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]
|
Ronald Bailey at Reason has a nice response to the Prince of Wales’ latest attack on GM foods. The Reason comment thread is also pretty good too. One thing that does not seem to cross Prince Charles’ mind – not a long journey – is the fact that by using disease-resistant strains of crops, it will reduce the need for pesticides, which surely any “Green” should support, right?
The Telegraph seems to have a strange indulgence for this sort of fogeyish/Green/oh-god-this-science-stuff-is-ghastly sort of thing. I wonder if snobbery has anything to do with it – “organic” food tends to be more expensive, after all. But to be fair, that newspaper has carried robust defences of modern science and farming, such as this article by Bill Emmott a few months back. Worth re-reading.
Update: Stephen Pollard thinks Prince Charles should shut up. That seems a bit excessive. I do not think that Charles is overstepping some sort of ancient constitutional rules by saying what he thinks. It seems a bit odd for an opinionated fellow like Stephen to be telling people in public life to put a sock in it. If he were King, and had to deal with tricky political issues, then Stephen might have a point. But let’s face it, being heir to the throne for decades is a pretty desperate situation to be in. If Charles wants to hold views on archicture, the teaching of English or the environment, why not?
This is brutal but sadly true about Andrew Sullivan:
There was, in fact, hardly a bigger cheerleader for going to war with Iraq than Andrew Sullivan. And it won’t do for him to invoke the defense that he was misled into the war because Saddam did not possess actual WMD. It’s true that Saddam did not have stockpiles of WMD, as the Bush Administration, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy, Jay Rockefeller, John Kerry, and many others believed, along with the intelligence agencies of virtually every nation on earth. In retrospect, we know that Saddam engaged in a massive effort to mislead the world into believing he had WMD. The obligation was on him to comply with U.N. resolutions. He did the opposite, and he paid for his deception (and his cruelties) with his life and the end of his regime.
It is fine for people to change their positions over time, either because of new evidence or because of an evolution in their own views. And almost everyone who has said anything about Iraq has gotten something wrong. But few people have changed their minds as dramatically and emphatically as Sullivan has over the last few years.
Absolutely. And I am not particularly convinced, either, by Sullivan’s reply on his blog today, in which he argues thus:
I simply cannot pretend that what we’ve learned about them these past few years – and what I’ve learned about the Middle East and wider dimensions of the struggle against Jihadism – hasn’t deeply affected my views. Just imagine if the press were to discover a major jail in Gori, occupied by the Russians, where hundreds of Georgians had been dragged in off the streets and tortured and abused? What if we discovered that the orders for this emanated from the Kremlin itself? And what if we had documentary evidence of the ghastliest forms of racist, dehumanizing, abusive practices against the vulnerable as the standard operating procedure of the Russian army – because the prisoners were suspected of resisting the occupying power? Pete Wehner belonged to the administration that did this. It seems to me that, in these circumstances, the question of moral equivalence becomes a live one. When an American president has violated two centuries of civilized norms, how could it not be, for any serious person with a conscience?
First of all, no-one, apart from the most deluded hawk, has or would deny that abuses have occurred, involving not just American but other Coalition forces. The point is that those abuses have in some cases already been punished. One can and should argue that the punishments could have been more severe, but that is a detail. As for the other stuff about “abusive” practices, Sullivan is frankly inviting ridicule to argue that the conditions at Gitmo rank on the sort of scale of horrors that have been inflicted on captured combatants in other campaigns, most notably those involving Soviet forces in the past, for instance. For all that one might be alarmed – as I am – about the willingness of some apologists for torture to argue for it, I certainly do not get the impression that it has been widely used or encouraged by the US and other administrations. Of course if that is the case, I might change my mind.
No. I am afraid that the critics of Sullivan have a strong point. His change of mind has been so dramatic, his use of language so heated, that it is easy to see why people who now are on the receiving end of his ire feel the guy has not been entirely honest about his switcheroo. After all, Bush’s Big Government brand of conservatism that Sullivan finds so obnoxious – as I do -was hardly a secret even before 9/11, such as his flagrant abuse of free trade over steel tariffs, for instance.
As to Iraq, what did Sullivan – who is hardly an expert in military affairs – honestly expect would have happened when the invasion began: a squeaky-clean victory, an easy reconstruction and minimal violence? Hardly. To be sure, he was pretty quick to argue that the post-invasion phase needed larger forces, as McCain had argued at the time. And it is easy to see why those who argued that Saddam’s removal from power was justified – as I did – felt angry about some of the errors made post-invasion. But let’s be honest about this. If you back a war, you have to understand the Law of Unintended Consequences – bad shit can happen that you do not expect. To deny this is frankly to invite contempt.
The New Yorker has an interesting article about the risk that excessive granting of patents and copyrights can reduce, rather than increase, the potential level of goods and services. The article is very fair-minded and worth a look.
The issue of patents and IP generally remains a really tough one for me to work out what my own views are. I tend to take the view that state-granted patents are a bad idea, and think it is entirely arbitrary to work out whether a patent should run for X or Y number of years before expiry. But notwithstanding the arguments of the likes of Lessig and other “open source” folk, I can see the case for giving people some financial incentive for coming up with an idea and trying to make money from it. This seems particularly so in areas like drugs, where the costs of research and development are very high, for example.
Thinking about the recent not-so-smart observations on men’s magazines by Tory politician Michael Gove, it is useful to recall that our so-called moral guardians have for a long time got themselves all hot and bothered about the prospect of biddable young chaps getting an eyeful of the fairer sex:
“The French rulers [the Bishop informed the House], while they despair of making any impression on us by force of arms, attempt a more subtle and alarming warfare, by endeavouring to enforce the influence of their example, in order to taint and undermine the morals of our ingenious youth. They have sent amongst us a number of female dancers, who, by the allurement of the most indecent attitudes, and most wanton theatrical exhibitions, succeed but too effectually in loosening and corrupting the moral feelings of the people.”
Quoted in Decency & Disorder, by Ben Wilson, page 16. The comments were made by a Bishop sitting in the House of Lords in 1798. The late 1790s were a frightening period for the British ruling classes – as well they should have been. But it seems strangely comical that a Bishop should imagine that pretty French girls showing a bit of leg were more dangerous than the armies of Napoleon. Even at the time, I suspect that the likes of your average British sailor who was in the front line of defending Britain from attack would have thought this prelate to be a bit of an ass.
But however silly the Bishop’s comments were, they do point to something that is actually quite important: soft power, as foreign policy strategists like to call it. Yes, force of arms can subdue a weak nation. But any part of a “conquest” of a culture must take heed of the power, not just of tanks, guns or aircraft, but of ideas and preferences. When the Soviet Union collapsed, we tend to forget that the sight of Western advertisements for goods and services, occasionally glimpsed by people living in the Soviet empire, must have been a shock to anyone told that state central planning was the inevitable course of economic history. And when young people the world over – of whatever religion or of none – get to enjoy greater freedoms, most of them, from what I can tell, rather like them. Of course, religious extremists recoil in horror at such freedoms, just as the bishop I quoted did more than 200 years ago. Such folk may even use moral panics about such things to inflame opinion in reaction. But most people welcome a more liberal culture, which is why religious and other ideological puritans get so angry about it.
Maybe the Bishop was actually being quite wise after all. He need not have worried though, since those ladies’ men, Nelson and Wellington, dealt with the Corsican tyrant in the end, with a bit of help from a lot of Russians and Germans.
Earlier this afternoon Perry and I had a lengthy editorial telephone discussion on the subject of Georgia. While we agreed broadly there was one area in which we had intense debate until I finally figured out how we were talking past each other.
The question is, how the hell did US intelligence assets miss the Russian Black Sea fleet movements? How did they miss the massive transport job of the troops and their logistical tail? They did not just materialize in position. It takes time and planning to make such moves. I will leave the detail of that to Perry as he seems to have been thinking about it in great detail.
My take is there is a limited amount of time available on the black satellites. The manpower and resources have been re-targeted on the Middle East. Orbits have been shifted to give maximal coverage in those areas of interest and experienced personnel have moved to ‘where the action is’.
This is not to say Russia is being ignored. It is however a very big place and I am going to guess that the time between scanning particular areas has greatly lengthened. Russian troop movements are mainly rail based and with enough eyeballs and Cold War era periodic coverage one might hope to pick up changes in traffic patterns and notice “something is going on”. But… this requires a certain periodicity in coverage. Changes in static positions like silos and strategic air bases are much easier to pick up even with occasional coverage. Dynamic changes, such as train and road movements are a different story. You have to have a satellite taking pictures at just the right time or often enough to pick up a signal just by chance.
This is what took Perry and I awhile to meet minds on: I have been thinking of this issue as a communications/information theory problem. How often do you have to sample an area to notice a change in the density of train traffic? I would posit it would have to be several times a week at the very least if the spike in traffic was huge and extended; if the spike were smaller and flatter you would need to sample daily or multiple times daily. You would have to do it at night and through clouds as well if you were to get a statistical value high enough to ring alarm bells. It is an issue of sampling rate versus the highest detectable signal frequency, pure and simple.
I doubt they have even been scanning large areas of Russia more than a few times a week (I suspect much less often) except in areas of nuclear strategic interest. They could easily miss large troop movements in a part of Russia which is not of great national interest to the United States.
Let the discussion begin. There is a lot of meat on this bone!
Says the man from the Devil’s Kitchen:
Bishop Hill has pieced together the full story of the hockey-stick graph and it is, in the opinion of your humble Devil, fucking dynamite.
Pardon his French. Unlike DK, I have not read this posting of BH’s yet, although I most certainly will be reading it very soon. But the Bishop has for at least the last year or so been one of my favourite bloggers, and Devil’s Kitchen is a regular favourite of mine too. This posting looks like it will confirm – no, strengthen – my high opinion of both of these bloggers, one for writing it, and the other for flagging it up. I came across the Bishop’s posting under my own steam, but soon after noting it, I noted Devil’s Kitchen noting it also.
Assuming that DK is approximately right about the excellence of this piece of writing by Bishop Hill, here is a fine example of one of the many things that the best bloggers are now doing very well, namely pulling together lots of postings on the same general topic (in this case all by the same person) and summarising them for the benefit of anyone who is interested, but who lacks the time or the inclination to read all those original postings.
I was going to write about the unconscionable Russian attacks on Georgia and how it is more important than ever to confront and isolate Russia and impose a cost on Russian imperialism… but then I read this article by Marko Hoare, who has written some great things in the past on the Balkan conflict, and he says much of what I would have…
This is not a case of Moscow supporting the right of national majorities to secede – the Abkhaz have no majority, not even a plurality, in Abkhazia. Nor is it a case of Moscow supporting the right of autonomous entities of the former Soviet Union to secede – Moscow has extended the same support to the separatists of Transnistria, which enjoyed no autonomous status in the USSR, while denying the right to secede of the Chechen Republic. This is simply a case of naked Russian imperialist expansionism. It is Georgia which is fighting to establish its independence, and Georgia which deserves our support. Georgia is a staunch ally of the West; the third largest contributor of troops to the allied coalition in Iraq. A Russian defeat of Georgia would be a tremendous setback for the West’s credibility and moral standing; it would increase Russian control of our energy supplies and encourage further Russian acts of aggression in the former Soviet Union.
We cannot afford to back down before this act of Russian imperialist aggression. We should defend Georgia with all the means at our disposal. We should send troops to bolster her. We should threaten Russia with sanctions. Heroic Georgia is fighting our fight; she is defending the freedom and security of democratic Europe.
Amen.
I am more than usually depressed by the report of the parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights that is published today. A Bill of Rights for the UK? is a reaction to the present administration’s kite flying for a “British Bill of Rights and Duties“, and goes to confirm my suspicion that human-rights lawyers are equipped with a tin ear for political discourse as part of their education.
They do not see the fierce conditionality of Rights-and-Duties. They are in their eunoetic little universe of the kindly legislator not the populist fury. Rather than a reaction of horror at the transparent desire to entrench ergate slavery to a corporatist ‘civic republican’ state as a citizen’s lot, there’s a mild whinge that the Government isn’t speaking clearly enough – no grasp that there is a different language in use:
33. We regret that there is not greater clarity in the Government’s reasons for embarking on this potentially ambitious course of drawing up a Bill of Rights. A number of the Government’s reasons appear to be concerned with correcting public misperceptions about the current regime of human rights protection, under the HRA. We do not think that this is in itself a good reason for adopting a Bill of Rights. As we have consistently said in previous Reports, the Government should seek proactively to counter public misperceptions about human rights rather than encourage them by treating them as if they were true.
That I could support. And the discussion in the same section makes some sense of reframing the ECHR and the Human Rights Act to give better protection to individual liberty against the state. However, it doesn’t face up to the Government’s agenda, which is entirely opposite. It doesn’t, as any Bill of Rights worth the name would do, presuppose the implacable hostility of authority to the exercise of freedom.
The rest is horror. Chandler called the game of chess “as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency”. You would need to harness a gigantic advertising group – WPP, say – for a full year, to piss away as much brain and education as has been wasted in the construction of the Outline of a UK Bill of Rights and Freedoms. Given the task of criticism and reflection, they have been reflexively orthodox. Not just the committee, but most of their witnesses, have demonstrated that, if it contingently makes the owner deaf to political meanings, the purpose of the tin ear in human-rights legal education is to pour jurisprudential treacle directly into the brain.
→ Continue reading: Like your manifesto, comrade
Is Russia now doing well, economically? Here’s a quote which suggests that it is. It is from classical music commentator Norman Lebrecht, writing with his usual over-the-topness about the young Russian recently installed as conductor of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, Vasily Petrenko. According to Lebrecht, he is doing very well. Here is what Petrenko says about his recent Russian past.
Petrenko’s grandparents endured the siege of Leningrad; his parents grew up under communism. He is among the last to have enjoyed the elitist benefits of the Soviet education system, getting fast-tracked through specialist schools after being spotted singing in a choir from the age of four. ‘People around me were being trained to direct choruses in Siberia,’ he remembers. ‘There were 200 professional choirs in the country, now there are nine. Those times are over. Parents don’t want their kids to be musicians any more. They make more money as bricklayers, not to say bankers.’
Whatever your opinion is about people being paid to sing in choruses – mine is that if audiences won’t pay, such singers shouldn’t be paid – it surely says something about the Russian economy that now you can make proper money laying bricks. “Banking” could mean anything, from proper banking to legalised thievery. Merely getting rich being a construction worker would be similarly ambiguous, economically speaking. But there is something reassuring mundane about bricklaying, suggestive of real people wanting to hire you for good reasons, to build buildings that actually make sense.
I remember vividly what Soviet bricklaying used to be like. I attended a Libertarian jamboree in Tallinn, Estonia, in about 1990, and I recall seeing the wall around the local Soviet military base (I think it must have been). It was by far the most badly constructed wall I have ever seen, then or since, and had I not seen it, I wonder if I could even conceive of such constructional badness. Try to imagine the most spectacularly incompetent bricklaying that you can, and then halve its quality. Then halve it again. That’s approximately half as bad as this brick “laying” was. It looked as if it had been done by six year olds, who had been alternating that with drinking Vodka.
Russian walls are now, I surmise, getting a lot better. Which I agree may not be wholly good news.
My dad was a newsagent, I went to state school, I’m Asian, I work in the city and I earn loads of money. I do it so my parents and future children can have something close to the only kind of life Toynbee has ever known. Me explain my position? How about she explains her right to speak for the poor?
– Peter Hoskin singles out that comment by Raj Chande on an excerpt from Polly Toynbee and David Walker’s book entitled Unjust Rewards
Since we are talking about South Africans (see my post below about cricket), ex-South African-now-American Kim du Toit, occasional commenter in these parts, says he dreams about getting one of these.
Kim’s dreams are pretty scary.
It is all so easy when you are an armchair pundit, and we bloggers are no different. With politics or economics, so with sport. Mike Atherton, the former captain of England’s cricket team and a man notable for his dogged, never-say-die style of batting, is unimpressed by the England’s cricket selectors’ choice of skipper, who was born in South Africa, could not get a regular place in that country’s team, and by some means, is now the captain of England. One might say that as the final Test in the series at the Oval in London unfolds, that “Our South Africans are better than theirs”.
It may all, as Atherton says in Eyeorish fashion, end in tears. But by God, what a start. I went to the match’s opening day yesterday with an old South African friend of mine, by the name of Martin. We watched in amazement as the England bowling attack exploited a benign surface and moist air to trick the South African batting with a wonderful spell of bowling that removed six batsmen in short order after the top-order batsmen, notably the captain, looked ominously comfortable. Their comfort proved short-lived. As a result of this marvellous bowling, involving an attacking fielding lineup with so many slip fielders that it looked like the West Indies in the old days, South Africa failed to make it past 200 runs in their first innings. Now England have to beat that target by a good margin if they are to win this match and salvage some honour from this series.
Ironically, the man whom Atherton prefers for the captaincy – Andrew Strauss – had another poor day at the crease yesterday, bowled out after a few deliveries. Ah, the joys of punditry, eh Michael?
|
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.
|
