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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Amazon has just been ordered by the French state to stop delivering books for free, and in general to refrain from charging too little for books. This is just wrong, says Instapundit.
With questions like this, I come over all Paul Coulam. I start not with what might or might not seem nice, but with libertarian dogma.
Amazon owns some books. They should be allowed sell them to you for any price they like, and subject to any conditions they like. They should be allowed to offer to deliver them any way they like, for any price they like. And if you are interested, you should be allowed to say … yes! Or: no. It really should be that simple. If you have to die your hair blue before they will sell books to you, well that would be a strange business model to follow, but: the books belong to them and they should be allowed to part with them, or not, on any basis they like.
However, the principle that if you own something you should be allowed to sell it on any basis you like would also allow certain other arrangements to pertain. → Continue reading: The state should not control prices but property owners should be allowed to control their own prices any way they like
The Stockholm Network people are trying as hard as they can to parlay their Golden Umbrella Awards into something truly significant. So they were pleased when Perry de Havilland did a piece here about the awards dinner last week, and even more pleased when Instapundit linked to that posting. And they were also delighted by this Wall Street Journal piece by John Fund. With awards ceremonies, what matters is not so much the dishing out of the awards as the matter of whether anyone else cares, or can be persuaded to care. This event was good. But it is the response to the event that will surely mean that the corresponding jamboree next year will be better.
Fund, who presented one of the awards, to a Bulgarian by the name of Dimitar Chobanov, begins his piece thus:
The Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the American Enterprise Institute and other free-market Washington think tanks are known to many Americans. What isn’t generally understood is that there has been an explosion of free-market think tanks around the world that are increasingly challenging the conventional view that government is the solution to society’s problems.
Like Perry, I was part of the throng, and in a piece I did about these awards for another European think tank last week, I made the same point about free market think tank expansion. Whereas Fund sees these enterprises spreading beyond the USA, I see them spreading beyond Western Europe, but however you slice this story, free market think tanks are spreading.
In among being impressed by all this, I took photos. Usually, when I take photos at pro-free-market events, my only questions are: How many women are here and how nice do they look? But the photography I did at the Golden Umbrellas focussed more on what was being officially talked about. Those ladies I did snap were snapped because they were on the stage, like Mistress of Ceremonies Karen Horn, Janet Daley and Cécile Philippe. There were plenty of other fine looking women present that night, but I concentrated my picture-taking on the people who were giving and receiving awards. And as well as photographing them, I listened to what they were actually saying. Which you can also do by going here.
I found this article by Edward L. Glaeser, about the city of Buffalo, very interesting. Both Buffalo’s rise and its current eclipse were caused by transport, first in the form of the Erie Canal, and then in the form of trains and lorries which made the canal less significant. Also important, at first, was proximity to Niagara Falls and its abundant energy supply. Later, when more efficient means of transmitting energy were developed, that proximity also counted for less.
More recently, of course, the Federal Government has only made things worse by throwing billions into the bottomless pit of successive ‘urban renewal’ projects, like superfluous housing schemes to add to the already abundant housing stock, or a superfluous train system to add to the already abundant road system. Instead of trying to help the place, says Glaeser, the Feds should be helping the people, to have good lives. In Buffalo or wherever else they end up living. Buffalo, he says, should “shrink to greatness”. I think it would be even better if the Feds didn’t try to help at all, and just knocked it off the income tax, but then I would, wouldn’t I?
All of which is very interesting, but I found this bit of Glaesar’s article especially intriguing:
And Buffalo’s dismal weather didn’t help. January temperatures are one of the best predictors of urban success over the last half-century, with colder climes losing out – and Buffalo isn’t just cold during the winter: blizzards regularly shut the city down completely. The invention of air conditioners and certain public health advances made warmer states even more alluring.
I should guess that this consideration may have something to do with the relative stagnation of the north of England compared to the south of England in recent decades. But because the difference is less marked, this would presumably be harder to prove. Whether that particular effect is real or not, a lot now would seem to hinge on whether the weather is going to get warmer, as the current orthodoxy among the politicians and their preferred scientists says it will, or colder, as some heretics now prophecy.
The Times yesterday reported on how well the Bible is now doing in China, both for Chinese readers and as yet another manufactured-in-China export:
One book a second glides off the production line at this joint venture between a Chinese Christian charity and the United Bible Societies, a Protestant organisation. Amity has been printing Bibles since 1986. The new factory will have a capacity of one million Bibles a month, increasing the current output by one third.
… Authorities at the officially approved Protestant and Catholic churches put the size of China’s Christian population at about 30 million. But that does not include the tens of millions more who worship in private at underground churches loyal to the Vatican or to various Protestant churches.
Of the 50 million Bibles Amity has printed, 41 million were for the faithful in Chinese and eight minority languages. The rest have been for export to Russia and Africa. Sales surged from 505,000 in 1988 to a high of 6.5 million in 2005. Output last year was 3.5 million and is expected to rise in 2007.
Does this mean that China will behave more nicely in the future than it is behaving now? An American commenter on the above piece reminds us that Christianity and niceness do not always go hand in hand:
After several visits to China I became concinced that if China ever turned ti the God of the Bible, God would bles that nation. It apears that China is turning and God is blessing. Will China become God’s instrument in brnging destruction to a Western Civilization that is becoming increasigly athiest, immoral and blastphemus toward the God of the Bible?
And its spelling has not been improving lately, either.
God will not long toledrate a society that has denigrated His word and His Christ in ways that are so filthy that it is beyond imagining. God is going to judge America and China just might be that instrument. …
Charming.
Speaking as one of the “athiest” and “blastphemus” ones, I do nevertheless concede that Christian congregations scattered around the landscape can do dramatically good things economically. Small groups of mostly decent people, constantly urged to refrain from frivolous consumer spending and to treat each other with kindly and thoughtful reciprocity, can become hugely productive. This in its turn causes others to join in, perhaps for rather less spiritual reasons than those which animated the prime movers, but in ways which also end up improving the newcomers morally, to the general betterment of economic life, among much else. So this process will surely strengthen the Chinese economy, provided only that it is allowed to take root.
But what will then be done with China’s economic strength? Unlike Islam (which positively encourages it), Christianity offers little justification for war making. But by contributing mightily, in the indirect and rather surprising ways described above, to the making of the means to fight wars, it nevertheless does encourage warfare, indirectly. Christian powers have fought wars because they did become, almost in spite of themselves, Christian powers. They fought, in other words, and fight still, because they can.
If a somewhat Christianised China veers away from the warlike pattern set by the West, it will be because the weaponry of all-out war has recently become so much more destructive than was the case when the Christians were fighting most of their wars, rather than because Christianity has become any more persuasive at making people nicer to foreigners of whom they know little.
It seems to me that we’ve reached the point at which a facility that bans firearms, making its patrons unable to defend themselves, should be subject to lawsuit for its failure to protect them. The pattern of mass shootings in “gun free” zones is well-established at this point, and I don’t see why places that take the affirmative step of forcing their law-abiding patrons to go unarmed should get off scot-free.
– Instapundit
Yesterday I did a posting here about climate, but I hope I will be forgiven for another one today on the same general subject. This one is because, in connection with yesterday’s posting, a commenter copied and pasted this story from Canada, which can be summarised briefly as: Canada is going to have a very cold winter.
I was not surprised by this news, even though many Canadians perhaps are. This is because, ever since doing this posting here a month ago, the notion mentioned at the end of it as hardly more than an afterthought has stuck in my mind. Here is how that posting of a month ago, mostly about giant diggers, ended:
In further interesting environment-related speculations Bishop Hill …
Yes, that Bishop Hill again.
… reckons we may be due for a cold winter, on account of the sun taking a bit of a rest just now. Interesting. We shall see.
Maybe now we are seeing. Maybe. What impressed me about this prophecy, unlike so many others in the climate change rack … , er, field, is that this one had a time frame attached. It concerned this winter. This winter is going to be cold.
Since I am on the subject of cold weather, let me mention another prophecy, also of cold weather to come, also because of the behaviour of the sun, also reported in Canada. Take a look this piece from a few weeks back, about the work of a man called Rhodes Fairbridge. Fairbridge, we learn, explained what causes the sun to influence the earth’s climate in different ways at different times. It is all to do with the alignment of the planets, and consequently the degree to which the sun is close to or quite far from the centre of gravity of the solar system. No, I do not understand that very well either.
What interested me about the article was not that it made any particular sense to me. It did not, and I am in no position to pronounce on its scientific merit or content, which could very well be zero for all I know. No, what caught my attention was that there was, once again, a prediction being made, with some dates attached to it. → Continue reading: There are cold times just around the corner!
Bishop Hill has a couple of good postings on climate themes. We here cannot keep track of all the climate hysteria and anti-hysteria, but he tries do. First, there is this bit of stand-up making fun of Al Gore. Stand-up is cheap to do, cheap to film and easy to stick up on YouTube. Even if YouTube are lefties, they cannot hope to censor everything. Watch this and feel the political climate changing.
The good Bishop ended the posting before that one, a round-up of climate stuff with lots of good links – climate cuttings number 14, no less – with the following:
And that’s it for this time. Thanks to those people who have suggested that I get off my backside and do some more blogging. I will try to oblige, time permitting.
Surely blogging means sitting down on your backside, not getting off it. But, that was the only mistake I could spot.
For most of my life I have been fascinated by two-man teams. Much is written in the management books about the decision making and leadership skills of individuals. Much is made of teams, of about six to a dozen or so people (a dozen being reckoned by most to be about the upper limit before factionalism sets in), and about the skill of building effective teams. But less, it seems to me, is made of the partnership of two, despite the fact that everywhere you look in the world of human accomplishment, you see two-man teams, often famously named: Rolls Royce, Gilbert and Sullivan, Laurel and Hardy, Powell and Pressberger, Pratt and Whitney, Rogers and Hammerstein, Flanders and Swan… trust me, the game of naming two man teams goes on for as long as you have time to devote to it. I could have machine-gunned this posting with links, but Google is Google – another now famously accomplished two-man team runs that, I believe – and I could not be bothered. Partly this is because this is, be warned now, a rather long posting, and doing proper links would have taken me the whole day.
Even when a single creative genius seems to stand in isolated splendour, more often than not it turns out that there was or is a backroom toiler seeing to the money, minding the shop, cleaning up the mess, lining up the required resources, publishing and/or editing what the Great Man has merely written, quietly eliminating the blunders of, or, not infrequently, actually doing the work only fantasised and announced by, the Great Man. Time and again, the famous period of apparently individual creativity coincides precisely with the time when that anonymous partner was also but less obtrusively beavering away, contributing crucially to the outcome, and often crucially saying boo to the goose when the goose laid a duff egg. If deprived, for some reason, of his back-up man, the Lone Genius falls silent, or mysteriously fails at everything else he attempts. Think Elizabeth the First and … damn, I can not remember his name, but he was crucial, and Elizabeth was never the same after he had died. Cecil, that was him.
That literature and showbiz are so full of two-man teams is evidence of the enormous emotional importance that we all attach to these partnerships. Every TV detective, for instance, seems to have his Dr Watson figure, less inspired, but perhaps emotionally more adult, who buys the pint afterwards, soothes the frazzled nerves of the great detective, and who generally carries the can and tidies up after. For every Holmes there is a Watson, for every Morse, a Lewis. And for every Regan, a Carter. Major kudos to the late John Thaw for having participated in – having lead, actually – two very different but equally famous two-man teams of British TV coppers. → Continue reading: On two-man teams (and on the current travails of Mr Brown)
Disturbing reports have emerged that Gordon Brown is rude to his secretaries – or garden girls, as they are known inside Downing Street. He is said to shout at them abusively. On one occasion he is reported to have impatiently turfed one of the girls out of her chair and sat down to use the keyboard himself.
All recent prime ministers – Thatcher, Major, Blair – were loved by the garden girls. All recent prime ministers from time to time endured problems. Only Gordon Brown has vented his frustrations on secretaries, who can never answer back or speak for themselves. In the end this intemperate and regrettable conduct may cause him as much damage as Mr Abrahams.
– the sting in the tale of an article in the latest Spectator by Peter Oborne under the heading At the heart of the Labour funding scandal is the moral collapse of a once-great party.
Gary Rosen has been out in China, burning his boats, the ones that might ever take him back to China in the foreseeable future. Good for him. My thanks to the ever useful Arts & Letters Daily for the link.
I particularly liked the bit about how the Chinese regime censors the awkward stuff, and I offer no apology for quoting it at some length:
Someone asked (well, it was me again) how Mr. Liu could reconcile his presentation of China’s peace-loving ways with Beijing’s clear position that, if Taiwan were to declare independence, the mainland would invade – a threat made more credible by its arms build-up across the Taiwan Strait and its provocative military exercises in recent years. Mr. Liu did not like my use of the word “provocative.” In the first place, he said, “You should phrase your questions with more respect.” More to the point, he rejected the underlying premise: “China has a population of 1.3 billion people, including the 23 million people of Taiwan. It is not for them to decide their own status.”
Which is about as excellent an exposition of the imperfect correspondence between the ideals of democracy and of liberty as you could ever hope to encounter, don’t you think?
Rosen continues:
None of this was exactly surprising, since it adhered closely to long-standing Chinese policy. What was surprising, as we shook hands and prepared to leave, was Mr. Liu’s insistence that his remarks were entirely off the record. This was news to us. All of our sessions, unless restricted in some way beforehand, were explicitly on the record, and we had been busily taking notes, with our tape recorders in plain sight. Liu Jieyi, in all his worldliness, was perfectly aware of what we were doing. Out of pique at my impertinence or perhaps because he did not like having lost his cool, he wanted the interview to go away.
This task fell to Mr. Huang, who called us together in the lobby once we were back at the hotel. “I need you to tell me that you won’t report about this,” he said. “It is best to respect the host; that is the international practice.” Pressure had plainly been brought to bear on him, and several in the group, feeling that they had no particular use for Mr. Liu’s words (and not wishing to jeopardize our sponsors or future trips), said they were unlikely to write about the session. Others, myself included, were less accommodating. One member of the group explained that she would find it hard to continue with the tour if the rules were continually changed after interviews. “We are not Chinese journalists,” she told Mr. Huang, “and this smacks of censorship.”
Knowing that I considered the material from the session valuable and might well use it, Mr. Huang pulled me aside several more times the next day to ask again that I “respect the host,” adding that if I did, “I would get better interviews the next time.” The threat in this, as reporters who cover China informed me, was that my future access might be limited; denying visas is a favorite tactic for punishing Western journalists who upset the authorities. But as I said to Mr. Huang, I was unsure that I would ever again report from China, and I could not relent on a key journalistic principle. Moreover, I felt obliged to tell him, his effort to suppress the story had become the story.
You seldom read reportage like that from China, or from any other efficiently administered despotism with a definite future, do you? And the reportage itself explains why. The exception that explains the rule, you might say.
Recently I have been teaching a small boy the ancient art of handwriting. Make the small Ts bigger! Careful with those zeros, they’re looking like sixes! Well done, it looks very neat! Yes I know it’s hard, but keep going! And so on. Thank goodness for pencils. But there is a problem here. Is handwriting really that important any more? It was in a comment on that posting from fellow Samizdatista Michael Jennings that the handwriting question recently presented itself to me.
Oh, I am sure that educational experts can correlate handwriting with achievement later on, just as in former times Latin went with being clever. But the fact remains that even highly-educated adults, and perhaps especially highly-educated adults, now hardly make any use of handwriting. We sign our signatures. If we are very pre-computer (as I still am in lots of ways) we write hand-written shopping and to-do lists, but more and more, people surely use electronic organisers for such things, if they use anything at all. And I find that the only stuff I remember now is stuff that I have blogged, because blog postings remain legible and are properly and accessibly stored, unlike my hand-written lists. If we are adolescents or young adults, we still use handwriting to take exams, in great intellectually sterilised halls, into which no information may be taken other than in one’s head. But is knowledge retention now the skill that really matters? Surely knowing how to use computers to acquire knowledge is at least as important.
Recently a friend told me of her worry about her young sons neglecting their homework, but instead becoming utterly engrossed in some immensely complicated and long-drawn-out computer game. My hunch is that they are learning at least as much while obsessing for hour after hour about this game as they would if snatched away from their computer and forced to trudge through yet more school work for a few more tedious minutes each day. But is that right?
I do not need persuading that reading remains an absolutely essential skill, with typing, in one form or another, having become almost as valuable. But: what use now is handwriting? I do not ask this in a sneering, it’s-useless way, as a merely rhetorical question. Maybe handwriting really does still have crucially important uses. If the teaching of handwriting is every bit as valuable as it ever was, I would love to be told this, and told why, so that I can proceed with my own current teaching duties with renewed enthusiasm? But, is it?
Grayson Perry to be exact, a Brit artist, of the sort that makes you want to reach for the sneer quotes. But, I do give this Other Perry two cheers if not three for saying even this much:
“I’ve censored myself,” Perry said at a discussion on art and politics organised by the Art Fund. “The reason I haven’t gone all out attacking Islamism in my art is because I feel real fear that someone will slit my throat.”
This may seem like a half-arsed attack on Islam and/or Islamism, but it is way better than nothing, I think. Half an arse is better than no arse at all. These kind of remarks are adding up. The project of denouncing Islam as the evil crap that it is gradually gains ground, inch by inch, and what Other Perry says is another inch advanced. And I do mean attacking Islam, rather than merely those accused of ‘betraying’ it by… doing what it says. The word is gradually spreading.
If you are a serious Islamist, who does believe in doing what Islam says, we infidels, even our artists, are starting seriously to understand you. Watch out. We take our time to understand these kinds of things, but we get there, and when we do… On the other hand, if you are, as so many Muslims are, a nice person, and accordingly not a serious Islamist, but if you merely say periodically in a self-hypnotic way that you do believe in Islam, then for goodness sake read the damn stuff properly and stop saying that you believe in it. You are trying to have it both ways. Stop this. Stop encouraging something that you say you don’t believe in. Make up your mind.
A good first step in denouncing Islam as the scary stuff that it is is to admit that you are scared of it, and not in any ‘phobic’ way but for good solid reasons. Grayson Perry has admitted this, and rather than complaining that he goes no further, I say, good on you mate, for at least going this far.
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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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