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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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The following choice quote has perhaps already been recycled here. It has surely done the rounds elsewhere. But just to be sure, here it is for Samizdata readers, either again or for the first time:
“After five years in government, I now have the same respect for politicians that the pigeons of Rome have for statues.”
Which, I think you will agree, nicely sums up the Samizdata attitude towards politicians, whether we have been “in government” on not. Usually, just having a particularly governmental bit of government done to us is sufficient, and it does not require five years of it to happen before such enlightenment is arrived at. And you certainly do not have to be a politician for half a decade to find out how nasty politics is.
This was said by Antonio Martino, Italy’s Defence Minister from 2001 until 2006, at the 2006 meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society in Guatemala. It was quoted by Charles Murray at the start of this speech, which was given in Washington just after that MPS meeting.
I came across this speech by Murray because I was looking for a picture of him to use in a posting at my education blog, about this article by Murray entitled The age of educational romanticism.
From time to time you hear a familiar tale about how X has not bought a TV license because X does not have a television, but about how the TV license people are nevertheless harassing X mercilessly. X tells them repeatedly that he has no TV, but it makes no difference, and a sum of money way in excess of the license fee being unjustly demanded is consumed in fatuous bureaucratic intimidation. Why don’t they say it honestly? The TV license is not a license to watch TV. It is a tax on all householders and all households, regardless of TV ownership or watching habits.
Well, here is a new tweak on the old story. Now they are inflicting this idiocy upon John Redwood, who does watch TV in his main home, but who has no TV in his London pad. Not only is John Redwood an MP and a former (and perhaps soon to be again) cabinet minister. He is also a blogger, and quite a good one:
Governments should assume honest conduct by citizens unless there is evidence to suppose otherwise, and should have a framework of sensible laws and requirements that most people most of the time respect and wish to follow. As soon as government becomes heavy handed and imposes too many laws – and too many laws that do not seem reasonable to the governed – there is more chance that more people will deliberately or inadvertently break them, and more likelihood that government will then intensify its snooping and heavy handed enforcement. Such a progress makes public life coarser, and creates a growing gap between government and governed. The UK now is suffering from rapacious government, seeking ever larger sums of revenue to feed the bureaucratic monster. It will in turn create an angrier electorate, resentful of how the money is spent and cross about the bullying techniques used to extract it.
That “now” makes this sound like a recent development. The posting as a whole is entitled: “Now they want us to pay for services we do not receive!”, as if a government charging for something it doesn’t do is a new idea invented by Gordon Brown which Redwood has only just noticed. But since Redwood is a party politician, he is obliged to spread the idea that there are simple party political causes of and cures for such woes. Apart from that, good posting.
If we want to build the country, maintain our dignity and solve economic problems, we need the culture of martyrdom.
– President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran replies to his critics (also quoted by Mick Hartley)
I recommend this short illustrated talk given by an American academic (no: businessman – see comment) who taught at Beijing University and who went with his family on a trip to North Korea. Here is part of what he says:
This is a woman that was directing traffic with great resolve and military precision outside the front door of our hotel. We watched her for at least ten minutes, as she moved and rotated with complete control of her little domain, and we didn’t see a single car go by. [Laughter] I mean, you do have to wonder what they think. …
He then sees one of those giant stadium displays, done with thousands of big hand-held squares which keep changing.
This big display, which sat opposite most of the people is just a huge communist video monitor, one person per pixel. The resolution of this screen was about seventy by four hundred. The frame rate was one to two hertz, and you could get up to two frames a second, before muscle fatigue set in.
And then we see this screen in action. It is actually rather impressive, especially when you consider how much the poor bastards doing it probably get to eat each day. And they’re the lucky ones.
It often happens that people who report not on “the situation” in wherever it is, but simply on what they happen themselves to see, can supply an extraordinarily vivid feeling of what it must be like there. They don’t tell the whole story. But then again, they don’t pretend to.
Meanwhile, the latest “news” from North Korea, is that they are building a huge underground fighter runway, right near the border with the hated South, Thunderbirds style. It is supposed to be invulnerable to military attack. Fat chance. I wonder how many people will die while making it.
It is increasingly clear that much of the current wave of repression is occurring not in spite of the Olympics but actually because of the Olympics.
– Amnesty International which has detailed numerous arrests and the harassment of Chinese civil rights activists
Yesterday afternoon, and again this afternoon, my hopes of getting a day’s worth of stuff done in a day, and then another day’s stuff in another day, were dashed by cricket, on the television. This was no ordinary cricket. This was not, for example, English county cricket, which has just begun again, and whose first round of matches concluded today, mostly in draws made inevitable by the gloomy, drizzly English weather. I did not get to see those two test match under-achievers but county supremos, Mark Ramprakash and Graham Hick, score their inevitable opening match centuries, in front of the usual tiny smattering of chilled spectators. No, what I saw was something quite different to all that. What I saw were two games on the first two days of something called the Indian Premier League.
On the face of it, this was not cricket of any great profundity, being twenty-overs-each-way slogfests, quite lacking in the long-drawn-out subtleties of five day test cricket or four day English county cricket or Australian Sheffield Shield matches. Nevertheless the Indian Premier League is something extremely profound. It signals the emergence of India as the superpower of cricket that it now is. Everyone in cricket agrees. It’s a new era.
India is not the cricket superpower because of its players, excellent though those players are. Yes, Sachin Tendulkar will soon become the greatest run-getter in test match history, when he overtakes the West Indian Brian Lara. But Australia are still, despite the recent retirements of Warne and McGrath, what they have long been, the best international side in the world. No, what makes India special is the number of its fans. I am fond of saying that there are more cricket fans in India than there are people in Europe, and my friend and fellow Samizdatista Michael Jennings would have corrected me long ago if this was wrong. And now, these fans are starting seriously to shift the centre of gravity of cricket.
The Indian Premier League doesn’t just feature Indian players. Their plan is to make the IPL have a place in cricket much like that the of the English Premier League in soccer, namely something played by the best players in the world, and watched and followed all over the world. And now, it has started. The atmosphere I got from watching these two games on my television was of a big, big country, self-confident enough not just to offer the world a compelling sporting product but to share the glory of it all with whoever in the world has the nerve and the determination to grab it.
And it so happens that the visitors are seizing their chances, so far rather better than the locals. Perhaps the Indians are weighed down a little by the burden of what they must be telling themselves is cricket history in the making, and are taking it just that much too seriously, whereas the visitors just see it as the chance of some fun and some (in some cases a lot of) highly welcome cash. Warne and McGrath have both forced their tired old bodies to have one final outing, I notice.
In the opening game, the Kolkata Knight Riders crushed the Bangalore Royal Challengers, from whom there was alas not much of a challenge, and the result was settled long before the end of the game, as often happens in these types of games. But New Zealander Brendon McCullum nevertheless got the IPL off to a suitably headline grabbing start by making the biggest individual score ever recorded in a twenty-twenty game. And today, another rapid not out century by Australian run-machine Mike Hussey was also the difference between the two sides, as the Chennai Super Kings set an even bigger target, which the Kings XI Punjab made a decent stab at but in the end couldn’t match. The Punjab side would have got closer if their top scorer, another Australian, had hung around longer and hit some more boundaries.
No wonder the best of England’s county cricketers are envious. They can hardly wait to get involved.
There are genuine fears that cricket is not so much being played as used up, and that spectators may in due course get bored with all this vulgar slogging, and instead of turning to more refined and antique versions of cricket, may instead switch their allegiances to other sports. But good or bad, this is certainly an event, not just in the history of cricket, but, because of the emergence-of-India-as-a-superpower angle, in the very history of the world.
I chanced upon these excitements (by coincidence immediately after posting this about the IPL at my personal blog) on something called Setanta Sports 1, channel number 34 on my digital TV, which is sometimes “encrypted” (i.e. it doesn’t work), but sometimes not (i.e. it does!). Can anyone tell me what further games I might be able to watch here in England on Setanta, given that I am not a subscriber to Setanta and do not plan to be? I get very little live cricket in England to watch, unless I visit a pub. I would love to be able to watch more of this tournament in my home.
People say: Is classical music dying? Go to Covent Garden and you can view the corpse.
–Joe Queenan reacts negatively on Newsnight Review earlier this evening to Sir Harrison Birtwistle’s new opera The Minotaur
Yesterday morning I posted, on my personal blog, some anodyne remarks about how economic trouble strikes. They included this:
Speaking of Paul Marks, …
… as I was …
… someone should really dig out him ranting away three or four years ago about the fact that the British economy is doomed, doomed. Now everybody is talking like this. They are merely telling us so, now. He told us so, years ago. With luck, it will be possible to find an entire Samizdata posting, from way back, in which this last week’s cursings are all there.
I scratched about for a while in the Samizdata back catalog, but could find nothing entirely suitable. I suspect that Paul may have posted a lot of his best doom-mongering in comments, both following up on his own postings, and on the postings of others. However, commenting at my posting this morning, Peter Briffa supplied a link to this posting at conservativehome.com, dated June 14th 2005. The posting itself concerns some fairly anodyne remarks from Shadow Chancellor George Osborne, about such things as a “modern, integrated transport infrastructure”, a reduction of the regulatory burden, a “strong macroeconomic environment” and “simplification of taxes”. But then, comment number two, quite long, turns out to be from a certain Paul Marks. It includes this:
On the Bank of England: Well the British money supply is expanding at least as fast as the Euro money supply (see the back pages of the “Economist” any week for the stats) – so even I would not make a jingoistic claim that all things in Britain are fine. Of course joining the Euro would mean even lower interest rates for central bank credit-money (hardly a good idea).
Sadly the notion that “expanding the money supply” is good for long term economic prosperity has been an article of faith for many decades (whenever there are problems the cry goes up “cut interest rates”). Once it was believed that this credit money expansion should be linked to the general “price level” (in order to prevent, horrors of horrors, falling prices), but at least since Keynes the doctrine has been to issue more money (by various clever means)as soon as there is trouble – whether the “price level” is going up, down or sideways.
I do not expect to convince anyone here that credit money expansion is the cause of the “boom-bust cycle”, but for anyone who thinks (along with Mr Blair and Mr Brown) that this cycle has been “abolished” I would advise them to watch and see.
So, not only did Paul Marks predict the trouble ahead that we have now crashed into. He also predicted what would be wrongly said about how to deal with it when trouble did in due course strike. I’m sure that there is similar stuff to be found here. Paul? Anyone?
AntiCitzenOne comments on this posting at David Thompson’s blog, thus:
I think we should give Muslim men with self control problems horse-blinkers, rather than cover women from head to toe.
The posting itself makes a vital point about how to defeat intimidation by Islamofascist zealots, which is not to leave anyone they pick on isolated. Thompson links back to this excellent piece.
This is why a general piling in with the insults against Islam and Islamic nastiness (the former leads directly to the latter in my opinion) is so important. Quite aside from being true and worth saying and a valid contribution to the debate and all that kind of stuff, these insults establish the principle that we can do them, and you can not stop us. There can be a debate. If and when you stop with the death threats, we will make the insults less insulting and more decorous, and some of us will go completely silent on the subject. Your choice.
This also explains why I do not denounce Christianity nearly so often or nearly so harshly. On those occasions when anyone does do this, the Christians do not respond with riots and death threats. So, beyond the occasional polite criticism of their (I think) odd theological views, together with praise for their more positive qualities, leave them alone, I say.
Let’s get this straight. The house price bubble has been caused by money printing. In today’s world, that means as a result of the Bank of England keeping interest rates artificially low. That’s why the money supply is growing at more than 10% a year and this money has to go somewhere. Lots of it has gone into the housing market. And the “solution” from all of the above is more of the same!
Those who are going to pay for this mess are the prudent, those who haven’t lived beyond their means. Their savings will be inflated away to bail out the welfare bums, many of whom are economic illiterates infesting the business world.
– David Farrer names and shames a bunch of granny muggers
I brought prejudices acquired during the Cold War to the struggle between civilisation and Islam, but tried – and try still – to be careful to see the differences as well as the similarities between the two struggles.
In this spirit, I at first thought that whereas Soviet communism was ideologically breakable, Islam is not breakable. More than a billion souls believe in it, and however true it might be that it is evil and repulsive nonsense, saying this would accomplish very little. It would merely poke the hornet’s nest with a stick. But slowly, I have been coming round to thinking almost the complete opposite. Not only does denouncing Islam as evil nonsense establish the mere right, of us civilisationers, to denounce Islam – along with our right to say anything else we might want to say – true or false, nice or nasty, sensible or daft. Such talk also, I am starting to believe, strikes a dagger into the heart of the enemy camp, by spreading doubt in it about basic beliefs and hence sewing discord and confusion. I used to think that Islamists were indifferent to such ideological attacks. Now, I am starting to believe that they fear them very much. Hence all the murder threats. They sense that this is one of their weakest and potentially biggest fronts in the struggle. The biggest front of all, in fact.
And even if only a few “apostates” materialise, they are of huge significance, for they bring with them deep knowledge of the enemy we face and how we can see the enemy off.
Another advantage of ideological attacks on Islam is that arguments about – and in favour of – “apostasy” unite civilisation, and divide its enemies. We civilisationers argue fiercely with one another about how to oppose Islam, but almost all of us believe that if you want to criticise a religion non-violently you should be allowed to, and that if you want to abandon a religion you should be able to do that without getting extremely violent grief, or even the threat of it, from those who still do believe in it. Talking like this or doing this may be rather daft, and very unwise, and get you shunned by polite society (i.e. scared society), but … yes, it should be allowed. I am content to regard all who say that they disagree with the claims in this paragraph as the enemies of civilisation that they are, not just from the point of view of the mere truth, but on tactical grounds. Put such cretinous pro-Islamist fellow-travellers on the defensive also, I say.
And now I read this article (linked to about a week ago by Instapundit) in which it is claimed that the trickle of converts from Islam that was all I had so far noticed is actually whole lot more than that. It tells of a spectacular growth in the number of converts from Islam. Conversions have been happening in a steady flow for decades, but recently they have become a torrent, world-wide. Mostly these people are converting to Christianity, but sometimes just to not-Islam. Bossiness and terrorism and constant fighting is, it seems, not just repulsive. It actually repels. People are leaving the religion of war and joining the religion of, approximately speaking, peace – or joining no religion at all. Islam is only still growing numerically because it is growing so quickly by purely biological means. As far as the flow of converts is concerned it is now in headlong retreat.
So, is this true? Is this allegedly huge exflux really happening? I have heard nothing about it before, but that could merely mean that I am ignorant. Or is the exflux just wishful thinking on the part of Christians, talking nonsense to keep their spirits up?
This is one of those before-I-entirely-forget-about-it and better-late-than-never postings, for which deepest apologies to all who might mind that I didn’t put it up a week ago, when I should have.
So anyway, some while ago Antoine Clarke and I did one of our occasional recorded conversations about politics, here and in the USA. After we’d talked about the mess the US Democrats have got themselves into (I suggested a coin toss to settle it), we then mentioned the Libertarian Party, and the fact that they will soon be choosing their Presidential candidate. And after that, we switched to libertarian politics on this side of the pond, the point being that, in a very small way, there is some UK libertarian politics to report, in the form of the recently founded UK Libertarian Party. Antoine mentioned that the UKLP was having some kind of public event in the near future, and I mentioned this possibility in the blog posting I did in connection with all this. And “Devil’s Kitchen”, one of the bosses of the UKLP and also a noted blogger, left a comment:
We have a general meeting and piss-up from 3pm this Saturday (29th March 08), upstairs at St Stephen’s Tavern, Westminster.
Do feel free to drop in if you so desire …
So, I did. This was just over a week ago, as I say. As I made my way there, I feared the worst, namely a little clutch of social dyslexics as old as me and as badly dressed as me, but even fatter and even uglier, some of them clutching grubby plastic bags full of newspaper cuttings. I got there nearer to 6pm than 3pm, and immediately thought: oh dear, I am too late and they have all gone. The first floor of the St Stephen’s Tavern was, you see, full of normal people. But just as I was about to leave and go home again, the guy who turned out to be Mr Devil’s Kitchen himself hailed me. He even recognised me. So, I went over, and asked him which of this enormous throng of people were the UKLP. “They all are”, he said.
I did not stay long, because I was trying to recover from a nasty cough and cold. Also, what with these people looking so normal, and hence of potential political significance, I did not want to infect them. But I stayed long enough to discover that they all seemed to have lives and jobs and brains, and social antennae, and the looks to match. Mostly they were twenty somethings or thirty somethings, mostly male but with a few young women. I was allowed to take photos, but the ones without flash were too blurry and the ones with flash (which I seldom use) made all concerned look like horror movie extras, because my red-eye thingy was either not switched on or else is useless.
Which was a pity, because appearances matter, or they do if you are trying to start a political party. If your only concern is publishing things, the way it always has been with me, fine, look any way you like. But trying to be politicians and looking old and ugly means that you are not just old and ugly, but stupid and pathetic as well.
But I did stay for a bit, and I can report that the effort put in by my generation of libertarians and libertarian fellow-travellers, such as those who run and write for Samizdata, have most definitely not been wasted, if all these nice intelligent young total strangers were anything to go by, which they surely are. I have always been deeply pessimistic about whether libertarian parties can ever get anywhere, but have reluctantly come to the conclusion that although it is a dirty job, someone has probably got to do it, and whether they should or not, they will anyway, so why fight it? I wish these people all the luck that I fear they will need.
I also learned something else. Mr Devil’s Kitchen is, like David Cameron, an Old Etonian. That’s another thing that maybe should not count, but does.
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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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