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For quite some while now, I have been meaning either to write this myself or to come across someone else writing this. Since the Australian blogger Russell Blackford beat me to it and I read him saying it this afternoon, here it now is:
Unfortunately, the impression has been created by many Muslim leaders that Islam seeks to control all aspects of individuals’ lives and does not shrink from using secular power to achieve its aim. We are all well aware of extreme examples in recent history, such as Afghanistan under the benighted Taliban regime. Until that fear is laid to rest, it is quite rational for the rest of us to fear Islam’s political ambitions – which is one reason why the word “Islamophobia” is so stupid. A phobia is an irrational fear, but secular Westerners actually have perfectly rational reasons to be at least wary of Islam …
In my experience there is nothing quite like the best sort of Australian academic or intellectual for calling bullshit bullshit.
Forgive me if someone has already said this exact thing here already. What many writers and commenters here have definitely said many times is that much of the art of the propagandist lies in the inventing of and the destruction of words. The bad guys invent bad words and destroy good ones. We good guys invent good words and destroy bad ones. And “islamophobia” is a very bad word indeed.
I love this mighty beast, linked to by David Thompson in his latest batch of ephemera links (which he does every Friday and which I highly recommend):
This rusting hulk is (was) one of the world’s biggest digging machines. It now resides in an open air museum, where the captions and propaganda messages are all about the ecological folly of big digging machines. But for me, this is a glorious monument to man’s continuing and growing ability to impress his imprint upon nature.
And thereby, incidentally, to create all manner of interesting new habitats for other forms of nature beside man, once man has finished with using them for his original purpose. Last night I happened to watch a TV show about some defunct clay-excavation-for-brick-making site, somewhere in the Midlands I think, which has now become one of Britain’s most satisfactory habitats for various particularly interesting sorts of newt. In general, I think the way that the First Industrial Revolution churned up the landscape and thereby made it more varied and interesting, is an under-talked-about topic.
The Norfolk Broads, no less, which I have fond memories of sailing on as a boy, began as peat mining:
It was only in the 1960s that Dr Joyce Lambert proved that they were artificial features, the effect of flooding on early peat excavations. The Romans first exploited the rich peat beds of the area for fuel, and in the Middle Ages the local monasteries began to excavate the “turbaries” (peat diggings) as a business, selling fuel to Norwich and Great Yarmouth. The Cathedral took 320,000 tonnes of peat a year. Then the sea levels began to rise, and the pits began to flood.
So, good for Dr Joyce Lambert, good for the Romans, good for exploitation, and good for rising sea levels. The Romans would have loved that giant digger, even as they would have been amazed and discomforted that it was made by their arch-enemies, the Germans.
In further interesting environment-related speculations Bishop Hill 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.
Phone conversation just now with Alex Singleton:
Me: “I hear that yesterday was your birthday.”
Alex: “Yes. I found out about it on Facebook.”
Alex will be the main speaker at the Libertarian Alliance Conference dinner tomorrow evening at the National Liberal Club, in other words the star speaker of the entire event. An excellent choice for this task stroke honour, I think, and I am looking forward to hearing him very much.
I say “recorded conversations” because I never know quite what the definition of a ‘podcast’ truly is. Is it a podcast if you just record it and sling it up at your own blog? So anyway, yes, I have recently done a couple of these.
First, I recorded Antoine Clarke and me having a discussion about the thinkings and writings of Sean Gabb, and person often mentioned here. We are, and accordingly were, somewhat critical. Blog posting by me here.
Second, Patrick Crozier recorded him talking with me about modern architecture, “Modern Movement” architecture, skyscrapers, horrible housing estates etc. Blog posting by Patrick here.
Both last about 40 to 45 minutes. If you have that kind of time to spare, enjoy.
And, Patrick Crozier and I have fixed to do another one of these things next week on the subject of Northern Ireland. Peace (so far, touch wood etc.) may not generate news, but we think it deserves to be at least talked about. I will certainly be re-reading the comments on this posting here before doing that.
I do not pay attention to the Libertarian Alliance Forum, but many do of course, and according to one of these guys, Sean Gabb recently posted there a link to this:
It is a video clip of a bolshy brummy filming a couple of policemen. The policemen spot him doing this and tell him to stop. He tells them to take a hike. He is breaking no laws. He also, as if interchangeably, says: “I’m doing nothing wrong”, and of course I agree. But, however right, and however desirable from the point of view of restraining the misdeeds of the powerful, how long before this kind of behaviour becomes illegal in Britain? I actually worry that too much publicity might be given to stuff like this, because it may give our meddling legislators ideas (was it wise to do this posting?)
Somebody told me last night (I think it was Perry de Havilland) that it is already illegal in some states of the USA to record the police. Commenters here often say that freedom etc. is doomed in Britain and that if you want such things you must emigrate to the USA. Hm.
At present the British Government already films whatever it wants. But cheap video cameras are rapidly becoming so small that soon everyone else who is inclined – rather than just wannabee spies and private investigators with money to burn – may be filming whatever they want, wherever they want. How will that play out, I wonder?
Insofar as the Americans are now winning in Iraq, as they do now seem to be, this is, first, because Al Qaeda have shot themselves in their stupid murderous feet by being stupid and murderous, and pissing off the Iraqi people; and second, because the Americans switched strategies, from (the way I hear it): sitting in nice big armed camps doing nothing except maybe training a few Iraqis to do the nasty stuff, to: getting out there themselves and doing it, thereby giving the Iraqi people something to get behind and to switch to, once they had worked out what ghastly shits AQ really are.
The first bit is very interesting, but this posting is about the second bit. Instapundit linked yesterday to this, and I particular like the first comment. Here, with its grammar and spelling cleaned up a little, it is:
The Democrats missed a great opportunity. Bush would not have changed strategy if the Dems did not win as big as they did. They could have said it was them that made Bush change to a successful strategy.
Over the summer I reread one of my favourite books of the century so far, How The West Has Won: Carnage and Culture From Salamis to Vietnam by Victor Davis Hanson (which was published in October 2001). In this, Hanson makes much of the Western habit of what he calls “civilian audit” of military affairs. Armchair complaining and grilling of often quite successful generals for often rather minor failures in the course of what often eventually turn into major victories. Sidelining Patton for winning some battles but then slapping a soldier. Denouncing Douglas Haig forever for winning too nastily on the Western Front. Votes of Confidence in the Commons during the dark days of World War 2. Most recently, General Petraeus being grilled on TV. That kind of thing.
Above all, there are the journalists, wandering around the battlefield being horrified and sending photos back of people who died during disasters, or during victories, thereby making those look like disasters also (which they were for the people who died.)
Unlike many with similar loyalties to his, who describe all this as a Western weakness, Hanson sees it as a major Western strength. Yes it is messy, and yes it is often monstrously unjust. Yes, it often results in serious mistakes and failures, especially in the short run. Yes the questions put to returning generals and presiding politicians are often crass, stupid and trivial. But the effect of all this post-mortemising and second-guessing and media grandstanding and general bitching and grumbling is to keep the West’s military leaders on their metal in a way that simply does not happen in non-Western cultures.
It must really concentrate the mind of a general to know that there are literally millions of people back home who are just waiting for him to screw up, so they can crow: we told you so.
It also results in Western armies filled with people who know quite well what the plan is and what the score is, having just spent the last few hours, days, weeks or even years arguing about it all. Western armies invariably contain barrack room lawyers and grumblers, to say nothing of people who sincerely believe that they could do better than their own commanders and who say so, courtesy of those interfering journalists.
Central to the whole idea of the West is that you get better decisions, and better (because so much better informed) implementation of those decisions by the lower ranks, if lots of people argue like hell about these decisions first, during, and then again afterwards. In fact if you argue about them all the time.
Take Iraq now. The narrative that is now gaining strength goes as follows: Iraq invaded for dubious reasons, but successfully. Peace lost because no plan to win it. Two or three years of chaos and mayhem. Change of strategy. Now war may be being won. Maybe this story has not quite reached the MSM, but I believe that it soon will, if only because of bloggers like this guy and this guy.
Strangely, Hanson has, during this particular war, been one of the most vocal complainers about the complainers, so to speak. He has gone on and on about how suspect are the motives of the complainers and how ignorant they seem to be of what war is necessarily like and how bad it would be if the West lost this particular war. Yet is not the way this story may now be playing out yet further evidence of the important contribution made by anti-Western kneejerk anti-warriors to the good conduct of Western wars by the West’s warriors? What these people want to do is stop the war by making the warriors give up and lose it. But what they often achieve instead is to bully the warriors into doing better, and winning. They are, so to speak, an important part of the learning experience. Hanson returns again and again to how the West often loses the early battles, but ends up winning the war.
Under heavy political pressure, President Bush switched in Iraq from a failing Plan A to what now looks as if it could be a successful Plan B. Would this switch have happened without all the pressure? Maybe, but it is surely reasonable to doubt it. The next commenter after the one quoted above says that it is still not too late for the Dems to do a switch of their own, and to start claiming that had it not been for them and all their grumbling, the switch by Bush from failure to success would never have happened. If and when they do start talking like that, they will surely have a point.
(Patrick Crozier and I recently discussed VDH in this podcast, more about which here.)
Mick Hartley quoted at some length the other day from this TimesOnline piece by Sarah Baxter, but I have only just read the thing itself. The first few paragraphs, which Mick Hartley did not recycle, are particularly choice, and I do quote them here, now:
A glorious culture clash took place in Iran recently that made me laugh out loud. The children of Che Guevara, the revolutionary pin-up, had been invited to Tehran University to commemorate the 40th anniversary of their father’s death and celebrate the growing solidarity between “the left and revolutionary Islam” at a conference partly paid for by Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president.
There were fraternal greetings and smiles all round as America’s “earth-devouring ambitions” were denounced. But then one of the speakers, Hajj Saeed Qassemi, the co-ordinator of the Association of Volunteers for Suicide-Martyrdom (who presumably remains selflessly alive for the cause), revealed that Che was a “truly religious man who believed in God and hated communism and the Soviet Union”.
Che’s daughter Aleida wondered if something might have been lost in translation. “My father never mentioned God,” she said, to the consternation of the audience. “He never met God.” During the commotion, Aleida and her brother were led swiftly out of the hall and escorted back to their hotel. “By the end of the day, the two Guevaras had become non-persons. The state-controlled media suddenly forgot their existence,” the Iranian writer Amir Taheri noted.
After their departure, Qassemi went on to claim that Fidel Castro, the “supreme guide” of Guevara, was also a man of God. “The Soviet Union is gone,” he affirmed. “The leadership of the downtrodden has passed to our Islamic republic. Those who wish to destroy America must understand the reality and not be clever with words.”
Don’t say you haven’t been warned, comrade, when you flirt with “revolutionary Islam” as if it were a mild form of liberation theology. …
LOL indeed.
I am actually quite optimistic that at least some (more) lefties will wake up, as time goes by, to the absurdity of them being in alliance with radical Islamists. The only rationale for this otherwise ridiculous arrangement is (see above) that the enemy of your enemy (the USA) is your friend, no matter what. If you really do think that the USA is the biggest baddest thing in the world and that curbing its power is the only thing that matters (think Hitler Churchill Stalin), then this alliance makes a kind of primitive sense. Although even if you do think that, encouraging the development of rampant capitalism everywhere except in the USA would make a lot more sense. That really would reduce the USA to the margins of history. But, if you think that lefty-ism is anything at all to do with positive support for civilisation, decency, freedom, female (in particular) emancipation, life being nice even if you do not submit to Islam etc., then you should surely turn your back on all such alliances.
Meanwhile, I cannot help noticing and rejoicing that those Islamists have such a genius for pissing off their potential allies. From what I have been reading, they have achieved this same feat in the last year or two with the people of Iraq, no less. Compared to that momentous own goal, if own goal it turns out to be, pissing off the Guevaras is small potatoes indeed.
Unless of course millions of lefties around the world read of this outrage and exclaim with one voice: “That does it. Not the Guevaras. How dare they silence these hereditary paragons of revolutionary virtue. We will now support the USA against the Islamists until the Islamists are utterly crushed. Then we will sort out the USA.” That would change things a bit.
I wonder what conclusions French voters will draw from this:
Down in the Pays Basque, the young natives are disconsolate. Immobiliers (estate agents) with sharp English marketing techniques are sprouting like radishes in the towns. In the markets, one hears three languages: Basque, French and English. And, astonishingly, in a nation so protective of its culture, some houses this summer had signs advertising them For Sale instead of À Vendre.
It was my French niece who saw them, out on her travels as a veterinary surgeon, and she came home to her small, rented house and dropped her handbag with an exasperated clunk on the table. What hope do we have of ever being able to afford a house, she said, when the Brits are paying crazy prices and we can’t compete? It’s just so depressing.
Partly this is a story about French economic decline. Economic decline often happens without you realising it. And then, suddenly, you do realise it. That factory you thought you had a safe job in for life gets abruptly closed, because the government has decided that the subsidies to keep it going are becoming too huge. You suddenly realise that private education for your kids is going to be forever beyond you, that where you live state education is actually getting worse, and that also you can not afford to move to where it is any good. Multiply little dramas like that by a million, and you have an entire country in economic decline. Thus, economic decline often impinges upon an electorate not in the form of rather meaningless statistics moaned about by journalists even as life goes on happily, but rather in the form of dramatic vignettes like this one, of vulgar English people invading the formerly idyllic French countryside.
Another French vignette of decline is of clever sons and daughters, nephews and nieces, who can not seem to get jobs worthy of their obvious talents and superior educations, unless they go to vulgar England. Even there, they will have to start out as waiters and waitresses, but at least they’ll have a chance of better things soon. In France, education is obviously far better than in vulgar England, but in vulgar England, for some reason probably involving evil America, more stuff is actually being done.
Another force which I think France is on the receiving end of here is the enormous difference that the internet, e-mail, etc., has made to the nature of life in the formerly deep countryside, of which France has a great deal, but England relatively little. (In Scotland it is different.) Simply, you can now do a lot more with your life when physically cut off from everything than you could twenty years ago. Did Engels say something about the “idiocy” of rural life? Some smug townie did. Well, now, country life is not nearly so idiotic as it was. Outsourcing is not just taking work from Europe to India, it is taking it from European cities jammed with commuters to European rural escape havens. The big thing they now sell in the countryside of places like France is not what the countryside grows, so much as how beautiful and nice it is to live in, provided you don’t have to scrabble about in the rural mud for a living. Thanks to email and the internet, organising the switch from suburb to country has also got a lot easier.
Or, to put it another way, the suburbs just got a lot bigger.
So, will France’s voters try to make the symptoms of economic decline and of the new super-suburbanisation illegal? Probably. Good luck with that, mes amis. You will need it. A smarter attitude would be to stop fretting about these changes and to start profiting from them, as many French people are already doing, of course, not least by selling their rural shacks for silly English money.
Maybe you recall that this time four years ago much was made here of the Rugby World Cup. This was because England fans like me genuinely reckoned England could win the thing. England went into the tournament on the back of two great wins in the Southern Hemisphere against the might of Australia and New Zealand, and when the tournament began they were the top ranked side in the world. If England played as well as they were capable of, they would win in some style. Actually, they did not play quite that well, but they still won, by the skin of their teeth and a famous Jonny Wilkinson drop goal in the final minute of extra time.
This time, it was all completely different. The only Samizdata coverage of this event so far has been Johnathan Pearce’s piece about how the shirts worn by New Zealand and Scotland in their group match were impossible to distinguish (I felt just the same).
I for one make no apology for this. I think that the way to enjoy sport is to pay close attention when your team is winning, but otherwise to relax and treat it all as only the game that it is.
England arrived at this current tournament in a state bordering on shambles. They won their first game against the USA, a rugby union minnow, but scored no points at all in the last half hour of the game while the USA even managed a try. And in the next game England hit rock bottom, being utterly annihilated by South Africa by the crushing scoreline of 36-0. Meanwhile, the other Southern Hemisphere sides were storming through their early games, winning by cricket scores. Any thought that England might be able to make a serious defence of their title was, frankly, ridiculous. → Continue reading: Quelle surprise!
I hate chewing gum. Well, not chewing gum itself, but the annoying things that a hideous proportion of gum chewers do with their gum after they have chewed it. These are the gum scum, and a conspicuous blot on Western Civilisation they are too.
During my summer blogging break, I more and more found myself ignoring politics on the internet. But I kept up with the gadget blogs, cataloguing as they do one of the most positive aspects of Western Civilisation. The gadgets just keep on coming, cheaper, smaller, better.
So, you can imagine my delight when I came across this posting at Engadget:
Revolymer’s latest concoction won’t play music or record your favorite shows, but if it passes European health and safety tests, it could end up in your mouth before long. The Bristol University spin-out company “claims that it has created a new material (dubbed Rev7) which can be added to gum that makes it much easier to remove from surfaces,” and in testing, it actually “vanished from street surfaces within 24 hours,” presumably from rain or street sweepers whisking it away. Moreover, the newfangled gum would even dissolve quicker than traditional pieces, and if all goes as planned, it could be launched as “early as next year.” Shoe soles, rejoice.
And pavement cleaners. More here.
This is how Western Civilisation works. It has a problem, and people moan about it, often believing it to be insoluble without social transformation or draconian punishments. But then, the techies get to work and deploy a technical fix. I am not saying that this particular technical fix will work perfectly, or that even if it does work well, technically speaking, everything about its deployment will be good. But this at least might be a step in the right direction, gumwise.
I mean, will non-non-stick gum become illegal to sell? It shouldn’t, but if mandating this new non-stick gum could result in cleaner pavements and fewer defaced adverts, you can bet your last fiver that it will be, which would be wrong. Chewing actually existing gum is not wrong; it is the throwing about of it afterwards that is the problem.
So, one step forward, half a step back is my guess as to how this story may develop next. That’s Western Civilisation for you.
First: raising a particular tax rate or lowering a particular tax rate, even quite substantially, makes extremely little difference to the amount of actual money that the government ends up collecting. This is because Britain is now at the top of the Laffer Curve. Raising a particular tax rate increases what the government gets from that particular tax, but spreads a ripple of disappointed indolence and enforced inactivity throughout the economy, which lowers the yields from all the other taxes. Lower a particular tax rate, and the yield from that tax falls, but a ripple of enthusiasm and activity spreads through the economy, and the yield from all the other taxes rises.
British politics arrived at this state in the late 1970s and has been in this state ever since.
Labourites are now saying that the sums associated with Conservative promise to cut inheritance tax do not add up. Yes they do. How will this cut be paid for? By the increased yield from all the other taxes. (By the way, I know that this “cut” would not be “real” in the sense that it has already been preceded by a massive increase due to house price rises. In other words, it would be real, just as the previous but slightly less obvious increase was real.)
Insofar as Chancellor Gordon Brown has already pushed Britain beyond the top of the Laffer Curve, a cut in a particular tax rate may even increase government revenue.
Other Labourites (i.e. The Government) are also now revealing that they semi-understand all this. The Conservative cut in inheritance tax would be evil, would not work, etc., but they will now do their own (this reminds me of the Soviet response to Star Wars. It is mad. It will not work. We will do it too.)
Second: When pollsters ask voters whether they would like better public services in exchange for a tax increase, they quite often say:yes. The voters imagine only a small tax increase to themselves, and a definite increase in the services that they themselves will get. Okay? Okay. (A lot depends on the exact wording of the question.)
But, when a politician running for office says that he will put up taxes and supply better public services, only the first process is certain and the voters know it. The question in the previous paragraph about increased taxes and better services is not the question that the voters will actually be asked. The question they will actually be asked is: do you want a definite tax increase, and the almost certainly empty promise of better services which are unlikely to benefit you in particular anyway even if by some magical process such improvements do occur? Okay? Not okay.
By the same token, tax cuts are very popular with those who are paying the tax in question. These persons will definitely benefit, if only a little, and provided only that the tax cut occurs as promised. Will the particular public services that these persons get deteriorate? Probably, but only because these services will probably deteriorate anyway.
Last Friday night I went to the theatre. The play was about a group of people who played poker with each other for life-damaging stakes, and my feeling about such people is that they deserve every misfortune that they bring upon themselves. So I couldn’t get involved in the play or care about what happened to any of the characters in it. (It didn’t help at all that they were all men.) Poker for serious money has apparently been on the up-and-up in recent years, and especially since the time when this play, Dealer’s Choice by Patrick Marber, was first written and performed just over ten years ago. But for me all that this proves is that there are, now as always, lots of people around with more money than sense. People who merely gamble about which of them ends up taking home all the money leave me cold, and this play left me correspondingly refrigerated.
I mean, if you’re going to gamble, gamble about something. Do something where your knowledge of the world and ability to predict its happenings will benefit others. Why not, for instance, gamble on the stockmarket, or on commodity prices. Contrary to widespread opinion, these are immensely valuable activities (as Johnathan Pearce regularly explains here), which help to create a world of rationally negotiated prices for just about everything, and which enable other people (people like farmers particularly spring to mind) to avoid the very risks that you so like to take.
Or do something more creatively hazardous, which, if you can bring it off, will amount to more than mere money in your wallet, which in any case, if you are the kind of gambler I saw in the theatre last Friday night, you will probably squander within the month with more vacuous betting.
Why not, for instance, open a theatre – a theatre which doesn’t depend for its survival on state hand-outs but entirely on the number of bums on seats you can contrive and the quantity and quality of other goods and services you can ply the bodies attached to the bums with, like food and drink in appealing surroundings?
Which is exactly what my friend and host for last Friday evening, Don Riley, did do. His theatre, which is just up the road from London Bridge tube station, is called the Menier Chocolate Factory for the most obvious of reasons, which is that this is what it used to be.
When it came to the play we saw last Friday, deal me out. But as for the Menier Chocolate Factory generally, count me in. I’ll definitely be going again, and I enthusiastically recommend the place.
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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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