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"My song is a hymn for individualism and against collectivism. I am also for balls and against circles, for corners and against edges, for trees and against the forest. In my performance it is not so much the song that counts but the moral attitude behind it. Whoever votes for me is against being standardized and cemented in by 'European Banality'."

Alf Poier, Austrian entrant to the European Song Contest.
(Via Michael Jennings.)

(In the end, Mr Poier got a respectable 94 points. It seems Britain got no points at all. Politically, this is all to the good.)

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In London just now there is a big push on to make the place more pedestrian friendly, and less car-dominated. The Congestion Charge is part of this trend. So are the three new footbridges across the Thames, in the form of the Millenium Bridge between the City and Tate Modern, and the two new footbridges they've put on either side of the old Hungerford (railway) Bridge to replace the one old puddle-ridden sewer of a footbridge that used to be there.

As a confirmed pedestrian, I consider all these changes to be big steps in the right direction, especially the Congestion Charge. The long term threat is that London may one day stop being a living city, and become a tourist city, like Paris. Paris is pretty. Of course it is. But the trouble with Paris is that increasingly, that's all that it is.

In London, for the time being, tourism is no threat. London is far too big, busy and ugly for that. Tourism is the seasoning of this great city, not its basic nourishment. And one of the more entertaining sights to be seen in London in recent years has been the tourist related one of seeing one of these things trundling about, these being DUKWs.

DUKWs, or "Ducks" as they have always, inevitably, been called, were originally used for amphibious landings during World War II, and although I've never witnessed them actually making the transition, the London ducks are amphibious here too, being both buses and boats at different stages of their travels about London.

While putting this together, I found myself wondering, not for the first time in my life: why DUKW? Well, according to this:

D = First year of production code "D" is for 1942
U = Body style "U" utility truck (amphibious)
K = Front wheel drive. GMC still uses that on trucks today (K5 Chevy Blazer)
W = Two rear driving wheels (tandem axle)

So now you know.

I also learned on my google-travels that London is not the only city where DUKWs are still making themselves useful, and keeping people employed driving them and looking after them. They are to be found all over the place, it seems.

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Just watching the cricket between Zimbabwe and England today, I have a couple of further comments to add to what Brian was saying on Thursday.

The background to all this is that Henry Olonga in the recent World Cup wore a black arm band to mourn the death of democracy in Zimbabwe. (Olonga incidentally was in 1995 the first non-white player to play top level cricket for Zimababwe, although there have been many others since) Although he was a member of the Zimbabwe squad for the rest of the World Cup, he was not selected in any further matches in the tournament. Off the record, the team management admitted that they would have liked him to have played, but they were under pressure from the Mugabe government not to select him. The final stages of the tournament were played in South Africa, and it was revealed at the end of the tournament several members of the Zimababwean security forces had travelled to Zimbabwe to "escort" Olonga back to Zimbabwe after the last game so that he could be charged with treason. The South African government should have screamed in outrage at this violation of its sovereignty but didn't. Apparently good relations with the Mugabe regime are still important there.

Unsurprisingly, Olonga went into hiding and left South Africa, eventually turning up in England. Many of us thought that this was so outrageous that cricketing ties with Zimbabwe should be ended, at least for now. Over the past ten years, Zimbabwe had gone to some effort to build up a good cricket team, but by this point things had reached something of a sad, depressing joke. (Of course, the situation with the game of cricket was unimportant compared to the indignities being suffered by the people of Zimbabwe in general, but it was sadly symptomatic of it).

However, the Zimbabwe team's present tour of England went on as scheduled. The England Cricket Board (which isn't in a great financial state) needed the money. The Australian board, which is in a perfectly good financial state, also confirmed a tour for October, so the English board are not alone. The first game between Zimbabwe and England (which goes for five days) is presently being played.

As Brian said, there have been some protests against the game. Brian reported that Channel 4, the advertising funded but technically state owned television network that covers English cricket, used the rain delays in the match to provide some discussion of Mr Mugabe's vile regime, and to interview Henry Olonga.

However, turning on the match this morning, I discovered it was even better than this. Henry Olonga is actually working for Channel 4 as a commentator. I don't know if this is just for this match, or he will be doing it for the whole summer. Like Brian, I was very impressed by him. Olonga is very articulate and knowledgeable, and was doing an excellent job. Many television channels would just cover the sport and pretend that any political controversy was not happening. However, Channel 4, while still providing good cricketing coverage, has not done this at all. Not only have they given the state of Zimbabwe some attention, but they have actually given Henry Olonga some work. This is sporting coverage and not news coverage, so they haven't been overt about it, but in a nicely understated way that doesn't take anything away from the sporting coverage, they have made a statement. This is deeply classy.

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The Ministry of Defence is leaving no stone unturned in its investigations of the allegations against Colonel Tim Collins:

The Ministry of Defence said an inquiry into the death raised issues about the "wider military culture" within the unit which demanded further investigation.

Say it isn't so!! A 'military culture' in the British Army? Has the world gone stark raving mad? 'Military culture' has no place in our armed forces and it must be rooted out forthwith.

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The Royal Mail is to sell off the Post Office Underground Railway, better known as Mail Rail. For the uninitiated, this is basically the Crossrail project (the East-West rail link across London that is as eagerly anticipated by commuters as it is delayed by politicians and dreaded by taxpayers). The only differences: it exists in reality, not just as a gleam in John Prescott's eye, and it only carries sacks of mail. Millions of them per day. Like Crossrail, however, it is too expensive - the Post Office says it is simply not economic to run any more.

The Times [to which Samizdata does not link], asks in today's Leader for ideas on what use may be put to such a railway, bearing in mind it is only tall enough to carry passengers if they lie down like guests in a Japanese capsule hotel. Surely the collective ingenuity of Samizdata can come up with some good ideas?

Here's two to start the ball rolling:

• Cross-London packet sevice. Surely it could continue in its present role if anyone - private individual, corporation, courier or freight company - could use it. Modern barcode technology could make it easy to identify the right packet to serve up at the receiving station. Mail Rail is infrastructure; if the Post Office opened their pipes to competing "content", like telcos and ISPs do, then perhaps the infrastructure would be viable, and even extended?
• The real Crossrail. Wouldn't it be cheaper to widen a tunnel that already exists than to build a new one? Everyone knows that Crossrail is desperately needed if London is not to sieze up - and risk losing companies migrating elsewhere to restore the balance. Everyone also knows that the £4bn estimate is likely to be spent several times over before the system goes into service - these projects always overrun. Isn't this a good opportunity to cut costs?

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Britain has no future outside of the European Union. That's what the federasts keep telling us. That is the specious lie they've been peddling for years now. I can only assume that these people manage to sleep at night by consuming a quantity of sedatives fit to bring down a horse.

We have touched upon this issue before, but it is so significant that it bears practically no end of reiteration. Put simply, the EU is dying:

2050, the working population of the USA will have increased by more than the entire present working population of Germany.

EU 15, in contrast, will have lost almost as much working population by 2050 as the entire present working population of Germany.

Remaining EU 15 nations are projected to suffer losses in working population ranging from the manageable (France, minus 8%) to the catastrophic (Spain, minus 35%, Italy, minus 41%).

Tell me, what future is there in marrying a corpse?

[My thanks to Emmanuel Goldstein for the link.]

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Sometimes the views of Britain one reads in the American press suggest to me that the authors must have visited Britain in some parallel universe rather than the one I live in.

Every now and again however, I read an article that suggests not just that there are indeed commentators in the USA who understand Britain just fine, but that some of them understand the truth about Britain a great deal better than many British journalists and the majority of Britain's dismal political class.

The sad truth is that British journalists who are not sounding shrill and alarmed clearly have not grasped the magnitude of what is about to happen to the British people's remaining ability to live under accountable governance and accessible law. As a result, the only voices in Britain which seem to be aware of the rapidly approaching blackhole that the United States of Europe represents are the perpetually shrill and alarmist tabloid newspapers like the resolutely low-brow Sun newspaper.

Thus it is this tabloid rag that Washington Times journalist Paul Craig Roberts quotes extensively:

Next month, Mr. Blair intends to give his approval to a new European Union constitution, which would create a United States of Europe and turn Parliament into the equivalent of a local council.

Trevor Kavanagh, political editor of the Sun, Britain's largest newspaper, says Mr. Blair's decision signs away 1,000 years of British sovereignty and hands "control of our economic, defense, foreign and immigration policies to Brussels. The EU will also gain authority over our justice, transport, health and commerce systems and dictate the strength of union power."

Mr. Blair has ruled out a referendum or vote on his decision to terminate the existence of Britain as a country. He says the issue is too complicated for voters to understand.

Think about that for a moment. Do you think it is too difficult for people to understand the difference between being an independent country and a province in a European empire? Do you think voters can't understand the difference between electing a government that is accountable to them and being ruled from afar?

[...]

Britain's unique legal system, with its habeas corpus and double jeopardy protections, would cease to exist. Native Britons could be imprisoned for voicing opposition to their cities being overrun by Third World immigrants. But Mr. Blair thinks these changes are too difficult for British voters to evaluate.

[...]

Britons can be arrested for self-defense. Imagine having to decide whether to submit to rape, robbery or assault or face arrest for responding with excessive force. Force capable of driving off an attacker is likely to be "excessive," especially if accomplished with use of a weapon.

[...]

Habeas corpus and protection against double jeopardy mean little when criminal sanctions apply to self-defense and to children playing with toy guns. It might be that, practically speaking, the British have already lost the protection of their law. In choosing Mr. Blair, perhaps the British people showed an indifference to continued national sovereignty.

Read the whole article. I am indifferent to the fading vaingloriousness of states. However I am far from indifferent to a process that will lock in the ever increasing growth of state by making its power centres even more remote than they already are, thereby making them immune to even the weak checks and balances of locally sourced law and democracy.

Many have fought the advent of the European super-state in Britain, but it has just been one issue amongst many. Only now and oh so very belatedly have a few newspapers and media commentators picked up the horn and sounded it. Suddenly it is dawning on them that the battle has now reached the very last ditch almost unnoticed, whilst the mass of people sleepwalk towards the end of a thousand years of evolving political culture. Lose this one and there will be no more political means left for opposition. No doubt the perpetual growth of mass surveillance and the impending introduction of ID cards at this time is just a coincidence. Sure.

Welcome to a dying nation.

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Nice 'fisking' of Chirac's preparations of G8 summit agenda by Collins on Pave France based on yesterday's article in the Telegraph titled Chirac to embarrass Bush at G8 conference:

He said Evian's main goal would be "to build the institutions and rules of a global democracy, open and interconnected"

Translation: I'm going to feed Bush a steady line of Communist bullshit until he gets fed up and leaves. Once he is gone, I will take cheapshots at the U.S., and then deny them when later confronted.

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It isn't often that one finds a damning indictment of state regulation in the pages of the Guardian, so I cannot possibly let this opportunity slip by unblogged.

The background to this comes courtesy of one of these 'food safety scandals' that periodically burst into the media spotlight and engender all manner of 'shock, horror' headlines before slipping quietly down the memory hole into oblivion. This time, the scandal involves chicken. Or, more accurately, a simulacrum of chicken because it appears that the British market is being flooded with cheap chicken products that have been pumped with water to artificially inflate them and stuffed full of hydrogenated beef proteins.

And the distributors are getting away with it, despite the existance of a plethora of complex food safety and labelling regulations and whole slew of portentious-sounding Euro-agencies to enforce them. The Guardian's Felicity Lawrence is beside herself:

The food standards agency, which we might expect to be our champions in the matter of food quality, seems to think this is all right so long as someone mentions it on a label at some point. Except, of course, since they communicate in Euro-regulation speak, what the white rabbit actually says as he puts on his spectacles is: "This is a labelling issue and a composition issue. It is not a public safety issue."

So it turns out that all these bureaucrats are good for is issuing sanctimonious press releases and little else. I believe that Ms.Lawrence has (quite accidentally of course) stumbled upon the principle of moral hazard. She, like many others, has hitherto placed her faith in regulations and state enforcers to ensure the quality and safety she requires, only to find that she is left dangling when the crunch comes.

But her tale of woe does have a happy ending. Almost certainly through frustration rather than dazzling insight, Ms.Lawrence comes to exactly the right conclusion:

We must wake up to the reality and to the fact that no one but ourselves will sort it out. Don't buy cheap chicken.

Bingo! Hopefully Ms.Lawrence has now come to appreciate the perils of assigning over personal responsibility to agents of the state and then hoping and praying that they do the right thing by you. They rarely have and they rarely will.

Regulatory regimes are not just a waste of time and effort, they are actually damaging. They suck a huge amount of otherwise-productive wealth out of society that ends up translated into nothing except sinecure jobs and state pensions.

In any event, the only traders who bother to comply with all these regulations are the ones who are worried about their reputation and, ironically, it is those traders who can be relied upon to provide us with good quality products without the monkey of the state on their backs. They want to make money and stay in business and they don't achieve those aims by poisoning their customers or brushing them off with inferior, shoddy goods.

So let's take all these regulations and put them on a bonfire. Yes, there will still be rogues and con-men but, as this story has clearly illustrated, enacting more laws doesn't stop them anyway. The combination of profit-motive on the supply side and a bit of personal responsibility on the part of the consumer is a better recipe for safety and quality than any number of faceless pen-pushers wielding absurd and counter-productive diktats.

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Has Al-Qaeda hired the Monty Python team as political advisers? I only ask because of this surreal outburst:

O Muslims, take matters firmly against the embassies of America, England, Australia, and Norway and their interests, companies, and employees.

Let's get this straight; they're invoking Muslims to attack America (natch), England (obviously), Australia (not unexpected) and... Norway?!?!?!?!?!?

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A referendum on joining the Euro will cause "all-out internal civil war"

I never referred to... [civil war] in the Labour Party. Calling for a referendum... would launch a long civil war in the UK with everyone fighting everyone.

[Source: BBC News at Ten, BBC online]

Oh well, that's all right then.

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We in England have been neglecting Zimbabwe. There have been very few postings on the subject here lately, just this from me since the Iraq war, unless I missed something in my backtracking.

That is now changing. Today is day one of the test match cricket series between England and Zimbabwe. The first test is a Lords, the St Peter's Rome of cricket, and frankly the cricket has been fairly dreary. In a rain interrupted first session England, in the persons of Trescothick and Vaughan, managed 28 without loss. While I wrote what follows, England got to about 100 for the loss of Vaughan. (I could explain, but if you don't know what that means, you almost certainly don't care.)

But of course the real story is off the pitch, and frankly this aspect of the situation is proving a whole lot more satisfactory and less embarrassing than I for one had dared to hope.

Take the TV coverage so far, on Channel 4 TV. There has been some play, so that has focussed some attention on the situation. But the rain interruptions mean that Channel 4 have been wheeling out all their if-it-rains plans, and one of them concerns the matter of the, er, regime in Zimbabwe, and any demonstrations against and reactions to that regime.

There have already been demonstrations, both inside (one gutsy demonstrator made her point and got herself shepherded out) and outside the ground. And more to the point, much more to the point, Channel 4 have pointed their cameras at some of this.

If you know anything about TV sports coverage, you'll know that it can be very misleading when a real world news item erupts in its midst. The tiresome habit of certain English exhibitionists invading sports events in the nude was inflamed by the promise of TV coverage, and is now being suppressed by TV coverage of these idiots also being suppressed. When British soccer fans behave really, really badly, they don't always make it to the TV shows either. What actually happens between rival fans at Celtic v Rangers soccer matches in Glasgow, for example, is nobody's business, and certainly never gets to be the business of TV viewers in anything like its full lack of glory. All of which means that the Channel 4 recognition of the "regime problem" is very significant. An enthusiastic pro-Mugabe-ite watching the TV coverage here today would not be a happy bunny.

Pitch invader, demos outside the ground, mainstream news coverage of demos outside the ground, above all the prospect of this relentless drizzle of media focus going on and on throughout the tour, destroying all attempts to suggest that things out there are in any way normal – it's looking a lot worse than such a person would have been hoping for.

It may even be that the tour going ahead, but surrounded by the ever louder claim that it shouldn't have, is the worst possible media outcome for the "regime". I surely hope so.

Above all, there is Henry Olonga.

Olonga it was who, along with Andy Flower, wore a black armband in protest at the policies of his country's government in the first Zimbabwe game of the cricket World Cup, recently concluded in South Africa. It cost both of them their international cricket careers, certainly for the time being.

Olonga has just himself been interviewed on Channel 4, by TV pinup boy and cricket commentator Mark Nicholas, and he came across both as a formidably articulate critic and as a shrewd media operator. He thinks the tour shouldn't be happening at all, but now that it is, he is going to make as much media fuss around it as he can.

It turns out that Olonga is very British educated, having been born middle class in Zambia, brought up middle class in Kenya, and only arriving in Zimbabwe in the mid nineties. He is going to make an impact in England, I'm sure of it, if only because he's a character, his hair being African street but his voice being English posh.

Olonga is also a musician, which will add to whatever media fusshe manages to stir up. I really, really don't want this to be embarrassing. Embarrassing or not, if we want to piss off Robert Mugabe, we can all buy Henry Olonga's CDs. We don't have to listen to them, any more than we had to read The Satanic Verses.

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I went to see The Matrix Reloaded last night, with two other Samizdatistas, who will no doubt share their opinions with you here. Based on my impressions, which ranged from boredom to frustration with the pomposity of the characters, I concluded that the film is so firmly wedged up its own backside that it is unlikely to re-emerge for the next sequel due in November. The Matrix Reloaded is a far cry from the original film's mind-twisting plot, lacking its predecessor's film noir atmosphere and plausible ontological riddles.

David Edelstein of Slate has put it so much better:

The grim news is that The Matrix Reloaded is as messy and flat-footed as its predecessor is nimble and shapely. It's an ugly, bloated, repetitive movie that builds to a punch line that should have come an hour earlier (at least). Then it ends as it's just beginning: Stay tuned for The Matrix Revolutions, coming in November to 8,000 theaters near you.

Almost from the start, Reloaded feels different from the original—more stilted, mechanical, blockbuster-business-as-usual, Lucasoid. Dull staging, tin-eared dialogue (I haven't even told you about Eurotrash king and queen of evil, played by Lambert Wilson and Monica Bellucci), bad acting: What went wrong? Have the Wachowskis been pickling in their own self-importance for too long? When they made the original, they'd come off their terrific low-budget lesbian noir Bound (1996), and they gave The Matrix a lean, no-nonsense, B-movie thrust. Here they seem to be bogged down by their budget and by Owen Paterson's top-heavy sets, and almost every sequence goes on for too long and to no particular end.

We can speculate on these things when you've seen the movie. And you will see it—and maybe even convince yourself it's spectacular. (Some people thought The Phantom Menace [1999] was a good movie—there's a collective delusion for you.) But a bigger bang for your buck would be the Wachowskis' related package of nine short animated films, The Animatrix, which proves that peoplelike cartoons can be much more enlivening than cartoonlike people. In The Matrix, Neo broke through the artificial into the real; in The Matrix Reloaded, he's stuck in a bigger simulation, with no exit in sight.

I am sure this will upset many a Matrix affictionado. I too was genuinely looking forward to seeing the film. I loved the first one and still cannot comprehend how the same people managed to produce such stilted, pompous and at times boring sequel. Sure, the special effects are amazing and will enter the film-making history, just as the first one did. (The motorbike in the car chasing scenes did quicken even my pulse briefly.) But do they compensate for the feeble plot and insufferable dialogue? Well, I don't think so.

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...Natch!

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I'll bet that the EUnuchs are beside themselves with glee now that they have managed to co-opt the Pope:

Just three weeks before the EU membership referendum in Poland, Pope John Paul II has recommended that his compatriots join the European Union.

Sure to be seen as a benediction by many in Poland. Does the Pontiff not realise that the EU is the work of the Devil?

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Once in a blue moon I stumble across a story that appears so contrary and so bizarre that I honestly do not know what to make of it.

In fact, I had to stand up, breath deeply and take a walk around my apartment just to make sure I wasn't dreaming when I read that the Israelis have expressed an interest in joining the European Union:

"In principle, the minister thinks a possibility exists for Israel to join the EU, since Israel and Europe share similar economies and democratic values," said a spokesperson for Mr Shalom before adding, "it doesn't mean he is preparing the dossier for applying tomorrow".

MEP, Marco Pannella, of the Transnational Radical Party is said to be heading the campaign for Israeli membership and claimed on Tuesday that Israel does not exclude submitting an application for full membership during the term of this government.

Alright, no binding promises on the table but just the idea that this is even being floated at quite high-level raises a whole bevy of questions without, as far as I can tell, a single satisfactory answer.

First of all, is either party serious? For the EUnuchs it may be. They have made no secret of their ambitions to expand their sphere of influence over the Middle East and North Africa. But do they really think that they are going to be able to cope with the...er local difficulties?

And what about the Israelis? I can see the appeal of access to European markets for their industrial and agricultural output but have they stopped to contemplate the cost of the greatly increased regulatory burden that would be imposed on them? And what about defence and foreign policy, both of which would eventually have to be decided in Brussels? Not even for a fleeting second can I imagine the Israelis being willing to hand over their security to anyone, let alone the EU. Do they honestly imagine that the Belgians are going to come riding to their rescue should the need arise?

On the other hand, maybe it is not serious at all, in which case, what are the Israelis up to?

No, I'm afraid it's all a big mystery to me but then the opaque and shadowy labyrinth of international relations often are. Searching for solid intelligence amidst the power-plays, hidden agendas, ulterior motives and nuanced positions is enough to drive anyone to the edge of madness and I am not prepared to go that far.

I am just intrigued.

And, by the by, who the flaming hell are the 'Transnational Radical Party'? I have never heard of them and I can't be bothered to go googling for an answer but let's take it as read that I don't like the sound of them one little bit.

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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.

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On Monday night I watched a Channel 4 TV documentary about the battle between Lockheed and Boeing for the contract to build the next US jet fighter. Winner takes all, and Lockheed won with this. It's all completely new stuff to me, although I'm sure Dale Amon has been all over this for years.

At the end this show there was a tantalising reference to unmanned flight, in which, it just so happens, one of the companies that is doing best is … Boeing. Ever since I've been on the lookout for uses for this kind of aircraft, besides searching out and bombing enemies on a battlefield I mean. I'm sure Dale Amon has been all over that question as well, but to me, it's a new one. What can you do with these gismos? War, yes, but what else?

(By the way, I take it there are people on the ground paying attention to these things when they're in the air, and that they don't genuinely and completely fly themselves. Tell me this is true.)

In the small hours of Wednesday morning I found myself watching another TV documentary, this time about how they're using swarms of these unmanned planes to make better weather forecasts. And here's something else which was apparently made possible by unmanned flight, this time in the form of a movie about birds.

Any other offers? There have to be lots of other brilliant things you can do with flying robots. One obvious application springs to mind, which is unmanned cargo planes full of stuff which, at a pinch, you can stand to lose.

And what about stuff you can't afford to lose? How about "unmanned" passenger planes? After all, there are unmanned passenger trains now. We have them in London, on the Docklands Light Railway. So why not an unmanned 747? I can of course well imagine why not, but seriously, could that ever help at all?

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As I have had a couple lengthy e-mails asking me to explain my hostility to PoliticalCompass.org, I thought I would do so in a new post.

My big problem with PoliticalCompass.org is that it makes inherently statist and left/right valued assumptions to which there is no appropriate answer unless you share those assumptions, making the test fine if all the world fitted neatly into the left/right, socialist (US=liberal)/conservative continua... but the world just ain't that simple.

Although they claim to provide a more sophisticated representation of political views than the crudity of left and right, they in fact strip away some of the true issues that differentiate statists and anti-statists. At best they differentiate one form of statist from another, separating social democrats from communists from conservatives. If you think you can usefully differentiate an agorist or anarcho-capitalist libertarian from a minarchist libertarian from a Kritarchist libertarian using the political compass tests, you are sadly mistaken.

I would argue that as the very meaning of their 'libertarian' axis is badly flawed, if they tell you your political coordinates are x,y, as they have no real understanding of what one of the four axes represents, the test and thus the coordinates on the 'compass' it generates, are highly suspect, to put it mildly.

There is no such thing as voluntary collectivism when applied to an entire society, which means 'collectivist' libertarianism does not accept several liberty and thus is not libertarian at all: if you live collectively on a kibbutz, one day you may decide it was all a big mistake and just say "screw this crap" as you walk out the door. If the other people in the kibbutz use force to stop you leaving, it is they who are the criminals... try doing that in a collectivist society (which in reality means a collectivist state) and you will find that the door to a non-collective existence is in fact a prison cell or a chimney.

If the test can only work for 'some people' then the test itself is of dubious value if the idea is to be able to represent the totality of modern political beliefs in a succinct way. Given that 'libertarian' is on one axis, it seems perverse that the test does not 'work' for most self-described libertarians whilst at the same time 'working' just fine for violence based collectivists who call themselves socialist libertarians, like Noam Chomsky. But a violence backed command economy run at a local level is no less tyrannous than a violence backed command economy run from a centralised state: libertarianism without liberty? Oxymoronic. This test tells you nothing about the range of actual libertarian thought but reveals a great deal about the people behind PoliticalCompass.org.

Rather than defining 'libertarian' by the values actual libertarians hold, they are defining 'libertarian' by values people on the statist left and right ascribe to 'libertarians' based on what statists of all ilks regard as axioms that are beyond debate. As those axioms are in reality rejected by almost all libertarians, clearly the questions asked are pointless at best and misleading at worst.

I do not think the very concept of PoliticalCompass.org is itself flawed, just its execution. In all fairness I do note that since I initially savaged the test back twice in 2001, they have indeed refined it somewhat, though leaving the objects of my derision largely intact. Perhaps if they actually had some real libertarians helping them draw up the questions, as opposed to faux libertarian socialists, the concept might even work.

Just take the first question:

If globalisation is inevitable, it should primarily serve humanity rather than the interests of trans-national corporations

Clearly the question is framed in such a way that I am supposed to define 'humanity' as being in opposition to 'trans-national corporations'! If I do not accept there is even a dichotomy, I cannot answer the question at all. It may be easy to define 'trans-national corporations', but what exactly is meant by 'humanity'? Peasant farmers in Guatemala are no doubt what the framers of PoliticalCompass.org had in mind.

What may surprise some is that I do indeed regard some 'trans-national corporations' as really quite toxic organisations to 'humanity' not because they are trans-national or corporations but because they use their money and influence to get states to distort and politicise trade in their favour. Yet I wonder if small information technology enabled but enthusiastically trans-national companies with HQ's in Russia or Croatia are what they had in mind, rather than large banana companies with HQ's in the United States? Are these companies in opposition to the general weal of humanity? Somehow I don't think so, so how exactly do I answer such a question?

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Robert Theron Brockman II observers how not to liberate a country from tyranny and chaos

It seems that the United States government has decided to disarm the Iraqi populace as part of its newly found desire to restore order.

This smells like the sort of thing that could lead to disaster, for all the usual reasons – only outlaws will have guns and whatnot. And if any population needs to be armed as a check on a potentially tyrannical government, it is the population of Iraq.

It almost seems like a clerical error – surely the guys who were the driving force behind the invasion over at Central Command aren’t gun control nuts, are they? 

This seems like a good basis for a lively discussion here at Samizdata.

Robert Theron Brockman II

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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.

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From the ever alert b3ta.com comes news of giant microbes. My favourite is the common cold.

Billions of people a year catch the cold. Now you can get one too -- without getting sick! Learn all about the Common Cold with this cuddly companion.

GIANTmicrobes, in a fit of propriety, calls these things "health dolls". No GIANTmicrobes, they're sickness dolls.

What, you are probably asking, does this mean for the prospects of western civilisation, immediate and longer term? I do not know. They are cute, I think.

This, on the other hand, also via b3ta, has got to be bad news for France.

And what does this (linked to yesterday by Dave Barry) say about Denmark?

COPENHAGEN, Denmark - The director of a Danish art museum was acquitted on charges of animal cruelty Monday after a court said a display with goldfish in 10 blenders that visitors could turn on, wasn't cruel.

Peter Meyer, director of the Trapholt Art Museum in Kolding, drew international notoriety in February 2000 after the art exhibit, featuring the goldfish, was dubbed cruelty to animals.

The display's blenders were plugged in and visitors were invited, if they wanted, to blend the fish. Somebody did and two goldfish were ground up.

Animal rights activists complained and the exhibit continued after the blenders were unplugged. Danish police fined Meyer 2,000 kroner (US$315) for animal cruelty but when he refused to pay it, the case went to court in Kolding, 200 kilometers (125 miles) west of the capital, Copenhagen.

Judge Preben Bagger said Monday that Meyer didn't have to pay the fine because the fish were killed "instantly" and "humanely."

During the two-day trial, experts including a zoologist and a representative of the blender manufacturer, Moulinex, said the fish likely died within a second after the blender started.

If someone blended me in a Moulinex, the fact that it took only a second for me to die my hideous death would, for me, be little consolation. What kind of a person unleashes a horror story like this?

The installation was the work of Chilean-born Danish artist Marco Evaristti. Beside the blenders, the temporary exhibit also included a nude picture of the artist with blackened eyes and a bazooka missile surrounded by tubes of lipstick.

And there was me thinking he might be some kind of freak.

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He has the gall to (metaphorically) dig up J S Mill's dead body, sit it next to him, do a ventriloquist's act with the dead skull, and then to say, "look - Mill agrees with me."

Hattersley claims that Mill would have joined him in wanting schools to be banned from teaching creationism. Here's the offending article. Yes, I know that Mill sometimes departed from pure classical liberalism, but if there was one thing that he, writing in an age riven by religious controversy and when religious organisations provided the majority of British primary education, would have recognised as a test case for liberty it would be the right of religious people to propagate their beliefs to their children as they see fit. Yet Hattersley writes:

"We need to decide where individual freedom begins and ends. Fortunately, we have John Stuart Mill to guide us. He was a passionate opponent of what vulgarians call "the nanny state". So he insisted that: "All the errors which [we are] likely to commit against advice and warning are far outweighed by the evil of allowing others to constrain (their neighbours) for their own good." But, while we must be free to harm ourselves, there can be no freedom to "injure the interests of one another, or rather certain interest which, either by express legal provision or tacit understanding, ought to be considered as rights." It is surely self-evident that to teach in schools that Eve was created from Adam's rib injures children's interests. They either go into the world believing manifest nonsense, or spend their adolescence under the impression that their teachers are cranks."

I may not have my copy of On Liberty to hand, but thanks to the internet, I can nail that one. Back before I lost the book I put an entry in my blog about Mill's very explicit view that propagating mistaken beliefs did NOT constitute an injury to another's rights. A quick Google search called it up. When the secretary of the Alliance, an organization agitating for the prohibition of alcohol, said, "I claim, as a citizen a right to legislate whenever my social rights are invaded by the social act of another," Mill replied:

"So monstrous a principle is far more dangerous than any single interference with liberty; there is no violation of liberty which it would not justify; it acknowledges no right to any freedom whatsoever, except perhaps to that of holding opinions in secret, without ever disclosing them: for the moment an opinion which I consider noxious passes any one's lips, it invades all the 'social rights' attributed to me by the Alliance."

From memory that passage comes very soon after the passage Hattersley quotes. How on earth did Hattersley come to miss it? Don't answer that! And how, too, did he come to claim Mill as an ideological ally given Mill's view, expressed in the same book, that Hattersley's beloved state education was a thoroughly bad thing:

"A general State education is a mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mold in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government--whether this be a monarch, a priesthood, an aristocracy, or the majority of the the existing generation--in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by natural tendency to one over the body."

(Quote found via Improved Clinch)

I haven't touched here on Hattersley's remarks on extending anti-discrimination legislation to cover sexuality even for religious schools who hold homosexuality to be a sin, nor on his views about halal slaughter. But I am pretty sure that on those topics, too, Hattersley vilely misrepresents the inferences it is possible to make from J S Mill's writings when he (Hattersley) concludes his article thus:

No doubt the government will behave in that way as it examines "creationist" teaching, employment discrimination and ritual slaughter. Unfortunately, it will take as its text not On Liberty but the recent report of a focus group.

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Michael Totten has stepped in that steaming pile on the information superhighway known as PoliticalCompass.org and thereby concluded he is 'one of us'... well... sort of.

Now as Michael is a thoughtful sort of leftie, it would pain me not at all if he holds onto that thought and bounces it around for a while. Maybe he will conclude that rational libertarianism may indeed be a better intellectual home for him than either the statist left or statist right.

However he will not find the answers to that question by taking the preposterous test offered by PoliticalCompass.org

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As a rebuttal to all those bloggers who think that the BBC has a left-wing bias, I refer you to this hysterical nonsense:

Gun crime is growing in the UK "like a cancer", police chiefs were warned on Tuesday.

The Association of Chief Police Officers' annual conference was told by the organisation's firearms spokesman: "It's coming your way, believe me."

How can they possibly expect any halfway sensible person to believe rubbish like this? Don't they realise that our government has enacted the most draconian and prohibitive anti-gun laws in the developed world? No, scrub that, the entire cosmos. So this cannot possibly be happening. It is nothing but a tissue of bald-faced lies. In fact, it's probably a fabrication by some bunch of swivel-eyed, right-wing, warmongering lunatics intent on trying to give the completely false impression that our noble and progressive anti-self-defence laws are not working.

Do not click on the link. Do not read the article. I do not want our readers minds to be poisoned by this filthy propoganda. Go away. Move onto the next posting. Find another blog. Now!

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Anyone who regularly peruses the left-wing press in this country (and I congratulate them on their intestinal fortitude) would be left with the impression that Britain is rapidly turning into Galt's Gulch, a rugged, darwinian, freewheeling gold-rush society where tax collectors have been beaten into plough-shares and the shrivelled remnants of the government have been consigned to a mildew-ridden basement room beneath Whitehall with a second-hand computer and a solitary, naked lightbulb.

You can hardly flick through the pages of any centre-left journal without being assailed by some chest-beating, polemical op-ed excoriating New Labour for abandoning socialist principles in favour of 'market forces' and 'Thatcherism'. They bewail the alleged unstoppable growth of 'free market mania' and demand that the government return to the old agenda of wealth redistribution and public ownership immediately if not sooner.

Those of us living on Planet Earth don't quite see it that way. Like the insensitive dolts we doubtless are, we have noticed the extra chunks of GDP that have been grabbed by the government every year since 1997. Nor has it escaped our attention that the 'Careers Section' of the Guardian has grown as thick as a telephone directory, replete with advertisements for government sinecures.

Well, boorish we may be but it appears that us Earthlings are right:

Chancellor Gordon Brown's tax increases are threatening the competitiveness of the UK economy by increasing the burden on entrepreneurs, according to Forbes Global.

Although France maintains its position at the top of the misery index, Forbes detects "an important change in the Misery Index for the UK. For the first time, and surprisingly, it is rising by more than France's Misery Index is decreasing." The magazine blames increased social security taxes for this development, but says it will still take many years for the UK to "catch up" with France.

I cannot think of a more appropriate term than 'Misery Index' and, believe me, I have tried.

But back to the nitty-gritty. Why this disconnect between perception and reality? Well, it is because Blair and New Labour have pulled off a pretty audacious trick (and it's a good trick, I'll grant you) by constructing a convincing and polished patina of 'Thatherite' rhetoric full of phrases like 'modernisation' and 'reform' and 'consumer choice' which they have used to mask a stealthy but relentless old socialist agenda.

The inescapable truth (for Earthlings that is) is that, over the last six years, the wealth-creating private sector has been subjected to a ferocious blood-letting in order to feed the voracious appetites of the public sector triffids who, in turn, (and by complete coincidence, of course) vote en bloc for New Labour. Combine this with the gradual 'Europeanisation' of our regulatory and legal regime and the result is that a once thriving economy has been plunged into misery of near-Gallic proportions.

There isn't a single state in the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), the only area where comparisons can usefully be made, that is taking less tax from its citizens in 2001 than it was in 1965.

I take no comfort from that fact that we are not alone. If everybody is on the same path of slow-suicide this only serves to convince the looters in Whitehall that they are doing the right thing after all.

Forbes asks: "Are we really living in an era of smaller government?"

No. Nor is that era close at hand. But we're working on it, Mr.Forbes, we're working on it.

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Salam Pax posted a big update yesterday, with photographs taken during a trip from Baghdad to Basra via Najaf.

So, those of you who thought he was not 'for real'... has this changed your mind? Whilst it is difficult to be sure, I have always suspected the 'Baghdad Blogger' was exactly what he said he was.

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As a break from the usual tread-mill of Libertarian Principles, here is a story that best reflects the 'quagmire' Britain got itself into by having anything to do with the EU and the countries using its institutions to their advantage. Despite the ravenous inclusiveness of the European Union, the one thing there is no room left for is common sense.

The European Court of Justice in Luxembourg ruled that Italian Parma ham must be packed and sliced in Parma itself to be marketed with its name of origin. The Asda supermarket chain has lost its legal battle to carry on selling Italian Parma ham, because it is packed and sliced in Britain.

Asda's Parma ham comes from Parma, but it is sliced and packaged near Chippenham in Wiltshire. Its delicatessen Parma ham also comes from Parma - but is sliced in its stores, in front of the customer. European judges have ruled that this is not enough under EU law to justify using the name.

Maintaining the quality and reputation of Parma ham justifies the rule that the product must be sliced and packaged in the region of production.

According to The Daily Telegraph Asda claimed the Italian law was not part of EU law and could not be applied in the UK, but ham from Parma was registered under a 1992 EU rule protecting the use of geographical names on some products. The battle went to London's High Court, which passed the matter to the Luxembourg judges for a ruling on the EU's Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) law.

The Parma ham producers' association, which owns the trademark Prosciutto di Parma, has been seeking an injunction against Asda since 1997. Consorzio del Prosciutto di Parma won the battle despite judge's recommendation to overturn the relevant European regulation and the advice the European Court of Justice received by one of its own members to invalidate the European Union rule.

As Asda representative said last year:

No one doubts that Scotch beef remains Scottish if sliced in Southampton; Jersey potatoes are still Jerseys when boiled in Blackpool; and cheddar cheese is still cheddar if grated in Gretna.

In most cases the court follows such advice, for example, the European court's advocate general delivered a similar opinion in a case brought against a company that grates the hard Italian cheese Grana Padana in France.

Not this time though. When you next eat your Parma, you can rejoice in the knowledge that it has been subjected to the traditionally tough quality control by its Italian producer. I suppose there is a first for everything...

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Not everything in this will make sense to everyone. Who's Biagi? Just someone they quite like but argue with a lot, if memory serves. Who, for that matter, is Tupy, the poster of the bit below? He's one of their ex-activists, now making his presence felt in the USA.

So, the Liberty Club AGM is over and I have just been e-mailed the names of the new LC committee members. Some of them I know and some of them I don’t know. But what struck me about the new composition of the LC leadership is how “diverse” it is. Yuck – the “d” word again! Still, the new LC committee will transcend the boundaries of gender, race and sexual orientation. And the best part is that none of that had to be doctored! The LC does not have a specific committee position for women, gays or non-Europeans and yet it attracts all these people. Why? Because freedom is close to their heart and they are prepared to work for it. Eat that Biagi!

Liberty Club – you rock!

After a brief flirtation with Scotland, it would seem from that last bit that Tupy is becoming a full-blown American.

Seriously, what this shows is how tenacious intellectual traditions at universities can be. And isn't it interesting how these university covens are staying in touch these days, via the internet?

Mind you, if the circa 2000 Liberty Club crowd do stay connected and have consequences, they won't be the first St Andrews alumni to do this. St Andrews was the cradle, a quarter of a century ago and more, of this.

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Cultural commentator - from a generally conservative vantage point - David Brooks has some interesting things to note about the popularity of men's magazines like Maxim, and about what this says about our culture. In a nutshell, he suggests that this shows that the advance of feminism and even political correctness (however you want to define that) may not have produced the results some commentators may have wanted.

He also makes the point, which to my mind rang true, that 'reactionary' attitudes are often not the preserve of the upper classes, but often most deeply held elsewhere, such as among America's rap music artists. Here's a nice quote:

We have a dynamic urban culture that treats women like whores and that regards owning a Mercedes as the highest possible human aspiration, and the leading articulators of progressive opinion have nothing to say about it. They can't seem to bring themselves to admit out loud that their most effective ideological enemies have turned out to be the same underprivileged people they wanted to rescue from oblivion.

This observation is hardly new. Yet even someone like yours truly, who likes to watch action movies, dreams of fast cars and feels no shame in enjoying pictures of lovely women, can feel a bit troubled about where things can be headed. I don't know if the kind of things Brooks frets about are problems that have to be 'fixed' in some way.

There definitely has been something of a backlash in parts of our culture against the dictates of political correctness. It doesn't surprise me all that much that the kind of mindless dreck published by the Maxim mags of this world is so popular. Maybe we are just observing the cultural equivalent of Newton's law at work - every action has an equal and opposite reaction. It applies to space rockets and it applies to culture as well, maybe.

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First they went for New York, then they hit Bali, now they are hitting their own backyard. This is terrorism back in serious business? That's what I was thinking, and now this guy, damn him, an unnamed e-mailer to this has said it all for me. Best to read the whole thing, but here are a few key paragraphs:

The most telling aspect of these last two attacks is the geographic locations – Arabic countries nearby radical Islamist regimes. In the case of Saudi Arabia, parts of their own country can be considered radically Islamist; Morocco’s location adjacent to Algeria has always made it a prime target.

Why did they hit New York? Because they could. Now, they can't. Why did they hit Bali? Because they could. Now they can't. So why are they now hitting their own back yard? Because they can. And that's all they can.

Why is this telling? These locations are within the “local” sphere of Arabic influence. The infrastructure and resources required to bring the fight to the enemy’s territory (us) has been effectively disrupted. Logistical planning and operational expertise has been effectively eliminated. Al-Qaeda can rely only on local extremist support, as that is what is left. The low-tech, Palestinian method, effectively demonstrates that few resources are available and that the imagination and planning required for more sophisticated attacks is just not present.

Well maybe it's not all they can now hit, and sometime Real Soon Now maybe they'll prove me, and this guy, wrong. I'm only optimistic that they won't hit New York (or London, or Paris, or Rome) because a lot of smart and hardworking people are absolutely not taking this for granted. It's like how you back a good sports team to win their big game, precisely because they don't assume that they'll win, that being all part of what makes them so good.

That necessary caveat aside, my bet about how things are now going is the same as this guy's bet:

The war on terror has been a success. The arena has not shifted. The roll back continues. Arabic countries have now been forced into the realization that, for their own survival, these groups must be destroyed. These regimes are nothing if not ruthless. Expect a surge of beheadings in the near future.

Soon, in other words, they won't even be able to hit their own back yard. With luck, and lots more not taking things for granted by our team, there will then, or eventually (after a few more horrors in out of the way spots), be a long period of silence. And then slowly, very slowly, it will dawn on everyone that it just might be … over.

And the moral is, if you have a clever thought, post it fast, or someone else will get to it first.

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I'm not sure that there's any libertarian principle that objects to planned failure in DVDs, or that there's any logical distinction in the comparative consumer rights between DVD rental and DVD self-destruction. For that matter I'm not sure that there's a logical distinction between (the much maligned) software rental contracts and leasehold on real estate, not while there is Copyright protection, anyway.

I am sure, however, that a great many people of all stripes, including the most avowedly propertarian libertarians, hate the tendency in the entertainment and consumer software industries to enforce their intellectual property rights and create new, lesser rights in their products in which to sell licenses. I am also sure that Copyright is simply losing the minimal respect that is required for a law to be effective. That libertarians should be part of this too should tell us something. After all, we seem quite happy to take un-PC views on the side of big-oil, big-pharmacy, big-tobacco, big-corportate-bogeyman-of-the-week - and revel in how contrarian we seem, how opposed to the "idiotarian" received wisdom. Why not do we not support big-Hollywood too?

Libertarians are generally a pretty law-abiding bunch and, to the extent that they are not, certainly don't boast or casually recount their crimes against property in fora such as Samizdata. But admission of "intellectual property theft" somehow has no stigma. No doubt I will be answered by a clamour of Samizdatistas saying that they disapprove, but I know that many openly engage in filesharing. I am also firmly convinced that much of the support for Napster Inc. and their ilk (the "potential legal uses" defense) is in large part a rationalisation - believed to be true, insofar as it goes, but far from the main motivation for such voluble outrage in their defense.

So what does libertarian antipathy to these developments, and support for filesharing, tell us? I've been meaning to write about this for some time, so let's test a few hypotheses.

1. That when it touches their lives directly, Libertarian principles go out the window and short-term self-interest reigns.

   Not likely. DVDs, Napster/Kazaa/Gnutella and Microsoft Passport may affect libertarians directly. But so do schools, NHS services, and the London underground, as well as passive smoking, GM foods, and the family of asylum seekers moving into the B&B next door. This hypothesis doesn't give a convincing explanation of why libertarians side with the "standardised concerned citizen" on intellectual property, while opposing the stereotype on so many other issues of equal personal relevence.

2. Libertarians are luddites. Any change is seen as threatening.

   This hypothesis is laughable on the face of it. Most libertarians aren't Extropians, but most do have broad sympathy with a watered-down version of that philosophy, while smiling benignly on its kookier limits. If a news story says that scientists have grown a replacement human arm in a jar, a potato that cures hemorrhoids, or built a car that drives itself, you can expect Samizdata to be full of rejoicing, not laden with predictions of woe.

   It is true that libertarians really do believe that government only ever makes things worse, and this is reflected in their instinctive reaction to just about any government initiative: any new policy is greeted with deep scepticism at best, even when it seems obvious to a neutral observer that had incumbent policy been the new one, and the change been in the other direction, libertarians would be roundly decrying the destruction of freedom and western civilisation.

   But the entertainment and software industries are not government bodies, they're the "big business" libertarians usually revel in defending. Out goes all pretense that libertarians are just indulging their knee-jerk anti-government emotions. Something else is going on.

3. Libertarians don't like "rental" licenses, only full ownership. A variant on (2) above, but applied to specifically to business model instead of product.

   This hypothesis doesn't explain why so many support or excuse Napster/Kazaa/Gnutella, which undermine sales of "proper" DVDs and software programs and are a major impetus behind short-life business models such as "pay-per-view" and software rental (OK, the rental payments don't address filesharing specifically, but the new business model is designed to support constant updates and required real-time online access to the vendor's infrastructure, which is a response to filesharing. Trust me on this).

   Anyway, if libertarians are happy to rent their homes, their cars and their space in the traffic jam, why would they object to paying each time they want to see "Sigorney Weaver kills yet more Aliens" or play Doom XXVII?

   Something else is going on.

4. Libertarians want something for nothing.

   This hypothesis alleges that libertarians expect some other agency (the industry, government etc) to continue to provide entertainment goods without charge to the consumer. For the response read Chapter 1 in The Standard Manual of Libertarian Dogma, or check the index under TANSTAAFL.
   

So if none of the obvious hypotheses are convincing, perhaps there really is something different about what is happening in the entertainment and software industries that libertarians have intuited, but not yet fully described.

My theory is this:

Libertarians, in common with most other ordinary people, have finally decided that they don't believe in Intellectual Property Rights.

There's been an ongoing discussion about this in the more theoretical reaches of the libertarian world for many years now, and there have been adherents to both camps. But I'm not really talking about a reasoned defence: I'm talking about an emotional commitment.

Libertarians have an emotional commitment to property rights. They don't just believe in them as a reasoned, pragmatic response to certain identified problems, they - WE - feel in our gut that property is good. It is morally right that you should own stuff, and that when you own it you should be be able to do with it as you choose. If someone tries to interfere with your stuff or take it for themselves then it is not just morally justified for you to defend it, but we'll all have a sneaking admiration for you if you take the opportunity to convince the malefactor of the error of his ways while you're about it.

All the rest - the empirical knowledge of the chaos of collectivism and the horrors of big-C Communism, the deep economic analysis of the price mechanism and the profit motive, the easily digestible stories of the "invisible hand" and the division of labour, and the highly indigestible praxeology of the Austrians and the intellectually respectable homegrown IEA -- all of that, it just goes to support and reinforce and justify an emotional commitment to the concept pf Property, which we know, in our gut, to be right anyway.

Intellectual Property is qualitatively different to physical property (either land or chattels). If I take of your land or chattels then, to the extent that I have more, you have less.

True property is a zero-sum game - not in value terms (when I have 2 cabbages, I have one more than I will eat before it goes mouldy, and exchanging my second cabbage for your second chicken probably creates new value), but certainly so in terms of my possessions: if you take my second cabbage, I cannot give it to my neighbour for his dinner. Free exchange adds to the sum of human happiness, but it doesn't break the Law of the Conservation of Energy. Misunderstanding what is and what is not a zero-sum gain when dealing in property (getting it precisely the wrong way around) is at the root of many failings of socialist economics.

Intellectual Property works the other way around. If I upload my copy of The Matrix to you, it doesn't stop me then giving it to my neighbour, and his neighbour, and his neighbour, ad infinitum. Warner Bros doesn't lose anything it can sell, at least not in the same way that they do if I pinch the DVD from the counter at Woolworths.

But Warner Bros does lose something. It loses a portion of the value of its product, which lies entirely in the extent to which it has a monopoly on supply. For all the arguments (frankly, excuses) about how "I wouldn't buy it anyway" and "I buy more music when I can check if I like it by downloading the MP3 first", in terms of Kant's Categorical Imperative Warner Bros gets screwed: if everyone did the download, Warner Bros wouldn't earn a dime.

Of course, the value of blacksmiths' businesses went down when Henry Ford got going, so a loss in value to Warner Bros isn't in itself necessarily a reason not to do it, indeed to suppose it does rather begs the question. But we shouldn't pretend that they won't lose out.

So, to recap, with traditional property you might create value by moving it from one person to another, but you will reduce their possessions; but with intellectual property you will reduce the rights-holder's value and you will not reduce anyone's possessions.

There's a whole bunch of consequentialist complications with intellectual property industries (personally, I don't see any real threat to making music, which any artist can now record and publish from his bedsit - but how a future movie blockbuster could possibly be made without IP protection is beyond me) - but let's pass by all that and assume, for the sake of argument, that either human ingenuity will conquor all, or that the IP industries will go the way of Gothic cathedrals, or both, or (most likely) that something entirely unforeseeable would happen.

We're still part-way through explaining why libertarians, of all people, seem to show no respect for Intellectual Property rights. Let's look at what these rights actually are, which are under attack, how, and why:

• Trademarks
• the law of Confidence and Trade Secrets
• "moral rights"
• Patents
• Design rights
• Copyright

• Trademarks

  Nobody much seems to have a big problem with these. They may seem just as "artificial" as any other IP right, but neither libertarians nor others are complaining that it is an infringment on my free speech that I cannot describe my own cocktail of fizzy sugars as "Coke".

  Trademarks are an extension of the common law of passing off (the rule that you must not sell a thing by misrepresenting its provenence) which is in itself an expansion and clarification of rules against fraudulent dealing. Trademarks are an administrative convenience, which remove some of the defences to the common law of passing off, and create a irrebuttable presumption of guilt in certain circumstances, all with the intention of levelling the playing field in favour of the single target under attack from a swarm of fly-by-night imitators.

  The only serious complaints about trademarks I have heard recently have been complaints about Internet domain names being taken from protestors, who want to use a web site address containing the trademark to bad-mouth the company or its product (www.acmecorporationsucks.com). This is a marginal complaint about application, and does not constitute a serious attack on the principle of trademarks.

  
  

• The law of confidence and Trade Secrets

  Another potential restraint upon "free speech", this is your right to prevent your doctor telling the tabloids about your syphilis. It is also an employer's right to expect his employee to get on with keep quiet while they fix a problem instead of scaring all the customers away. It is also his right to stop his employee revealing the Colonel's Secret Recipe.

  Confidence is an extension of the law of contract: if I contract with you to keep schtum you should, and if we enter into a contractual relationship and I don't explicitly enjoin your silence, then that expectation can sometimes be implied along with the expectation that you won't spit in the soup you just served me.

  The law of confidence extends this to certain cases where the law doesn't recognise an actual contract. Doctors, when providing free treatment, are a good case in point.

  Various whistleblower laws have been nibbling at the edges of the application of this principle, while new protections for "privacy" have been extending it slightly in other cases. Fundamentally, though, it is well founded and not under attack on principle.

  
  

• Moral rights

  This is the right of an artist not to have his work altered after he's sold it in a way that makes him look a fool or an incompetant. Alternatively, it's the right of the artist to have his name taken off the work if it is so altered.

  Moral rights are not recognised in some legal jurisdictions, and in some where they are they can be contracted out of, which rather defeats the purpose.

  To the extent that they infringe on freedom of contract libertarian doctrine is opposed to moral rights. On the other hand, for a film studio to claim that Billy Writer was responsible for the absurd, sentimental mish-mash that made it through the production process is, in extremis, a serious slur on his reputation. And we do have libel laws for that sort of thing, so why not a particular legal right tailored for the particular situation but based on the same principle?

  However moral rights' patchy implementation, even lesser enforcement, and the fact that they only really impinge on real artists and authors (and their employers and direct customers) means this is not a topic of widespread interest.

  
  

• Patents

  Strictly speaking a patent is a precise description of how to build an object - and the monopoly right to build that exact widget, for a limited term.

  The American Founding Fathers said that this was for the advancement of science. Most people like the idea that James Dyson, back-bedroom inventor of colorful and powerful vacuum-cleaners, gets a decent crack at getting rich rather than losing out to copycat products from incumbent manufacturers like Hoover. Libertarians are well known for supporting drug patents in the face of criticisms that they price drugs out of the affordable range of patients who die when they don't receive them. To quote the decidedly un-libertarian TV series The West Wing:

  Toby: The pills cost them 4 cents a unit to make. Josh: You know that's not true. The second pill cost them 4 cents. The first pill cost them $400 million.

  The concept of patents is being criticised at the moment in three main areas: genome research and the like, software, and patents for business models.

  Genome research is alleged to be a discovery, not an invention: it is argued that not only does this mean it is not a "machine" legally capable of being patented, but also that while the suction-pump on a Dyson may be nifty there are other ways of getting dust of the carpet; whereas there is only one true set of bases in the 103rd gene on the 22nd chromosome, and "you can't patent a fact".

  Patents for software algorithms are attacked on the same basis. While software programs, like Microsoft Word, are protected by copyright, it is currently possible in some cases to obtain a patent from the US patent office for any conceivable implementation of a particular computation formula (algorithm). For example, compression algorithms: if you apply a particular set of calculations to a set of data, it is possible to compress that data so that it takes less disk space. GIF is an image format that describes an image on the screen containing 480,000 pixels each with any of 16million colours, for a total of 11,520,000 bits (or about 1.4Mb) compressed into a file of maybe 2,048,000 bits (or a much more faster download of 250kb). GIF depends on the LZW compression mechanism, which is an algorithm patented by Unisys. It doesn't matter in what software language you rewrite that formula, Unisys are still asking for their patent license fees. Needless to say, some people say "Algorithm = formula = maths = truth = unpatentable".

  Perhaps the most surprising patents have been for business models. Ebay has tried patenting online auctions, Amazon has patented its "One-Click" ordering, various different people have been awarded patents which, as reported to a laymen by a lay journalist, appear to grant them exclusive rights to any business mechanism characterised by my computer buying something from your computer without either of us being aware of the specific transaction. Keep checking the papers; this story will run and run.

• Design rights

  Design rights are simply a cross between trademarks and patents: they protect the individuality of the look of your product. The distinctive shape of the Coca-Cola bottle, the green and gold of anything from Harrods (even if you call yourself Harold's), the beaming furriness of a stuffed Bugs Bunny in any size or deportment, these things are all protected by design rights. And most everybody reckons it's OK for the law to protect this, because only Coca-cola is Coke (tm).

• Copyright

  Despite much aggro in the world of patents, Copyright is where the action is.

  Rights holders are extending the utility of their rights both through technology and through aggressively-lobbied legislation. Copyright term protection has increased from 18 years to 30 years to 50 years to 70 years. The software industry has avoided the most product liability and fitness for purpose regulation by imposing "contractual license terms" on customers that depend, for their applicability, on the notion that you must copy software to your PC in order to run it, and so once you've bought the program disc you still need to contract for a license. Under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, and the similar European Copyright Directive, you can't even alter the protected item for your own use, e.g. making a DVD designed for Region 1 (USA) play in Region 2 (UK). And, of course, the music and movie and software industries are all trying to move to a pay-per use model, thereby capturing repeat payments from all those who don't need yet another new wordprocessor for their personal letters and like the Beatles, not Ms Dynamite.

  
  Rights holder organisations have Congress, Parliament, the Council of Ministers, WIPO and the 9th Circuit (on both sides of the Atlantic) in the palm of their hand. Nonetheless, the RIAA, MPAA, SPA, MCPS, BSA and the rest of the alphabet soup are all running scared. How can this be?

  It's because while companies that get even moderately successful at abusing other companies' intellectual property rights make a nice easy target for a lawsuit, it is much, much harder to get gazillions of consumers to behave themselves if they don't want to. Most of all, it's because such mis-behaviour became so easy when everyone got on the Internet. Films are still very slow and painful to share; software is much easier, and has a longer payoff for the consumer who downloads it; but music - ah, music.

  Time was, you'd go to the music store and browse through stacks of vinyl; top 10 singles sold millions and album covers were works of art in their own right. Now, people start playing one track, think of another, find it, and can have it downloaded and ready to play while the first one's still annoying the neighbours. The only thing stopping the Internet using public doing this freely is their personal belief that this is morally wrong. And, quite simply, people just don't think that.

  Filesharing programs like Napster and Kazaa depend upon people giving away their music etc., while downloading new stuff from others. They get no direct benefit from doing so, indeed it might even slow down their own downloads, and some programs provide a simple switch to stop sharing your own stuff. The system appears to be open to an enormous free-rider problem, but it doesn't actually seem to suffer at all.

  When upstanding citizens do something represensible normally they feel a twinge of guilt. If you park on a double-yellow line you don't shop with a clear conscience, and it's not just the fear of traffic wardens. Saving extreme anarchists, there's a slight twinge when you lie on your tax return, however swiftly it is assuaged by the "free beer" bought with the little less of your hard-earned that's going to Uncle Sam for division between starving indigents and middle-class holders of bureaucratic sinecures. Should an allegedly respectable citizen walk out of a shop 'accidentally' wearing the dress she tried on in the fitting room, she certainly won't chat idly about her 'bargain' with her friends. Chances are, the guilt and shame will prevent the dress ever being worn at all.

  Filesharing is different. If you watch a file upload complete, you don't feel a twinge of guilt that EMI have just lost a sale that was rightfully theirs to some unknown music-lover in Korea. You feel a sense of pride, of satisfaction that your taste in Country-Soul-Rap-Swing is not entirely without company, and you feel a sense of duty-discharged; you have done your bit to give back to the community that so kindly donated your 60Gb of wall-shaking, neighbour-deafening, environmental-health-officer taunting Mike Oldfield tracks.
  

Which brings me back to the Libertarians. Libertarians, though I love you dearly, can be some of the most self-righteous, morally censorious, dogmatic people I've ever come across. I know one who spent 10 months of unemployment steadfastly refusing to claim State benefits while her life savings drained away, and no attempt to persuade her that it was just a refund on her taxes shook her determination not to compromise her beliefs. I myself have some of these tendencies, and admit to being a little too quick to sneer at those who profess that taxation is theft from their government-grant-funded lecture halls. Yet card-carrying libertarians, myself included, just don't connect online filesharing with that basic, raw, emotional commitment to the sanctity of property.

Nor is it just in "official" libertaria, like Samizdata. Check out Slashdot, one of the oldest blogs: produced by and for computer programmers and sysadmins, Slashdot participants have very strong libertarian tendencies. "In Soviet Russia..." has moved from comment title, to cliche, to joke, to the entire comment. A major topic category, "Your Rights Online" has its own editor promoting stories on Privacy - Echelon, Crypotography regulation, and Censorship, along with other well-worn Samizdata favourites. Read one of the daily stories on the RIAA/MPAA attacks on filesharing, and you'll see many vigourous (well, loud) defenses of the right to share music, and the right to bear arms in case anyone tries to stop you. Sure, there's a lot of talk about potentially legal uses of such software. There are those who claim they only use it for legal purposes - and a few even sound credible. The overall message remains clear: "I share music and stuff. I don't apologise. Any organisation trying to prevent this is bad, and should be stopped".

Mainstream media such as youth, culture and entertainment publications all recognise that filesharing is a fact of life and, with a bare nod to the sensibilities of their advertisers and their lawyers, accept it as guilt-free. Taken as a whole, we're looking at the most widespread civil disobedience since the introduction of speed limits.

In conclusion, I believe that most people, and most libertarians, have decided in their hearts that they don't believe in Intellectual Property Rights. They are willing to accept them as a pragmatic implementation of an aspect of the moral position also protected by the law of contract (confidence), of fraudulent passing off (trademarks and design rights), and of libel (moral rights). They like the idea of the madcap inventor having some protection from Big Bad Manufacturer, and are scared that no patents equals no R&D; equally, people dislike corporate behemoth carving out large and incomprehensible monopolies, especially over things that sound like true necessities or simple facts of nature. But since patents really only feature in the world of business there is little that most individuals care or can do about them anyway. However copyright doesn't enjoy any of these defenses; there are no analogies with basic common law, and if ordinary citizens won't wear it then Copyright is doomed. To believe and choose to respect Copyright, personally, deeply, emotionally, you have to truly believe that an idea can indeed be Property.

It is in the realm of Copyright where individuals, consumers, citizens are making their moral choice heard loud and clear. We can't even be bothered to be mad as hell; we're just not going to take it any more.

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It is becoming increasingly clear that Europe’s economic problems are a year or so away from becoming nightmarish.  The international economic establishment is getting worried, G7 finance ministers, the OECD and the IMF are making increasingly gloomy noises.  Deflation approaches like a glacier, slowly but almost impossible to stop without radical measures.  The ECB’s constitution is inadequate to deal with the problem. It is charged with holding down inflation and maintaining price stability, not with encouraging economic growth.

Inflation is not a threat, deflation is a real threat.  Japan has had 41 consecutive months with no inflation, Germany is going the same way pulling Europe with it. The US has abandoned the strong dollar policy in order to reflate, devalue its debt and cheapen exports. Consequently the Euro has now strengthed over 40% from its lows, adding to the woes of exporters.  Germany is mired in high taxes, social costs and rigid structural problems – Eurozone unemployment rates are nearly double that of the Anglosphere countries. Real interest rates (base rate – inflation) in the Eurozone are punishing compared to the US. Don’t even think about the unfunded pension problems.

So what does the ECB do? Nothing. Last year many people laughed when 90 year-old Milton Friedman joked that he would outlive the Euro. If the ECB does not re-invent itself as a growth orientated central bank, Milton may yet have the last laugh.

Paul Staines

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Walt Disney will introduce self-destructing DVDs for 'rent' this August in a pilot project to crack a wider rental market. The discs, dubbed EZ-D, become unplayable after two days and do not have to be returned. They stop working after a change in colour renders them unreadable, starting off red, but when taken out of the package and exposed to oxygen, the coating turns black and makes it impenetrable by a DVD laser.

The technology is impervious to hackers as the mechanism which closes the viewing window is chemical and has nothing to do with computer technology. However, the disc can be copied within 48 hours, since it works like any other DVD during that window.

The only purpose behind this wasteful production of DVDs I can see (think of all the waste from the useless discs!) is Walt Disney having a go at the rental market in an attempt to recoup the return on films released on DVDs. Presumably licenses or other means used to control the rental market are not good enough for them.

For the customer the benefit is marginal, I no longer have to remember to 'return' the disc, whose only use thereafter will be as a tacky coffee mug mat. In fact, there will cease to be rental market as such, as there will only be two kinds of DVDs I can purchase. The expensive ones that last and the cheap ones that will play only for 48 hours. It is not clear whether they will be distributed by a similar network of 'rental' shops. It certainly makes economic sense to do so, since one of the benefits of renting a DVD or a video is the convenience of being able to do so close to one's home and at any hour of the day.

I do not have sufficient detail to take a firm position on this one. My gut reaction is that any attempt to control markets by restricting either supply or demand eventually blows up in the face of companies whose delusions of market power got better of their business sense.

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The French Trade Unions are up in arms at the disgraceful antics of pro-government activists. It seems that in response to the national strike by bureaucrats desperate to preserve their looting rights, a group of libertarian and pro-market conservative activists bombarded the mail servers of the trade unions with several million email messages crying out a stronger version of "Enough is Enough!" ["Ras le Bol!"].

As Marc Blondel, the General Secretary of FO (Force Ouvrière = "Workers' Power") bleated: "This is no way to engage in dialogue". The anti-strike campaign was launched by "Droite libre" ("the Free Right") a faction in the pro-government party. The grouping is led by former candidate to the UMP leadership, Rachid Kaci. He described the action as "supporting the reform of [state bureaucrats'] pensions. They blocade France, we blocade their email inboxes."

The campaign will continue in retaliation for any further strikes by the transport and teaching unions. I thought that I might include the list of email addresses being bombarded by the Free French forces, just in case any foreigners might wish to add their comments:

secgene@snes.edu; SUD-Rail@wanadoo.fr; sudrailpaca@free.fr; g10nat@ras.eu.org; sud.education@laposte.net; mblondel@force-ouvriere.fr; rhoup@force-ouvriere.fr; mbiaggi@force-ouvriere.fr; jmbilquez@force-ouvriere.fr; bdevy@force-ouvriere.fr; jjayer@force-ouvriere.fr; jcmailly@force-ouvriere.fr; jcmallet@force-ouvriere.fr; mmonrique@force-ouvriere.fr; mspungier@force-ouvriere.fr; rsantune@force-ouvriere.fr; rvalladon@force-ouvriere.fr; info@cgt.fr; cgt-com@cgt.fr; presse@cgt.fr; scbc@cgt.fr; synd-societe@cgt.fr; environnement@cgt.fr; territoires@cgt.fr; act-eco@cgt.fr; eco-sociale@cgt.fr; doc@cgt.fr; jeunes@cgt.fr; orga@cgt.fr; form-synd@cgt.fr; polfi@cgt.fr; revendicatif@cgt.fr; formation@cgt.fr; emploi-garanties-coll.@cgt.fr; culture@cgt.fr; travail-sante@cgt.fr; protection-sociale@cgt.fr; compta.conf@cgt.fr; ugict@cgt.fr; ucr@cgt.fr; ihs@cgt.fr; indecosa@cgt.fr; lepeuple@cgt.fr; webmaster@fsu.fr; unsa@unsa.org; cnt@cnt-f.org

Vive La France Libre!

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The election results from Belgium are the usual mess: there are two sets of political parties, which hate each other on linguistic as well as political grounds. Because of proportional representation, this means a compromise of morals, beliefs and meaning.

At this time it is not clear whether the French speaking socialist leader will agree to let the Flemish speaking socialist become the new prime minister, or whether the Flemish free-market liberals will do a deal with the Flemish socialists and retain the leading position in government.

Either way, it looks like more cuts in public spending and taxes, with the outgoing coalition partners (the Greens) having taken a big electoral kick up the backside. The Flemish Greens, appear to have lost all their seats to the Vlaams Blok, a party which campaigns for Flemish independence and against 'mass-immigration'.

The next government will continue to implement the Euro-bank's economic policies (a big improvement on any Belgian policy since ... who knows?). This means that the opposition nationalists combine breaking up Belgium and effectively the European Union. With any luck, next time the Belgians vote the European Commision will have to pack up and move to Warsaw.

(4) (36)

I cannot speak for other of course but, as far as I am concerned, if you're not making enemies then you are not trying hard enough. Conciliation is for wimps.

With this is mind I must commend the blogosphere (well, certain sections of it anyway) for their admirable efforts as enemies are, indeed, beginning to nail their colours to the mast.

Case in point here is a certain Bill Thompson who wants the world to know that, while he loves blogging, he is very worried by actual bloggers:

Yet the blogeoisie and their acolytes dismiss 'journalism' and those who practice it, arguing that the direct reporting of events is the only thing needed. As Dave Winer says: 'The typical news article consists of quotes from interviews and a little bit of connective stuff and some facts, or whatever. Mostly it's quotes from people. If I can get the quotes with no middleman in between - what exactly did CNN add to all the pictures?'

This isn't about not liking blogs. It's about not liking unaccountable concentrations of influence, about believing it is still true that 'the first duty of the press is to obtain the earliest and most correct intelligence of events of the time and instantly, by disclosing them, to make them the common property of the nation' - and about noting that 'most correct' does not mean 'what the blog says'.

Mr.Thompson names a few names in his diatribe (but rudely fails to mention the Samizdata) and ruminates darkly about 'economic libertarians' and their 'voo-doo'. Looks like the large preponderance of libertarians in the blogosphere has not gone unnoticed in places where we sincerely hoped we would be noticed.

Given that Mr.Thompson appears to be a acolyte of the BBC/Guardian Axis, his animus is hardly surprising. Indeed, it is welcome. We cannot honestly argue that we have even reached base camp until we are well and truly getting up the noses of people like him.

And getting up his nose we most certainly are. Mr.Thompson makes not even a faint attempt at concealing his haughty indignation that this gathering moss-ball of independent voices does not include any (trumpet fanfare, please) 'PROPER JOURNALISTS'. Yet, lacking in some such official stamp of professional approval, we spout off like men and women possessed, filling cyberspace with our dangerously 'un-approved' ideas.

I am going to hazard a guess that Mr.Thompson doesn't quite get it. Perhaps it is simply beyond his ken that it is exactly his brand of arthritic leftist orthodoxy that we are aiming to disassemble. Or perhaps he does get it. Maybe he can see that the writing on the blogs is, as far as he an his ilk are concerned, the writing on the wall. Hence his complaint of us being 'unaccountable'. To whom or what does he expect us to account to? The government? The BBC? A committee of appointed poo-bahs? Or 'the people', that abstract, meaningless totem on behalf of which guardianistas like Mr.Thompson love to crusade but which is, in fact, a euphamism for a committee of appointed poo-bahs?

It matters not. What matters is that Mr.Thompson is seething with resentment. He doesn't like us and thinks we are far too wrong and far too influential. Good. All that says to me is that we are doing something right and that we must keep on doing it.

[My thanks to Steve Chapman for the link.]

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British academic communists suffer from ideology, which is a brain virus. It takes every natural, logical and honest thought and turns it into a version of itself. So everything becomes political. A person is either good (communist) or bad (capitalist), poor and trodden-upon (good), white and privileged (bad) and so on. American communists, however, live in an intellectual and informational vacuum. So they make it up as they go, creating the most marvelous conspiracy theories as they go along.
- An insightful observation by a friend of Gabriel Syme...

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Yeah, yeah, yeah, but it's this or nothing. Seriously, there's been nothing here for nearly twenty four hours, so I'm going to write about Tesco moisturised and elasticated No Fuss 2 in 1 anti-dandruff shampoo and conditioner, because it's a subject I feel strongly about. (Sorry, I can find a link to the Tesco enterprise as a whole, but no direct link to any information about this particular product.)

For the last few decades I've always assumed that shampoo, by its nature, is something that can't be entirely convenient. Does the lid hold the shampoo in tightly? If so, it will be a bother opening it, by unscrewing it or by otherwise gouging it open, and that means you'll tend to keep it open, and that means that it loses its moisture and gets stuck at the bottom of the container, and you have to hold it upside down for about a minute, waiting for it to appear, or perhaps dilute it, which risks diluting it too much and turning it into an uncontrollable liquid rather than a semi-controllable sludge (no disrespect intended). Then, once it has appeared, I assumed it to be a law of nature that not all of it would end up in my hair, but that some of it would assemble itself just outside the hole in the container from which it had emerged, where it would dry out and perhaps block the hole. Which is why I probably should keep the container shut, by screwing it shut again, or by forcing the lid back on. (Remember, a lid that is easy to force short is a lid that can easily fall open again, and that defeats the purpose of the thing.) But that's so much bother that I can seldom be bothered.

Actually, the procedure I eventually got around to using was to put the lid back on, but to keep the container upside down so that I didn't have to wait for it to journey laboriously to the exit every time.

I hope this is making sense.

So, let's take those two adjectives that I apply (for they do not appear on the container) to the latest Tesco shampoo (and conditioner) one at a time. Moisturised, and elasticated.

Moisturised. This means that the shampoo (and conditioner) remains soggy, and does not dry out. How did they do this? I don't know. I merely note that they have done it. I no longer, with Tesco 2 in 1 shampoo (and conditioner), have to hold the shampoo (and conditioner) upside down for a minute in order to get shampoo (and conditioner) out of the container, or remember to keep it shut but upside down. This is a definite advance.

Elasticated. This means that the shampoo (and conditioner) no longer hangs about outside the container or in the exit of the container. It gets sucked back in again automatically, as a consequence of its own inner structural strength, like a semi-liquid three dimensional rubber band. How did they do this? I don't know. I merely note that they have done it. The container stays open and upright for weeks at a time, yet remains looking as if it has only just been opened.

"No fuss" indeed. Remarkable. Truly remarkable.

Note that this is not only a technical achievement. Equally impressive is that the soapologists set themselves, or had set for them, the right task to perform in the first place. The right answers were preceded by the right questions being identified as the ones to answer. Left to their own merely technical devices the soapologists might not have arrived at moisturisation and elastication as the targets to aim at for shampoo (or for conditioner).

What with gulf wars and peace processes and Robert Mugabe and the European Union, it is easy to forget that underneath and beyond all that, civilisation keeps quietly advancing. There are those who say that increases in mere comfort and convenience mean nothing, but I disagree. For me an item like Tesco No Fuss 2 in 1 shampoo (and conditioner) signifies something both good and honest and splendid in and of itself, but it also points the way to larger potential triumphs by the forces of civilisation in the future.

Suppose "peace processes" were conducted as logically and diligently as was the search for moisturisation and elastication with regard to Tesco No Fuss 2 in 1 shampoo (and conditioner). Might we not now have rather more peace to go round? If the governing of Zimbabwe was done as well as the managing of Tesco, wouldn't that be a fine thing?

Yes it would. But the secret is not merely to put Tesco executives, fresh from their shampoo (and conditioner) triumph, in charge of peace processes or of Zimbabwe. That wouldn't work. We know this from experience. What needs somehow to be contrived is a world in which the rules followed in the search for shampoo (and conditioner) moisturisation and elastication are somehow made to apply also to the search for peace, and for good Zimbabwean government. We somehow need a free market in peace, and in Zimbabwean government.

Easier said than done. But as the story of Tesco No Fuss 2 in 1 shampoo (and conditioner) tells us, if you can frame the question right, that's a huge step towards getting the right answer.

I have another question which is probably more easily answered. What is conditioner? It sounds good, but what is? And why the need to combine it with shampoo?