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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Globalisation does funny things:
Former Baywatch star David Hasselhoff has been named international star of the year at the Bollywood movie awards in Atlantic City in the US.
He received the award because his shows, including Knight Rider, are among the most popular on Indian TV.
That is the BBC story. I also recommend this Reuters report on the event, which packs a lot of information into a small space. Such as, that:
Rani Mukherjee won the best actress award for her role “Hum Tum.”
What does Hum Tum mean? Is it a medical condition? Or is that the name of Rani Mukherjee’s character?
And I did not know that they have Bollywood awards in Atlantic City. What is that about?
Says Reuters:
The event was held in the old U.S. East Coast gambling resort of Atlantic City as part of Bollywood’s bid to be a global force in cinema.
Interesting. And I did not know this either:
Bollywood churns out around 1,000 movies a year but despite a fan base that extends to the Middle East, Europe and Asia, few movies make money and the industry is under financial pressure. Bollywood films have not had much commercial success in America.
But Shammi Kapoor, who was given a lifetime achievement award, said better technology was leading to more and better films. “They’re getting to be more topical,” he added. “They aren’t the happy, happy movies of yesteryear.”
Indians will soon be complaining that Bollywood is becoming a fifth column Frankenstein’s laboratory Trojan Horse turncoat snakepit of anti-Indianism that panders to the global market and apes its worst excesses.
A few days ago I sat down to write an article about this election that is coming up, to try to explain why neither I, nor the other Samizdatistas, nor, apparently, very many of the British electorate, were getting very excited about it. Last time around, the voter turn-out was way down, and they are predicting the same thing again only more so.
However, I think it is important to distinguish between boringness and the decline of the overall vote, because an election can still be extremely exciting for those who remain excited by it, yet turn off lots of others by the million. Witness recent Presidential elections in the USA.
So, in this posting I will concentrate on the decline in the British voter turn-out in successive general elections, and speculate about why this has happened.
In order to try to understand this, I googled my way to this short piece, which I found very informative.
It shows several things. First, it shows that the vote has indeed declined. See the first graph of voter turn-out for each general election since the war.
Second, it explains where. Basically, the voter decline has been most severe in the Labour inner-city strongholds. The voting decline is largely a working class – or perhaps one should say ex-working class – phenomenon.
What gives? Why are these people not voting as much as they used to?
Let me rephrase the question by turning it upside down. Why did they ever bother to vote in such huge numbers in the first place?
I think the answer is that they voted because people who cared about them, and were of use to them, asked them to and told them to. A sociologist would say that they were all members of a voting tribe, for whom voting was a norm. An economist would say that they voted in exchange for favours that fellow tribesmen gave to them. In practice, such things are but different facets of the same thing, reinforcing one another to the point where separating the two notions becomes impossible.
Not that Britain’s working class voted Labour in the nineteenth century. There was no Labour. But they did vote. Individual interest and collective values, tribal and national, both pushed them towards voting, in huge percentages. With the rise of Labour, working class votes flowed towards Labour, but never completely. There were always millions of working class Conservative voters. But this posting is about the total number of votes cast, not who they were cast for. → Continue reading: Voting decline and the two welfare states
The Globalization Institute’s crack of dawn email of links continues to arrive, every week day, and continues to be well worth getting.
One of the recent links thus promulgated was to this editorial, from Kenya.
First few paragraphs:
With all the money they get as emoluments, one would have expected that our Members of Parliament would strive to ensure that they do an honest day’s job all year round.
But a report on their performance released yesterday shockingly says that the legislators only did 57 full working days the whole of last year. Allowing for public holidays, weekends and the days Parliament was in recess, this translates to less than two months of work.
Yet, these are people who are enjoying a salary package of Sh500,000 and other perks. They are the people who have been entrusted with articulating the needs of their people in Parliament.
Despite this, the study conducted by the Institute for Civic Affairs and Development says, there are some MPs who never brought any Bills to the House, never contributed to any and never raised a point of order.
In plain terms, this could be called incompetence.
One of the more depressing and destructive assumptions now rampaging about the world and doing damage to it is that the basic job of politicians is to pass laws. The more laws they pass, the better they must be doing.
But would Kenya really be a better governed country if all its members of parliament were to bring Bills to the House, instead of only some? Is it really the ultimate criticism of a politician that he never tries to pass any new laws. If politics means passing more laws, then maybe Kenya is lucky that it is not getting as much politics as it is paying for. There are far worse political vices than laziness.
I get the rough idea. Kenya’s parliamentarians are not the greatest, and I am sure that is true. But this is a very bad way to explain what is so wrong with them.
Kofi Annan fears that this:
The United States and other countries have protested about the re-election of Zimbabwe to the UN’s main human rights body, the Human Rights Commission.
Zimbabwe was one of 15 countries chosen by members of the UN’s Economic and Social Council in New York. All but one were chosen by consensus.
Critics say too many countries with appalling human rights records have been on the commission.
. . . may “caste a shadow on the UN’s reputation as a whole”.
Which until now was, of course, completely unblemished.
Whatever you reckon on the politics of it all, it is still a big (and I do mean big) step (jump?) forward for aviation. I refer to the maiden flight of the gigantic Airbus A380, which has just been successfully completed.
The A380 – designed to carry as many as 840 people between major airports – took off from its production site in southern France at just after 0830 GMT.
“The speed on take-off was exactly as we had expected,” said test pilot Jacques Rosay.
“The weather is wonderful. Everything is absolutely perfect and we are very happy.”
The crew took the plane out over the Bay of Biscay, before returning to base.
This, though, the Antonov An-225, featured last Monday evening on C5 TV’s Massive Machines show, is even bigger.
Airbus will not mind about that, but they may be more worried about this:
WASHINGTON – Buoyed by an influx of new orders, Boeing Co. appears to be turning the corner in its battle with archrival Airbus.
So, will all this airplane competition make global warming worse, to the point of eventual global disaster? My sister goes on about the globally warming badness of jet airplanes is every time I meet her.
I must remember to ask my nephew, her son, what he thinks about this issue, next time I meet him. He is an airline pilot.
Two recommendations. First, a general recommendation for this news site. It is the work of a law firm, and there is a definite bias in the direction of news stories about internet law, intellectual property matters, and such like. You will not get relentless civil liberties based complaint about the way things are going, the way you do here, but you will, if you tune in regularly, learn quite a lot about the legal facts around which such arguments rage.
If there is a general message, it is: It’s complicated! Call us before you do anything! Fair enough. Here is yet another example of how to do Internet business. They ‘advertise’ themselves and their services, not by having silly adverts saying, e.g.: “It’s complicated! Call us before you do anything!”, but by giving away helpful and informative content where that is only one of the subtexts.
And second, a particular recommendation for this article from last week, which explains what the ID card argument is all about. → Continue reading: A national electronic database – what ID cards are really about
This Friday, Michael Jennings will be doing my last-Friday-of-the-month talk, about China. Emergence of, economic miracle, impact on rest of world, and so on.
And, as if determined to assist me in my efforts to publicise this event, the European Union, in the person of Euro-Panjandrum Peter Mandelson, has been uttering anti-Chinese fatuities:
The European Union has called on China to reduce its clothing exports to Europe or else face enforced limits.
That was the warning given by EU trade commissioner Peter Mandelson, as he launched an EU probe into nine categories of Chinese textile exports.
Exports of certain Chinese clothing items to Europe have surged by more than 500% since an international quota system came to an end on 1 January.
Heaven forbid that the people of Europe should be allowed to buy really cheap clothes, as much as they want. Clearly this is a retrograde step, and must be resisted.
“Europe” still lectures places like China as if places like China are the Third World, and Europe, obviously, is the first. But this has a very eighteenth century Asia feel to it, to me. Europe can no more prevent itself being swamped by, flooded with, etc. (although “sold” would be a better word) cheap clothes now than Asia could then prevent the incoming tide of pots and pans, cups and plates, and shirts, made in what was then the English workshop of the world.
This nonsense seems all to be based on some Agreement that was signed a few years ago. And it perfectly illustrates the folly of such agreements, which serve only to allow the supposedly protected industries to remain somnolent for a few more precious years, thereby to lose all touch with economic reality beyond the protections behind which they briefly shelter, to the point where the pressure of economic reality becomes so immense that it is impossible to resist, at which point the protection collapses and economic melt-down duly happens.
It also illustrates Public Choice Theory rather nicely. You can be sure that hundreds of desperate European shirt and trouser makers are even now busily conspiring to explain that Mandelson is talking sense rather than nonsense. Meanwhile the people whom Mandelson is trying to harm (everyone else in Europe plus many thousands of poor workers in China) will be too busy with other things to object very loudly. After all, each of us will only suffer a bit, and anyway, what can any of us do if the EU/Peter Mandelson has decided to harm us all, a bit. That is not news. That is Euro-business as usual.
In due course, the benefits to all of us of free trade with China will be concentrated into the hands of a few illegal clothes importers. But the clothes will not be quite so good or quite so cheap.
Reuters reports on the Chinese response here. My thanks to Alex Singleton of the Globalization Institute for the links, via this, which continues to happen at the ungodly hour that was originally promised. Tim Worstall comments on the same story at the Globalization Institute blog, making similar points to mine about the concentration of the (temporary) benefits associated with protection, but the dispersed nature of the costs, and about how previous restrictions have only stored up trouble.
Meanwhile, how else is “Europe” responding to the menace of people working too hard? By having a law against it.
Our standing orders on Samizdata are to write not just about certain specific areas of thought and policy, but about what is on our minds. I take this as an invitation to stray beyond the obvious and beyond our core expertises, such as they are. Not everything here is even supposed to make complete sense.
In that spirit, let me tell you about two pieces of writing which, taken together, struck me as interesting. They are pretty interesting even separately, but together they get even more interesting. Anyway, see what you think.
The first piece of writing is a book called The Cradle of Thought, by Peter Hobson, who is an expert on autism, but not only on autism. Hobson’s subject matter is not just the particular form of unusual thought and experience called autism, but also the light that this and other abnormalities throw on the processes of normal human thought. (One of the best ways to understand how something is supposed to work is to examine what happens when something or someone damages it or in some way interrupts its smooth working.)
What comes across from this book is that thinking, of the sort that most of us do most of the time, is an intensely social thing. It starts not just with me thinking about that. It starts with me thinking about that by learning what you already think about that. What you (typically my mother) think(s) is the thing that gets me started with my thinking.
So, if I am the sort of me who is especially disposed not to pay attention to what you (my mum) are (is) thinking, that changes how I think, about everything. I may become very expert, by default, about things, but remain permanently baffled by people, and in particular by the notion that other people have a point of view of their own which I can tune into, and by the idea that other people are accordingly very different from other mere things.
This book seems to be quite well known and quite highly regarded, so there is no shortage of further verbiage to read about it should you feel the urge, now that you have heard a little of my point of view about it.
The other piece of writing was this article and related discussion, about dogs, and about the differences between dogs and such animals as wolves and foxes, which I got to via the ever interesting and stimulating Arts & Letters Daily. → Continue reading: Autism, dogs, etc.
John K added a comment to the Rover over story here last week which Mark Holland liked so much that he reproduced it over at his blog in its entirety. I agree, and had in mind to do something similar here when I first read it. But now that Mark has already immortalised it, I will confine myself to reproducing the final enraged paragraph of what John K had to say about Stephen Byers:
I know we sometimes make jokes about jumped up Polytechnic lecturers going into Parliament, but Byers really was a jumped up Polytechnic lecturer, a man with no experience of anything outside of the Senior Common Room and Labour Party hackery, and this spineless imbecile, a man so hopeless that despite living up Tony’s rectum eventually even el Presidente had to realise he was not up to the job, or indeed any job, and expel him like the compacted turd he was, is and forever will be, this man completed the Labour Party’s destruction of the British owned motor industry.
So far so entertaining. We think Byers is a fool. We would. But then last Sunday evening, in the tube, I picked up a discarded copy of the Observer business section. And I later read, on its front page, this piece about the Rover debacle, which contained the following choice invective, also about Stephen Byers:
But there is nothing ‘natural’ about the Longbridge scandal; it is no act of God. It is an entirely man-made catastrophe, which can be blamed on a relatively small number of individuals. They can and should be made to pay.
The first culprit is Stephen Byers, who pushed the BMW-Phoenix deal through in 2000. Confronted on TV with his guilt, he all but sang ‘Je ne regrette rien’, while praising himself for keeping the Longbridge workers in employment for the past five years. This is the man who sold the original deal as a way of guaranteeing a long-term volume car business in Britain.
Now we are asked to believe the real plan all along was to ease the workers into redundancy, and to view industrial policy as an extension of the social security department. That speaks volumes about new Labour’s attitude to business. Byers, who harbours ambitions of a return to government after the election, is a busted flush who should stay on the backbenches for the rest of his hopefully brief political career.
The other culprits are, of course, the Phoenix Four, led by their still maddeningly smug chief, John Towers. . . .
Something tells me that Byers will not actually pay anything, and incompetence by the standards of normal life is not the same as political incompetence, is it? So he may indeed make a political comeback. However, the fact that Byers is being trashed in the Observer makes me optimistic that this particular incompetent may have had his day.
If so, then I guess he will have to go back to Polytechnic lecturing. If they’ll have him.
Yesterday I was out and about and spotted multiple front cover display of the latest Economist, with a headline which went: The flat-tax revolution.
I liked this, and took a photo of it, but it came out blurry, and before I could take a decent number to make blurriness less likely I was chased away by a security guard mumbling about copyright, etc. So here is the Economist version:
Final paragraph of the story:
It is true that the flat-tax revolutionaries of central and eastern Europe are more inclined to radicalism than their politically maturer neighbours to the west and across the Atlantic. Mobilising support for sensible change is far harder in those more advanced places – but not impossible. In tax reform, as 1986 showed, the radical programme can suddenly look easier to implement than the timid package of piecemeal changes. Now and then, the bigger the idea, and the simpler the idea, the easier it is to roll over the opposition. The flat-tax idea is big enough and simple enough to be worth taking seriously.
Portillo was wittering on yet again, on the telly last night, about how the Conservatives had to go for the “middle ground”, and electorally speaking that may well now be true, if getting votes for whatever will get votes is all that you care about. Accordingly, I look forward to the time when a flat tax is middle of the road, and when flattening the damn tax into the road so that there is nothing left of it is the “extremism” that Portillo et al will then be warning us all against.
Sean Gabb now has a report up about his efforts to knock some freeness into the heads of those self-styled fair traders. And in Alex Singleton’s Globalization Institute email this morning was a link to a write-up of the Globalization Institute in the Church press, although how significant this particular example of the Church press is I do not know. Still, it all helps. See also this posting.
In the comments on that earlier posting that flagged up the meeting in the Church last Friday night, puzzlement was expressed about why so many of these Fair Traders are in favour of free trade for the rich countries, especially in things like agriculture, yet opposed to free trade for poor countries. How come? Are they not being inconsistent?
I can suggest a possible answer that makes sense of such an apparent contradiction. Suppose that (a) you are an egalitarian, and that (b) you think free trade is harmful to whoever has it imposed upon them. That would explain it, I think. Trade freedom makes rich countries poorer, and trade unfreedom makes poor countries richer. Total bollocks of course. Egalitarianism is stupid, and the claim that trade freedom makes countries poorer and that trade unfreedom rescues poor countries is the opposite of the truth. But if that is what you are and what you think, it becomes reasonable. As in: a madman is someone who has lost everything except his reason. Impeccable logic, based on false axioms.
The result of such agitation is actually to make rich countries richer, and to keep the poor countries poor, which is the very thing these self-righteous morons spend their lives saying they object to. But there you go. There’s one born every time a celebrity clicks his/her moronic finger on the telly.
For some further thoughts on these and related matters from me from way back, see this.
I love this headline:
Castro Lauds Cuban Municipal Elections
I bet he does.
Under Cuba’s one-party system, city and provincial leaders, as well as representatives of the National Assembly, are elected by citizens on a local level. Anyone can be nominated to these posts, including non-members of the island’s ruling communist party – the only one recognized in Cuba’s constitution.
So, in theory, anyone can stand for election, and if they win they can then take part in choosing anyone as President.
Well, not quite.
Cuba consistently defends its system as democratic, but critics of Castro’s government argue that tight state control, a heavy police presence and neighborhood-watch groups that report on their neighbors prevent any real political freedom on the island.
It is easy to sneer, and I hereby sneer, at elections like this. But what also strikes me is that fraudulent though this system obviously is at the moment, it might eventually mutate into something genuine. To put it another way, window dressing can end up taking over the shop.
What if Castro dies – Castro will, I predict, eventually die – and there is no longer any widespread agreement about who it is proper to vote for, and who those voted for should themselves vote for when they choose Castro’s successor?
At least Castro now feels sufficiently pressured by the challenge of true democracy to feel the need to arrange his own fraudulent version of it. And the experience of participating in this charade is quite likely to make at least some of those taking part in it wonder how it might feel to vote in a real election.
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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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