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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Last night I attended this event, about Blogs, Democracy, etc.
The atmosphere radiating from the panel of speakers was odd. They all had in common that they were concerned above all not to get too enthusiastic about blogging. One sensed that both the dot.com boom and the current enthusiasm for blogging that radiates from sad little blogging enthusiasts like me had affected them far too deeply for their own good. To me they sounded like people saying in, say, 1550, that all this hype about the impact that printing was destined to have was all rather overdone. → Continue reading: Democracy and the blogosphere? No big deal
I snapped this outside the Victoria Street (London SW1) branch of Sainsbury’s on Monday evening. It’s too dark to see much of the bloke actually selling those Evening Standards, but his message is clear.
Sainsbury’s has been taking a bit of a beating at the hands of Tesco just lately. But this is bad news for Tesco.
This is an excellent story. I got to it from here.
A bag of bills stolen from a casino was snapped up by beavers who wove thousands of dollars in soggy currency into the sticks and brush of their dam on a creek in eastern Louisiana.
“They hadn’t torn the bills up. They were still whole,” said Maj. Michael Martin of the St. Helena Parish Sheriff’s Office.
The money was part of $70,000 to $75,000 taken last week from the Lucky Dollar Casino in Greensburg.
Is there not some kind of law saying that you are not allowed to do this kind of thing in the USA? No doubt the beavers have by now appointed a lawyer to represent their interests. An eagle perhaps? Never mind.
A remake of Do They Know It’s Christmas? has just been recorded.
Some of the brightest stars of British pop and rock music recorded a new version of Do They Know Its Christmas? yesterday, 20 years after the original became an international hit and raised millions for famine relief in Africa.
[…]
Chris Martin from Coldplay, Will Young, the Pop Idol winner, Justin Hawkins, frontman for The Darkness, Ms Dynamite and Joss Stone, the soul singer, were among the host of stars to attend.
It says everything about Band Aid, the original version, that what is still remembered as if it was yesterday are the various performances and pronouncements made by those pop stars, but that little attention is spared to even ask what exactly, if anything, was achieved with all that money.
Consider this, from a piece in the Spectator by Daniel Wolfe a few weeks back:
Geldof was the front man, and he has played his part to perfection, then and ever since. This is not to impugn his motives: Geldof is undeniably charming and sincere, but that does not mean that what he says is holy writ. He told the international media that agencies had to trust the representatives of the Mengistu government, thus seeming to deny, by implication, that the aid operation was being used by that same government. Yet the places where the aid was distributed, and the conditions under which it was distributed, were determined by Mengistu. There is something remarkably patronising in the assumption that an African dictator – as ruthless and cunning as they come, a survivor among survivors – might fail to see an opportunity when it was staring him in the face.
As it turned out, Mengistu knew a hawk from a handsaw. In 1984–85, up to a billion dollars’ worth of aid flowed into Ethiopia. Thousands of Western aid workers and journalists flew in with it. The regime ensured that the visitors converted their Western dollars to the local currency at a rate favourable to the government: in 1985 the Dergue tripled its foreign currency reserves. It used this influx of cash to help build up its war-machine, it commandeered aid vehicles for its own purposes and, by diverting aid supplies, helped feed its armies. The UN in Addis Ababa, which was co-ordinating the aid operation, denied that the level of diversion was significant. Later on, it became clear that a significant proportion of the relief food in Tigray – the epicentre of the famine – was consigned to the militia. The militias were known locally as ‘wheat militias’.
Above all, the government used the aid operation to support its military strategy: it saw food aid as both a tool for consolidating control over disputed territory and as bait for luring people from rebel-held areas into government territory…
And so on.
And now? Another war. Another famine. Another generation of popsters eager to help. I do not blame them, not the younger ones. They want to help. They like singing and playing their guitars, for this is what they do. If they are hoping for the best as a result of their efforts, rather than fearing the worst, this is hardly their fault. They mean well.
Geldof, on the other hand, ought to have learned something by now. Twenty years ago, he gouged a ton of money out of everyone, and became a secular saint. This time around, the assumption he still seems to be basing all his efforts on is that although flinging money at Africa may not do as much good as it might, it surely cannot do any great harm. But alas, if a lot of the ‘aid’ goes to the people who are causing a lot of the misery out there, then his ‘aid’ may indeed do some serious harm.
This is a very odd piece of reportage, from Spiegel Online:
Finally some news out of Holland that doesn’t have to do with the religious violence that has gripped the country for the last 10 days: The Dutch cabinet has decided on a March 2005 withdrawal of the country’s 1,350 troops in Iraq. Dutch Defense Minister Henk Kamp made the announcement on Friday afternoon.
What, not anything to do with it? Surely the Dutch cabinet at least hopes that Dutch Muslims will be slightly less angry about everything now, even if the actual decision to bring the boys home was made either before all the domestic rowing, or during it but for genuinely unrelated reasons.
And some will certainly argue that there is a connection, so there is your connection right there.
I do not say that the religious violence was the sole cause of the withdrawal, merely that these are definitely inter-woven news stories.
Having said nice things about Instapundit in my previous post (below), I feel compelled (i.e. choose) to add that I have also today criticised him, here. My complaints concern, first, the unfortunate picture that is used at the top of his recent Guardian articles, and, second, a visual blemish that disfigures his otherwise impeccably laid out blog. Briefly, when he has a picture to the right of a posting, it usually has text jammed right up against it. When I have a picture on the right of something I post, it does not do this. The conclusion is inescapable: I am better person than Instapundit.
Queue an HM Bateman Cartoon, entitled The Man Who Criticised Instapundit, featuring a handsome, smiling, carefree young man (me), surrounded by guests in shocked statue poses who have just heard what he said.
I don’t usually much enjoy denunciations of liberal bias, because they so often seem to me to be as tediously and unthinkingly abusive as the liberal consensus that they denounce so often is. But I did enjoy this piece by Mark Bauerlein, entitled Liberal Groupthink Is Anti-Intellectual (linked to recently by Arts & Letters Daily)
The essence of Bauerlein’s description of liberal bias is that it is a social process, and not just a political conspiracy. Quote:
The problem is that the simple trappings of deliberation make academics think that they’ve reached an opinion through reasoned debate – instead of, in part, through an irrational social dynamic. The opinion takes on the status of a norm. Extreme views appear to be logical extensions of principles that everyone more or less shares, and extremists gain a larger influence than their numbers merit. If participants left the enclave, their beliefs would moderate, and they would be more open to the beliefs of others. But with the conferences, quarterlies, and committee meetings suffused with extreme positions, they’re stuck with abiding by the convictions of their most passionate brethren.
Quite so. What I like about Bauerlein’s piece is that it addresses how it feels to be a typical academic. And your typical academic does not feel biased, in the sense that he thinks what he thinks through a great and continuous effort of mental will, in full knowledge of several alternatives. On the contrary, he thinks that what he thinks is the most natural thing in the world. So, if you do call him biased you immediately lose him, and prove to him only that you are stupid, about this and about much else.
Unchallenged extremism is one problem. Another is the resulting tedium. Bauerlein takes a J. S. Mill line, to the effect that even if the orthodoxy is right (which he doesn’t think it is) it still needs to be kept on its intellectual toes by facing regular in-house challenges.
But he writes about liberal academics more as confused and ignorant barbarians than as fully functioning enemies. His job is not so much to oppose them as to rescue them. He feels sorry for them. → Continue reading: On liberal academic groupthink and on why it may be worse in the USA than in Britain
Blogging will not turn bad writers into good ones, but it can make life a whole lot better for good writers.
The fear among them (us? – I vomit the verbals, you judge) is that if you just fling your stuff up as it gets done so that it can immediately be read by all those greedy readers forthwith and at no cost, you will, at best, become a world-famous pauper, a super-celebrity beggar, famous on six continents for not having two cents to rub together. Buddy can you spare a Paypal payment? Well, at least blogging gives the downtrodden a voice.
Oh, you do occasionally get paying gigs out of all that unpaid stuff you churn out. But think tanks are one thing, and actual paying readers are something else again.
This is why I find the news that Scrappleface has just had a book published so very interesting, from the point of view of blogging in general, if not of this particular blogger.
I caught myself thinking yesterday that although I could blog about this book, I could not actually review it because I have not yet read it. But actually I have, I assume, read quite a lot of it, as soon as it came out. It is, I am entirely confident, very good and very funny. If you enjoy poking fun at Democrats etc. as much as he does, you should buy it. You will love it.
Seriously, we bloggers must all hope that this book sells really well.
At present, most regular publishers probably regard blogging as just one great big given-away cowpat on their lush and expensively priced pastures. But if the idea gets into their heads that they can grow a whole new crop of expensive books in this ordure, well, this could really bring the old media and the new back into bed with each other.
Think about it from a publisher’s point of view. What do publishers do? What they do is edit stuff that they have finally got into their hands. So, let the mainstream, big name editors surf the blogs and find their writers there. They can feel happy and powerful choosing material that has – blessing upon blessings – already been written and is already on their desks. No begging phone calls, and ordeal by deadlines. (Deadlines are hell for writers, but imagine what they are like for hard-pressed publishers.) The entire job is already on their desks and in their hands.
As for readers, well, writing as a reader, I do not notice any decline in my enthusiasm for books, or in anyone else’s. Books are nice. You can read them in the lavatory, and in coffee bars and trains and bank and supermarket queues. You can give them as Christmas presents to human beings, or to members of your family.
As blogs multiply in number, the need for people to spot the best ones and pick out their best bits is bound to grow. Bloggers have shown a great enthusiasm for picking out their favourite bits by everybody else, today. But not many have shown themselves willing to plough through their favourite blogs and tell the rest of us which are their favourite bits from a year ago, two years ago, and (for let us look ahead) ten years ago. (Personally I cannot be bothered to pick out my own favourite bits by me.) Publishers have just the people to do this, and just the product (books) in which to display the fruits of such labours.
Bloggers. The new book writers. We can all hope.
I well recall how, on the first day of the serious, large scale, televised bit of Gulf War 2, I watched, in Cracow (in Poland), the unfolding story on BBC News 24 and on nothing else. At first I was uncomfortable, as the allied forces were sucked forwards from catastrophe to catastrophe into the beckoning quagmire, like horror film extras emerging from their graves. It took me an hour or more to work out that what the pictures were actually showing (as opposed to what the BBC said they were showing) was an astonishingly rapid and almost completely casualty free (on the allied side) advance on Baghdad. The allied soldiers were not being made fools of by the ever-so-cunning Iraqi army; it was simply that the BBC were making fools of themselves.
But although the quagmire that the BBC prophesied, a cunning ambush in the streets of Baghdad, did not materialise, there was enough of a different sort of quagmire to keep BBC spirits up, in the form of lots of suicide bombings and rebellions and ructions.
At least this time it is being acknowledge that the USA is doing whatever it is that it is doing in Iraq just now on purpose. However, this time the anti-USA spin is that a significant proportion of the fighters who were supposed to be holed up in the place the Americans are taking possession of have already slipped away, and are causing mayhem elsewhere. Plus, of course, civilians are getting it in the neck too. Both claims make sense to me. But how true are they? I will be interested to see what, if anything, the Belmont Club says about this. They are covering the set-piece battle with enthusiasm. What, I wonder, will they say about the bigger picture, as the Independent is now describing it?
And if there is now a particular burst of mayhem, how long will it last? What I know about insurgency and counter-insurgency would fit snugly into one of these postings (without any MORE involved), but it is my understanding that insurgency is harder if you do not have a nice safe base, and the USA is now engaged in overrunning just such a base. So even if people are getting away and causing mayhem, it will be harder for mayhemmers to operate in the future. Yes? Or maybe: yes, but they will still find a way.
One other thing puzzles me which I have not seen mentioned elsewhere. There seems to be no agreement about how to spell the focal point of all this drama. Should we spell it Falluja or Falujah?
The smoking debate is, to me, too depressing for me to want to go on about it. This Telegraph leader does go on about it approximately as I would if I could force myself, so read that instead.
The Scots, in the Gadarene sense, are leading the way towards a total smoking ban.
Says the Telegraph:
Over-mighty politicians, in Scotland as in the rest of the country, need reminding that they are elected to do the will of the people, and not to cure our bad habits.
The problem with that being: what if that “will of the people” is, precisely, to cure a bad habit? Once again, we observe democracy being equated with niceness and sensibleness, something we regularly complain about here.
With luck, the same story as has occurred with devolution will play out with smoking. The Scots go crazy, it all blows up in their faces, and the English get the chance to learn from Scottish error. I hope so.
David Farrer reports on Scottish devolution disappointments, from which the North of England learned, and on how the Scottish smoking ban is working out.
Changing the subject, but to emphasise what a continuingly good read David’s Freedom and Whisky blog is, here are two political maps of North America, both very diverting in their very diverse ways.
I agree with Virginia Postrel and Tim Worstall, and no doubt with plenty of others, that it is a nice giggle that 7-Eleven had the best on-the-day polling for that Presidential Election they had in the USA the other day. 7-Eleven coffee purchasers that day were asked to choose between Bush cups and Kerry cups, and it went Bush: just over 51; Kerry: just under 49, which was better than anyone else seems to have done on the day.
Is this the first time 7-Eleven have tried doing this? And, crucially, did they announce a rolling score throughout the day? If they do announce the score throughout the day (and I suggest that they should next time if they did not do it this time – see below), and if the news gets out big that they did well with their coffee cup polling this time around, the story will not end there, because the next step will be for political fanatics to drink gallons and gallons of 7-Eleven coffee on the day of the next election, in order to influence the 7-Eleven results. The fanatics will not, I think, necessarily buy coffee in the cups of their own team, because if their guy is reckoned to be well ahead, they might want to make the race seem closer than it is, to get all of their vote out and win bigger. Then again, they might drink gallons of their own guy’s cups of coffee, to demoralise the opposition vote, and to say to it: you have lost, there is no point in you voting. It depends on what time of day the various Karl Roves reckon their voters and the other guy’s voters will be voting.
If 7-Eleven do as I suggest, they will either (a) get the result spot on, again, or (b) get it totally wrong but sell an extra billion gallons of coffee. Win-win.
Tonight at midnight I am to be on the Richard Bacon debate show on Radio 5 Live, arguing about censorship. My job, and that of my pro-censorship opponent, will be to poke a stick into the wasps nest that is the Radio 5 phoning-in community, thereby ‘involving’ lots of people. They hope. If no one calls, we will no doubt talk amongst ourselves, although if I know these people they will have done some preliminary poking already, and lined up some callers of appropriate extremity and craziness, for if we two official debaters let the side down by talking too sensibly.
Libertarianism, civil liberties, etc., is strictly stuff that they squeeze in when nothing real is happening (i.e. football). However, I take such chances when they are offered, and if they make it worth my while. They have promised me £80, which for me is not bad for an hour’s intermittent chit-chatting. Wish me luck.
I keep trying to get these radio shows to introduce me as a Samizdata blogger, instead of just as “from the Libertarian Alliance“, but they still do not understand about this, or perhaps fear that their listeners will not understand. I suppose the problem with writing for the internet is that, you know, anyone can do this and it is very easy so therefore it is of no importance. I mean, what on earth could ‘blogging’ possibly have to do with a debate about the official control of and suppression of information?
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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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