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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If anyone ever had any hopes that Boris was any different to the dreary authoritarians who populate the system, this should lay such notions to rest. He is very much ‘one of them‘.
He purports to have ‘libertarian instincts’ and yet thinks the role of the state should extend to telling people at gun point what they can eat. To hell with taking a moral position and respecting self ownership, says Boris, what are the utilitarian arguments?
A vote for this man was sadly a vote for more of the same regulatory statism that spews out of the political class.
Free-market Western democratic capitalism is sustainable, both environmentally and economically, and alone gives us the affluence and freedom to allow a sizable minority to divorce itself from the gritty daily tasks of production to critique and revile the very system that nourishes them.
– Victor David Hanson
This article has nothing really to do with politics or so forth, but it caught my eye as an excellent piece of analysis of a man’s reputation, not least a reputation that had been assiduously cultivated by the man himself, Pablo Picasso:
“They say that I can draw better than Raphael”, Gertrude Stein recorded Picasso as saying. “And they’re probably right. Perhaps I even draw better.” Picasso made this boast in claiming his right to creative freedom. The truth, however, is that Picasso not only did not draw better than Raphael, he may well have had a very limited understanding of how Raphael drew.
So writes someone called Catesby Leigh, in Standpoint magazine.
The author of the piece looks at an actual attempt by Picasso to draw a human form – a man called Vollard – in the manner of the Old Masters, such as Ingres. The commentary reminds of me of when one of my early efforts at school was given a fairly dusty appraisal by my arts teacher:
For starters, Vollard just isn’t put together quite right. Most problematically, he appears to be missing a goodly portion of his jawbone. His face reads like a rather shallow, U-shaped mask. As a result the structure of the side of his head and its engagement with the neck is badly resolved. Apart from the head, Picasso lavished the most care on the other unclothed portion of Vollard’s anatomy: the hands. Surely he recalled Ingres’s countless masterful hand studies from his Montauban visit. Vollard’s fingers in particular are modeled with excruciating care — a far cry from the familiar Picasso bravura. Even so the back of the outer hand, like the wrist of the partly covered hand, is a lumpen mass and not the articulated anatomical form it should be.
Picasso also failed to draw Vollard’s rump properly. He treated it, along with the better part of his upper left leg, as one big, flat receding plane, with the delineated folds in the trousers of his suit contributing nothing to its modelling. Shading lines continue straight back from the rump’s outline into the space between it and the back of the chair. This is a violation of one of the most elementary canons of classical draftsmanship: that lines should “follow the form” and in doing so indicate its depth. In this case those shading lines should have curved at the rump’s end so as to communicate its three-dimensionality. But Picasso followed the shade and not the form.
The familiar “subversion of academic conventions” apologia for Picasso’s idiosyncracies will not wash in the Vollard portrait’s case. Though working from a photograph, Picasso was doing this one straight, eager to convince himself and others that he could draw like an Old Master. Impressive as the results undeniably are, he couldn’t match Ingres’s draughtsmanship no matter how hard he tried. For economy of artistic means combined with flawless technique, his rival’s Guillon-Lethière leaves Picasso’s Vollard in the dust.
The article’s mood is very measured and polite, but that doesn’t mean we need to be so reticent. Picasso has always left me cold, and assuming the analysis here is correct, could it be said that one reason for Picasso’s move away from traditional forms of art is not just because of a genuine desire to take art in what he saw in a new direction, but because, in terms of the skills of the Old Masters, he just could not quite hack it in every rigorous aspect, and therefore chose forms more in tune with his undoubted talents?
For those interested, this book on the skills of the Old Masters, by Charles Lock Eastlake, looks interesting. Drawing and painting is a skill of mine that I have, to my shame, let go a bit. It is something I intend to put right.
It did not fit easily into my previous post but another example of a person afflicted by “… a desire to maintain the delusion that the world would heed your message if only it were allowed to hear it” is Peter Gleick, who despite having his own blog at Forbes Magazine and turning down star billing to debate his opponents at the Heartland Institute face to face persisted in his belief that they were managing to “prevent this debate”.
Incidentally, the Undebated One has been reinstated at the Pacific Institute, I see from a report in the Guardian. You will rejoice to hear that
The Pacific Institute indicated in the statement that it had found no evidence for Heartland’s charges that Gleick had forged one of several documents he released last February.
To my suprise Suzanne Goldenberg, the author of the report who until now has appeared besotted with Gleick now sounds almost like one of those cynical reporters one used to read about:
But the Institute offered no further information on the findings of the investigation, or any evidence to support the claim of having conducted a fully independent investigation. It gave no further explanation for its decision to reject Heartland’s charges that Gleick had faked a document.
Ms Goldenberg then continued to veer from side to side in the article. After Old Suzanne wrote about a Heartland plan to “spread misinformation in schools about climate change” (making no reference to the fact that the most damaging quotes on that score came from a document that she has hinted a minute ago was fake), New Suzanne lets slip, I think deliberately, that:
… when Heartland promoted the climate conference by taking out a billboard comparing believers in climate change to psychopaths like the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, a run in donors, which had been relatively modest immediately after Gleick’s exposé, spiked dramatically. Two board members resigned, almost all of those based in its Washington DC office quit, and a number of Heartland allies publicly chided the organisation
The words in bold represent a change. Until recently the Guardian line was that Gleick’s exposé had been, shall we say, misguided, but had struck a mighty blow against Heartland.
I do not think I quite qualify as an ally, but I was and am a strong supporter of the Institute in its efforts to get the truth out of Gleick, and was also one of the chiders after the Unabomber poster came out, though as you will see if you read that post and its comments many here disagree. My impression is that Ms Goldenberg and others with similar views turned with relief from defending Gleick to talking about the Kaczynski poster. Without a confession or an adverse verdict in a court of law they will never admit that Gleick lied. However I suspect the penny has dropped that their public credulity regarding an obviously fishy story, and the public excuses they made for Gleick’s admitted dishonest tactics, let alone his unadmitted ones, sent the message to the public that they may also be credulous and tolerant of dishonesty when it comes to climate science.
“By the way, George Soros also warned that the new, creditor-dominated Europe would become “a German empire with the periphery as the hinterland”. Didn’t a certain female politician warn of something along these lines nearly 25 years ago, and wasn’t she branded xenophobic for her pains? An entire generation is being made to pay for our continent’s slow learners.”
Charles Moore.
Declare free trade unilaterally, says Tim Worstall in the Telegraph. Good and true are his words, but since you all know that already, allow me to draw your attention to an exchange you may not have seen in the comments that manages to be both entertaining and at the same time slightly sad.
“davidaslindsay” wrote:
A perfect illustration of how there is nothing more anti-conservative than capitalism.
The Cold War is long gone, so there is no remaining need for Tories to be corralled out of fear into voting for Conservatives and other such Liberal parties
Imagine, just imagine, if a site not unlike this one in structure, if in nothing else, were to give a platform to people who recognised that there was no patriotism without economic patriotism, set within a broader appreciation of the rural, the provincial, the socially conservative, and the classically (and Classically) Christian, with the consequent pronounced aversion to global capitalism, to American hegemony, to obeisant Zionism, to wars to make the world anew, to wars generally, and so on.
Just imagine such a voice in the debate. Just imagine it. Even if only for one moment, just imagine it.
“TimWorstall” replied
David, this is a blog.
You have a blog. Thus there already is a blog which reflects such views.
Very democratic place, the internet.
What is both funny and sad about David Lindsay’s cri de coeur is that he does not just have a personal blog but has, or had in 2009, a slot in the Telegraph, a privilege that most bloggers would give their best stripy pyjamas to obtain. Lindsay’s cry of “Just imagine such a voice in the debate. Just imagine it. Even if only for one moment, just imagine it” makes him sound like a combination of Galileo facing the Inquisition and Captain Kirk trying to get the Fabrini to believe they are on a generation ship in For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky. Yet he scarcely had to stretch his imagination to conceive of a voice exactly like his being given a platform even beyond the one offered by davidaslindsay.blogspot.com. All he had to do was remember as far back as 2009.
What is the appeal of believing that you are silenced when you are given a megaphone?
Some of it is persecution envy, or to be more accurate, envy of the chance to be heroic. Mr Lindsay is of the nostalgic Right and appears to me to suffer a little from this condition but the phenomenon is most common and strong on the nostalgic Left. How they do hate being the rich, safe, privileged ones. How they love to reminisce about standing up to Thatcher, or at a pinch, their resistance during the grim Bush years. How they would have loved to have been a Freedom Rider. They would have been heroes, honest.
Some of it is a desire to maintain the delusion that the world would heed your message if only it were allowed to hear it. This thought hurts much less than the thought that the world has had ample opportunity to hear your message and heeds it not. Before you laugh at Mr Lindsay – or being realistic, slightly after – remember that (a) in so far as this is a delusion it is one he shares with us (have we not blogs? Seen the libertarian sentiments of the populace lately?) and (b) the belief that the people are being stopped from hearing minority voices by a semi-conscious conspiracy of the mainstream media is only just now ceasing to be true.
We do not quite match the faithfulness in delusion of those communists who have announced the imminence of world revolution every year for close on a century, but many of the bloggers whose writing I love most – Instapundit, Brian Micklethwait, me – have announced the imminent death of the gatekeeper every year for close on a decade. Yet there the decrepit old bastard is each new morning, bleary eyed, swaying on his feet, pretending not to know about the people who slipped past him while he was drunk and incapable the night before – but still manning his old rotten gate most of the time and just damn refusing to die.
Mind you, we were not exactly wrong about the old boy’s morbidity, just premature. He’ll turn up his toes eventually and the patient messengers of every suppressed creed with break through and be heard in all the land, only we’ll be heard most gladly because we are in the right. I hope. I think.
“The late economist Mancur Olson has argued that economies tend to grow more slowly as rent-seeking coalitions become pervasive and ubiquitous, since they divert resources from wealth-creating to wealth-consuming uses. This is one reason, he argues, why the United States grew so rapidly in the nineteenth century, and why West Germany and Japan grew so rapidly in the two or three decades after World War II. At such times, these economies were open to investment and entrepreneurship, and, as a consequence, they enjoyed historically high rates of growth. With the passage of time, all of these systems were gradually encumbered by coalitions seeking benefits through the state. Political paralysis and slow growth, Olson argues, are by-products of political systems captured by rent-seeking coalitions. These groups, operating collectively, can block any overall effort to cut spending or to address the problems of deficits and debt.”
– James Piereson
Recently I wrote here about how the US Presidential campaign is hastening the end of the CAGW scare. One of the things I said in that piece was that I didn’t know if Romney intended to make a big issue out of the new energy sources that are now coming on stream in the USA. But, I argued, even if Romney’s only interest in enterprises like Solyndra is that they are corrupt and wasteful rackets for syphoning tax money into the pockets of Obama supporters, I argued that such policking would still have the effect of flagging up the CAGW argument, to the extreme disadvantage of those who still take the CAGW scare seriously.
The central problem for the CAGW team being that whereas until now, others have been trying to knock some sense into their heads, with little apparent success, now the CAGW team itself is going to have to convince a crucial cohort of American voters that CAGW is a problem, when those voters now mostly reckon that it is not. This the CAGW team will be totally unable to do, any more than they have convinced the people whom they describe as “deniers” to stop their complaining about all the dodgy “climate science” on which the CAGW scare has always depended. All that the CAGW people will do is publicise their failure so far to make any persuasive sense.
I learned today, from this article by Walter Russell Mead, that Team Romney is indeed well aware of how Team Obama’s fondness for Greenery has caused Team Obama to impede the development of new energy sources in the USA, and that Team Romney very much intends to make an issue of this.
Says Mead:
Republicans are seizing the opportunity to make energy politics a centerpiece of their campaign.
And then Mead links to an FT story which is behind a paywall, but also quotes from it, as now do I:
“Blue-collar voters were never that sold on environmental issues, and if some Democrats come across as not keen on economic development, it could lose them support here in Ohio,” he said.
Who “he” is there, I don’t know, not being able to read the previous bit of the FT piece that says this, and Mead himself doesn’t say. But I am sure that whoever he is, he is right.
Republicans, from Mitt Romney, the party’s presidential candidate, to the congressional leadership, have made Barack Obama’s alleged stifling of the energy industry a centrepiece of their campaigns this year. …
Mr Romney has said he will approve the Keystone XL pipeline as soon as he wins office and curb the powers of the Environmental Protection Agency.
So, it would appear that the intellectual pressure already being applied to the CAGW-ers is even greater than I said in my earlier piece. Good.
This is delicious about Professor Paul Krugman.
The president of Estonia chewed out Paul Krugman on Wednesday, using Twitter to call the Nobel Prize-winning economist “smug, overbearing & patronizing,” in response to a short post on Estonia’s economic recovery. Krugman’s 67-word entry, entitled “Estonian Rhapsody,” questioned the merits of using Estonia as a “poster child for austerity defenders.” He included a chart that, in his words, showed “significant but still incomplete recovery” after a deep economic slump.
This paragraph packs its own, statistically-deadly punch in the direction of the New York Times columnist:
Estonia, which in 2011 became the latest country to join the eurozone, has been heralded by some as an austerity success story. That year, it clocked a faster economic growth pace than any other country in the European Union, at 7.6 percent. Estonia is also the only EU member with a budget surplus, and had the lowest public debt in 2011 — 6 percent of GDP. Fitch affirmed its A+ credit rating last week.
Update: Dan Mitchell weighs in with some damning data of his own against Krugman.
Taking refuge from having to think about the Surrey cricket team, who yesterday had another nightmare day in the county championship, I instead turned to a piece about the extreme effectiveness of Tim Bresnan as a member of the currently very effective England cricket team, who begin their third of three test matches against the West Indies today.
England is now the top rated test team, but they haven’t won every recent game they have played by any means. However, every one of the thirteen five-day-long test matches that Bresnan has so far played as a member of the England team has been won by England. What, asks Ed Smith (a writer whom we have already noted and quoted here), is the secret of Bresnan’s mysterious contribution? Until the second game against the West Indies in which he took eight wickets, Bresnan’s numbers haven’t been that great, yet whenever he plays, England win. (Let’s hope that in the South Africa tests later this summer, that continues to be true.)
Smith links to another piece, by Michael Lewis, about a basketball player whose personal numbers seem to be even worse that Bresnan’s, yet who likewise seems always to make the team he plays in twice the team it would have been without him, a basketball player called Shane Battier.
Smith picks out this paragraph by Lewis about Battier, as do I:
Here we have a basketball mystery: a player is widely regarded inside the N.B.A. as, at best, a replaceable cog in a machine driven by superstars. And yet every team he has ever played on has acquired some magical ability to win.
And, as Michael Lewis also explains, lost that ability as soon as Battier, whether because of being sold on or because of injury, stopped playing for them.
At this point, I had, as in my custom in many of postings here about sport, intended to end with a brief but profound Samizdata point, pertaining in some way or another to the desirability of the private ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, as illustrated by the thoughts alluded to above. What that point was going to be, I did not know, but I would, I felt sure, think of something. Instead I found myself speculating, more pertinently if in a rather less Samizdata-ish way, about what exactly the Bresnan Battier effect might consist of, or at any rate part of what it might consist of. → Continue reading: On how Tim Bresnan and Shane Battier make winning teams
If you visit, for example, the Financial Times website, you will be presented with a pop-up box warning you about cookies. This is becoming more common and is a result of the EU Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications, also known as the e-Privacy Directive, also known as the cookie law, which took effect on 26th May.
Since no-one understands the law and has to rely on vague guidance that gets updated without really clarifying anything, web designers who have heard of the law will likely rely on the annoying pop-up box for some time and it will become boilerplate which is instinctively dismissed by users. Luckily most web designers seemingly have not heard of the law or are otherwise ignoring it, probably because they have real work to get on with.
Dave Evans of the Information Commissioner’s Office writes:
We’ve stressed that there’s no ‘one size fits all approach’. We think that organisations themselves are best placed to develop their own solutions.
Freely co-operating organisations did solve the problem years ago, when they invented web browsers with cookie settings. This legislation solves nothing at the cost of confusing, worrying and irritating people.
“The great irony of the Diamond Jubilee celebrations is that the most overt snobbery emanated, not from the House of Windsor or its posh cheerleaders in political and media circles, but from so-called republicans. It was them, these embarrassments to Tom Paine, who looked with horror and derision upon the great hordes of modern Britain. They pronounced themselves “aghast” at all the little people “happily buying Union Jack cups and bunting”. They mocked the masses for obediently heeding the “message from on high” telling them “not to worry about increasing inequality and its accompanying social problems, but to clap your hands, smile and applaud”, like good little children.”
– Brendan O’Neill.
He’s hit the nail on the head. I think – as a libertarian and minarchist, that we if we are going to have a state at all, then I see little that is objectionable from a freedom point of view in having a constitutional monarchy instead of an elected president, although I suppose the glitz factor would be reduced. Republicans who are serious should ask this question: would a single piece of Nanny State legislation, the Database State, our membership of the EU, our massive taxes and regulatory burdens, be improved in any way if we said goodbye to the monarchy? Really?
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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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