters take a harsher view. Someone calling themselves “karapipiris” thunders,
The elephant in the room is this:
It was precisely this inconsistency that Conservative MP Sir James Pitman – grandson of Sir Isaac Pitman, the inventor of shorthand
In any society when power and influence is hereditary what one will get is damage done by trying out ideas of incompetents in the real world. I can imagine that dozens of people dedicated to educating children at the time actually had good ideas on how to do better, but they were not aristocrats.
In vain do other commenters point out that Pitman’s knighthood was not hereditary and that the ITA was actually a cross-party initiative originally proposed by a Labour MP, Montefiore Follick; the upvotes still flow in a mighty river to Mr, Ms, or Mx Karapipiris for saying that the reason that this ill-conceived scheme was so casually inflicted on so many children was that its leading spirit had a knighthood.
Karapipiris is wrong about the aristocracy part, but right about it being remarkable how little discussion or testing there was before an experiment which obviously had the potential to harm the children it was meant to help was launched in thousands of schools.
Someone called “BFEMBis” thinks they have seen through the conspiracy:
Like Karapipiris, BFEMBis got plenty of upvotes for this asinine comment, although in fairness to the Guardian commentariat, the person who pointed out that all the posh schools listed start taking pupils at the age of thirteen got more. Once again, however, I must admit that BFEMBis does have the shadow of a point. I don’t know what the use of pseudo-Cockney eye dialect in “Makes yer fink,’ in’nit” was meant to convey, but the relatively low uptake of the ITA by private schools does indeed make yer fink. Despite being infested with at least as high a proportion of kaftan-wearers as the state sector, the private sector does seem to escape the worst of these fads. It introduces mad schemes just as enthusiastically as the state sector does but is quicker to dump them when they don’t work out.*
Why is that then? Why do private schools on average have stronger immunity to fads than state schools do? If BFEMBis and his/her/their upvoters finked a little more deeply about that question they might realise why so many people remain willing to pay double for their child’s education despite all that the current government throws at them.
A private school – or a “public” school in the British meaning of the term – cannot afford consistently bad results. “Bad” is a relative term: a surprising number of the UK’s fee-paying schools are aimed at children with special educational needs who have been failed by the state system. But whether success is measured in Oxbridge admissions or some poor kid who had been written off unexpectedly scraping a couple of GCSEs, a fee-paying school must be able to convince parents and prospective parents that the service they offer is worth the cost. If it cannot, those fees will dry up faster than you can say nief.
is all the terrorism carried out by Muslims. The London bombings of twenty years ago are but one entry in a long, long list. Muslims are much more prone to commit acts of terrorism than any other group in the world. This has been true for forty years.
No, this does not mean that all or most Muslims are terrorists. As I have often said, some of the bravest people in the world are Muslims who know that the terrorists can find them and their families and fight them anyway.
No, this does not mean it is decent behaviour to buttonhole your Muslim work colleague and harangue him or her for the crimes of their co-religionists.
It does mean that unless and until the Muslim world confronts the fact that most terrorism is Islamic terrorism, the non-Muslim world is rational to view Muslims with extra suspicion and to discriminate against them in matters of security. The idealistic refusal of the Western part of the non-Islamic world (or rather its political class) to do this is folly, a folly that will eventually backfire on Muslims living in the West.
Remember that photo of Sir Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner taking the knee in support of the Black Lives Matter movement? Leaving aside the question of whether George Floyd’s death was murder – the late Niall Kilmartin thought it was not – it was inevitable that people would eventually ask why, if the then Leader of the Opposition and now Prime Minister of the United Kingdom was obliged to get down on his knees and beg forgiveness because the police in a foreign country had killed one man, should not Muslim leaders and opinion-formers make some similar acknowledgement that all these thousands upon thousands of murders preceded by a shout of “Allahu Akbar!” had something to do with Islam? Why can’t there be – why is there not – a “Kafir Lives Matter” movement?
Mexico is inching closer to a Venezuelan-style autocracy. Consider the case of María Oropeza, who was forcibly abducted in Venezuela by armed men without due process. Her crime? Sympathizing with the opposition. That’s the future Mexico risks: where justice is not blind, but partisan. Some dismiss these warnings as exaggeration. But as Adam Smith observed in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, people often ignore distant tragedies until they arrive at their doorstep.
Just as Gorbachev’s failed reforms accelerated processes which “encouraged many Russians to redefine the Soviet territory as alien and to identify the Russian territory as their homeland,” we see a similar process on the rapidly evolving British Right in distinguishing between the Britain of recent memory and its UK replacement. When even Tory grandees such as Lord Frost borrow the disparaging term “Yookay” from the internet Right to disparage what he defines as Blair’s “new country, an actual successor state to the old Great Britain [but] distinct from it”, we see a similar, explicit distinction being made as that between Russia and the USSR. The counterpoint to Blair’s UK, or YooKay — the two are, now, more or less interchangeable — is, as Frost observes, simply Britain.
Whether you welcome this development or fear it, British politics in its current tumultuous form, with all its increasingly radicalised and existential debates on immigration and demographics, on its history, social housing and the welfare state, and on the nature and boundaries of Britishness or Englishness, is inexplicable without accepting that the country has now entered this phase of political development.
Alex Tabarrok over at the Marginal Revolution blog has an interesting item that pushes back against the idea that the items we buy, such as clothes and household appliances such as electric toasters, fridges and vacuum cleaners, don’t last as long and that is something terrible and a fault of modern capitalism, yadda-yadda.
He concludes: “appliance durability hasn’t collapsed—it’s evolved to meet consumer demand. We’re not being ripped off. We are getting better products at better prices. Rising incomes have simply redefined what “better” means.”
One part of it, as Tabarrok said, is that the “Baumol Effect” shows that the cost of repairing stuff rises vs the cost of buying that new toaster, flat-screen TV or whatever. And that seems to make sense. I’ve also noticed with a lot of modern tech, it is less reparable. That is partly, I think, a function of moving to a digital from analogue world. I am just about old enough to remember how to service my first car, including changing the spark plugs on the engine, etc. Nowadays, the chance of maintaining a modern car engine rank alongside how I’d fix the human brain.
The MR post also cites this excellent and detailed Rachel Wharton article in the New York Times’ “Wirecutter” publication, which contests the idea that “planned obsolescence” – some fiendish business tactic – is the cause.
Read the article and you will learn a lot about the market for fridges. You will thank me later.
“If you can’t see it now, you never will. The sight of tens of thousands of people at Glastonbury yesterday joining in a spirited chant of ‘Death, death to the IDF’ was the sight of us officially becoming a very different country, I fear. One in which anti-Israel hysteria has so flawlessly rehabilitated Jew hatred that it has become unthinking, conformist, almost mundane. Something that Home Counties idiots can jive to before adjusting their hot pants and heading off to catch Charli XCX. Something that is broadcast by the BBC into millions of homes. The banality of the new anti-Semitism.
“Let’s not muck about here. When punk-rap duo Bob Vylan called for the killing of Israeli soldiers yesterday – as they warmed up the crowd at the West Holts Stage for every Israelophobe’s new favourite Irish rap trio, Kneecap – they weren’t opposing war. They were calling for war, and on the one army on Earth charged with protecting Jews from genocide. The army now at war with a jihadist cult that murdered, raped and kidnapped its way through an Israeli festival not unlike Glastonbury on 7 October 2023. The army that almost all Israelis are expected to serve in. Indeed, those making excuses for that sickening call-and-response yesterday hopefully don’t know that Hamas justifies killing Israeli civilians on the grounds that they are basically all tainted by national service. That they are all enemy combatants. Death, death to that IDF?
“Whether we got here by ignorance or conscious hatred is pretty much moot. The end result is British Jews – at Glasto or at home – watching thousands whoop as Jew-killing slogans are recited. Frontman Bobby Vylan also treated the crowd to a deranged rant about the indignities he suffered working for a ‘Zionist’ at a record label, because he had to listen to his boss talk favourably about Israel. I wonder if he knows that the vast majority of British Jews are Zionists. I wonder if he cares.”
Pop concerts seem to prompt exhibitions of behaviour that can put markers in the ground for a culture, or – as we saw in Manchester Arena (UK, 2017), Bataclan and other attacks in Paris (2015) and in Israel on 7 October, 2023 – indicate the level of evil that Islamism represents, and a need to confront it.
What, if anything, should be done about the specifics at Glastonbury? Well, it seems that if there is a law around incitement and it should be enforced consistently, then there are grounds to deal with those principally involved in shouting these chants if they are deemed incitement to engage in violence. I guess if you’re in a band called “Kneecap”, it does rather tilt the scales of justice against you. Just saying.
I cannot be sure, but I’d be interested to know the demographics of the crowd, and what proportion are English and middle class, university educated, etc. I’d say quite a large chunk.
To be clear, there is nothing remotely ‘progressive’ about defending the current state of welfare – and incapacity benefits, in particular. As if it needs to be said, people whose disabilities prevent them from working deserve the best possible quality of life. Arguably, the system ought to be far more generous than it already is to those in genuine need.
The trouble is, as finally seems to be dawning on the political class, the soaring number of claimants bears little relationship with the state of the nation’s health. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, about four million 16- to 64-year-olds – that is, one in 10 of the working-age population – now claim some sort of disability benefit, compared with 2.8million in 2019. As explained in the Financial Times, recent rises in disability claims are almost entirely an artefact of the system itself. Policies and incentives are the main driver of rising and falling claims. Allowing claims for mental-health issues, enshrined in the 2014 Care Act, has had arguably the largest impact. Currently, 44 per cent of all claimants cite poor mental health as their primary condition.
To achieve a similar transition today would require us to introduce ways to help people acquire property. Most UK people are much richer than the statistics tell us. That is because they typically do not include the right to free healthcare, to free education for their children, and to the right to receive a state pension upon retirement. These are wealth, but they are not property, in that they cannot be alienated, given away or bequeathed to heirs. They die with the person.
The pathway to a property-owning democracy lies along two parallel routes: access to home ownership and to an investment portfolio. Both of these are property that belongs to the owner, and can be passed on to heirs and successors.
Home ownership can be made more accessible by a massive increase in the supply of housing. This means we have to streamline and liberalize planning laws, particularly in high-demand areas like London and the South East. We must simplify the process for obtaining planning permission and reduce local opposition barriers. The Town and Country Planning Act has passed its sell-by date.
That’s right. In the Guardian. My surprise at the location of the article was equalled by my surprise at the location of its writer: “Jane Qiu is an award-winning independent science writer in Beijing.” I didn’t know there were independent science writers in Beijing, but I guess there must be for an article on this particular topic written by someone describing themselves as such to appear. Anyway, she writes:
Some scientists assert evidence supporting natural-origins hypotheses with excessive confidence and show little tolerance for dissenting views. They have appeared eager to shut down the debate, repeatedly and since early 2020. For instance, when their work was published in the journal Science in 2022, they proclaimed the case closed and lab-leak theories dead. Even researchers leaning towards natural origins theories, such as the virus ecologist Vincent Munster of Rocky Mountains Laboratories in Hamilton, Montana, told me they lamented that some of their colleagues defend their theories “like a religion”.
No one embodies the crisis of trust in science more than Peter Daszak, the former president of EcoHealth Alliance. A series of missteps on his part has helped to fuel public distrust. In early 2020, for instance, he organised a statement by dozens of prominent scientists in the Lancet, which strongly condemned “conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin”, without disclosing his nearly two-decade collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology as a conflict of interest.
Similarly, he denies that his own collaboration with the Wuhan lab involved gain-of-function research, even though Shi Zhengli – the Chinese scientist who led the bat-borne coronavirus studies – has openly acknowledged that the lab’s work produced at least one genetically modified virus more virulent than its parental strain. (That work is not directly relevant to the origins of Covid-19.)
The documentary [Christian Frei’s Blame: Bats, Politics and a Planet Out of Balance, short title Blame] claims that attacks on EcoHealth Alliance and the spread of lab-leak conspiracy theories have fuelled distrust in science. In reality, it’s the other way round: public distrust in science, fuelled by the unresolved H5N1 gain-of-function controversy and by lack of transparency and humility from scientists such as Daszak, has driven scepticism and increased support for lab-leak theories.
This is not news to anyone who has read Matt Ridley and Alina Chan’s book Viral. Or to anyone who does not entirely get their news from the Guardian, the BBC and the New York Times, come to think of it. Still, better five years late than never. Why now, I wonder? Did someone at the Scott Trust take Katharine Viner to one side and gently suggest that it would be nice if the customary Guardian delay between “this is an absurd far right conspiracy theory” and “it’s the fault of the far right for talking about it before we did and using up all the available words” was not too far out of line with the nearly four years it took to admit Hunter Biden’s laptop was real and Joe Biden was senile? Or is something big about to break?
Alfred Marshall’s grand vision of economics was that you did the maths to check your logic. Then you translated all of that into English and burnt the maths. Steve Keen won’t do it that way for of course Marshall was a neoclassical and that’s just wrong, see?
Keen did once try to insist that I followed along with one of his papers – he was showing that there are no free markets, there are only oligopolies and therefore everything must be controlled by politics – and was most put out when I said well, yes, that’s mathematically true but useless.
For his contention was that as we’ve never got an infinite number of producers (nor consumers) therefore that model of free markets – which relies upon no individual producer or consumer having pricing power, which in itself implies an infinite number – therefore neoclassical economics was all wet. His maths was fine for that’s all true too. Except for the bit where if we analyse markets which we know are oligopolistic and then see how many producers we need for them not to be then the number seems to be about 5 or 6. True, true, 7 supermarkets doesn’t mean a wholly perfectly free market with profits no higher than the cost of capital but it’s pretty damn close. Close enough for either jazz or the economics of public policy.
The maths is for working through the logic not a replacement for it.
I remember when the main way to answer that question was to watch the News at Ten. More sophisticated people would read newspapers. The limitations of mainstream media are ever more apparent. The internet democratized information, so that should help. There are still various problems, including filtering and resources.
YouTube is probably the most successful solution to the latter problem. It is possible to be a full time YouTuber focusing on a niche topic and earn a living.
The former problem is hard. Search engines have bias; bots abound. I offer here a handful of ways I figure out what is happening.
To answer specifically what is happening, lately I have found the Miltary and History channel useful. In the linked video he explains what is known about the results of the US strike on Iranian nuclear facilities, complete with satellite imagery. He has daily updates with information about multiple conflicts with lots of detail. He is analytical and unpolitical.
To answer why it is happening, William Spaniel’s channel looks at events from the perspective of crisis bargaining theory: it is war economics where territory is the currency, hence the refrain that everything is about “lines on maps”. In the linked video he explains why the USA bombed Iranian nuclear facilities when it did, in terms of Israel setting the stage and creating a window of opportunity. More generally, the channel is useful for understanding why fighting is happening instead of negotiating, and how different things will have to look before negotiation is possible.
For a broader perspective of capabilities and defense economics, there is Perun. He explains the principles, brings in real world data and describes the range of possibilities. An unexpected bit of information in the linked video is that Israel would likely run out of ammunition for its iron dome before Iran runs out of cheap, badly aimed ballistic missiles. That is why eliminating launchers is so important to Israel, and it affects how long an air campaign can go on for.
In general, if I really want to understand something, I have found that finding a good specialist YouTuber is one of the better ways to do it. The feedback loop of financial reward and algorithmic feedback seems to work: not universally, but enough that there is a rich vein of good information on any given topic amongst the noise.
For something lighter, I can also recommend Daniel Owen if you are looking to buy a GPU for your computer, and Chris Spargo for dull yet fascinating pop history like the story of nationalised pubs.
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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