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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How do they do it? To be more exact and honest, how do we do it? Some of us, that is to say. I am referring to the mysterious tenacity of poshly educated people in British politics. Tony Blair went to a posh school. Now it looks odds on that the Conservatives will pick another posh, after a generation of not-so-poshes, starting with Edward Heath. Why? What is the magic that the canniest and most ruthless of us public school educated people which keeps the most prominent of our kind so prominent?
Part of it is that the education of the non-posh majority has, in Britain, been severely damaged, in the name of advancing the non-poshes. That is certainly part of the story.
But I think that another quality that people like David Cameron manage to exude � honestly or dishonestly, it really does not matter which � is: humility. Personally I tend to find this type insufferable, which may be because I got to know these people close up when they were still perfecting their personas, and in some cases before they were even trying and were just being pure bastards. The nastier the bastard, the thicker the veneer of humility that they later glue on, in my experience. But if you are not intimately acquainted with these nice, nice chaps, that humble act can fool you. Plus, in a few cases, the humility is genuine and was there from the start. Anyway, Cameron’s type radiates the notion that he only got where he is by being very lucky. The cards he was dealt made Cameron what he is, Cameron seems to say. Without these cards, the undoubted skill with which he played the cards he did get would have availed him nothing. One, you know, does one’s best, but one has been fortunate, extremely fortunate.
The trouble with the meritocrats whom the likes of Blair and Cameron come up against is that they seem to believe that they merit their cratness. They deserve it. Gordon Brown, for example, suggests to me a man who not only thinks that himself to be an excellent Chancellor of the Exchequer, but also a man who thinks that he deserves to be the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and for that matter deserves to be Prime Minister, instead of recognising with his every public word and gesture that he also needed a hell of a lot of luck to get anywhere near either job. → Continue reading: Posh politicians and not-so-posh politicians who actually do things
A friend of mine alerted me today to this story, of 34-year-old property developer Sally Cameron:
She was walking from her office in Dundee to her home in the suburb of Broughty Ferry when she was arrested under new anti-terrorist legislation and held for four hours.
She said: “I’ve been walking to work every morning for months and months to keep fit. One day, I was told by a guard on the gate that I couldn’t use the route any more because it was solely a cycle path and he said, if I was caught doing it again, I’d be arrested.
“The next thing I knew, the harbour master had driven up behind me with a megaphone, saying, ‘You’re trespassing, please turn back’. It was totally ridiculous. I started laughing and kept on walking. Cyclists going past were also laughing.
“But then two police cars roared up beside me and cut me off, like a scene from Starsky and Hutch, and officers told me I was being arrested under the Terrorism Act. The harbour master was waffling on and (saying that), because of September 11, I would be arrested and charged.”
My friend was trying to imply that the police were somehow overdoing it here. But this seems like a perfectly reasonable set of circumstances to me. After all, you do not want swarthy looking young men in anoraks hanging around harbour installations. But, you cannot pass a law called the Anti-Swarthy-Looking-Young-Men-In-Anoraks Act. It has to be anyone doing anything suspicious, like, you know, walking about.
But, cyclists are obviously not a problem. Cyclists are good. This is a well known fact. So, whereas public footpaths in the vicinity of harbours are an obvious problem and need to be shut down, there is clearly no need to involve cyclists in this prohibition. Cyclists are, I repeat, good. So, these footpaths can simply stay as they are, but be cycle tracks. But, that means that pedestrians must now be told to steer clear of these ex-footpaths, despite the fact that they still exist.
At which point, since this is the Anti-Terrorism Act that is being imposed here rather than merely some exercise in traffic control, any insubordinate pedestrian who causes trouble, by – I don’t know – laughing when you tell him, or her, about the new arrangements, must clearly be treated as the terrorist that he, or she, may well be. I mean, better safe than sorry. This is the survival of our very way of life that we are talking about, the preservation of our ancient liberties against the forces of barbarism.
I cannot see why the Times Online is making such a fuss about this utterly routine matter.
I went from Instapundit to this this presumably not-so-instant pundidtry by Glenn Reynolds called The old industrial state, and from there, via an eBay reference, to another Glenn Reynolds piece called Is small the new big?.
The idea here is that that new big businesses – eBay, Amazon – are getting big by helping the small guy to do his thing, unlike the old big business, which was an economically deluded tyrant.
But did not the big, bad old industrial system – which only became a “state” in the years of its dotage – also empower people? For as long as it was properly run, it did.
The Model T and the Sears Roebuck Catalogue empowered the little guy, just like eBay and Amazon now. The Model T was the basis of many a small business. Sears Roebuck made it possible for smaller operators outside the big cities to function on level terms with the city folks by letting them buy the same stuff and get their money back if not satisfied, just as if they were buying it from a big city store. Most of the USA still lives in small towns, I am constantly told. The old industrial “state” is what enabled them to do so, comfortably.
More recently, the personal computer industry – now dominated by big, bad, old Intel and Microsoft – has empowered millions of individuals, and made possible the growth of enterprises like eBay and Amazon. Empowering the little guy is not a new idea. I can still remember the thrill of empowerment that I felt from my first computer, an Osborne 1.
There are two quite distinct ideas rubbing together here. One is bigness, and its alleged badness. The other is the genuinely bad idea that it is both smart to try to – and actually possible to – insulate huge numbers of people from market pressures, indefinitely. J. K. Galbraith, quoted by Reynolds, thought that this could happen, and his big idea, if you can call it that, was that business bigness meant being above and beyond market realities. The truth is that a big business that ignores market realities is heading for a big fall.
But the little guy is just as prone to economic delusion as the big guy. That is often why he is so little. Like the guy making a small fortune in sport, he started out with a large fortune.
The ultimate embodiment of the Galbraith delusion was of course the USSR, which copied the bigness of US business without copying any of the market responsiveness that brought the USA’s business bigness into being in the first place. The USSR just stole bigness from others, and eventually the loot ran out.
What is true is that formerly successful and still established ways of doing things can get into serious trouble, and because they once were so successful, they can last way beyond their days of success. There is a lot of ruin in them. Big and successful businesses become Galbraithian. They become, on a tiny scale, economically speaking, the USSR. But they cannot last, any longer than the USSR could. Not being able to murder all their rivals and critics, they last a lot less long.
Business bigness is the consequence of a new business idea becoming thoroughly understood by a few exceptional people, who proceed to organise it, and then to triumph over almost all of their rivals. Then, times change, and that kind of bigness needs to change too, but by then millions have got used to it and cling to it. That is the problem of the old “industrial state”. What we are living through is neither the end of bigness nor the beginning of individual empowerment by bigness. It is a transitional period, between one lot of bignesses and other sorts of bigness. And these new bignesses will be just as like to give rise to new Galbraithian delusions as the earlier ones were.
And let us also give credit where credit is still due. Those big old businesses got big in the first place by doing lots of empowering of the little guy. To put it in Reynolds-ese: the old big also did small.
It is not just that I dislike filling in forms. Worse than that, I am very bad at it. Which makes it nearly impossible for me to buy things on the internet. Last night I tried to buy some tickets for a comedy show. All I had to do was fill in about twenty boxes with what was required, and every time I tried, something went wrong, and when I went back to where I might or might not have made the mistake, that page disappeared. So I tried again and this time it said that I could not order twice as many tickets all in a row as I actually wanted. So, I gave up. This morning I tried again, and now the thing said that I cannot buy tickets even in the number that I do want. Last night I think what the original problem was was that I failed to tell them that London is in the UK, although that could be quite wrong. Maybe London is not in the UK. Maybe London is in England. Or Great Britain. Who knows with websites? So, now, I and my friends will not be going.
This is the secret reason for why shops still exist. Secret, because explaining this fact means admitting that you, like millions of other sensible people, are repeatedly confused beyond endurance by allegedly user-friendly but actually use-effing-impossible, interactive (i.e. you have to do it all) websites. You can go to a shop, see it, and if you can’t do all the things they say you must do with your credit card or your address or whatever the hell details they want, they have to explain what you must do before they can sell you anything. All a computer does is repeat whatever gibberish it was that you did not understand in its tortuous entirety the first time around.
This is why banks still exist, instead of all inhabiting cyberspace. The banks all want, physically speaking, to shut themselves. But the people in them know that if they do not explain things face-to-face to actual people from time to time, they will lose out to more obliging competitors. This is why people love their Post Offices. One of the most useful services that Post Offices supply is the service of filling in forms for you. There is a wonderful tax office at the bottom of Euston Tower where you can take your tax forms, and where they tell you face-to-face if you have got everything right. Everything. And when the guy behind the desk whose facial minutiae you can actually scrutinise says that all is now okay, it is. (Apart from the fact that they have stolen thousands of pounds from you and will now do nothing with about half of it and harm with about the other half. Those are different arguments.)
This is, more generally, the reason why places – villages, towns, cities – still matter. This is why London exists.
This is also why live theatrical performances exist and will continue to exist. I recall reading somewhere that the Marx Brothers beta-tested all their movies by first taking them on the road to show to live audiences, to find out which bits really were funny. → Continue reading: Face to face: why places will continue to exist
Instapundit today links to Ralph Kinney Bennett’s charming article about the history of shaving equipment. Anyone who still – even after being subjected to the cry of “dentistry!” – doubts that modern comforts are really as comfortable as all that, really should read this hymn of praise to just what capitalism and its attendant attention to detail can do for human happiness. I mean, imagine having to shave with an uneven, hand-made cutting edge. Bleedin’ hell, as we English would say.
The heart of Bennett’s article is a short account of the life and works of – and this really was his name – King Camp Gillette. Gillette was a salesman, and his achievement was essentially to ask a question. What if, he asked, you could separate the bit of a razor that gets quickly blunted, and needs to be either sharpened or replaced, from the rest of it? Thus the disposable razor blade.
Like so many creative endeavours, the Gillette empire had another guy heavily involved, an engineer who actually made everything. But here there was a problem.
A grateful Gillette wanted to incorporate both his and Nickerson’s names into the company that was established. Nickerson felt his name sounded too much like what the new product was designed to avoid.
We are now deep into the age of three-bladed, four-bladed, and even, now, the five-bladed razor. But the first blade was the one that really made the difference.
Gillette himself, at any rate according to this, was himself some kind of socialist:
Gillette was part of a broad socialist movement in the USA in the 1890s, who wanted to use the profits from his safety razor to finance his beliefs in a new socialist system.
Which only goes to show that people who are clever at one thing are not necessarily so clever at other things.
The words that follow are the start of a (not all that) recent piece by Theodore Dalrymple entitled You Must Be Healthy. They certainly deserve to be noticed here, even if belatedly.
The place of liberty among political desiderata is a matter of philosophical dispute. No doubt, we must occasionally curtail liberty in pursuit of other ends; but I nevertheless find alarming the creeping authoritarianism of the medical journals, which seldom recognize liberty as an end worthy of the slightest consideration in the making of public policy.
I think the problem here is a malign mixture of politics and the medical mentality. The politics is pretty obvious. Here is a generation of politicos who are opposed to freedom, and who will miss no opportunity to establish the institutionalised habit of violating it.
The medical attitude, and the reason why doctors are so vulnerable to this anti-liberty political agenda, is that doctors typically see people at their weakest, at times when they are positively begging to be told what to do by the god-almighty doctor. Doctors are thus pre-disposed to neglect the distinction between them advising people what to do, and simply telling them, for their own good.
Dalrymple has also written recently about the closing of the asylums. This story, in contrast, is one of how the duty to take charge and to give orders was shockingly neglected. Mad people really do have to be bossed about. Madness is horribly difficult to explain or diagnose, and this is often done wrongly, even wickedly. Looking after mad people is likewise horribly difficult, and is often done horribly badly. But that is no excuse for it just not being done. Yet, in accordance with the itself mad idea that madness is all of it caused by social circumstances, a shocking proportion of mad people in Britain have just been turned loose to fend for themselves, often with minimal help.
What this all adds up to is that everyone who can do adulthood is being treated in an ever less adult manner, while insane people – who truly cannot endure the burdens of adult life – have had those very burdens thrust upon them.
The insane, but only the insane, have been liberated.
Actually it was a much cheerier gathering than I expected: usually the Tories have a leader who embarrasses them, but this year they have no leader and everyone’s full of beans.
– Eamonn Butler at the Conservative Party Conference
I am feeling well disposed towards Mark Holland just now, because he quite often links to and comments at my personal blog (now mercifully back in full picture posting business). So go and have a read of this, featuring a classic collection of fun lines that Mark found here.
Particularly good bit, political and Samizdata friendly:
There was a fire at the main Inland Revenue office in London today, but it was put out before any serious good was done.
That is Ronnie Corbett exchanging scripted banter with long time Two Ronnies partner Ronnie Barker, who died yesterday.
Barker, for benighted foreigners who do not know about him, was for several decades a dominant force in British TV comedy, starring in such classics as Porridge and Open All Hours. He also wrote lots of funny stuff.
I know it is always said that whoever it is will be sadly missed when they die, but he really will be.
One of the things we quite often tell each other here at Samizdata is that if a new government department is created, then whatever it is of, so to speak, is now in much deeper trouble than before. Ministry of Defence. Ministry of Social Security. Department of Trade and Industry. Those all mean that defence, social security, trade, industry, are all going to be in permanently short supply and in a bad way from now on.
So it was with considerable sadness that, in Victoria Street this afternoon, I encountered this:
Constitution look out. And be anxious also about justice, rights and democracy. Click on the above little snippet of the photo I took to get the bigger context. I do not know why exactly, but I particularly dislike the lower case letters for the acronym. How long has this particular acronym been in existence? Since June 12th 2003, apparently. I had never noticed it before. This dca resides in an office block of impeccable tedium called Selborne House, 54 Victoria Street, the boring side and towards the boring end, which is why I had not noticed it before.
As soon as I started snapping, and in fact after I had only taken the one rather blurry photo that I have here displayed, a security guard emerged to remonstrate with me. Do you have permission to take photographs? No, of course not, I said. You need permission, he said, to take photographs of this building. Is it illegal, I asked, to take photos of this building from the street? You need permission to take photographs of this building. Why? You need permission to take photographs of this building. Okay, got you the third time, but it seems very strange. You need permission to take photographs of this building. Yeah got you mate. I’m just telling you that you need permission to take photographs of this building. He was an African with a very African voice and an impressive physique, and frankly you do not want to get into complicated arguments with people who work for the government. One of my rules. So I did not press my case.
But I press it now. Is it actually illegal to take photographs of government buildings from the street? Probably, these days, it is, sort of, depending on which lawyer you talk to. But how, in the age of zoom lenses, do they propose to stop people doing this? And what will they do about photos like mine? Perhaps, if some aspect of the government sees this, we will have to take these pictures down. It is the vagueness and the intimidation of all this, as much as the rule itself, that I object to. There was a sense of lawlessnesss about the whole situation. I did not collide with the will of Parliament, just with some government diktat that went round Whitehall in about 1999.
Surely, before telling someone out in the street that they may not take photos, the security men should have known their legal rights and been able to assert them explicitly, instead of just repeating that you have to “get permission”. If it was fear of terrorism, why could he not have said?
Something about all this makes me think that my suspicions about how little protection the people in this building will actually provide for such things as justice, rights and democracy are all too justified.
I mean, what kind of a building has a sign at the front saying what it is, which it obviously wants you to read and be impressed by, but then says you can’t take photos of it? And in the case of this building, it seems particularly odd.
The political system tends to lag behind technological change, which is often a good thing. I remember attending a House subcommittee hearing in the 1980s on whether the U.S. should create a phone-computer system modeled on the state-funded French Minitel, a text-only network being promoted as the wave of the future. Fortunately, the Internet exploded – making Minitel obsolete – before Congress could fund such a project.
– Glenn Harlan Reynolds reviewing this book
I realise that Samizdata is not really for this, but what follows is what is on my mind. The woes of politics, economics, life (i.e. other people’s lives), etc., can wait. My question is: does anyone know of an online source – preferably a blog – of advice about how to make a blog running on/under/with “Expression Engine” work better than it does now?
I offer no links in this posting, other than to the ailing blog in question, because links is what I want, rather than what I have.
My personal blog is now facing serious problems. First, I do not know how to make my monthly archives contain everything written during that month. You merely get the top few postings. And second, the process of uploading pictures has stopped working, without anything resembling an explanation:
A problem was encountered while attempting to upload your file.
Not helpful.
Third, in general, first really, the list of things you can tweak and twiddle when you look in the “Admin” section of the control/input system, or anywhere else in among all that stuff for that matter, consists entirely of things that could mean absolutely anything, and consequently, to me, mean absolutely nothing. Where do I find how to increase the number of postings shown in each monthly archive? It is impossible even to guess, and so far I have found nothing on the subject, despite several hours of looking.
Because the blog still is not working properly, I have not been able to get out of the “here is something silly just so as there is something up today” mode, and to start doing serious thinking and serious posting. I like trivia, from time to time. But not all the time.
My problems are caused by my opinions about how my blog should look. I think my blog should look good. I often write about the look of things, which is why I often want to put up photos, right next to what I have written. A blog that is one of those blog standard template thingies would not suffice for these purposes. I want something that looks a bit special, like the things I often like to write about.
What I really need to learn of is a blog where Expression Engine users ask each other questions and where clever Expression Engine show-offs or would-be Expression Engine paid consultants provide show-off and expert answers. Any Expression Engine experts in the London area would be especially useful to learn about. I do have someone helping me quite a lot, but that someone works funny and numerous hours at something else, and is not omniscient. A group blog just might be omniscient round the clock, as near as makes no difference. But is there one?
By the way, please (I cannot compel this but I can beg) do not turn any comments on this into an argument/celebration about how to upload photos to something else, like Flickr. My picture problem is uploading pictures into an Expression Engine blog posting. I want pictures on my blog. Pictures somewhere else as well is not now my problem.
If I cannot solve my problems with Expression Engine, which basically means finding a person or people who can help me solve my problems with Expression Engine, then I will stop using it. I only used Expression Engine in the first place because I was told that Samizdata was going to switch to it, which it has yet to do.
Bloggingwise, it has not been my year.
UPDATE Wednesday October 5th: Expression Engine is not to blame! Repeat: Expression Engine is not to blame! I am still confused by it, but I am confused by everything computational. I am now busy concocting a slightly longer version of this to put up at Samizdata, but meanwhile I attach this to the original posting. If you publicly denounce a product, and it turns out to be blameless, you must say so, and in a blog it is possible to say it right next to where you did the original trashing. So: sorry Expression Engine! Hope you are still in business. When I have done the longer posting, I will add the link forward to it from here.
I went out this afternoon to partake of coffee with a friend, and on my way to the coffee house, I stumbled upon a news story, and took some photos of it.
Who is that?, I asked. A Father 4 Justice. Oh, one of them.
Cheap, modern, democratised communications pervade this story, and may also influence the reporting of it. Note that the guy has a portable telephone, which would probably not have been the case a decade ago, and which must surely have influenced how the authorities set about dealing with him. I mean, if you were a copper, it might make a difference if the guy you were trying to arrest was supplying a running commentary of your every move to his pals. Who were recording everything he said, as they surely were.
Other photographers were already out in force by the time I got there.
The professionals were there in strength.
But, so were the amateurs, …
… me included, with my 10x zoom lens and automatic anti-shake focussing, in a camera that cost less than three hundred quid.
One of the features of modern government, or maybe that should be recent government, is that modern/recent government often likes simply to blot stories off the airwaves. I am not saying that they wanted to squash this one. But I am saying that if they had entertained any such censorious thoughts, although they might have got away with this ten years ago, now, they would have far less chance.
They would merely have handed the blogosphere a nice little scoop.
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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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