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.
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I watched the beginning of Dirty Harry on the telly (before remembering that I already have it on DVD), and have just heard Clint Eastwood deliver the first version of the do I feel lucky? speech. And I just want to say something that I have long felt, which is that he delivers the line, at least on that first occasion, very badly. They should have done a retake. The actual “do I feel lucky?” bit is gabbled, and you can hardly hear it. There should have been a slight pause between “you’ve got to ask yourself a question” and “do I feel lucky?”, but there is no pause. The sentences just before are fine, but this particular bit sounds like an uncomprehending read-through, not a performance at all. I realise they did not want to upstage the rerun of the same lines later in the movie, when the real Bad Guy is asked the same question, but I reckon they downplayed it too much.
Not that I blame Clint Eastwood. Or, I blame him only if he was the one who chose this particular take. But I presume that this was the director, or maybe the producer. Actors are usually helpless in circumstances like these. Time and again, they get called bad actors, when it was really bad directing and bad editing.
Otherwise, excellent movie entertainment, full of good sense about the deterrent value of chasing and punishing criminals and the pointlessness of worrying too much about what makes them become criminals. The important thing is to hunt them down and lock them up, or worse. (One of the biggest reasons why they become criminals being that they do not expect this to happen.) This is a lesson which the USA’s rulers now seem to be learning fast but which our rulers here in the UK (see the comments on Tuesday’s murder posting) are still only groping towards.
Most of the mere people in both countries have of course always known this.
Thank goodness for the movies. On this particular issue, insofar as they have argued anything at all, they have mostly argued very sensibly.
And let no one kid you that movies like Dirty Harry are just “mindless” entertainment. When people call a movie mindless, it generally means that it is actually rather mindful, but that the mindfulness involved is something that the complainer would rather not face. So, he claims that there is nothing to be faced. It was the same with the (ridiculously titled) Death Wish series. Those movies are crammed full of ideas.
And mostly very good ones. When Bronson chalked up his first kill in the first of these movies, cinemas everywhere erupted with spontaneous cheering.
Like many others I have been watching events in the Middle East, hoping of the best, and remembering that it could still all turn very nasty, and hoping that the White House has that possibility at the front of its collective mind. So far so obvious, and I for one little to add to such responses as these.
But, it does occur to me that, what with all the agonising about, e.g., what the Syrians will do next, and what with all the pro-warriors crowing about how they must not crow, and the anti-warriors trying to talk their way out of giving President Bush any credit for what is happening, there is one significant consequence of these events which may have escaped immediate and widespread attention.
9/11 was bad, but almost worse was the amount of celebrating about it that seemed to be going on, and presumably was going on, in the Muslim world, and among Muslims generally.
These latest demonstrations have, surely, changed the idea that will from now on be held in the West of popular opinion in the Middle East. For the first time since 9/11, these people no longer look like “these people”, that is to say, utterly foreign and barbaric, all either exulting in the deaths of the innocent, or else silently acquiescing to such exultation, out of fear or out of semi-barbarism.
It is not that millions of people of the Middle East have spent the last month marching about with signs saying: “Sorry – We Were Wrong About 9/11 – It Was Horrible And We Should Not Have Celebrated It”. It is merely that a whole lot of different people are now getting their faces into our camera lenses and onto our front pages and magazine covers, with messages that we in the West can thoroughly relate to, like: “Let Us Govern Ourselves Intelligently”. My particular favourite in this connection was the one that went: “Let Muslims and Christians Unite Against The Syrian Occupier”. That sounds very Western to me.
Clearly, “these people” are not all barbarians, and from now on, any Westerners who persist in believing that they are will be in a small minority.
It may well be that this new message is almost as misleading and un-nuanced as the previous one. But it is very different. And in many ways, the big point here is as much the desire to communicate this new and dramatically more West-friendly message as the matter of whether the message itself is completely accurate.
The long term consequences of this different message now emerging from the Middle East are surely huge.
And talking of Muslims and Christians uniting against those damned Syrians, let us also notice that we are surely witnessing a come-back of a kind, and a rather interesting kind, for Arab nationalism. → Continue reading: Democracy in the Middle East: good news and bad news
“Other news today” in today’s Telegraph makes cheerful reading.
Here are the first four stories:
Convicted man who cooked victim’s brains admits killings
Teenager killed boy for his baseball cap
Elderly woman stabbed to death by thieves
Waiter accused of axe murder
And that last one was not just a murder, it was a decapitation. A few feet away from where her boyfriend works, apparently.
George Orwell wrote a famous essay called Decline of the English Murder. It would appear that England, has, murderwise, bounced back since Orwell’s time.
If you are at all interested in matters British and constitutional, or even in matters British or constitutional, you really should read this, the latest from Sean Gabb.
Final two paragraphs:
The headline news is grim. We have just had imposed on us a Prevention of Terrorism Act more subversive of due process than any law made in peacetime since the 1650s. Add to this the Civil Contingency Act, the abolition of the double jeopardy rule and the allowance of similar fact evidence made by the Criminal Justice Act 2003, the Proceeds of Crime Act, and all the lesser invasions that have come and are yet to come from this current Parliament, and we might suppose all was already lost. And look before this Government, to the Thatcher and Major Governments – those, to be fair, laid the foundations on which the present structure of despotism is now being raised. But look beyond Parliament, to those quiet places where the lawyers gather and discuss what the politicians have in mind for us, and there is a counter revolution under way.
It may be worth giving our support and best wishes to those charismatic outsiders who are now beating on the doors of Parliament. It is still more worth while, though, to thank and support those old men in wigs, whose often pedantic and always long decisions about pounds of bananas and hunting bans are restoring to fact what once seemed the theory of a limited constitutional order.
“The Jaws of the Trap Are Closing” says Sean’s title, and that will almost certainly lead you to think that he reckons, as per usual, that we are all doomed, doomed, etc. But it is not that kind of trap. On this matter, Sean is guardedly optimistic.
I have just read the whole thing, and urge you to do so also, if for no other reason that Sean Gabb is one of the great unsung prose stylists of our time. I read him with pleasure about anything – which is why, in defiance of his oft-stated-to-me wishes, I wish he would become a blogger, instead of just a set-piece essayist.
The recent judgement to which Sean is referring to is to be found here (more disintermediation!), and Sean’s earlier (Feb 2002) piece on this same subject of judicial challenge to the politicians, about the Metric Martyrs case, is to be found here.
This IRA versus the McCartneys (aka civilisation) struggle is truly amazing. First a bunch of IRA thugs murder Robert McCartney. Then, in defiance of all precedent, the McCartney family complains, loudly, in public, and demands justice. The IRA obviously cannot allow IRA people to be tried in a court of law, so they offer to shoot the rogue elements who committed the murder. Not good enough say the McCartneys (they are not anarchists, they want it done by the state. I can see their point).
Now one of the leading IRA/Sinn Fein thugocrats, a repulsive exhibit by the name of Martin McGuiness, has perpetrated another public relations clanger:
Sinn Fein has warned the sisters of murdered Belfast man, Robert McCartney, to stay out of politics.
The party’s chief negotiator, Martin McGuinness, told them to “be careful” and not to step over the party political line.
The sisters insist the IRA was involved in the murder with one of them accusing Sinn Fein of taking part in a cover-up.
The family are to fly out to the US on Tuesday to continue their fight for his killers to be brought to justice.
Mr McGuinness said their campaign could leave them open to political manipulation.
He ought to know.
This is not the kind of thing you should tell people who are bereaved, who are good looking (which the McCartneys are, very) and who are on the telly a lot. One of the rules of the modern, TV-dominated world is that bereaved and televised families may say and do whatever they choose and may not be criticised. They certainly cannot be told by a politician-stroke-terrorist not to do politics. But McGuinness is only following another rule, a Northern Ireland rule, which says that if the IRA tells you to shut up, you shut up. So you can see how hard this must all be for him to comprehend. When he issued his warning, he was only doing IRA business as usual.
But business for the IRA is no longer business as usual.
The equally revolting Gerry Adams is now over in the USA, where he usually gets a free ride and choruses of When Irish Eyes Are Smiling. (The BBC showed Clinton and Adams singing along together in happier IRA-USA times.) But this time it is different. Not only have the IRA carried on murdering people. They have also been blamed for a truly enormous bank robbery. President Bush, comparing Adams to Arafat, has told Adams to get knotted, and now not even Ted Kennedy will give Adams the time of day. All of which is just one more little consequence – yet another of those knock-on effects – of 9/11. Suddenly the friends (the IRA) of their enemies (Islamist terrorists) no longer look so appealing to the Americans. They look more closely, and do not like what they see.
Adams was accordingly very much on the defensive. Challenged by the McCartneys, who are also over in the USA drumming up support for their quest for justice, Adams was then shown by the BBC protesting piously that if, God forbid, he had become involved in anything as nasty as the murder of Robert McCartney, then as soon as he had realised the enormity of what he had done, he would have handed himself in to the relevant authority (although he was a bit vague about who that would be exactly) and would have made a full confession. Like hell he would.
Mark Steyn goes into a bit more detail, and has a few more swipes at the IRA. Patrick Crozier (to whom thanks for the link) asks if this is a first for Steyn. Is it?
As Steyn points out, this is a mess which the British and Irish Governments have done a lot to perpetuate, along with all those idiot American IRA-donors. The UK and the Republic have followed a policy of relentless appeasement, and it has not worked. The appeased have taken and taken, and carried right on terrorising.
I have always suspected that if the British Government had said, about a quarter of a century ago, that they would stop even discussing a change in the status of Northern Ireland until the IRA had pretty much ceased to exist, and that if the IRA chose to exist for ever, that would mean Northern Ireland remaining British for ever, that might have settled this thing long ago. But appeasement, for all its fatuities, does at least have the advantage that it makes the nature of the appeased beast unmistakable, and unites all but the most casual of onlookers against the beast. So, now that Bush has changed the rules, the rest of us can all join in and give the IRA the kicking they deserve.
I certainly hope that this is what is now going to happen.
I would like to start this posting with a long-windedness warning. Basically I have only recently thought of the notions that follow. The separate bits of these ideas have mostly been present in my mind for quite a while, but the bundling of them is, for me, new. And stuff you are still excited by on account of its extreme recentness is generally the stuff you write least well. Apologies, but there you go, that is blogging for you.
Anyway… here it is. Cough, all sitting comfortably, begin. (Or skip, of course.)
Much is made, and quite rightly, of the empowering effect of the Internet for the little guy. We can all have our blogs and our say.
Recently I have begun to wonder if a similar Internet impact might be about to become unmistakably clear at the very top end of society, the bit where Great Men (as opposed to us little guys) try to have their say.
Great Men trying to have their say?!? But do they not do this already, all the time? Well, yes they do, but they are often either misunderstood or just plain ignored, and often relentlessly so.
I have lost count of the number of times when a Great Man has given what he hoped would be a Big Speech, laying out a major strategy for the months and years to come, only for all the questions from the assembled mob of hacks to ask only about the latest scandal that they have either observed or invented, concerning the petty details of the life of the Great Man. So, what about your wife’s astrologer? What about those crazy daughters of yours? About this intern. About your mortgage. This dodgy land deal you and your wife did ten years ago. How about this National Guard skiving then?
In a kind of hybrid category are the scandals that are less personal but equally demeaning and diminishing, like the scandal of Blair and Bush invading Iraq in pursuit of weapons they knew were not there, or Reagan doing whatever wicked thing he did with the Nicaraguan Contras.
Now I certainly would not want the hacks to neglect such questions. The idea that they should be compelled to ask only about the high and mighty abstractions laid before them in the Big Speech, is repellent not to say totalitarian. But one of my many complaints about our mainstream media is that they have a tendency only to ask the embarrassing questions. The attitude of the mainstream media when reporting a speech given by a Great Man is to look only for clay at the bottom end of his body, rather than to pay any attention to the noises emerging from the top end. → Continue reading: The smartening up of the culture: thoughts on some recent speeches by President Bush
Visiting London without a camera is like visiting the Lake District without climbing boots.
– said to me by this northern lady yesterday in Parliament Square
Here are the first two paragraphs of a BBC report about a report, from a Commission:
The UK-led Commission for Africa has urged wealthy nations to double their aid to the continent, raising it by £30bn ($50bn) a year over 10 years.
African leaders need to root out corruption and promote good governance, the commission’s final report says.
I cannot help suspecting that there may be something of a contradiction there, between paragraph one and paragraph two.
Is the way to root out corruption to double the amount of money you are chucking at it? This, it seems to me, might be problematic.
I mean, how do they intend to persuade Africans to refrain from being corrupt? Bribe them?
Patrick Crozier writes about MRSA, which stands for Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus Aureus:
Stephen Pollard mentions MRSA (seems that the government figures are rather dodgy), which got me wondering: is it any better in private hospitals? So, I did a bit of googling and uncovered this, this and this.
And the answer? Yes, it is.
Indeed. The second this gets you to this:
Evidence from a selection of hospitals in Sheffield reveals that a far smaller proportion of private hospitals are being blighted by the infection, which has led people to ask why this disparity exists.
I daresay readers of and writers for Samizdata could come up with the odd reason or two.
I was delighted by the first What If? book. So I eagerly purchased its successor volume, More What If?, when I also came across that in a remainder shop.
I buy lots of books in remainder shops – my intellectual efforts beiong heavily influenced by chance purchases – and often only read them months or years later. So it has been with More What If? I am now, finally, reading it. Not in any particular order. Just dipping at random, in among reading and writing other stuff. (This posting is not a review, merely some speculative reactions to this follow-up book, but here is a review, which includes a contents list.)
And the more I dip, the more convinced I am of the extreme efficacy and vividness of this particular way of writing about the past. Reviewers like the one linked to above can get rather blasé, because they know all this stuff anyway. (As he says in his first paragraph, the professional historians all have what-if conversations when doing their degrees.) But for the rest of us, this is a truly terrific way to learn history, because it brings it so alive. Suddenly, the uncertainty and unpredictability of what it was actually like living in what is now the past but was then the present is brought fascinatingly to life. Regular history tells you what happened, one damn happening after another, but it often neglects to tell you which happenings mattered most, and why. The What If? formula cuts down on the number of happenings, but explains in great detail how important each selected happening was, by telling you not only what else happened because of it, but also what would have happened had the happening itself not happened, or happened differently. → Continue reading: More What If?
The Millau viaduct is simply mindblowing. You may know in advance how big and how high it is in terms of numbers, but when you see it it really blows you away. I have seen a lot of great works of engineering, but I cannot remember the last time I saw one that was simply as awe inspiring as this one.
– Michael Jennings on the French engineering miracle previously reported on and argued about here
Mark Holland is, as Instapundit would say, on a roll just now. I wonder if some things that were said at that Friday meeting I seem to want to keep mentioning has something to do with this. Mark was there, and seemed genuinely surprised by the high esteem in which his blog is held by all those of us present who are familiar with it. Maybe that encouraged him. It would be good to think so. If so, this nicely illustrates the value of old fashioned face-to-face contact. “I really like your blog” is not the kind of message that carries quite as much conviction if you cannot see the whites of your admirer’s eyes.
Mark writes about (and/or links to) many things (crappy old British sex comedies, the sport of bicycling, politics in Slovakia) but he told me something rather intriguing that I do not recall reading about at his blog, although this could just be me.
Mark and some friends attended a Bruce Springsteen concert some years ago, in a Manchester football stadium. He and his mates arrived early for the thing, and took their seats way up high in the stands, about a quarter of a mile from where the performance was going to be given. Then, a Big Person approached them. They were unnerved. But no. The Big Person guided them from way back and way high up, right to the very front of the assembly, into Bruce Springsteen Heaven. And they duly watched it all, feet away from The Man. (Sorry, Boss. Sorry.)
Thinking about this some more, I reckon that it makes sense, is probably often done, and is therefore not news to those readers and writers of Samizdata who are also regular attenders at rock gigs. But I am not such, and if you are not this either, allow me to reinvent the wheel for you.
What do you absolutely not want in the front few rows of the crowd at a major pop gig? Two things, I suggest. One: Uncool People (old, ugly, dressed in corduroy jackets, etc.). And worse, two: empty seats. Such horrors would completely spoil any video footage of the event. When everyone is standing in a scrum, this is no big problem. (Presumably uncool people can simply be dragged backwards from the front, and cool people dragged forwards.) But in an all-seater stadium, such as this was, with individual seats booked, there is the real threat of horrors in those vital front few rows.
So how do you prevent these? Answer, you do not sell the front few rows, but instead handpick the people at the front from the early arrivals, like a night club queue minder picking out cool people for a club. Mark, being cool and several degrees cooler back then, I dare say, was, together with his (I assume) comparably cool mates, selected for the front.
You might at this point be expecting one of those blue MORE things, after which the significance of this is explained in more detail and its relevance to lowering income tax etc. is all gone into with proper thoroughness. But, that is all.
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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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