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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Scientists eh? First they tell you all the things you have to do to stay in perfect health and be immortal. Then they tell you that that very things they have been recommending for the last three decades are what will kill you.
The latest health fad to get the treatment? Decaf coffee:
The US study looked at 187 people, a third of whom drank three to six cups of caffeinated coffee a day, while a second group drank the same amount of decaffeinated coffee, and the rest had no coffee.
Researchers measured the level of caffeine in people’s blood, as well as a number of heart-health indicators, including blood pressure, heart rate and cholesterol levels over the course of the three month study.
At the end of the study, the group drinking decaffeinated coffee had experienced an 18% rise in their fatty acids in the blood, which can drive the production of bad ‘LDL’ cholesterol.
Bad cholesterol. Bad!
There has only ever been one good reason to drink decaffeinated coffee, which is that you like it.
My nutritional recommendation just now is: Walkers Marmite Flavoured Potato Crisps. Mmmmm. (I get mine from the new Sainsbury’s in Wilton Road, Victoria.) As it says on the packets:
Same great taste . . . now better for you.
We have been reducing the levels of saturated fat in our crisps so that now they contain 30% less saturated fat than in 2003.
This is because we carefully blend our vegetable oil with a special sunflower oil to produce a better crisp with all the same great taste.
Indeed.
In related news, I note with alarm that Alex Singleton appears to have eaten nothing since November 6th. Has he died of starvation? Perhaps. But Singleton Diet commenter Paul Coulam expresses a different fear:
Do the lack of blog entries indicate that you have fallen off the wagon and are lying in your bed, curtains closed, with crisp bags and pizza boxes scattered all over the floor and chocolate smeared all round your mouth?
So is it famine, or feast, or something else again, such as a moderate diet of marmite flavoured crisps, washed down with not too many cups per day of decaffeinated coffee?
As already reported here, there are two conferences of possible interest to Samizdata readers this coming weekend, Novermber 19th-20th, in London.
There is this one about the theory and practice of Rational Selfishness. And (as already reported here) there is the one I will rationally and selfishly be attending myself: Liberty 2005: The Annual London Conference of the Libertarian Alliance and the Libertarian International.
The reason that I mention this latter gathering in particular today is that now is just about the last moment for booking yourself in to the banquet on the Saturday night. Sean Gabb needs to know by Wednesday at the very latest (so best to make that this evening) so that the National Liberal Club (a fantastic, must see before you die building, by the way) can be told the number of guests to cater for. If past versions of it are anything at all to go by, this banquet will be an excellent occasion, and a splendid opportunity to socialise with libertarians from all over the planet, so if you want to be there, email Sean Gabb now.
Turning up on the day on the day to hear all the speakers, waving banknotes, is okay, and you will be made very welcome if you do that. But for the banquet, if you have not already booked, it is now or never.
Sean tells me that the Conference is already sure to break even, but the more the merrier. It is a big place, as well as a great looking one.
By the way, unless I am much mistaken, the relevant stretch of the Circle and District Underground line will not be in action (see para 5) over this weekend. Watch out for that.
This Chinese banning of electric bicycles is placed firmly in the stupidity column at Beyond Brilliance Beyond Stupidity. Bicycles good, cars bad.
It is hard to disagree with BBBS when they oppose this particular piece of partiality towards cars and against bikes. My only uncertainty concerns the fact that someone has to decide about how roads are administered, and there just might be good reasons for this, besides trying to hurry along the making of a big home market for cars in China, and clearing the proles off the roads, to speed things up for fat cat limos.
That hesitation aside, this certainly looks like a classic case of a law to stop the potential future from competing with the established present. Cars are already big business. Electricity for transport has a long way to go, but will surely go that long way, if allowed to. Batteries, to name just one crucial aspect of electric transport technology, seem to be progressing well, judging by how much better digital camera batteries have got lately. So is China wise to be deliberately trying to rebuild old Detroit?
The libertarian line on all this, which of course is the one I prefer, is that road owners should price the use of roads, and then the market would decide whether electric bikes are a reasonable proposition or too much of a bother to other road users, such as cars. Something tells me that this solution will not be unleashed in China any time soon, although that something may be misinformed.
Whatever you make of this story, it is an interesting angle on China now. My personal policy towards China is (a) trade with it by buying cheap stuff, and (b) learn about it, good and bad, and (c) blog about it, ditto. And one interesting thing I learned from reading this story is that in China they apparently have something called the China Bicycle Association. Concerning this ban on electric bikes, the China Bicycle Association is “enraged”. Good to hear that associations in China are allowed to be enraged. I could not find any China Bicycle Association website though.
Hark! Hark! It is the sound of Norman Lebrecht hitting nails on their heads, but also his fingers and thumbs, leaving blood everywhere:
Film has become fact on DVD. It has left the cinema and joined us for drinks, an emancipatory moment for the last of the great western art forms. Books and music have always furnished our rooms, but to have film as a point of home reference, like Oxford English Dictionary and the complete works of Shakespeare, signals a revolution in cultural reception and, inevitably, creation.
It will, for instance, make it that much harder for Hollywood to remake its own milestones when half the world has the originals to hand for instant comparison. The Manchurian Candidate (1962), with its dream cast of Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey and Janet Leigh was unlikely to be bettered by Jonathan Demme’s 2004 reshoot with Denzel Washington, Liev Schreiber and Meryl Streep. But if anyone had foreseen that the original DVD would be around in the public hands, Demme’s studio would never have raised the finance, let alone the enthusiasm, for an otiose update.
Lebrecht is right about DVDs having been a big change. As usual he has a nose for a big story. Read the whole thing, as we bloggers say. But the original Manchurian Candidate has been out for years on DVD. I owned it on DVD ages before the Denzel Washington remake emerged.
One of Lebrecht’s several follies here is to imagine that all generations are like his generation, and that all generations will thrill to Bergman and Godard just as his version of his generation did. It is hard for old crusties like him, or like me, to imagine a world in which a whole generation has grown up neither knowing nor caring about The Manchurian Candidate, the original one, the proper one, with that woman who now does Murder She Wrote on the telly playing the Evil Witch Queen, but there it is, such a generation now exists, and there is business to be done. Curious oldies who want to see the remake or own the DVD of it, just to check it out and to be able to sneer at the new version having actually seen it, will add a few thousand bums on seats and a few hundred thousand in DVD sales. Meanwhile the plot is a proven entity, Denzel Washington is a proven star, and Meryl Streep, who brings an older following with her, fancies doing a turn as the Evil Witch Queen, knowing she won’t come near the Murder She Wrote woman, but hypnotically drawn to the part nevertheless. So, the project can go ahead.
And millions of Young People These Days will actually prefer it to the original! It is, for starters, in colour instead of black and white. And Laurence Harvey? He was not everyone’s Anglo-American cup of tea even the first time round, I can assure you. → Continue reading: Norman Lebrecht discovers DVDs
The headline really says it all:
‘Safer Cigs’ Condemned
But I will copy and paste the first few paragraphs of the story anyway:
Anti-smoking campaigners are fuming at the development of a “safer” cigarette designed to reduce the risk of cancer and heart disease.
British American Tobacco (BAT) is planning to use a new filter system which removes more toxins but still allows nicotine to enter the lungs.
The new brand – which could be launched next year – would look and taste like normal cigarettes.
But John Britton, a professor of epidemiology at Nottingham University, told The Daily Mirror: “These new cigarettes could be more like jumping off the 15th floor instead of the 20th.
“Theoretically the risk is less – but you still die.”
Whereas, we happy persons who do not smoke may confidently expect to live for ever. Oh yes.
My thanks to Mark Holland for the link to this piece.
This argument reminds me of the one that also rages about contraceptives, ‘safe’ sex, and so on. On one side you have people saying that surely safe sex is better than just plain old sex. On the other, you have people blaming contraceptives, because these are by no means totally safe, and only serve to excuse and encourage the evil thing itself, sex intercourse, with all its attendant dangers.
Both arguments have some force. But if you think that with that comparison I am trying to put all obsessionally controlling puritans in the same box, labelled “Obsessively Controlling Puritans”, you are quite right.
Still, I suppose it is better to have people roaming the earth pursuing their moral equivalents of war than to have people actually fighting wars.
You could argue that we here at Samizdata do the same, but that we just pick on different sinners, such as obsessionally controlling puritans, and different sins, such as obsessionally controlling puritanism.
The difference is that we are correct! Oh yes! All violations of freedom of choice are dangerous, and it is no excuse to say that you have found a way to violate freedom rather less than before so that’s alright then! Oh no! Let virtue reign unsullied!!
Amen and have a nice day.
The ever-perceptive Harry Hutton makes a good point:
The West is losing the War on Arson, along with the War on Drugs, the War on Terror, the War on Fare Dodgers, and some other wars I don’t remember right now. Is it time to consider decriminalisation? Making it illegal just drives it underground and gives it a false glamour, like filleting haddock on a wooden surface*. If burning stuff down were legal it could be taxed and controlled, as in Holland. There was a most interesting piece about it in The Economist.
The filleting haddock thing is explained thus:
*Banned by the 1990 Food Safety Act, since when cases of food poisoning have obviously rocketed.
I have never liked the “it gives it a false glamour” argument against banning drugs, for precisely the reason Harry pinpoints, which is that the same thing applies to bank robbery, arson, and so on, and they are falsely glamorous but so what? I prefer the simple “it’s wrong to ban something that isn’t an aggressive attack on the rights of others” argument. Terror is an attack on others’ rights. Fare dodging is stealing, ditto. Haddock filleting on a wooden surface you can avoid, by not doing it, and by avoiding restaurants where they do it, if you really mind it that much.
Personally I think that the old ways of preparing food are less poisonous than the kind that the EU now demands, and I think those figures that Harry Hutton links to back that up, as he implies. But why has reported food poisoning abated since 2001? Have people stopped bothering to report it? Have some of those vulnerable to it died off? My guess is that the restaurants that poisoned their customers have been identified and shunned by those wanting a meal. After a period when new and safer rules were introduced and new and safer food preparation methods mandated, which was obviously extremely dangerous, the worst excesses of the new regime are now starting to be avoided, but obviously not yet as successfully as happened before the new and safer safety regulations were introduced.
If there must be laws against food poisoning, let them be laws against actual food poisoning, rather than against practices which, in the opinion of EU officials who just want to regulate stuff for the pure pleasure of it, might be poisonous, although less poisonous than any imaginable alternative.
The other argument I like to use about alleged crimes without actual victims which ought not to be crimes is the practical point that these are harder for any policemen to find out about. If you commit the crime of filleting a haddock on a wooden surface, and you and your dinner guests happen to prefer haddock filleted thus, why would any of you inform the authorities? Laws against victimless “crimes” are easily broken, by otherwise law abiding persons, and thus lower general respect for the law.
The trouble with that argument is that many real crimes are a source of shame to their victims, and they will not tell the police for that reason. Banks, for instance, do not want the fallibility of their security systems to become too public. Many property thefts are, as our current Government never tires of telling us, our own fault, and we are justly punished for allowing such thefts to be committed. Dare we bother the police with news of our trivial and self-inflicted misfortunes? But that is insufficient reason to make stealing that the victims are ashamed of legal, even if in practise that is pretty much how things are.
With hindsight it can be stated that the outcome of the Industrial Revolution was that human beings no longer needed to go out and grab other people’s possessions by force, but merely to settle down, work hard and exchange the considerable surplus they produced for something they wanted from the surplus someone else produced. How simple it all seems! Yet how hard to put into practice.
– Findlay Dunachie (1928-2005 – his funeral is today) in The Success of the Industrial Revolution and the Failure of Political Revolutions: How Britain Got Lucky, page 6, published in 1996 by the Libertarian Alliance.
A few days ago, Findlay Dunachie died.
His widow Lyn asked us to send her a few words of appeciation concerning his contributions to Samizdata, and we sent her the following, some of which will be read out at Findlay’s funeral, which is to be held this coming Tuesday. These few hastily composed reflections were not written with a view to publication on Samizdata, but when we asked Lyn if she would object to them being used for this purpose also, she very kindly agreed.
Last night we at Samizdata received the sad news of the death of Findlay Dunachie. He had recently told us that he was, he believed, dying, so this was not a complete surprise. But we were still greatly saddened. Only one of our number ever actually met Findlay, and we know him best through many phone conversations, but above all through his writings for Samizdata. Selfishly, we regret that there will be no more such writings.
Samizdata is a weblog – “blog” for short – devoted to spreading news and comment, profundity and triviality, concerning human freedom, human progress, and about the many and various enemies of these things. We seek to celebrate and to spread the ideas of, approximately speaking, classical liberalism and libertarianism which Findlay Dunachie held dear.
For a number of years, Findlay had been writing review articles about some of the many books he had been reading, and in October 2003, having received a great trove of these writings, we at Samizdata began to publish them.
Almost all of Findlay’s writings for Samizdata were book reviews of one kind or another. In total we published just under fifty such articles, the most recent one being a timely tour de force about Nelson, the Battle of Trafalgar, about the man Nelson’s death left in command of his fleet, Admiral Collingwood, and about the aftermath and consequences of the battle.
Looking down the long list of topics covered, a few things stand out. Findlay wrote about the whole world and about the world’s long varied history. He did not confine himself to his own country or culture, or to his own time. However, a deep love of Britain, its language, its institutions, and of Britain’s on-the-whole beneficial and liberal effects upon the world is also strongly evident in Findlay’s writings, as is an interest in the various forces arrayed against such influences – continental European despotism, such as that against which Nelson fought, such as communism in it various forms, and such as the more repellent aspects of Islam throughout its long history.
Findlay’s professional background as a scientist was also reflected in his interest in the claims of, and the most scrupulous and eloquent critics of, the environmental movement, so much of which involves making misleading or false claims about science and about technology, and about the largely beneficial effects of technological progress.
From the start Findlay’s writings were hugely appreciated, by a readership concentrated in but by no means confined to Britain and the USA. We know this, because at Samizdata our readers are able to comment. And concerning Findlay’s many writings, comment they did, gratefully, effusively, and continuously. It was regularly said and never contested that Findlay’s reviews were among the best things if not the best things to be found on Samizdata. Since, on the whole, Findlay tried to read books that he himself would end up liking and mostly succeeded, he surely made a not insignificant contribution to their sales figures.
His widow Lyn tells us that it gave Findlay enormous pleasure to find readers for his writings at this late and presumably rather painful time in his life. The feeling, but not the pain, is entirely mutual. It gave us huge pleasure to have published Findlay’s writings.
Those of us who had direct dealings with Findlay, by phone or in person, formed the impression that he was, quite aside from being an attractive and formidable intellect, also a thoroughly nice man whom it would have been a great pleasure to have known a lot better than we did, and to learn a lot more of what else he did in his life besides write things for Samizdata. Geography made that difficult. But modern electronic communication, in the form of the internet, made it possible for Findlay to find readers who would otherwise never have encountered his mind and writings.
To all his closer and closest friends and loved ones we at Samizdata say: we hope and believe that we helped to make the last two years, for Findlay, that little bit better than they would otherwise have been. If so, this is only fair, because he did exactly the same, and more, for us and for many readers the world over.
I was about to make this a Samizdata quote of the day, but Scott got there first:
One way in which consensus opinion changes is when scattered individuals become aware that many others share their opinions.
That is our own Natalie Solent reflecting on some comments at the BBC.
Of which this was one, from Chadi Bou Habib of Beirut:
I lived in France for 8 years and I have never understood why the “youths” deal with “social problems” only through riots. Until one day, I was admitted in a meeting of a so-called “cultural association” subsidized by the local council. A Muslim “brother” talked for about an hour on the difference between “us” and “them”, to conclude that whatever we do to “them” is of god’s will, a kind of Jihad. Well, the French authorities should start inquiring on the kind of “culture” they are subsidizing.
Meanwhile, Mark Steyn has this to say about Prince Charles and his ill-timed efforts to get the Americans to stop being beastly to the Muslims:
Having followed the last Prince of Wales in his taste for older divorcées, His Royal Highness seems to be emulating Edward VIII on the geopolitical front, too, and carelessly aligning himself with the wrong side on the central challenge of the age.
Although, there is one thing to be said in favour of appeasement, which is that it does allow everyone to grope their way towards approximate agreement about the nature of the enemy, based on what actually is the nature of the enemy, rather than on wishful fantasies.
Nicolas Sarkozy has threatened rioters with prison sentences. But this evening a BBC TV reporter ended his report from riotous Paris by saying that the Muslim Parisians who have been chucking bricks at the gendarmerie and torching cars say that the cause of the rioting is Nicolas Sarkozy with his hostile and unfeeling attitude, and that he should say he is sorry.
Quite so. The cheek of the man. Anyone would think that those rioters were breaking the law.
I guess Chadi Bou Habib has a bit more commenting to do.
The BBC has an interesting piece up about Sony being sneaky:
Mr Russinovich, a renowned Windows programming expert, came across the Sony BMG anti-piracy system when performing a scan of his computer with a utility he co-created that spots so-called rootkits.
Rootkits are starting to be used by a small number of computer virus writers because they allow malicious code to be inserted deep inside the Windows operating system, meaning that it will not be spotted by most anti-virus scanners.
Rootkits are used to hide malicious software once it is installed and ensure it is not found and removed by anti-virus programs
After extensive analysis Mr Russinovich realised that the “cloaked” software had been installed when he first listened to the CD album Get Right With the Man CD by country rockers Van Zant.
No mention of Rootkits, according to Mr Russinovich, in the licensing agreement he signed when he stuck the CD in his computer to play it.
My attitude to all such things is that the market will decide, aided by the internet, which will spread stories like this around. People copying CDs illegally, and now Sony putting intrusive software on their CDs, seem to me to be opposite sides of the same coin, the coin being the unviability – so it now appears to me – of the old way of doing things in a new time. Moralists may curse, and maybe they will, here, again.
What Mr Russinovich presumably wants the market to decide is that Sony are, as this guy would put it, bastard people! And maybe it will. But maybe, instead, it will decide what Sony and most of the other Big Content and Electric Toy companies presumably want them to decide, which is not just not to copy CDs, but not, as a general rule, to allow pre-recorded CDs anywhere near their computers. That way CDs never get copied, and we all have to have two lots of Electric Toys, one lot to compute, and the other lot to play music and stuff. Although personally I do like to keep entertainment separate from computing, largely out of habit but also because when one breaks down I still want the other to work, I cannot see such separation really catching on.
For me, there is a certain irony in Sony, notable pioneers in cheap music copying technology and now leading the way in do it yourself movie making – ideal for sneaking into cinemas – now trying to make disc copying especially difficult and dangerous. I guess they of all people know how easy copying has now become.
Meanwhile, Adriana throws interesting light on the digital info-habits of the kind of people who will be e deciding the future of all this.
Yesterday I got into conversation with two sibling members of my family, both of whom are opposed to the US invasion/liberation of Iraq. One is (approximately) an environmentalist, the other is (precisely speaking) a UKIPper, but both are agreed in opposing the war and Britain’s involvement in it. I am cautiously and pessimistically supportive, but am not sure. I hope Mark Steyn is right about it, but fear that he may not be.
Anyway, an hypothesis about the state of US public opinion surfaced, as interesting hypotheses will when people who disagree, and who hence bring varied ideas and attitudes to the table, but who wish to remain civil with one another, as I and my siblings do.
For the last few years, the Left in the USA has been saying: It’s all about oil, it’s all about oil. Now for many Americans, and for most people outside America, fighting a war for mere oil is evil. But what if lots of Americans hear that this war is all about oil, and are pleased? But what if the dime has now finally dropped that actually this war is NOT all about oil?
Could that be what Middle America is getting nervous about? For as long as they were convinced that it was all about oil, they were content. That is our kind of war. Simple, limited, clear, selfish. All the things you want, and not like Vietnam at all. But now that it is dawning on them that this really is about “democracy” and such like, for that exact reason they are getting fidgety. Will it be worth it? When will it end? Where will it end? etc.
It would be entertaining to think that the American Left have been the most energetic de facto supporters of President Bush because of what they regarded as their fiercest criticism of him, but that now that the Left is being defeated in the argument about the true nature and true purpose of the war by the war’s most energetic supporters, support for that war is, as a direct result, eroding.
One should probably not be looking for entertainment in such serious things, but, entertainment aside, is this not a rather interesting way of looking at it? I am sure that this theory does not apply to all American supporters or ex-supporters of the war. But to some, maybe?
No links in this I am afraid. I do not recall hearing anyone else saying anything quite like this, although some surely have.
Something extremely interesting has just been reported on Newsnight.
David Cameron has apparently been saying for some time now (but I missed it until now) that he is against “opposition for opposition’s sake” and that the Conservatives may well be voting for the Government’s latest education reforms. David Cameron is and has for some time been the Conservative spokesman on education, and he seems to be handling the Conservative response to these proposals.
Yesterday I did a posting concerning Cameron, and the consensus among the Samizdata commentariat was that nobody knew what Cameron stood for, or what any of his ideas might be. But I think what we have here is an idea of great importance. Maybe not an especially original one, and long overdue, but extremely potent mevertheless.
The Conservative Opposition has spent the last decade opposing everything that the Government has done, a process which I particularly associate with William Hague, but which his successors have not fundamentally altered. And since the Government has been relentlessly “triangulating” – i.e. stealing whichever Conservative policies they think are popular or which they think will eventually prove popular because they think that they will in the meantime work – this has meant the Conservatives suffering from a permanent, yet self-imposed, philosophical incoherence.
One moment the Conservatives would be saying that something or other that the Government was talking about should be more market-oriented. A moment later, some other Government initiative that was more market-oriented would be complained about. Complained about, as Cameron has apparently said, for the sake of complaining. One moment the Government was being not tough enough on terrorists, the next moment too tough, for doing pretty much what the Conservatives had just said they should do in another context. This is not opposition, so much as opposition-ism. It says: whatever they do is wrong! Never mind why. Never mind what we would do, or what we really think of it. Denounce it! We just scrape up whatever mud we can find on the floor and chuck it at them. No wonder the Conservatives have won parliamentary battle after parliamentary battle, but have been slaughtered again and again in the electoral war.
What would the Conservatives do, if they were the Government? For the last ten years, they have offered no sort of answer. And for this reason, there has been, in the competitive sense, no opposition, because no alternative Government that it made sense to even consider voting for. All anyone knew about the Conservatives was that they did not like the Government. Big surprise. But that is not a policy; it is a mere emotion. It has condemned the Conservatives to relentless irrelevance and unending public ridicule.
Now, if this “Cameron doctrine” is what it appears to be, and more to the point, if it goes into action right across the board, with David Cameron imposing it across the board in his capacity as Conservative Leader, New Labour will finally face what you might call a New Nightmare.
Take these education reforms. Blair says they are intended to make schools more independent and self-governed, and less controlled by local authorities. This is very Conservative friendly stuff, and not at all Labour friendly. There is a good chance that the massed ranks of Labour MPs will not vote for these reforms in nearly sufficient numbers, but that a more unified Conservative Party will see the reforms through nevertheless. This will split the Labour Party from top to bottom. We are doing Conservative policy! And with Conservative help! And in spite of our core beliefs!
Repeat that procedure every time Blair presents one of his reforms, but oppose ferociously when they resort to old fashioned, Old Labour, collectivism, and suddenly it is a new Parliamentary ball game.
It gets worse for Labour. In the electorate as a whole, the question will start to be asked: if we already have a Government that does Conservative things, despite its own supporters, and if that is what that nice Mr Blair thinks should be done, then does it not make sense to vote for the real thing, and vote in a real Conservative Government?
This is a tactical switch that the Conservatives should, from the purely political and competitive point of view, have done years ago. Finally, they have done it.
Or then again, maybe they have not. Cameron might not win the Conservative Leadership. Davies might go back to crass oppositionism. Cameron may win, but it may turn out that “opposition for opposition’s sake” was just a nice sounding phrase to win him the job, and he will then forget about it and carry on with the mud slinging.
But, this might just be a political turning point.
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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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