We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Another episode of “The Trap’ has been shown… I gave it a pass given the low quality of scholarship and the high level of ‘argument by personal attack’ in the first one. It seems this low brow method was used against other targets in the latest episode, this time with the author of Public Choice Theory as one of the targets.
First a basic primer for the recent commenter to my earlier article. The personal life of a creative person has nothing to do with whether their creation is right or wrong. That decision is made in the marketplace of ideas and in the appropriate research journals. Anyone who thinks otherwise has something brown leaking out their ears.
If we judged ideas by the personal life of the creator, we would toss Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings in the bin. The man was a nutter who cut off his ear. Obviously his paintings must be garbage. Or maybe the whole basis of cybernetics is wrong! After all, Turing was gay! All those right wing conspiracy types must obviously think anything he created must be wrong! And Einstein? That wild haired fruitcake? Marx? A drunken womanizer!
Argument by ad hominem will get no one anywhere with anyone at Samizdata.
It also helps to have some knowledge of the subjects on which you expostulate, or to at least state your areas of ignorance out front. The idea that public workers do not work to make life better for their families just like anyone else is absurd: and that is what saying ‘Public Choice Theory is wrong’ means. Suggesting that markets will always ‘collapse to a point’ is absurd and counter-factual. It is not OFCOM that makes BBC ‘better’. It is competition with the high production values of programs from elsewhere that are indeed (more) free market than the UK in this respect. The rhetorical concept which is thus indirectly espoused by our commenter that “REGULATION is INDIVIDUALISM” is just plain silly.
I invite you all to read the comment on that previous article and disassemble the commenter’s argument into its weak component parts as I have not the time to do so at the moment.
I usually make the point of only ever smoking a cigarette or cigar on No Smoking Day. It is the principle at stake, dear reader. For the remaining 364 days of the year, however, I avoid the weed. But for those who are less bothered about the state of their lungs or just love to smoke, here is a must-have gadget.
I think if Ian Fleming were alive today, he would make sure 007 had such a case for his Q-branch gadgets and Turkish ciggies (via the always-diverting Boing Boing website).
The invaluable Belmont Club points out the double standards of the "anti-war" side.
Captain Ed notes that Iran has blatantly announced it is going to violate the Geneva Conventions, but no one in the press or the human rights community seems to notice Iran announced tonight that the 15 British sailors captured off the coast of Iraq would get indicted as spies. … Referring to them as “insurgents”, the site concluded: “If it is proven that they deliberately entered Iranian territory, they will be charged with espionage. If that is proven, they can expect a very serious penalty since according to Iranian law, espionage is one of the most serious offences.”
Of course, an essential element of the “espionage” under the Geneva Conventions is being out of uniform, and the British sailors seized by the Iranians were in uniform, so the sailors are of course not guilty of espionage. Belmont Club observes:
As currently interpreted the Geneva Conventions only apply to individuals bent on destroying America. Individuals who blow up elementary schools, kidnap children, attack churches and mosques, kill invalids in wheelchairs, plan attacks on skyscrapers in New York, behead journalists, detonate car bombs with children to camouflage their crime, or board jetliners with explosive shoes – all while wearing mufti or even women’s clothing – these are all considered “freedom fighters” of the most principled kind. They and they alone enjoy the protections of the Geneva Convention.
A note to those who howl so loudly about Guantanamo, and are silent about Iran and its allies: When your principles are so flexible, and always to the detriment of one side, do not be surprised when people wonder if you are truly “anti-war” or just “on the other side”.
After global warming, what will be the next hysteria?
When I decided that I would blog the cricket World Cup in detail, I thought I would be reporting on cricket matches. Right now, I should be sitting in a pub watching Australia play South Africa, the biggest game for my team so far. However, I am at my computer writing at length about peculiar historical events. When I started I thought I was writing the following piece for my own blog. However, as it went on, I realised I was writing a background piece to what was being discussed (as much in the comments as the article, and as much by myself as by Brian) in Brian’s piece on Bob Woolmer’s murder yesterday. The piece starts with some history, but this is crucial to understand the weird and pathological events of the game today, if indeed they can be understood.
For Samizdata readers, there is one point that I sort of assume knowledge of, but which may not be obvious to people who do not follow cricket. I get to it at the end of the post, but I may as well emphasise it now. Cricket has an odd structure, which stems from a century in which it was unable to decide if it were an amateur or professional game. Cricket is today a professional game, but the principal professional teams are national representative teams, which play together all year long. Australians must play for Australia, Indians for India, Englishmen for England. If a player falls out with management, that can end a career, whereas in baseball or soccer he would simply find another team. This also means that if a very good player has the misfortune to come from a small poor country, he will not make nearly as much money as an equally good player from a larger or richer country. It also means that a quite good player who comes from a country with a strong team might not get much of a professional career, whereas the same player would easily do so if he came from a country with a weaker team. It also is partly responsible for the fact that playing strength, expertise in the game, money, and good governance are all too be found in different countries. These imbalances are one thing that makes the game as prone to corruption and criminality as it now seems to be.
In soccer, the World Cup is played between teams of players who spend most of their time (and make most of their income) playing for clubs. In cricket, it is played between the same teams who play together for the rest of the year.
In 1983, India unexpectedly won the World Cup in England. This was a huge event for India, and it led to India and Pakistan asking for and gaining the right to host the 1987 World Cup. This was a big thing for the cricket World Cup, as it had been a largely English event (hosted by England, under English local playing conditions) until that point. The 1987 event ended up on the subcontinent at least partly because the England board had to some extent lost interest, and they were not too bothered by somebody else taking it off their hands. (It was not too long later that the cricketing boards of the world – including England – started arguing bitterly over the right to host it – but interest in it was limited at that point).
India followed up the 1983 win with a win in the seven nation World Championship of cricket, held in Australia in 1985 to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the state of Victoria (or some such excuse). At the time, this event was not regarded as much less than a World Cup (which was, as I said, England’s event) – the key thing is that all seven test playing countries were participating. That 1983 win had something that the Australian organisers would not have preferred but which must have gone down well on the subcontinent – an India v Pakistan final, won by India.
Thus India in Pakistan went into the 1987 event believing that they were the teams to beat, and that the event represented a coming of age for subcontinental cricket. The two teams did indeed play well, topping the points tables in the two groups, and each playing home semi-finals. The expectation of everyone was that India and Pakistan would meet in the final.
This did not happen. Australia and England each won their respective semi-finals and met in the final, with Australia winning the tournament. (Expectations in Australia were so low that nobody had even purchased the television rights to the tournament until midway through it – and then after Channel Nine did so, it did not bother to show any of the semi-finals live, and then chose to show a movie rather than the second (England) innings of the final. Australians did not get to see Australia’s first World Cup victory on live television). Some people in India compared the final to a wedding without the bridge and groom. The event was in truth a huge success, and probably the first major subcontinental media saturating cricket event, of a type we have had many of since. The victory by Australia seemed to many to be a complete fluke at the time, but looking from 2007 it seems almost fated – the first of a great many Australian victories that have filled the last 20 years. I remember reading in an English newspaper a couple of months after the event that gave no credit to Australia whatsoever, blamed the victory mostly on Mike Gatting’s reverse sweep, and that it was a game that “England would have won nine times out of ten”. You cannot imagine an English commentator saying that about England v Australia matches these days, but that kind of attitude might help to explain why we still enjoy beating England so much. 1987 was also probably the time when the curious inability of home sides to win the World Cup started to become clear. Nobody had expected England to win any of the three previous tournaments in England, and England did actually do well enough, especially in 1979. However, India and Pakistan could not do it in 1987, and then Australia could not even make the semi-finals despite being pre-tournament favourites in 1992.
But as I was saying, 1987 was the first big subcontinental cricketing media event. → Continue reading: Some background to the Woolmer affair: how did cricket get here?
“Warren Buffett said that the one thing that really changes your life is the private jet.”
– Bob Hersov, entrepreneur and the man behind NetJets. Actually, using a private jet need not be just for the mega rich.
“At some point, I think I would like to get out and found a much smaller business. I’d like to start with perhaps two or three billion dollars, and go from there.”
– Michael Jennings’ dinner companion this evening, who was admittedly nice enough to pay the bill at the end of the meal.
The next International Space Development Conference (ISDC) will be held in Dallas over the Memorial Day weekend this year. Of particular interest to all of our Space Venturers is the symposium to be held on the front of it.
Here is the press release:
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National Space Society to Host Second Annual Space Venture Finance Symposium at 2007 International Space Development Conference
Commercial space investment symposium scheduled for May 24, 2007 at the Hotel InterContinental in Dallas, Texas
WASHINGTON, March 23, 2007 – The National Space Society today announced the second annual Symposium on Space Venture Finance, to be held on Thursday, May 24, in conjunction with the 2007 International Space Development Conference (ISDC) in Dallas, Texas. Bringing together leaders in the investment and space communities, the symposium will focus on recent innovations and deals in early- and mid-stage finance within the commercial space, spaceport, satellite and space-related information technology industries. → Continue reading: Space Venture Forum at NSS Conference in May
Patrick Crozier defends Al Gore against the hypocrisy charge, in a way which I think is slightly mistaken. He compares Al Gore’s vast greenhouse gas emissions with his, Patrick Crozier’s, use of state regulated trains, which Patrick disapproves of, but still uses, unhypocritically. But I think that Patrick does not quite nail it. Gore is being somewhat hypocritical. He surely could fairly easily do more to reduce his emissions. But, those who disagree with Gore are being very unwise if they make that their central complaint about him. What matters is not the degree to which Gore is or is not personally doing what he says should be done by people generally, but whether he is right about what should be done.
I am talking here about the “we are not doing enough” way of winning – and of losing – arguments.
You win arguments in politics by saying exactly what you want and not stopping until you get it. Sometimes that means setting an impossibly high standard of improvement, because what you want is very hard to get. Tough. You want it? Say so. Never say you are entirely satisfied until you really are entirely satisfied. You do not win arguments by surrendering three quarters of your case before the argument even begins. → Continue reading: Thoughts on the “not doing enough” argument
If it were not for the fact that I saw ‘300’ on its UK opening night (i.e. last night), then this hilariously PC review would have me thrusting my hand into my pocket to whip out the price of a ticket:
It’s an ugly business: brutal, racist, homophobic – dare I say fascist? Harmless escapism indeed.
Damn those warmongering Neo-Spartans!
I am sending an email to the producers with my suggested title for a sequel – “300 II: the Persians are back and this time they’re Islamic!!” The cultural cringe alone will be worth the budget.
Behold the depths of your innermost soul
A Minotaur walking in endless despair
Mythical like a dream
Invisible like a soft breath of wind
– Bel Canto, Time without end.
I suppose I just cannot bring myself to give a damn about what is happening in the news today.
Like most ‘evil free market people’ I hold that collectivist (i.e. big government) ideas taught at schools and universities give the media a built in bias in favour of big government and against liberty. I am sometimes asked to give a specific example of what I am talking about and I will now do so.
A recent edition of Newsweek magazine attracted my attention because it had Europe at 50 in big letters on the front cover.
It turned out that the cover indicated a story about the European Economic Community – European Union (50 years old this year). This story being the normal nonsense, crediting the EU (rather than NATO) with peace in Europe, and crediting it with the economic recovery after World War II. Something that was actually achieved by the policy of deregulation, such as the scrapping of price controls, and tax reduction followed by finance minister Ludwig Erhard in Germany from 1948, and by political leaders in some other European countries.
However, it was a story in China that really interested me. New government spending increases in China were justified on the basis that they were in the spirit of “FDR’s depression busting” policies in the 1930’s which countered the “blows of the free market”.
In fact President Roosevelt’s spending schemes and regulations helped prolong the depression. And the depression was not caused by the ‘free market’ , it was caused by the boom and bust monetary policy of the Federal Reserve System.
In 1921 a previous government credit-money bubble, that of World War I, had burst, and the government of President Harding did nothing much, other than cut government spending, and the economy was well on the road to recovery within six months.
In 1929 another government credit-money bubble bust, that of the late 1920’s – caused by Governor B. Stong’s, of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, policy of trying to support the overvalued exchange rate of the British Pound by a loose credit money policy with the American Dollar.
The administration of President Hoover (contrary to the ‘did nothing’ myth) went in to overdrive – doing all the wrong things. Trying to hold up wages (in order to protect “spending power – demand”), by rigging agreements with industry, agreeing to more government spending, and agreeing eventually to a large increase in both domestic taxes and, in 1931, in the tax on imports.
The administration of President Roosevelt carried on the interventionist policies of President Hoover and, in some ways, deepened them. Thus making the depression the longest in American history.
Why do the good people at Newsweek not know any of the above? Why do they, instead, write of FDR’s “depression busting” schemes, and the “blows of the free market?
It is because of what they were taught at school and university – as simple as that.
People can not be expected to understand current events (such as the government schemes in China) if they have been taught a false view of the past.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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