Duke Ellington has more in common with Ravel than with Snoop Dogg. Scott Joplin would have regarded today’s “black culture” as an oxymoron. To eliminate a century and a half’s tradition of beauty and grace from your identity isn’t “keepin’ it real”; it’s keepin’ millions of young black men and women unreal in ways the most malevolent bull-necked racist could never have devised.
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I have just added Bryan Appleyard’s blog to my personal blogroll, here, this being one of several recent reasons why:
As for Blair’s recent Labour Party Conference fairwell triumph:
I don’t know if Blair has “done up Brown like a kipper”, as is earlier proclaimed in the paragraph quoted from above. Time will tell. But separating “the acquisition and sustenance of power from its exercise” is central to understanding Blair and the Blair era. However, the essence of the Blair message throughout has been “I’m not like those appalling Conservative gits”, and now that the Conservatives seem to have found their own version of Blair, similarly ingratiating to the voters, similarly obsessed with getting power and similarly indifferent to doing anything worthwhile with it, Blair may be leaving the stage at just the right moment. My thanks to Stephen Pollard for alerting me to the Appleyard blog. September 30th, 2006 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
 I was all set to concoct a posting called something like “Why I am not a Christian – reason number seventeen” ho ho, about how you can’t expect much in the way of a robust defence of Civilisation against Islamic barbarism from people whose basic belief about their enemies is that they should love them, turn the other cheek, etc. And then (via Instapundit) comes this:
Carey even launched a new word, or at any rate one I’ve not heard before: “Westophobia”. Don’t get me wrong, Carey perpetuates as many clichés as he challenges. For instance:
Perish the thought. But at least …
Simple, I’d say. The founder of Islam believed strongly in violence, was himself very good at it, and recommended it enthusiastically to his followers. They have obliged, century after century after century. But still, you can feel the Western brain cells being rubbed together. See also – another example among many – this rather blunter pronouncement along similar lines. And, for a response to all this moderate Muslim guff, see also this recent blog posting from Peter Saint André. The idea that the West’s response to the Islamic challenge will only ever consist of the first hasty and opposed responses to 9/11, which were entirely what people already thought – “We all ought to get along better”, “We are provoking them”, “They must become more democratic”, and so on – is very foolish. The West – a vague label I know but it will serve – is the most formidable civilisation that the world has yet seen. It has faced down several recent and major challenges to its hegemony, and it will face down this one, I think, with whatever combination of sweet reason and cataclysmic brutality turns out to be necessary to get the job done. This challenge now seems bigger than the earlier ones. But they always do at the time, don’t they? I cannot find on the internet the full text of Carey’s speech. If it can all be linked to, my apologies for suggesting otherwise, and could someone else please supply a link?. If it cannot be linked to, then, given the incendiary nature of this debate, this is an error that should be speedily corrected. The technology is now in place to spare us from having to rely on journalists to tell us what is in potentially important pronouncements of this sort, and it should be used. UPDATE: Link to the full Carey speech. Thanks Julian. September 21st, 2006 | 32 comments - (Comments are closed)
I am listening to the test match cricket commentary, and I can tell you that cricket is about to become extremely big news, of the front page variety. England are playing Pakistan, at the Oval cricket ground in London. England are two up, but Pakistan are looking favourites to win the final game, despite a good England batting fight back. Or, they were. Because now something far more serious has happened. A while before the tea interval, Pakistan were punished by the umpires, for ball tampering. (Ball tampering in this case means deliberately and excessively scuffing up one side of the ball, to make it swing more.) The umpires changed the allegedly tampered ball, allowing the England batsmen out on the pitch to choose the replacement ball, and England were awarded five penalty runs. The Pakistanis were found guilty of cheating, in other words. There appears to be no evidence one way or the other to back up or disprove this judgement. (Where are those cameramen when you want them? They were all over it when Cook was given not out when he looked to have hit it, earlier in the day.) The Pakistanis carried on with the game at that point, but now the Pakistan side are refusing to take the field after tea. “Under law 21,” one of the commentators is saying, “if a side refuses to come out, the umpires shall award the match to the other side.” This has never happened before in international cricket. The umpire at the centre of this row is Darrell Hair, and he has a history of battles with Pakistan. → Continue reading: Darrell Hair versus the Pakistanis August 20th, 2006 | 64 comments - (Comments are closed)
Having recently become a struggling podcaster myself, I have been paying a lot more attention than I otherwise would to podcasters who sound like they have got past the struggling stage. And of all the podcasts I have heard, the one that has impressed me most in recent weeks has been this one, in which Russell Roberts interviews Bruce Bueno de Mesquita. At Cafe Hayek, where I first learned about it, Roberts describes this podcast thus:
And at EconTalk, Roberts writes:
King Leopold II of Belgium is a particularly revealing example. August 16th, 2006 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
I’m sorry to say that the latest on carrying hand-baggage on flights to/from Britain is that violins appear to be a no-no. – Jessica Duchen writing today about the difficulties now being faced by itinerant classical musicians August 15th, 2006 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
There have already been a couple of Samizdata quotes of the day, the first officially labelled thus, and the second an SQOTD in all but title. Had there been no such copying and pasting postings so far today, then I would have put up a quote from this (“MSM sacrifices itself for Hezbollah”), such as, for instance, this:
My thanks to Nigel Sedgwick (who urls himself as something to do with this) who flagged up this piece in a comment on this posting here yesterday. → Continue reading: Puppets and liars and the myth of the non-existent camera August 11th, 2006 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
The report basically says no one gets fired for screwing up in the civil service and that there is no price for failure. It recommends some reforms that will not work because inherently governments have a coercive monopoly. Whereas in the private sector the profit motive works as an incentive because customers will stop buying crap services from businesses, hurting their profits. In the public sector if you stop paying your taxes the government will try and jail you. A mandarin hits it on the head in the report when he admits “Why is Whitehall poor at delivery? Because they’re aren’t any rewards or sanctions in place for civil service delivery.” Where is the incentive for better government? August 8th, 2006 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
I wandered through the aftermath of the anti-Israel, anti-Bush, anti-Blair demo in Parliament Square last Saturday afternoon, late on. I had my camera with me, and snapped one of the many placards still on view. It was not exactly what you would call a ceasefire call:  I can not help thinking that this guy is better at making photogenic placards than he is at military strategy. Unleashing armies would be like putting up other big signs, surely, saying: “Put your bombs here”. August 7th, 2006 | 43 comments - (Comments are closed)
One of my sillier pastimes is doing the Radio Times crossword, the easy version. And last night I was stumped by one of the clues, and had to look at the upside down crib to learn the answer. And the answer was an outrage. The clue was “Lack of fairness”. Even when it was blank blank E blank U blank L blank T blank, I still did not get that the answer was “INEQUALITY”. Which is, as I say, an outrage. Fairness is absolutely not the same as equality, and under cross-examination, everyone – everyone – will admit this. Should a murderer be treated in an equal way to someone who commits no crimes at all? Of course not. Well, yes, of course, it would not be fair to treat murderers equally, but even so, equality, roughly and readily, still, sort of, means fairness. The principle is established, conceded, and then promptly forgotten. But I say that the murderer/good person contrast applies in a modified way to many other less outrageous, yet assumed completely fair, proposals for an equal outcome. What about people who work very hard, compared to people who do the same kind of work, but somewhat less diligently and effectively? Is it fair for those two to get exactly the same pay? Again, no. Equality is one thing and fairness is something quite distinct and different. Sometimes, as when dividing up scarce biscuits at tea time, an equal outcome makes the most sense. But when more is at stake and more needs to be taken into account, well, more is at stake and more needs to be taken into account. An argument to the effect that people who do unpleasant manual labour for a living deserve, on the grounds of fairness, to be paid more than people who work in nice clean, sweet-smelling offices, is at least using the idea of fairness in a reasonable way. But notice that this argument is likewise not about equality. It is being claimed that it would be fair for the unpleasant (as it were) manual labourers to be paid more than the occupiers of comfortable offices. So this argument isn’t saying that fairness equals equality either. My answer to this claim is that it might well, in some ways, be fairer for shit shovellers to be paid more than office drones, but that, at any rate in an approximately free society and free economy, it is not typically a good idea for people to be paid what a third party decides that they deserve. The world works better if people are paid whatever an employer freely agrees to pay them. Imposing ‘fairness’, whether defined (fatuously) as equality, or defined in some other far more reasonable way, is a bad idea. (Not least because those imposing this ‘fairness’ must clearly by unequally powerful, or they would not be able to make their decisions stick.) But that is a different argument. August 5th, 2006 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
My favorite conspiracy theory is the one that says the world is being run by a handful of ultra-rich capitalists, and that our elected governments are mere puppets. I sure hope it’s true… The only way I can get to sleep at night is by imagining a secret cabal of highly competent puppetmasters who are handling the important decisions… I know some of you will say that it’s obvious that corporate money influences the government. But that’s not enough to make me feel comfortable. I want to know there’s an actual meeting of the puppetmasters every Thursday at 3 pm… – Scott Adams via Frank McGahon who got to it via Hit and Run August 3rd, 2006 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
Last night, I snapped photos at the Globalisation Institute gathering at the Foreign Press Association, Carlton House Terrace, just off Trafalgar Square. Alex Singleton used a few of the snaps I took at the GI Blog, and several more of my snaps have also already appeared at Guido Fawkes. Said Guido:
Indeed it was. Here are some further snaps that Guido might have used, but didn’t.  
It was an impressive gathering, high both in quantity and quality of attendees, all chatting away merrily and sipping pink champagne. Also. a bloke spoke:  The bloke, a Conservative Shadow Minister, spoke about how free trade in Africa would be a good thing. NGO persons and other enemies prowled about, gnashing their fangs and wondering how to denounce this well-disposed and well-organised event. Potential donors also mingled, impressed. The GI is definitely going places. July 25th, 2006 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
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