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From late June of this year until earlier this month my personal blog stopped working. All previous such outages had been either very brief, lasting only a few days at worst, or they were longer but purely voluntary breaks, while I went off on holiday or just recharged the blogging batteries. But this summer’s break was different. For boring bloggage reasons involving comment spam attacks (who by?) and Supergeeks who wouldn’t answer the phone, the details of which I will spare you mostly because I don’t understand them (although I hope and believe that my Geeks and Supergeeks do), my personal blog stoppage went on, and on, and on, and on, for the best part of three months. The stoppage only stopped about three weeks ago, and when it did I had become so used to not blogging that it actually took me about another week to jump back into it again.
When I started personal blogging, I supposed that if my personal blog was ever seriously interrupted, I would welcome the outlet offered by the other blogs that I have posting rights to, such as the Transport Blog, and of course Samizdata, to write whatever else I felt like blogging that fitted their remits. But instead, I found that I did not want to blog at all. Unable to avail myself of it, I found that blogging, anywhere, had lost its charm. I still wrote some bits for money, although the frequency of that also slowed during the summer. But that was work. It was not, you know, blogging. Why did this happen? Why did losing my own blog mean that my desire to contribute to anyone else’s blog evaporated?
The best answer I can offer is that for me, wandering about on the internet looking for stuff to mention on Samizdata or Transport Blog constantly results also in stuff I want to comment on and link to chez moi. So if chez moi is no longer functioning, it’s like having a gag stuffed in my face. I do not actually blog about everything I find that is of interest to me. But it hurts if I can’t. Starting a personal blog meant that, for me, the internet had finally become fully interactive. I can say whatever I like about it, to it, on it. Being unable to say whatever I liked, I switched back to reading books.
I seldom encounter much in the way of verbal discussion attached to Flickr photos, because the kind of Flickr photos I usually look at are things like pictures of footbridges, concerning which there is really not a lot to be said, given how many such snaps abound on Flickr. But this snap (catchily entitled “DSC07222.JPG”) is different because it is a photo of a rather violent political demo in France. This was taken by an accredited photographer, who had his card examined by the Police but who was then permitted to keep his snap. But, says one of the commenters:
i got all the photos and videos i took yesterday on my camphone deleted by a policeman who told me he would arrest if he ever saw me doing again. I don’t know if he had the right to erase the photos, i should see about that.
Presumably not. My thanks and congratulations to Norwegian media blogger Kristine Lowe for the link to that, and for spotting the above comment. Kristine blogged earlier about the new French law.
If all French bloggers, podcasters, vodcasters, and even those snapping a picture with their mobile phone camera and sending it to a relative, could be put on trial or fined for publishing footage from the frontlines. How bizarre, troubling, surreal. …
Indeed. This is a huge issue. I was in Parliament Square not long ago and observed some hairy anti-war person being shoved into a Police van. The entire scene was surrounded by other demonstrators holding video cameras. They were subjecting to the Police themselves to surveillance, guarding the guardians you might say. I do not ever want that to be illegal in Britain, but in France, it would appear that it already is.
Expect a thriving market in fake “accredited photographer” cards. And expect things in France to get even more interesting, when, as they soon will, digital cameras become so small that it will be impossible for the Police or anybody else to spot them being used. In fact, expect things everywhere to get more interesting.
Meanwhile, I have been chronicling that brief moment when digital cameras are (were) quite small, but still visible in action.
I am glad that things look to have become a bit more peaceful in Northern Ireland.
Would I be correct in guessing that this settlement may be one of the good things to have emerged from 9/11? This would be a pleasing thought, given the grief that Britain and the USA seem to have made for themselves in Iraq, provided its truth will survive serious scrutiny.
What I have in mind is that following 9/11 the USA took its first truly serious look at IRA terrorism, voters as well as just terrorism experts, and all that sentimental and unthinking Oirish blarney support for the IRA, which had over the decades turned into real money and real weapons on a huge scale, no longer seemed like a harmless slice of electoral politics and suddenly looked like a seriously bad idea. (I recall thinking as soon as the Twin Towers came down that the IRA would not like this.)
For, no matter what concessions have been gouged out of the North Ireland Unionists, and even though nobody directly involved in this settlement would dream of saying it out loud for fear of upsetting the new applecart that has now been bodged together, this surely means that the IRA has lost. For the time being anyway. They wanted Northern Ireland to be detached from the UK and to become attached to the Republic of Ireland, but this has not happened.
Or is this just a ceasefire? And will the IRA, Hezbollah style, merely use the settlement and the governmental privileges it gives them to prepare their next offensive? Presumably this remains the Unionist fear. Only time and lots of it will tell, but to an ignorant outsider such as south of England me, this seems real. If so, then the inevitable self-congratulatory noises emerging from the government, and the general media acclamation for the deal, would appear to be justified.
Patrick Crozier defends Al Gore against the hypocrisy charge, in a way which I think is slightly mistaken. He compares Al Gore’s vast greenhouse gas emissions with his, Patrick Crozier’s, use of state regulated trains, which Patrick disapproves of, but still uses, unhypocritically. But I think that Patrick does not quite nail it. Gore is being somewhat hypocritical. He surely could fairly easily do more to reduce his emissions. But, those who disagree with Gore are being very unwise if they make that their central complaint about him. What matters is not the degree to which Gore is or is not personally doing what he says should be done by people generally, but whether he is right about what should be done.
I am talking here about the “we are not doing enough” way of winning – and of losing – arguments.
You win arguments in politics by saying exactly what you want and not stopping until you get it. Sometimes that means setting an impossibly high standard of improvement, because what you want is very hard to get. Tough. You want it? Say so. Never say you are entirely satisfied until you really are entirely satisfied. You do not win arguments by surrendering three quarters of your case before the argument even begins. → Continue reading: Thoughts on the “not doing enough” argument
What I only guessed to be a possibility on Tuesday night, and repeated as a guess here on Wednesday, has now been officially confirmed:
Jamaican police today confirmed that British-born Pakistan coach Bob Woolmer was murdered.
Next question, as Michael Jennings commented here yesterday, and which he also copied-and-pasted to his own blog: How about Hansie Cronje? Just to remind you of what Michael said:
I have always been very suspicious about the death of former South African captain Hansie Cronje in a plane crash in 2003. When someone as mixed up with gangsters as Cronje dies mysteriously, one tends to think the worst. I wouldn’t have thought that Woolmer was mixed up with gangsters. However, nobody would have believed it of Cronje (who had a reputation for being honest, upstanding, and God-fearing) until he was caught red handed. Secondly, perhaps the situation is that to enter the Pakistan dressing room is to be mixed up with gangsters.
I don’t think that Woolmer was mixed up with gangsters if by that is meant that he was personally involved in match fixing. More probable is that he was about to publish in a book what he had merely observed. But, who knows?
If this was a Poirot murder mystery on TV, the real killer of Woolmer would turn out to be someone entirely unconnected with cricket or with cricket betting, who killed him or who had him killed for entirely different and perhaps purely personal reasons.
But this is not Poirot on TV. This is for real, difficult though many are now finding all this to believe. Today, the entire Pakistan team was questioned and finger-printed by the Jamaican Police.
International cricket matches involving Pakistan now become more than somewhat ridiculous, and are likely to remain so for quite some time, even supposing that cricket’s administrators permit them to continue. It makes no sense at the moment to shut down the entire Cricket World Cup. What purpose would that serve? (At least Pakistan are now out of it.) Nevertheless, Ireland’s ‘surprise’ win against Pakistan on St Patrick’s day now looks more like a gift than an achievement.
England are looking well below what it would take to get very far in this competition, even if they do get past lowly Kenya tomorrow. Yesterday New Zealand thrashed Canada, and Holland were far too good for fellow minnows Scotland. Commentators will want to avoid words like “murdered” when describing such games.
Who (approximately) said this?:
“Most people have no interest in liberty. The limit of their desires is a tolerable overseer.”
I ask not because I know and wish to show off, but because I do not but am curious. I found it here, and he would like to know too, but has so far had no suggestions.
Yesterday, I came across this story, about the late and much lamented former England international cricketer and cricket coach for Pakistan, Bob Woolmer:
Speculations are rife about foul play being involved in Pakistan coach Bob Woolmers death. Reports indicate that some current senior Pakistan team members might have fixed both matches, against West Indies and Ireland.
It is being debated in cricketing circles that he could have been killed to cover up match-fixing by the Pakistani team. The Pakistan team would not be allowed to fly back home till the investigations are over.
And, although I never blogged about this yesterday, I did talk about this yesterday, while surrounding by Iain Dale who at least pretended to be interested, and by three young Conservative ladies who almost went to sleep with excitement. This was on DoughtyStreetTV last night, by way of mere introduction to saying how very much I had enjoyed reading this short but sweet recollection by Peter Briffa, about how Woolmer was one of his teachers at prep school. We have not, I said, heard the last of this story. I also said there would be a tax cut, although I cannot recall if I actually said it might be income tax. So, I had a pretty good night of it.
Because, the Woolmer story has now erupted from the recesses of the internet and gone global:
NEW DELHI: Pakistan cricket coach Bob Woolmer, found dead a day after Pakistan’s shock defeat at the hands of Ireland, was murdered, police have confirmed. Although the Pakistan Cricket Board has been claiming that the autopsy conducted on Woolmer was inconclusive, sources, according to Times Now, have confirmed that investigators have indeed said the coach was murdered.
In fact, the Jamaican Police is said to be already ascertaining the whereabouts of some of the Pakistan players at the time the murder could have taken place. Sources confirmed to Times Now that further questioning of Pakistan players is on the cards as well.
The confirmation comes soon after allegations by former Pakistan pacer Sarfaraz [wrong spelling – should be “Sarfraz”] Nawaz that Woolmer was murdered by the betting syndicate. The outspoken Nawaz has said that almost everybody in control of the game is involved in betting and Woolmer was perhaps about to reveal all in a book.
Since they spell Sarfraz Nawaz wrongly, I cannot help wondering if they have any other of their facts wrong, such as little details like: “police have confirmed”.
For, on the other hand, there is this, from Woolmer’s wife:
“No I don’t see any conspiracy in his death. I am aware that his death is being viewed as a suspicious death. He had nothing to do with the match fixing controversy and any such person being involved is highly unlikely. We never got any threats as far as I know.”
I await developments with extreme interest. Not least because, whatever the truth of these now very noisy rumours, they do rather put this ruckus in a somewhat different light, do they not?
As for the mere cricket, try reading this.
UPDATE: The BBC now confirms that Woolmer’s death is being treated as “suspicious”.
No no, not money. I need ideas.
I recently agreed to do another chat spot on 18 Doughty Street TV, and like a fool I picked Tuesday March 20th, i.e. this evening, all unaware that tomorrow is Budget Day, and we would all have to talk about the damn Budget. I hate, hate, hate Budget Days and Budgets, and conversations about Budget Day and conversations about Budgets, from the depths of my soul. I find the details of tax law deeply depressing and complicated, not least deeply depressing because so damn complicated. Plus everyone on regular TV drones on about it all for hour after hour, while saying (because knowing) extremely little, like cricket commentators when it is raining only not funny or interesting.
Anyway, I got an email this morning from His IainDaleness which included the following instruction:
We will talk about tomorrow’s budget in the first half hour. Please come armed with three things you’d like the Chancellor to do and three things you think he actually will do.
Any suggestions? I particularly need help with the “he actually will do” bit. Generally, presumably, he will (a) kiss babies and (b) steal their lollypops. (A lollypop for whoever can pin down the movie reference there.) But more precisely, what specific horrors are in the pipeline? I assume a lot of anti-4×4 crap. But what else?
And, of course, suggestions about what he should do will also be trawled through with a view to me using the best of them tonight, probably without credit to the originator.
I think that the entire government down be shut down for ever and taxes lowered to zero. But I think they want something more precise than that. So far, I can only think of saying, again, that The Top Rate of Income Tax Should Be Cut to Zero, which I think is a brilliant idea, if only because it makes the current lot of leftier-than-thou Conservatives squirm.
I am now off to read what UKIP has to say, budget-wise. (So far I have not got beyond the heading. Which should surely say “fiddles” rather than “tinkers”. The Emperor Nero was a violinist, was he not?)
“Hand-feeding is not appropriate to the species and is a grave violation of the animal protection laws,” said Frank Albrecht, an animal rights campaigner. “Legally speaking, the zoo should kill the baby bear. Otherwise it is condemning the bear to a dysfunctional life and that too is a breach of the law.”
– spotted in timesonline by Dizzy
Like everyone in my part of the blogosphere, I am very excited about last night’s Channel 4 Documentary, The Great Global Warming Swindle. I also recorded it to my TV hard disc.
The two most interesting claims in it, for me, were: that the Global Warming CO2 link is that that Global Warming causes more CO2 rather than the dominant notion now (as expounded by Al Gore) that more CO2 causes Global Warming, and: that Maggie Thatcher set the whole recent Global Warming pseudo- (if pseudo- it be) science funding bandwagon in motion because it was a stick to beat coal miners with. Brilliant. You want to explain what a mad cow Thatcher was? Denounce her take on Global Warming as cynical bollocks.
What was so excellent, for me, about this show is not that it totally convinced me (I have had enough experience with arguing to know that changing your mind is not something you should do lightly and impulsively) but that it sketched out with absolute clarity the anti-Gore (for want of a better phrase) case. It’s the sun what does it. Sun temperature change, earth temperature change, CO2. That’s the direction of the causes, not CO2 earth temperature change. They are correlated, just as Al Gore said. But Gore got the causation the wrong way round.
I also finally understand the point I have kept hearing about sun spots. Hitherto, sun spots have, when being sold to me as the explanation of all this, sounded to me like they are supposed to cause things. Wrong. They are merely a symptom of what does cause things, namely big change in the sun as a whole. The sunspots are a symptom of the sun warming, not the cause of anything on earth in themselves.
Nevertheless, this show certainly made me more of an anthropogenic Global Warming atheist, and less of a mere agnostic on the subject. I will be watching out for whatever arguments for and against that I encounter during the next few weeks and months. I will, for instance, be watching out for what happens to the academics featured in the show who were brave enough to put their heads above the parapet. That we now have a whole heroes gallery of sun-worshippers (so to speak), whose general intellectual demeanour and record we can now scrutinise, is an immense help. Presumably there will be (have already been) lots of character assassinations, attempted and maybe successful.
And who is Martin Durkin, the guy who made the programme? Ah yes, Living Marxism (that was what they called themselves when I first got to know these weirdos. Before that they were RCP. Equals Revolutionary Communist Party).
Living Marxism were one of those creepy outfits that then said you should only refer to them as LM, without saying what LM used to stand for. Sort of like BAT (who were absolutely not British American Tobacco you understand, definitely not, no relation whatsoever at all blah blah blah), only political. Then when that was greeted with the derision and contempt that it deserved, they dumped even the LM crap, and called themselves the Institute of Ideas. I do not trust them further than I can spit them.
But, for their own bonkers cult reasons, they are very ambitious and worldly wise, rather like the Scientologists (Claire Fox, for instance, is one of them. Frank Furedi is another). Generally, what they say is, strangely, well worth listening to. They speak truth to power, because they are insane and want one day to be power, and do Marx knows what to us.
RCP/Living Marxism/etc. is one of the great conveyor belts of libertarianism from the libertarian ghetto here on earth to the real world, also here on earth, via the planet Zarg. Their Zargian take on the whole Class War thing is that the Class War is still raging between the nobs and the yobs, just like Marx said, but Zargians explain it differently to the usual way. Instead of Al Gore et al being described as repentant nobs on the side of the yobs, the RCP/Living Marxism/etc. people describe Al Gore et al as unrepentant nobs, foisting their latest line of bullshit on the toiling masses, the Working Stiffs of the World who Have Nothing To Lose But Their Chains. RCP/Living Marxism/LM/Institute of Ideas/Whatever will lead the Working Stiffs of the World to victory, and then put Marxist lizards in power or whatever the hell they have in mind.
All of this will now be explained with great enthusiasm by Al Gore et al, the central claim being: These People are Bonkers and we can safely ignore what they say!!!
My answer: These People are indeed Bonkers and Not To Be Trusted (i.e. warmed over and (not very) secretly unrepentant Marxists), but meanwhile, what do you say to their arguments? This particular clutch of notions sounds rather persuasive to me.
Not the least of the fun is going to be that a bunch of warmed over Marxists (Al Gore et al) are going to have to explain that another bunch of warmed over Marxists are bonkers, and are going to disagree about whether they should play the Marx card. I personally agree completely that being a Marxist, still, is strong evidence that you should be taken away in a van. But how will other Marxists with a different take on Marxism handle this argumentative opportunity?
But all that is a digression. The truth is the truth. If a mad, not-to-be-trusted person says something true, there is still the matter of its truth to be considered. Pointing out that the person saying the truth is mad and not-to-be-trusted does not make the truth untrue. Point of logic. Besides which, although the RCP/LM crowd are from the planet Zarg, that doesn’t mean that the scientists they have rounded up are likewise Zargians. They are almost certainly, almost entirely, bona fide earth people.
The arguments in this documentary are now going to be the new orthodoxy of the global right wing, anti-regulation, anti-high-taxes, anti-road-pricing, fuck-you-Karl, fuck-you-Tarqin crowd, who will now echo-chamber these arguments with their blogs into a roar that will deafen the world, in other words these arguments will be adopted by a huge number of earth people. Al Gore et al are going to have to explain why these arguments are nonsense, or, despite the fact that they have won every battle so far, they will lose their war.
I await developments with fascination.
UPDATE: try here for some responses from the opposition.
Cross posted from www.brianmicklethwait.com
Classical music blogger Jessica Duchen yesterday featured a bit of video/audio of the great Grigory Sokolov playing the wonderfully manic third and last movement of Prokofiev’s Seventh Piano Sonata, which is marked Precipitato. I have a DVD of Sokolov playing this, plus some Beethoven, and I assume this clip is from that. (The Beethoven on that DVD is also marvelous. I’ve never heard the somewhat poor relation Op. 14 numbers 1 and 2 sonatas sound better. Or, maybe I’ve just never listened properly before, and this DVD of Big Bear Sokolov finally got me doing that. Don’t know, don’t care.)
To succeed, music has to have at least one of: melody, harmony and rhythm. Too much twentieth century classical type music scores zero out of three, and hence will never be widely liked. This Prokofiev movement scores a thunderously successful ten out of ten (to switch marking systems) in the rhythm department, and does pretty well on the other two as well, I think. (Which, come to think of it, is a description that applies pretty well to Prokofiev’s entire output.) Do have a listen/look if you’ve not heard this piece and enjoy white hot piano playing. It is about four minutes long, with lots of understandably noisy clapping at the end that you can ignore.
It helps that this is the kind of music that, I think, easily survives cheap computer-type speakers.
Everything I have heard and read tells me that this kind of thing used to be true in Britain.
I live in a very small street with only eight houses, but delivery vans come down here at least twice a day. Fed Ex and that other company. People have a lot of parcels delivered by not the Post Office these days. The internet brings us gifts every day.
They bash on the door a few times, then put the parcel down and walk off. One time, a delivery man hid the parcel under our doormat. I guess he thought it was more valuable-looking than usual (true- it was Lego/s). Nobody expects parcels to be stolen from doorsteps. Everywhere I’ve lived in England, that would be insane. I never minded about crime when I lived in the UK, but that was before experiencing life in a place that feels this safe. It’s wonderful.
I heard a story from my brother-in-law about Nottingham in the thirties. Apparently, in a very poor part of town and at a very poor time, as was the practice in such places in those times, a man used to come round with a big leather bag, collecting rent, in cash. This man was not liked. People went hungry to ensure that he got his cash. But it never occurred to him or to anyone that this was a stupid thing for him to do, because it was not stupid. Anyway, one day, he left his bag in the middle of the street for some reason, full of cash, unattended. A while later he came back and collected it, untouched, all the money still there. Those were the rules.
But stories like that about long-ago Nottingham are far easier to dismiss than the contrast that Alice Bachini-Smith describes from her own direct and hugely contrasting experiences. To tell me that I am wrong about 1930s Nottingham only involves saying that the story has become exaggerated over the years, as maybe it has. To tell Alice that she is wrong means telling her that she is wrong about her own experiences. It means calling her a liar, pretty much.
As to why things worked like this in most or even all of Britain in the past and still do work like this in the more law abiding parts of America, well, that is another argument. The reasons are quite complicated, I would say. (For instance, I have long believed architectural design to be part of the story.)
I recall publishing an interesting piece for the Libertarian Alliance by the historian Stephen Davies entitled Towards the Remoralisation of Society about these kinds of arguments. This was published in 1991 but since then the story in Britain has surely changed rather little and if anything has got somewhat worse. (Here and here are some more recent writings by the same author, the former being a book that you have to buy, but the latter being a blog posting that you can actually read.)
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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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