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To initiate terrorism is to justify your very own apocalypse, many more Arabs and Chechens are going to die than Americans, Europeans and Russians, because our ability to carry out terrorism is greater than theirs.
- Dalmaster

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The situation in Beslan in Russia has ended in predictable horror. Whilst Russian behaviour in Chechnya has never been a model of surgical restraint, I have yet to hear plausible accounts of Russian forces rounding up children, blowing them up and then shooting survivors as they try to flee.

The horrors of September 11 2001 have receded into being little more than a 'televisual curiosity' in many circles in the USA. However the Russians have been getting regular reminders about the nature of the enemy with whom they are at war, an enemy by no means unconnected from Al Qaeda.

In Beslan, one of the surviving terrorists was kicked to death by enraged civilians after being dragged out of an ambulance and I suspect this is just a hint of what is to come on a far greater scale. The political pressure on Vladimir Putin to move against anyone even suspected of sympathies with Chechen Islamists will now be overwhelming.

Coming on the heels of the destruction of two Russian domestic airliners, a great many Russians will probably see the extermination of Chechnya as simply a matter of survival and I fear Chechen innocents will be given about as much consideration as those Chechen terrorists gave the innocent Russian children of Beslan.

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I am attending a wedding tomorrow, of the daughter of a school friend (the other daughter is my god daughter), and this got me thinking about Muslims and Muslim weddings, which are, or so I have been persuasively told, not like our weddings.

When we marry, we marry outside our family, and our weddings are thus gatherings involving and uniting two families, and what is more two families who probably had nothing to do with one another until the bride from one and the groom from the other brought them together. Our marriage customs are, in the patois of the anthropologists, "exogamous". We marry outside the clan.

Muslims, on the other hand, by custom, marry within their own clans, and a Muslim wedding is thus a gathering of and a celebration of just the one family, together with its various friends and hangers-on. Arab marriage customs are "endogamous".

As one of my favourite intellectuals – a French anthropologist called Emmanuel Todd, known to the Anglo-Internet mostly for his bizarre opinion that the Euro-economy is racing ahead of the US economy, but better than that at anthropology, trust me – puts it, in his brilliant book (which fully lives up to its amazingly confident title) The Explanation of Ideology:

From Morocco to Pakistan, from Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan, a single family form dominates, its unique trait being preferential marriage between paternal parallel-cousins. Typical of the Muslim world and not simply of the Arab one, this characteristic can be observed in Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan and among Berbers of Algerian or of Morocco. …

This does not apply to all Muslim societies, because Islam conquered some non-endogamous societies on its perimeter in its early time of military supremacy. But it does apply to the Muslim heartland.

Here in the West, alliances and cooperative ventures that go beyond mere clan membership are commonplace. You may not like, for example, the Labour Party, but at least its upper echelons are not confined to people who are all related to one another. Yet Saddam Hussein's Iraq, to take one particularly famous example, was ruled by a clan all of whom lived in one town, and old habits die hard.

One result (among many) of this peculiar fact is a society in which them and us remain permanently divided. Islam, in Islamic minds, is irreconcilably divided from the rest of us, and similar them/us divisions afflict Muslim society itself. We in the West indulge in plenty of themming and ussing, so to speak. I am, after all, doing it in this posting. But the Islamic version of this habit is now, I think it is fair to say, far more absolute.

This could have been a very, very long posting, but I will keep it short and just say that I think this explains a lot.

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George Will, dorky docent of American conservatism, detects a return to the libertarian stylings of Barry Goldwater at the Republican national convention.

Four decades after a Republican convention in San Francisco nominated Sen. Goldwater, sealing the ascendancy of conservatism within the party, his kind of conservatism made a comeback at the convention here. That conservatism - muscular foreign policy backing unapologetic nationalism; economic policies of low taxation and light regulation; a libertarian inclination regarding cultural question - is not fully ascendant in the party. But the prominent display and rapturous reception of Rudy Giuliani and Arnold Schwarzenegger demonstrated that such conservatism is not an insurmountable impediment to a person reaching the party's highest echelons.

For structural and probably cultural reasons, it is highly unlikely that America will ever have anything other than a two-party system. For this reason, pragmatic libertarians will have to learn how to work the two-party system. For all their manifest shortcomings, the Republicans seem to be a more hospitable environment at this point.

But the domination of the Republican Party by cultural conservatives did make some other conservatives — libertarians and religious skeptics, among others — feel uneasy, even unwelcome. Being derided as RINOs — Republicans in name only — did not help. And the dominance of the cultural conservatives gave force to the Democrats' and media's caricatures of the Republican Party as a brackish lagoon of intolerance, a caricature that, like all caricatures, contained a trace of truth.

For all the rending of garments coming from the Democrats and the secular left, I see remarkably little in the way of actual state action implementing the allegedly theocratic cravings of the social conservatives since their rise to influence in the Republican Party. I certainly disagree with them on a number of points, but a careful reading tends to show that a great deal of what they want falls into the area of civil society, not state action. They have, of course, been infected to some degree with the virus of statism, but cries of alarm from the statist left that the Christian conservatives are attempting to implement state-mandated mind and social controls smack more of projection than anything else. Much of the social/cultural conservative agenda is defensive and reformist - they are animated by a desire to roll back what they see as a state-facilitated and noxious cultural of radical relativism and secular radicalism. Even their current flagship issue - the "defense of marriage" - boils down to preventing change from being imposed by state organs without democratic approval.

Interesting times, my friends, interesting times.

ADDENDUM: A few additional thoughts whilst standing in line for lunch.

In discourse, terminology is destiny. As a legal drafter, I always go first and foremost to the defined terms of a contract, regulation or policy. In bashing out the paragraph above on cultural or social conservatives, I mistakenly adopted some of Will's terminology.

The bugaboo of the left (and their organ the Democrats) in the US is the "religious right," and my comments in the paragraph above are directed primarily to this bugaboo. Aside from religiously driven moral concerns, though, the major driver of real social/cultural conservatism in this country is the puritan streak that has been handed down through the ages as the antithesis of the hedonistic American thesis.

In recent decades, this puritanical impulse has been mated to the statist impulse, yielding such unholy offspring as the radical environmental movement, the anti-smoking crusade, the nascent anti-fat crusade, and of course the drug war. You will note that the puritans reside comfortably all across the political spectrum in America, and have had a much greater impact on state activities than religious devotees. Neither the Republicans or the Democrats has really made any effort to take on the puritans, who in many ways have become a major bulwark for the cult of the state.

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To disagree with three-fourths of the British public is one of the first requisites of sanity.
- Oscar Wilde

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The mighty Dissident Frogman is in typically excellent form and has produced a marvellous gonzo masterpiece to help John Kerry get a better grasp of geography... so go to The Frogman's Propaganda Bureau, scroll down to the bottom of the article, click the red button and find out just where the hell is Cambodia?

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Since Hollywood studio bosses are famously averse to 'downbeat endings' for their movies, perhaps it was their clandestine intervention that resulted in this script change:

Kidnappers in Iraq have handed two French journalists to another group said to be prepared to free them, one of the men's editors told the BBC.

The second group, said to be from the Iraqi opposition, is "in favour of releasing them", Charles Lambroschini, Le Figaro deputy editor, told BBC News.

France's foreign minister said earlier that both men were alive and well.

The kidnappers had linked the men's fate to France's move to ban Islamic headscarves from schools.

No, probably not the handywork of Hollywood executives but a rather surprise 'ending' nonetheless given the grisly fate that has been meted out to just about every other hostage in Iraq.

If (as it appears) these two men are to be sent back home to their families in one piece, then I am very pleased. There are plenty of people in this world to whom I bear an extraordinary degree of ill-will but these two French hacks are not among them. However, I find myself unable to dismiss the question of whether there ever really was any risk that they would end up six inches shorter.

When Hamas, Hezbollah and a bevy of otherwise insanely violent Caliphascists are falling over themselves to denounce the kidnappers and call for the hostages release, you know that this is not business as usual. There could be any number of explanations, but the sudden materialisation of a 'caring, sharing' side is, I submit, the least likely of them.

Events may overtake this and I may yet be forced to recant, although that is hardly an important matter. But, until then, the impression I have formed is that this was not so much a hostage crisis as an elaborate pantomime.

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Recently the IEA sent me a flier about this book in praise of globalisation, and I went round there and bought a copy from them (at an enticingly reduced price – thank you Adam). That second link is to an IEA review of the book. So far I have only read the Introduction, so I cannot offer you a review of my own, but already I am impressed.

I found especially interesting what the book's author Martin Wolf had to say about the World Bank, and about its boss at the time that he worked for it, Robert McNamara.

For some reason I have never really paid proper attention to the World Bank. I knew that I was vaguely against it. I suspected it of doing too many of the things that the globalisers who are the target of Wolf's book still complain about it not doing. But I had never really got to grips with the story. So this bit of Wolf's Introduction really struck home to me:

By the late 1970s, I had concluded that, for all the good intentions and abilities of its staff, the Bank was a fatally flawed institution. The most important source of its failures was its commitment to lending, almost regardless of what was happening in the country it was lending to. This was an inevitable flaw since the institution could hardly admit that what it could offer - money - would often make little difference. But this flaw was magnified by the personality of Robert McNamara, former US Defence Secretary, who was a dominating president from 1967 to 1981. McNamara was a man of ferocious will, personal commitment to alleviating poverty and frighteningly little common sense. By instinct, he was a planner and quantifier. Supported by his chief economic adviser, the late Hollis Chenery, he put into effect a Stalinist vision of development: faster growth would follow a rise in investment and an increase in availability of foreign exchange; both would require additional resources from outside; and much of these needed resources would come from the Bank. Under his management, the Bank and Bank lending grew enormously. But every division also found itself under great pressure to lend money, virtually regardless of the quality of the projects on offer or of the development programmes of the countries. This undermined the professional integrity of the staff and encouraged borrowers to pile up debt, no matter what the likely returns. This could not last – and did not do so...

Wolf's next paragraph starts predictably:

By that time I had had enough...

But then Wolf goes into a bit of detail, on the subject of India.

... I had worked on India as senior divisional economist for three years. During that time, my chief function, so far as the Bank was concerned, was to justify the provision of significant quantities of aid, even though this money was helping the government of India avoid desperately needed policy changes. As it turned out, those changes were made in a midst of a deep foreign exchange crisis in 1991, almost two wasted decades later...

And then Wolf hammers home the further point that his Indian experiences illustrate:

Unfortunately, lending too much was not the Bank's only fault. It also had to lend to governments. This had two undesirable consequences: it had to assume that the government represented the interests of the country; and it reinforced an unjustifiably collectivist view of that national interest. Bank lending made it easier for corrupt and occasionally vicious governments to ignore the interests and wishes of their peoples. By the end of my time at the Bank, I came to the conclusion that its borrowers fell into three categories - those that did not need the help; those that would not use the help; and those that needed the help and would use it. The Bank was constitutionally incapable of concentrating its efforts on this third, often quite small group. As a result, its efforts were often either unnecessary or wasteful. I therefore came to agree with most of the criticisms of aid that had long been made by the late Peter (Lord) Bauer.

Who he? (As the IEA's former editorial supremo Arthur Seldon would say.) He.

Wolf continues:

The realization that the institutions designed to oversee aspects of the global economy might fail, even though integration was an important element in successful development, has stayed with me to this day. To defend a liberal world economy is not to defend the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization or any specific institution. These must be judged - and reformed or discarded - on their merits...

The important thing to understand about foreign aid (which is what stupidly soft loans are) is that they do not merely fail to do good. They do active harm. They help to keep in place destructive policies and to keep in office vicious and destructive politicians and officials which and who might otherwise have been done away with. They do bad.

And the World Bank is all part of that sad story, and a very big one I should imagine.

Apologies if I am the last person who writes for or who reads Samizdata.net to have heard this item of news. But no apologies for posting what Wolf says about it, because he is not just saying it, on a blog or something. He is saying it in a big and important book which has the air of establishment-think about it. So the news here is not just that the World Bank is harmful and dangerous, but that People Who Matter are starting seriously to realise it. This is very good news indeed.

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Every great movement must experience three stages: ridicule, discussion, adoption.
- John Stuart Mill

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As mentioned before on Samizdata.net, a television advertisement for featuring a woman firing a gun has been banned by regulators after it prompted complaints from viewers. The advert for the Freelander Sport was accused of glorifying guns and encouraging dangerous driving. Ofcom, the regulator for the UK communications industries, ruled that it had breached guidelines on harm and offence and must not be shown again.

Given regular coverage of high-profile shooting incidents and public concern about the wider social impact of the so-called gun culture, the glamorisation and normalisation of guns, even indirectly, is simply offensive to many people.

What on earth do they mean by gun culture in Britain? It must be the fact that criminals have them, because a law-abiding citizen can not get hold of one. Oh, no, guns are bad, bad, bad. The fact that a gun would enable a father to defend himself and his sons against a drug gang thugs terrorising his neighbourhood is obviously missing the point.

A public-spirited man who was beaten up in front of his young sons when he confronted drug dealers outside his home committed suicide because he felt powerless to protect them.

We must ensure that those who want to protect themselves and their families understand that guns would only increase the level of mindless violence in Britain and, more importantly, make the self-righteous Guardianistas and assorted champagne socialists look even worse. There is no room for gun culture in the multi-cultural Britain.

Interestingly, David Davis, the shadow home secretary notes:

Large amounts of crime go unreported and many people accept yob culture as a fact of life.

We shall also fight the 'yob culture' with luncheon vouchers, wagging our fingers at hyper-active young men beating up whomever stands up to them and banning them from town centres for unruly behaviour. That should show them.

Now pass me that baby...

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I did a few postings on my Education Blog at the beginning of this month, but these aside I've taken the whole of the month off from blogging. And now, my Internet Connection willing, I am back.

It was not so much that I was fed up with blogging, more that there were other things that needed doing, seriously, with the kind of concentrated attention that daily blogging was making impossible.

My home needed new shelves for books and for classical CDs, and it needed old shelves, laden with Libertarian Alliance pamphlets that nobody now needs, to be emptied and taken down. Mounds of papers needed to be sorted and classified, and space had to be created for them then to be stored in such a way that they didn't just get muddled together again. Two notorious no-go areas (the big cupboard and the space under the desk in my bedroom) were … gone into, and cleansed.

I did do one radio spot about … oh, something or other, and at the end of the month I hosted my usual Last Friday meeting (thank you Paul Marks – excellent talk and an excellent evening). Oh yes, and I did a talk about Classical Music for Tim Evans's Putney Debate on the Second Friday. But basically I took a holiday from pontification more profound than I can ever remember having enjoyed since I got started as a politificator at the beginning of the nineteen eighties. I did carpentry, sorted through papers, and in between times I socialised with friends (including some of my fellow Samizdatistas), undistracted by the self-imposed duty to tell the world what it should be thinking, or even to think about it.

It was a blessed relief suddenly to find myself in a world where the only problems that mattered were my own, and my own to grapple with and to solve. Yes, I have had Internet Connection problems, but I can deal with them, provided only that I get seriously stuck into them. And yes, carpentry can be exhausting. As was taking out about three dozen black plastic bags of rubbish, with about another two dozen still to go. But what a joy to be obsessing only about things that I could personally do something about.

My kind of politics is very anti-political, as is a lot of the politics here. But it is still politics. And there is a world of difference between sneering and jeering at the buffoons who rule the world, or who think they do, or who pretend that they do, and truly not giving these people the time of day, for day, after day, after day. It really was very refreshing, and not, I believe, an experience I will soon forget.

I even stopped reading Samizdata.

Now that I have resumed reading it, I am glad to see that I was not essential to its continuing success. (I would not want to be writing for a group blog that depended on me.) I did read a book or two during August, and I did inevitably do the odd spot of abstract thinking, about this and that. So I return to blogging action with a mind that is not completely blank. Meanwhile, my deepest thanks to the Samizdata editorial team for not nagging me, and for letting me rest in peace.

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It would be fair to say Conrad Black's spectacular and much publicised difficulties are being presented by him as a struggle between a capitalist libertarian (yay!) versus evil regulatory statists (boo!)...

The name-calling between the parties has been ugly, however, with Lord Black filing a libel suit in Canada against Mr Breeden and other Hollinger International directors, accusing them of waging a "campaign of defamation". He was being persecuted by "truly evil people", among them "Breeden and his fascists", who represent "a menace to capitalism as any sane and civilised person would define it", he complained in court documents.

But is that indeed the case? I am in no position to judge the truth or otherwise of the specific allegations but it seems to me what is at issue here is did Black (et al) fail in their fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders for whom they were actually working? Moreover, did were those shareholders actively defrauded by Black and his colleagues?

Again, I have no idea but I would be very leery of assuming this matter has any first order ideological dimensions at all.

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There were two articles on the Rittenhouse Review which rather interested me:

Firstly the blog's author, James Capozzola, displays what I can only describe as a very healthy disdain for democracy (which I certainly share) by applauding the fact that people in Pennsylvania will not be allowed to vote for Ralph Nader for President of the USA. I have commented on this subject before on Samizdata.net.

Now if only Kerry and Bush could also be disqualified...

Secondly, there is an article which mentions that the 427th Transportation Company (based in Pennsylvania, hence being of particular interest to Philadelphia based Rittenhouse Review) was deployed to Iraq with insufficient body armour and GPS sets. He approvingly notes that after he reported on this, one of his readers privately purchased a GPS set and intends to mail it out to Iraq for the unit to use. I too heartily approve of this and would love to see a significant proportion of the military's funding gradually replaced with voluntary subscriptions, something I would happily contribute to myself. However I must take issue with the phrase:

Imagine it: The U.S. military, notably reservists, relying on family, friends, neighbors, and perfect strangers to fill gaping holes in the Pentagon supply chain.

I would prefer to think of it as 'members of society with a vested interest in survival and an affinity for the people defending them', rather than the more pejorative 'perfect strangers', filling the spaces left in the Pentagon's supply chain which are theirs to rightly fill.

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Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of jackals by jackasses.
- H. L. Mencken

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On the very first occasion that I saw the advert on my TV, I knew, I just knew that is was going to set the fur flying. I was right.

Scenario: a man picks up his car keys and leaves the house to get into his brand, spanking, new Land Rover Freelander Sport motor vehicle. A woman (presumably his wife) spots him leaving. She rushes up to the bedroom, opens the dresser drawer and pulls out a starting pistol. She rushes downstairs again and runs outside just as her husband is getting into the car. She points the gun up to the sky and fires a single shot, thus giving him signal to get started.

Pretty innocuous stuff. But still far too traumatic and disturbing for some people:

A television advert for Land Rover featuring a woman firing a gun has been banned by watchdogs for glamourising gun culture....

The agency behind the advert said it was intended to promote the message "that the Freelander Sport triggered sporting behaviour".

But 348 viewers complained to media regulator Ofcom, meaning that the advert is in the top 10 of the most complained about commercials.

Most viewers were concerned that the commercial glamourised or normalised gun culture despite the fact handguns are illegal in Britain. Many also pointed out that the gun was stored irresponsibly.

Yes, you are reading that right. People might be encouraged to store the guns which they do not possess irresponsibly. Priceless!

The right to keep and bear arms is not a debate in this country. Nor is it an issue or an idea or an argument. It has all been subsumed into a deep national psychosis for which I see no prospect of any cure.

What would make you think we are trying to provoke?

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Perhaps it is merely a case of grabbing whoever is conveniently to hand. Or perhaps not:

A group calling itself The Islamic Army in Iraq says it is holding the two men - Christian Chesnot of Radio France Internationale and Georges Malbrunot of Paris daily newspaper Le Figaro....

Arab TV station al-Jazeera showed a video on Monday in which both men, speaking in English, called for the law banning headscarves to be overturned - and for French people to demonstrate for its repeal.

A group calling itself The Islamic Army in Iraq says it is holding the two men - Christian Chesnot of Radio France Internationale and Georges Malbrunot of Paris daily newspaper Le Figaro.

Arab TV station al-Jazeera showed a video on Monday in which both men, speaking in English, called for the law banning headscarves to be overturned - and for French people to demonstrate for its repeal.

Of course, the only way to prevent this kind of thing happening again is for the French to change their misguided and interventionist domestic policies.

[P.S. Why were they speaking in English, I wonder?]

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War is an ugly thing but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feelings which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.
- John Stuart Mill

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If pigs could vote, the man with the slop bucket would be elected swineherd every time, no matter how much slaughtering he did on the side.
- Orson Scott Card

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In the most recent edition of the Sunday Times1, there was an interesting article by Ferdinand Mount called Uppers and Downers which had the tagline:

Ferdinand Mount believes a 'classless' delusion grips Britain. Not only is the class divide wider than ever, but in a compelling new book he explores how the rich are treating the poor with an unprecedented contempt

I must confess that this intro led me to read this article with a predisposition for contempt for that premise myself. And indeed, I found much of what Mount had to say about class attitudes in Britain debatable to put it mildly. However the central thesis, something not hinted at in the introduction, was indeed compelling: that many social problems today in the UK are a direct consequence of the destruction of working class culture, and this was caused by, as Mount puts it:

Worse than all of this is the fact that in the past I have worked for a Conservative government, and not just any government but the administration led by Margaret Thatcher, which its passionate opponents still believe did more to deepen class divisions than any other government since the war. I was, for a time, the head of her policy unit. How can someone like me pretend to know what life was and is like for the worst-off of my fellow countrymen?

My answer is that it is People Like Us who are largely responsible for the present state of the lower classes in Britain. It is our misunderstandings, meddlings and manipulations that have transformed a British working class that was the envy and amazement of foreign observers in the 19th century into a so-called underclass that is often the subject of baffled despair today, both at home and abroad. We did the damage, or most of it. It is the least we can do to try to understand what we have done and help to undo it where we can.

For me this is truly the key but it is not a consequence of the 'Conservative' or 'Labour' varient of intrusive regulatory statism (for in 2004, who really thinks there is a huge material difference between them?) but of regulatory interventionist statism in all its progressive democratic forms. I shall certainly read Mount's new book Mind the Gap, though if the pre-release blurb is true that the book asks...

[T]he author pursues an oft-times illusive answer to the fundamental question: How can oppressive inequality in Britain be wiped out once and for all?

...which begs the question does 'oppressive inequality' (a) actually exist in Britain, and (b) it is anyone's business to 'wipe it out'. If that is in fact what the book is about then I expect I shall be putting a pretty nasty book review up here on Samizdata.net in the not too distant future.

For me the core issue here however is that as Mount indicates, it was indeed the political class, people like him, who bear the responsibility for destroying a significant section of civil society and replacing it with a state-centred dependency and entitlement culture of de-socialised barbarians.

Thus the question that really needs answering it not how do 'we' solve this problem but rather how to dis-aggrandise the entire class of people from left to right who caused the problem in the first place. I cannot tell without first reading Ferdinand Mount's book but perhaps he has realised that there is indeed what Sean Gabb calls an 'enemy class'... and much to his chagrin, the term 'People Like Us' indicates Mount has realised that he is a member of it.

1 Due to the benighted archiving policy of The Times making articles unreadable to viewers overseas, we do not generally link to Times articles

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Does anyone believe that Michael Moore actually had this conversation?

I mean, with an actual live human being, and not just in his own head.

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Alice Cooper, that paragon of conservative values and restraint is... backing George Bush! Methinks the more wingnut elements of the Republican Party will probably have rather mixed feeling about that particular endorsement.

Well at least his reasons are hard to fault. Why? Because so many musicians are backing Kerry and...

If you're listening to a rock star in order to get your information on who to vote for, you're a bigger moron than they are. Why are we rock stars? Because we're morons. We sleep all day, we play music at night and very rarely do we sit around reading the Washington Journal. Besides, when I read the list of people who are supporting Kerry, if I wasn't already a Bush supporter, I would have immediately switched. Linda Ronstadt? Don Henley? Geez, that's a good reason right there to vote for Bush.

Not quite enough to get me swooning for Dubya, but damn, one can find strangely compelling wisdom in the most unlikely places.

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Liberty is to the collective body what health is to every individual body. Without health, no pleasure can be tasted by man; without liberty, no happiness can be enjoyed by society.
- Thomas Jefferson

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Yet another attempt is underway to portray Ernesto 'Che' Guevara as someone who was actually admirable, rather than someone who should be remembered, if at all, as an inept communist thug and mass murderer who deserves to be buried under the scrapheap of history.

Fortunately not everyone is fooled.

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The Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, has called an election for October 9. So we get to choose once again between a fuzzy right-wing statism, or a 'Blair wannabe' statism. You will excuse me if I do not get ferociously excited about this choice.

One of the worst things about Australian elections is the placards that political parties insist on hanging on street poles. At no other time of the year are any other organisation permitted to do this, but political parties do like their perks; inflicting an eyesore I call it.

I am not going to vote - I will defy the State, and not vote. That is an offence which will cost me a parking ticket fine. It is actually also illegal for me to advocate not voting to other people as well.

As to who will win, I think the 'Blair Wannabe' Party will win; I wrote about this back in June and nothing has happened since to make me change my mind. In the great scheme of things, this is a small matter but it will consume the local media and blogs here for the next six weeks.

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Power and Glory: Jacobean England and the Making of the King James Bible
Adam Nicolson
HarperCollins Publishers 2003

A claim on the dust jacket states:"The King James Bible is the greatest work of prose ever written," and the message of the book, while not repeating it, is an elaboration of this claim; Nicolson, though not quite a believer or an unbeliever, is obviously besotted with the King James Bible, often called The Authorised Version, though it was never officially authorised by King or Parliament. It is now rarely to be found in the pews and on the lecterns of most churches, and hardly ever heard in public worship, where its language, already deliberately archaic even in its predecessors, has also been discarded and God, just like everyone else, is addressed as 'you'. If Christians are a minority in the English- speaking world, then KJB readers and users are a minority within a minority. Does this matter? The Centenary of its publication in 1611 is approaching and is unlikely to be celebrated, or commemorated by as much as a postage stamp, the excuse being that this would be 'controversial' or 'divisive', in the way that 1588, 1688, 1603, 1605, and 1707 were or will be. Adam Nicolson has written a fine book, of interest to all of us brought up on the King James Bible, quotations from which resonate in the memory, even when not at once identifiable, while those from all other subsequent translations set the teeth on edge. Here we are told part of the story - for most of it is lost - of how this seminal work was produced.

Why lost? The Translators (then and now capitalised), organized into six 'companies' of nine men, left few clues as to their working methods, their deliberations, discussions or disagreements and the manuscript sent to the printers has disappeared, possibly burnt in the Great Fire of London in 1666 (p. 225). Just as the whole scaffolding to build a great edifice is taken down and dispersed, so notes and drafts of the great translation ended up in the wastepaper basket, with some intriguing exceptions, and the fifty workers (four short of what there should have been) got on with their lives afterwards, leaving no memoirs, let alone diaries, of what it was like to have been on the project and not dreaming they had written the world's bestseller, the Bible to dominate the English-speaking world for four centuries and help shape the English language. Only a few, fascinating scraps remain. Like the copy of the Bishops' Bible (the text the Translators were supposed to revise) which the Bodleian bought from one of them (or someone) for 13/4 (pre-decimal for 2/3 of a pound), with his suggested emendations for the new translation marked in it. Or John Bois, the rather humble, impoverished but very learned Translator, who took notes of the revisers-translators' discussions of the complete work and whose notebook has somehow survived - everything in it written in Latin, bar Greek, of course. This leads Nicolson to speculate whether the discussions were carried out in Latin.

It is almost certain that had not King James desired it, 'his' Bible would not have been produced, and England, and Scotland too, would have made do with one of the versions already extant, either the 'official', Elizabethan Bishops' Bible of 1568 or the Geneva Bible of the late 1550s, favourite of the Puritans and heavily annotated politically - and subversively so in the opinion of the King, a good reason for replacing it; he banned its printing in England in 1616, though it continued to be produced on the Continent. It is fair to say that this was not his only reason. After he came to the throne he made a real attempt to promote peace and unity in his kingdoms. He ended the war with Spain, which had dragged on irrelevantly, but was unable to unite Scotland with England into a single Kingdom with one Parliament (the English objected). He also attempted -he was, after all, its Head - to reconcile the two factions within the Church of England, though this meant retaining the penal laws against Roman Catholics, now, however, less strictly enforced. The King was used to the Puritan faction; he had been up against its like all his life in Scotland, where he was certainly not the head of the Church, with its lack of bishops, its Presbyterianism and its Calvinism. The reconciliation was only partially successful; bishops were non-negotiable ("No bishops... no king"), and hard-line opponents were excluded from the start from the Hampton Court Conference, designed to bring concord.

Indeed, with the king bringing out all the disagreements, to some extent fudged by Elizabeth, the Conference was a stormy affair and seemed to make things worse. But his wish to have a new version of the Bible prevailed, and even though Bancroft, the Archbishop of Canterbury had been an opponent of the idea, he took charge of the operation to bring it about, perhaps to ensure the Puritan element was excluded. Even so, men with Puritan leanings were included amongst the Translators.

Bancroft's instructions are still extant; a copy of the first of its two pages is printed as an end paper (why not the other?) and Nicolson discusses each fifteen of their headings. As for the translation itself, the Bible, including the Apocrypha, was divided up into six sections for the six 'companies' of nine to translate - and there, for the next four years, the information largely runs out. The first instruction directs that the translation should be founded on the Bishops' Bible, for it had been far from the intention of anyone for almost the last eighty years to make a translation de novo. The Bishops' Bible was descended, through the Great Bible commissioned by Henry VIII in 1539, back through Coverdale to Tyndale, who might have translated the whole Bible if he had not been caught and burnt in Flanders. In fact, the translators looked at all the versions that had been produced, including (without acknowledgement) the one produced by the English Catholics in Rheims and Douai in 1609. This backward gaze was to invite an archaic style and there is every reason to believe that this was accepted as desirable, and the Gothic font of the early editions deliberate.

Departing from Tyndale's spare, vernacular style, the Jacobean verges on the rhetorical and orotund, or, as Nicolson prefers to put it, majestical. But can one, if brought up on it, subject it to any sort of literary criticism? Nicolson emphasises very much the reverence for the original texts, translated with far less freedom than was countenanced in rendering the secular classics into English, where even the translator's own views might be allowed to obtrude. Yet this did not mean literalness, or always using the same English word for the original one in different contexts.

Perhaps from lack of information about the procedures and meetings and discussions that the Translators must have endured, Nicolson instead describes some of them, in order to give us an insight into their characters and ways of thinking. It would have been nice to have had more portraits; those he has included are most interesting. Unfortunately, none of the eleven men in the painting reproduced on the back of the dust jacket is identified (though one is plainly Robert Cecil) in a picture entitled "The Somerset House Conference, 1604", a Conference not mentioned in the book and possibly a mistake for the one at Hampton Court. This is entirely in keeping with the cavalier and slipshod way dust jacket pictures are generally presented by publishers. In this fine, but anonymous work, all have turned to face the painter except two who sit opposite each other, in mild confrontation, the only ones with their right hands just resting on the rich table covering, meticulously painted. Were the two sides 'Establishment' (obviously on the right, with Robert Cecil at the front, notepad and inkstand in front of him) and 'Puritans'? And why was this picture not included in the book itself?

All fifty Translators (there were a few drop-outs from the projected fifty four)are listed by their 'companies' at the end of the book. Most had comfortable ecclesiastical positions; eight were or became bishops, eight were heads and twelve were professors of university colleges; others had, or were given, prebenderies or vicarages. The actual funding of the project is uncertain, but it seems to have been understood that the actual Translators did the work as part of the duties implicit in their positions. The printer could be expected to make a profit from his work, having paid £3,500 for the privilege, but in fact he went bankrupt. James's chief minister, Cecil, probably eased the matter of expenses; he was excellent with what would now be called 'stealth taxes', but James was almost equally prodigal with what he secured.

The Translator Nicolson obviously found most interesting is Lancelot Andrewes, Dean of Westminster Abbey, later successively Bishop of Ely, Chichester and Winchester, whose manifold and often contradictory qualities are listed like a threnody from page 26 to 27; at once sensitive, even saintly, and yet callous, he could regularly spend five hours every morning in prayer (and in tears), but sneer at a stubborn Puritan, incarcerated in a filthy dungeon, who would later be executed, obviously with his approval (p. 92). Known for the wonderful prose of his sermons (see p. 191, for the passage borrowed by T.S. Eliot), he was just the man to make the new Bible "shine as gold more brightly, being rubbed and polished", as the Preface to the finished work, The Translators to the Reader, probably written by Miles Smith, puts it. For the Translators were careful not to impugn any previous translation, probably one reason why all were revisions. Nicolson suggests that Andrewes may have revised the bulk of the first twelve books of the Bible: "Most of our company are negligent", he wrote dismissively, and Nicolson produces some evidence to back this (p. 192).

The only lay Translator was Sir Henry Savile (price of knighthood: £1000) who was lucky to survive his complicity in the Earl of Essex's rebellion at the end of Elizabeth's reign. He was very much a Renaissance Man and, as such, unscrupulous as well as learned (he produced, with help, the definitive edition of St Chrysostom, at enormous cost, which did not sell well), with an eye for a good billet - Eton, despite the fact that the Provost was supposed to be a cleric - and at the same time an unreliable patron, as John Bois, the Latin note-taker mentioned above, found out. By another quirk of survival, we know more about Bois than of most of the other Translators, for a close friend wrote a memoir of this absent-minded husband, devoted father and financially careless brilliant scholar, and Nicolson uses it to illuminate one niche of the environment in which the translations took place (pp. 203-215).

Early in 1609 all the nine sections were brought together for revision by twelve unnamed scholars, meeting in the new Stationers' Hall, for whom Bois was the note-taker. There is evidence, though from a later source, that the whole Bible was read through: "one read the translation, the rest holding in their hands some Bible, either of the learned tongues, or French, Spanish, Italian, etc. If they found any fault, they spoke up; if not, he read on (p. 209)." Nothing could make clearer that the sound was as important as the sense. Perhaps this procedure also accounts for the fact that two years passed before a complete manuscript was ready for the printer.

It might be expected that after all the care taken in its production - "three hundred and fifty scholar-years" Nicolson estimates - it would be a great publishing success, but this was not the case. Only after the Restoration in 1660, almost fifty years later, did it come to take its place as the only Bible in English that all Protestants read. Even the Translators were too accustomed to the Geneva Bible: Andrewes' sermons are sprinkled with quotations from it and Smith (or whoever wrote its Preface) did not quote from the Bible he was presenting to the Reader, but from the Geneva, though in mitigation it may be said that he would not have a copy of the new text readily available. Likewise, a generation later, Archbishop Laud, scourge of the Puritans, used the same Geneva Bible they favoured. There seems to have been no definitive first edition and careless printing ensured that editions were produced littered with misprints, the most notorious being the 'Wicked Bible' where the Seventh Commandment enjoins "Thou shalt commit adultery."

Nicolson obviously has little time for subsequent translations, but, though he gives examples from both earlier and later versions to point the KJB's superiority, he has to admit that Jacobean scholarship was sometimes inadequate, particularly for tackling the knotty prose of St Paul, and that superior original manuscripts than those used have since come to light, or were even available at the time. Oddly, he stigmatises the Revised Version, produced in 1885, claiming that "it introduced a string of Jacobethanisms which had not been in the 1611 text", though the words he lists are all well-represented in Cruden's Concordance of the KJB, published in 1737.

The Bible, however translated, has not made a successful transition from a religious to a literary work, though there have been several attempts using the KJB, with titles such as The Reader's Bible and The Bible Designed to be Read as Literature. Though probably unknown today, Arthur Mee's lavishly illustrated Children's Bible, is a fine example of editing, pruning the KJB's 775,000 words down to 250,000. Nor is it likely that the Bible could be taught as an example of Eng. Lit. without there being a demand that other religious works should be admitted for 'balance', though probably nothing would be able to compete with it for narrative interest and comprehensibility.

Other books I can recommend on this topic are In the beginning: The story of the King James Bible by Alister McGrath; The Making of The English Bible by Benson Bobrick; and David Daniell's massive The Bible in English.

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The problem I see with the libertarian pro-war position is that libertarians don't have recourse to the most powerful argument for the war: that it made the world a better place. Non-libertarians can yammer on about freeing poor Iraqis who were crushed under the thumb of Saddam Hussein, and that's definitely a benefit. But Libertarians don't believe it is OK to steal money via taxes and spend it on other people. Hence they can't use this argument.
- Patri Friedman

There has been a lively discussion in the comments section of Johnathan Pearce's article here on Samizdata.net When libertarians disagree. It has thrown up so many interesting points that I felt a new article on the issues might be a good idea. It is pleasure to see so much intelligent discussion of strongly held views without the acrimony and name-calling that so often characterises debate on the internet.

We have a problem that the label 'libertarian' sometimes it does not really inform as to what a person thinks, something which September 11th 2001 brought starkly into view, and I am not just referring to the more absurd uses of the term. For example a frequent commenter here on Samizdata.net, Paul Coulam, is a prominent libertarian and anarchist, well known in pro-liberty circles in London. He is also a friend of mine and has been known to get plastered at Samizdata.net blogger bashes. I too am fairly well known in the same circles and describe myself as a 'minarchist', or social individualist or 'classical liberal' or a... libertarian. I see Paul as a 'fellow traveller' of mine but clearly we have fairly major disagreements of where we would like to end up. We just agree on the direction we need to move from where we are now. I regard the state as probably indispensable, albeit a vastly smaller state than we have now, whereas Paul sees no state as the final destination.

In my view the minarchist 'classical liberal' view to which I subscribe means the only legitimate state functions which can be funded via some form of coercive taxation are those which can only realistically be carried out by a state, and which are essential to the survival of several liberty. The military seems a fairly clear cut example of that to me (with the proviso I would like to see the state military as only 'first amongst many') and possibly a very limited number of other roles, such as (maybe) a centre for disease control function to prevent plagues, and some form of superior court function.

So once you get over that core issue of small state or no state (no small feat), the rest is arguing over magnitude (also not a trivial issue), rather that whether or not you even have a military funded by some form of coercive action: that also means 'how you use that miltary' is an argument over degree rather than existence. In short I see the difference between a 'libertarian' (or whatever) of my non-anarchist ilk, and sundry types of non-libertarian statist as being one of the degree to which the state is allowed to accumulate coercive power.

Certainly some libertarians fall at the trap labelled 'magnitude' as they cannot bring themselves to see the moral or sometimes even practical differences between the USA and Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. As I want a 'vastly better state' rather than 'no state', and as I also regard the process of getting a vastly better state involves holding 'the state' and its borders in considerably less regard, the idea of using' less bad states' to overthrow 'much worse states' does not really pose a great moral dilemma for me, particularly in the here and now of 2004.

I am not suggesting wars and struggles between states are a generally Good Thing but at the ends of the continuum, the moral and practical calculus does not seem that hard to me. Sure, the justification 'it makes the world a better place' is used by left and right statists all the time for all manner of things and sometimes they are even correct... but for me the test is 'but would the world be an even better place if the state had got out of the way and left private individuals to sort things out?' On that test, the state fails pretty consistently, which is why my 'ideal state' is one where it is permitted to act in only those very few core functions where private non-coercively funded action cannot do what must be done for the survival of life and liberty.

So yes, I supported war by the bloated regulatory nation-states of the USA and UK (and others) against Ba'athist Iraq and doubly so against the hideous national socialist regime in Belgrade, whose works I saw first hand in Croatia and Bosnia (a process that not only inoculated me against the Murray Rothbard virus once I was exposed to it years later but also left me with an abiding hatred for ethnic nationalism, a fondness for 338 Lapua and 'smile reflex' whenever I see an F-16). My view is that it is only a matter of practical consideration whether or not one should be shooting at tyrants and their servants and using other people's money to do that. My friend Paul is not a pacifist so I am sure we would agree that ideally tyrants should be overthrown locally and, ideally, for profit: where we depart is over when it needs to be done on the taxpayers dime.

Left to their own devices, tyrants accumulate to themselves the means to spread tyranny and so the notion that offensive war against a tyrant is morally wrong seems bizarre to me, particularly as I am not too hung up on the whole national borders thing when it comes to spreading liberty. The utilitarian consideration of 'are they too strong to just attack' is rather important of course, which is why I rather like the idea of attacking North Korea before they get nuclear weapons.

Why? Because it makes the world a better place.

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I recall, shortly after I first got myself on-line, frequently seeing the phrase 'ROFLMAO' appear on various chat rooms and fora. I had not a clue what this term meant but, after a little judicious detective work, I discovered that is was an acronym for the phrase 'Rolling On the Floor Laughing My Arse Off'.

Well, I was ROFLMAO when I read this:

TORY leader Michael Howard has been barred from the White House and told he will never meet President George Bush, it emerged last night.

The bombshell ban was slapped on Mr Howard after he called for Tony Blair to quit over the Iraq War....

What particularly upset the White House was Mr Howard’s comment: “If I were Prime Minister I would seriously be considering my position.”

They were also angered when the Tory leader accused the PM of "serious dereliction of duty".

Mr Rove, who speaks with the President’s full authority, said: "You can forget about meeting the President full stop. Don’t bother coming, you are not meeting him...."

And it has deeply damaged the decades-long alliance between the Republicans and the Conservative Party.

Senior US Right-wingers blame Mr Howard for undermining the coalition in Iraq and say they are privately rooting for a Labour victory in the next election.

A Tory source said: "They see Tony Blair as a true ally against terror and the Tories as a bunch of w*****s."

Wherever would they get that idea??!!

Although the cause of this spat is laid at the door of Mr Howard's apparent equivocation over Iraq, I get the feeling that the real friction lies elsewhere. Strange as it may sound, I have been reading what sound like reasonably reliable reports in the UK press about squadrons of young British Conservative activists hot-footing it off to the USA to work in the Presidential election campaign...for the Democrats!.

In the interests of accuracy, I think it ought to be said that this is far more about the Tories trying to pull some sort of rug from under 'Teflon Tony' than establishing any sort of link with either the US Democrat Party or Mr Kerry. But in any event, it is still a deeply ill-judged political blunder. The article alludes to an 'alliance' between US Republicans and British Conservatives and while I think that 'alliance' is too strong a term, there certainly has been a traditional affinity between these two centre-right Anglo-Saxon political tribes.

That being the case, one wonders what these jet-setting young Tories were hoping to achieve by throwing their lot in with Mr Kerry? There is nothing to suggest that a President Kerry would somehow undermine Tony Blair. If the Tories cannot make a dent in him at home, then how are they going to land any meaningful punches on him via Washington? And if they imagine that they are going to be the subject of any outreach by either the US Democrats of the Guardian-reading classes at home then all I can say is that they are even stupider than they look (and they look fairly stupid).

In short, the British Tories have managed to alienate one of their few powerful friends for no gain whatsoever and, since I assume that the leadership either gave their blessing to these transatlantic jaunts or, at the very least, turned a blind eye, then it merely reinforces my view that the British Conservatve Party is in the hands of buffoons and political pygmies.

I understand that the streets of New York will be plagues this week by throngs of the Great American Unwashed wearing 'George Bush=Hitler' T-shirts. I do not imagine that any such items of radical apparel will be making an appearance at the next Tory Party convention. However, I do wonder if would get any sales with a 'Michael Howard = Chief Wiggum' version?