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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Well, it was a nice idea. But today I have to say oh dear, and Michael Jennings can say heh. Australia smashed England at one-day cricket today, and the man who made the biggest impact was the still great Glenn McGrath, who took two of the three wickets that fell at the very start of the England innings. England tried hard after that but never recovered.
In other sporting news, the rule in England is that if you are Scottish and you lose you are Scottish, but if you win you are British. I did not know that Tim Henman had Scottish ancestors, but it would seem that he does. On the other hand, someone called Andrew Murray is, for the duration of his Wimbledon run, British.
In other cricket news, the Zimbabwean cricket team is not welcome. That is history, of the horrible sort, and a rather ineffectual attempt to make it less horrible. Plus, the cricketers of the USA are at each others’ throats. That is more like farce, although having been caught up in one of these irreversible faction fight things myself, I sympathise more deeply than most would.
I am watching the BBC Ten o’clock News, and the lead story is Condoleezza Rice, spelling out the Bush doctrine:
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has delivered a forceful call for democratic reform in the Arab World in a major policy speech in Cairo.
The US pursuit of stability in the Middle East at the expense of democracy had “achieved neither”, she admitted.
“Now, we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people,” she said.
The BBC’s Frank Gardiner said her comments marked a complete departure for the US, and were “immensely risky”.
Indeed. In order to have seen this one coming, you would have had to have read some of President George W. Bush’s speeches, in particular his Second Inaugural Address, and to have then made the even greater mental leap of realising that President George W. Bush had actually thought about what he was saying, and had meant it.
So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world. (Applause.)
As the BBC immediately explained, the worry is that democracy in the Middle East may result in Islamomaniacal governments which “hate America”. As opposed to regimes like the ones in Egypt and Saudi Arabia now, which permit no anti-American sentiments whatsoever.
Now the BBC is explaining that Egypt, like the USSR before it, is immovably non-democratic. Mubarak will be followed in the fullness of time only by further Mubaraks. We shall see.
President George W. Bush is a physically quite little guy, or so he seems in the photos that I have seen. He has an eccentric way with the English language, his pauses extending to the point where they flirt dangerously with embarrassment. He believes – really believes – in God. So, he is an easy man to underestimate, and all of Europe now does this. Yet if US Presidential greatness is defined as determining a new course for the USA and then making that new course the actual course that is then steered by (which it is, although there is also the matter of whether the new course is good and wise to consider), then President George W. Bush is getting greater by the month.
I had all kinds of plans of Things To Do over the weekend, but instead I spent my time following the news, with growing disbelief, of Australia losing two cricket matches, yesterday against England which was a bit of a surprise, and on Saturday against Bangladesh which was a cricket earthquake. The Aussies will probably pull themselves together by the time the test matches come around, because they are, after all, the Aussies, the best cricket team in the world. But they have now lost four games in a row, which is quite a hiccup by their standards. They lost the twenty over thrash against England last Monday, heavily, and then they lost to Somerset in a fifty-over warm-up game. And now they have lost these two games. As you can imagine, the British media are having a fine old wallow. → Continue reading: Are the Aussies at last becoming fallible?
This BBC report about the anxieties and arkwardnesses now being suffered by the EU’s leaders in the wake of their repudiation by the voters of France and Holland makes fun reading for all those of us who fail to see the point of the EU. What is it for? What good and worthwhile thing can the EU do that could not be done just as easily by the separate nations and governments of Europe with a fraction of the fuss or expense or grief? Why must the nations of EUrope homogenise themselves into one nation? For what? Against whom? The EU’s leaders have never explained in a manner that makes simultaneous sense to all of EUrope’s people.
Instead, they have tended to fall back on the argument that the EU is inevitable. Yes but is it desirable? That does not matter, because desirable or not, it is happening. It is reality. It is the future. Arguing that it should not be reailty or the future is to indulge in fantasy.
If the EU had a desirable and agreed purpose of the sort that the people of the EU might actually be able to get enthusiastic about – some purpose, I mean, other than that of giving the EU elite a superpower to be the bosses of – that would have made quite a difference in recent weeks. In crisis, all fundamentally effective institutions go to their core purpose. But the EU has no core purpose that its leaders are willing to allude to. All that the EU has is its precious momentum, its inevitability, and if it suddenly looks like it does not have momentum or inevitabitlity, then, in the word’s of Germany’s Vice President, a certain Guenter Verheugen, “the ground is shaking beneath our feet”.
Shake baby shake, I say.
The EUro-momentum will no doubt soon be re-established, and this little democratically induced tremor may soon be forgotten. But while it lasts, I am enjoying it. I can even tell myself that it might be remembered for a while.
The BBC are now bingeing on Beethoven, which is fine by me. (And yes, I quite agree that if you do not care for Beethoven, you should not have to pay for it, blah blah. Let us take that as a given, shall we?)
On Saturday night BBC4 TV showed three videos of the first three symphonies, conducted by Sir Roger Norrington in One (which I missed), the late Otto Klemperer in Two (in 1960s black and white), and Rattle doing the Eroica with his old City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in 1995. Rattle’s Eroica was, for me, as gloriously invigorating as Klemperer’s Second was cloddish and over-solemn. Watching a very obviously heart attacked, slack-jawed Klemperer sitting like someone in a hospital waiting room waving one finger vaguely in the air while the New Philharmonia tried to divine some musical sense out of these wobbly gestures suddenly did not seem funny any more, although on another night I might have been entranced.
But Rattle’s Eroica was fabulous. All his calculatedly wide-eyed astonishment and arm-waving, armpit-flaunting drama-queening made perfect sense, given that he was conducting what is probably the single most astonishing and dramatic piece of music ever written. This is amazing, said Rattle’s every look and gesture, and it was. → Continue reading: Eroica
For me, this was the biggest news yesterday. Synthetic phonics is now thoroughly established as a serious educational policy option.
“Synthetic phonics” is a somewhat jargonic way of saying the sensible teaching of reading, based on the idea that despite all the deviations (in English especially) from the rules, letters stand for noises, and the way to read is to work out what the noise must be from the letters. To say that this is how to learn reading is to miss the point. The point is: this is reading. Seeing the letters “e l e p h a n t” next to a picture of an elephant (which is precisely what I did see this morning when channel hopping – in a TV show supposedly helping children to read) and guessing that therefore this assemblage of baffling squiggles must mean elephant is not reading. Reading means seeing those letters on their own, and knowing that they mean elephant.
A good way to get to grips with the background to this story is to read the latest newsletter from the Reading Reform Foundation, who have been agitating on behalf of synthetic phonics for many years now.
At the heart of this argument is not the value of phonics as such. Even the most diehard look-and-say people now concede that phonics is part of the story. But, say the RRF people, too many teachers – teachers who have only been following or agreeing with the guidance they have been getting from the government – believe in a mixed approach. In other words, says the RRF, they confuse children by urging them to combine reading with guessing. Should some version of phonics merely be included in the government’s literacy strategy (it already is), in among picture books, stuff about “word shape”, and so on, or should literacy be based entirely on phonics, properly done? The latter, says the RRF. Personally I find the RRF argument thoroughly convincing.
At lot of what is happening here is not really an argument about what works best (synthetic phonics has been proved to work best), so much as an elaborate exercise in giving a whole generation of fools a soft landing. Too sudden a switch from the wrong methods to the right ones would reveal at once how bad the wrong methods were, and make an awful lot of experts look very inexpert indeed. So, although they must surely now know that they are losing, these people are still digging their heals in and fighting every inch of the way.
Kudos to the government, for, better late than never, taking all this on board, to use an unlovely Blairite phrase. For this is classic Blairism. Once again, New Labour (this kind of thing being the New bit) are cherry picking one of the better things that some Conservatives have been saying, and ramming it down the throats of their own natural (Old Labour) supporters, who will put up with anything rather than have too serious a fight with their own front bench and thus let the Conservatives back in.
My favourite moment in all the media reportage yesterday about all this came when a newsreader (I think BBC but am not sure) was reading the phrase “synthetic phonics” out. Exhausted by the effort of reading “synthetic”, she then stumbled over “phonics”, and had to stop, and try it again. Eventually she got it right. Maybe it would have helped if she had had a picture to help her.
Well, no, it would not. She should simply have read it better.
To kill one baby may be accounted carelessness, but to kill four . . .
Here is a classic gruesome shock horror well-I-never what’s-the-world-coming-to? story from timesonline. The headline says it all:
Mother hid dead babies in the freezer
Who says they don’t write headlines like that any more? They wrote that one today. No wonder Europe has a demographic crisis on its hands. These people really do not like to have children, do they?
To be more geographically selective, what is Austria coming to? To me Austria has long been a rather sinister place. It is one of the two national bits at the heart of Nazism, but unlike the other bit, Germany, it has never properly apologised. (Germany has never stopped apologising.) Very pretty waltzes, I agree. Nevertheless, Austria is, you might say, Japan on the Danube. Hitler, remember, was Austrian, and he incubated a lot of his worst ideas when living in Vienna. If only he had been frozen at birth. More recently we have had to share our planet with the creepy Kurt Waldheim.
On the other hand, I have only occasionally been to Austria, and have little first hand experience of its people. No doubt many of them are quite nice, and I do not just mean the Austrian economists.
This frozen baby thing happened in Graz.
Graz, a picturesque city of 250,000 lies 120 miles south of Vienna and is the birthplace of film actor turned California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
They do not spell it out, but the implication is clear. The baby freezing was Arnold’s fault! Along with most of the other Samizdatistas, I think Arnold is a good Austrian. However, according to this, Arnold invited Waldheim to his wedding, which I did not know until now. (Waldheim did not attend.) Nor do I know whether this means that Arnold is worse than I thought, or Waldheim better. Maybe it just shows that you get all sorts at weddings.
The artistic version of the Labour Theory of Value is restated, at its natural home, here:
One song hails from an album that took years to craft and perfect, the delays in its conception seriously denting profits for EMI as fans across the world awaited its release. The other was obviously whipped up in a matter of minutes by a dodgy German dance act with an 80s record collection and a sampler.
Nevertheless, following the cliche that there is no accounting for taste, the Crazy Frog ringtone appears to be jumping over Coldplay’s Speed of Sound towards this week’s number one spot.
And appearances did not deceive. Yes, this was the big Frog head-to-head over the last few days. An electronic rehash of the dominant tune of Beverly Hills Cop: would it get to number one? Yes? Or no.
The samizdata.net meta-context is sometimes a bit hard to work out and apply, but in this contest, I think we all know where our sympathies lie. Do we vote for the oh-so-late album of a bunch of dreary navel-gazing complaint rockers, aimed at dreary ageing complainers (a big market, I do agree), or for a spirited up-beat can-do problems-are-there-to-be-solved need-for-speed aquatic cartoon creation? I think we know the answer to that one, don’t we girls?
Normally, I would not myself be so partial to the Crazy Frog, if only because I also quite like his deadly rival Sweety. But the Frog does seem to get up all the right noses, so all power to his legs.
Next stop for the goggled one, Korea.
… or at any rate prolonged the misery.
I have been reading The Motivated Mind by Dr Raj Persaud, British TV’s most familiar psychiatric face. This book is, for me, rather less than the sum of its parts. There is a structure to it, in the form of the assertion that human motivation is often very complicated, and more complicated than many psychologists have said. But mostly it is a mixture of more or less informed pop psychology about how to get on with your career, love life, etc., and references to interesting learned articles. It reads more like a bundle of articles than a real book, and personally I would have preferred it as a blog, but that may just be me. So I have not been reading this book solidly. Rather, I have been dipping.
And near the end (p. 396 of my paperback edition) I did come across this amusing titbit:
For many years the most popular method of suicide in Great Britain was asphyxiation – sticking one’s head in the oven and turning on the gas. After the discovery of natural gas deposits in the North Sea in the fifties and sixties, most English homes converted from coke gas, whose high carbon monoxide content made it highly lethal, to less toxic natural gas. From 1963 to 1978 the number of English suicides by gas dropped from 2,368 to eleven and the country’s overall suicide rate decreased by one-third. Despite England’s varying unemployment rate and social stresses since then, it has remained at this lower level.
Maybe you knew that, but I did not, and I find it most intriguing.
The moral? Plenty of them, I suppose, but one would be the extraordinary mismatch that constantly occurs in life between trivial causes and portentous consequences. Economic analysis that it would be more dignified to apply only to such insignificances as chocolate bar purchases – in the form of transaction costs – turns out to illuminate self-administered death also.
For me, if suicide ever beckons, it will either itself be painless, or my continuing existence will itself have become so painful that one more spasm of further pain will make no difference. So it does actually make sense to me that if you remove what must at least seem like a reasonably painless means of exiting from life, many who would have slipped out by this door, instead remain living until death, by natural causes, reaches out to them.
Sport is going through an awkward transition phase just now, caused by the onward march of technology. During this phase, the problem is that the commentators often have technology to scrutinise and generally second-guess umpiring or refereeing decisions that are not available to the umpires or referees themselves.
This is quite natural. The commentators can afford to muck about with wild technological experiments. They can stick with them if they seem to add something to their descriptive and analytical efforts, and quietly discontinue them if they only confuse. And even if it takes them twenty minutes to come up with their techno-analysis, it is still worth them showing it to their viewers. But including technology into actual game officiating is a necessarily more cautious and cumbersome process. So there is bound, at any given moment, to be this mismatch between the techno-toys the commentators have, and what the umpires and referees have.
Trouble is, again and again, this technology makes fools out of the game officials. It makes chumps of the umps.
The other day, Liverpool won the European Cup. But would they have won it if the referees of the Liverpool Chelsea semi-final had been technologically assisted. Maybe that Liverpool goal would still have stood if the officials had been able to look at all that subsequent computerisation. But at least disgruntled Chelsea players and supporters would have known that the decision was based on a different interpretation of that information rather than on the opinion of people who were standing in entirely the wrong place to have a valid opinion on the subject.
Rugby, both league and union, already uses slow motion cameras to help them decide about contentious tries. Did his foot go over the side line before he touched down? Did he touch down properly? That kind of thing. (In rugby, unlike in American football, they do not call it a touch down, but you do actually have to touch it down.)
Cricket is the sport I know most about, when it comes to adjudication technology. And cricket is, and always has been, full of tricky decisions that the umpires have to make. Technology is slowly being introduced to help the umpires make fewer errors.
Cricket umpires already use slow motion cameras to decide about run out decisions. This is when a batsman fails (or does he?) to complete a run by reaching the line that matters before the fielders hit the stumps with the ball. And this has greatly improved these decisions. With their being less doubt, batsmen now get less benefit from it, but so what? These decisions are now clearly better.
A big problem remains, however, with LBW decisions. That’s “leg before wicket” ? when the ball strikes the batsman’s leg and would have hit the wicket. Or would it, question mark question mark, argument argument. There was a series not so long ago between England and South Africa which was settled in England’s favour with a series of highly dubious LBWs in the deciding match, and that kind of nasty-taste-in-the-mouth we-was-robbed stuff happens quite often. But at least that happened, as I recall, before the age of Hawk-eye.
Hawk-eye is the machine that tells us, as well as anyone or anything can, whether a batsman was out LBW or not. And although the ultimate truth of the matter is still hard to be sure about – because, after all, the machine is still only guessing where the ball would have gone, rather than measuring anything it actually did do – Hawk-eye looks pretty convincing to me. Put it this way. If I were a batsman being given out, or a bowler begging in vain for the verdict, I would rather that Hawk-eye was supplying the verdict rather than some one-eyed umpire.
The cricket commentators also have their “snickometer” to determine whether the ball has touched the bat while passing it or not, and in some cases to work out whether the ball touched the bat before hitting the pad, and therefore whether or not a batsman can be given out LBW. (If he hits it first, however gently, it is not out.) The Snickometer produces an output that looks like a voice analyser, and expert interpreters to tell what kind of noise that spike is, and exactly when it happened. So the Snickometer can really help, with things like snicked catches to the wicketkeeper.
But, although the commentators, and hence also all the TV viewers like me, have Hawk-eye and the Snickometer, the umpires, as yet, do not. Time and again, they give their instant verdicts, based only on what they just saw, at full speed, and then moments later (fewer and fewer moments as time has gone by) Hawk-eye and/or the Snickometer have given their verdicts. Often they differ. Invariably, the technologically aided decisions are more convincing, and often embarrassingly so. → Continue reading: The technology of sports adjudication
For what it may or may not be worth, Channel 4 News has just said that a leaked exit poll gives the Non side victory with between 53 and 55 per cent of the vote.
Meanwhile, the EU Referendum blog reports that it has read a document which explains that Non will not actually mean No:
In short, the authors conclude that, in the event of one or both countries voting “no”, the ratification process should be neither suspended nor abandoned. They assert that all member states have expressed a commitment to proceed with ratification by virtue of Declaration 30, appended to the Constitutional Treaty. Member states cannot unilaterally or collectively decide to change the ratification process.
Thus, member states which have not already ratified should continue with the process whence, once 20 members have done so, the matter should be referred to the European Council.
In the meantime, the authors caution that “the European Union must not remain paralysed”. Rather, they say, “it must continue and intensify its efforts to relaunch its policies, even by implementing in advance, where possible, the provisions of the Treaty that do not meet with open opposition”.
Thus, the considered response in the event of a rejection of the constitution should be “full steam ahead”. Member states should implement it even faster than they are doing already.
Very helpful. I wish I could be equally helpful in return on this question:
So what, precisely, do we have to do to stop this thing?
I read the EU Referendum blog in the hope of getting answers to questions like that. If they have to ask that, what is the chance that anyone else will have an answer?
I am definitely not a real football fan. If the team I want to win is winning, well jolly ho. If it is losing, then it is only a game and nothing to get fussed about it.
So when I came home from a walk along the river in the evening sunshine, to find that Liverpool were already 3-0 down in the European Cup Final against AC Milan, it was no great source of sadness to me. Only a game. I switched to CSI Miami.
But every so often I flipped back to see how Liverpool were doing, and quite by chance, I caught the first Liverpool goal, scored by captain Steven Gerrard. Hullo, said the commentator. Expectantly. And prophetically.
When I next flipped back from the gruesomenesses of CSI, Liverpool were already celebrating goal number two, scored by substitute Smicer (pronounced Smeetzer), and on my next visit I saw Liverpool get awarded a penalty.
At this point, I did not want to watch it, not because it did not matter, but because it did. It had gone from Only A Game to: God On A Bike!!! in the space of about five minutes. If I allowed myself to get all excited, Liverpool would then lose, and I would suffer idiotic agonies. So, back to CSI, where the news was that more people were being murdered gruesomely, by really nasty people. Lucky thing the forensic scientists all look like actors. Back to find that Liverpool have converted the penalty. (I spare myself the agony of actually witnessing what they show me later: the Milan goalie saving it and then the Liverpool guy knocking it in at the second try. This is rare.)
From then on it was a visit back every five minutes or so. 3-3. 3-3. 3-3. 3-3. Extra time looms. 3-3. 3-3. Extra time. 3-3. 3-3. 3-3. Penalty shoot out looms. 3-3. 3-3. Penalty shoot out.
Can not bear that. If I watched that I would get even more wound up, and additionally wound up by the sense of shame at getting so additionally wound up. It is only a game!!! (God on a bike!!!!)
Ten more minutes of something, else. Ooh, I wonder how the shoot out is going. Milan have missed their first two! Amazing. Liverpool are actually likely winners. So I watch their next one, and of course the Milan goalie saves it. Liverpool are still one ahead, and still probably winners, but again, over to Celebrity Home Makeover Love Island on Ice Meets Eastenders Uncovered Confidential. (Actually I think that by then it was Blackadder.) And when I go back again, Liverpool are celebrating. Bloke in specs: “Jamie, tell me honestly, did you think at half time that you had any chance?” Jamie: “No.” Bloke in specs: “Rafael, that was fantastic, fantastic.” Rafael: “Yes, bloke in specs, that was fantastic fantastic”, etc.
As Alex Ferguson said after his Manchester United won the 1999 final of the same tournament against Bayern Munich in equally improbable style, with two extra time goals from Sheringham and Solskjaer: “Football. Bloody hell.”
At half past one a.m. tomorrow morning they will be showing it again. And that I will video, and then watch it properly later, and then again in the months and years to come. That is how to enjoy sport, if you are a not-proper sports fan like me. Watch and rewatch the games your guys win in style, and forget the rest. Do not waste your one life obsessing over games that got away, or which were won by your team but unmemorably, without any amazing magic moments to savour. Take all that spiritual energy, and apply it to doing real life better, I say. My method wastes far less time on all this nonsense.
But when games go right, enjoy.
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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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