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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Fame at last. Thanks to Peter Briffa for the link.
More from me about the glorious Vicky Pollard…
…here, here and (only yesterday) here.
In a recent Spiked article, Dr Helene Guldberg quotes Liz Kendal talking about a recent IPPR report about child rearing which she co-authored:
Any government serious about giving children an equal start in life cannot overlook the significance of the parenting role… The lack of practical, social and emotional support for most parents undermines other attempts by government to reduce childhood inequalities.
I think this quote throws an interesting light on the mania to regulate that now sweeps across the world. There is nothing like an impossible task to enable the regulatory process first to begin, and then, once begun, to go on for ever.
Consider. According to Liz Kendal, who emitted the above quote, the government should be “serious about giving children an equal start in life”. Yet think about this. It is impossible. It simply cannot be done. People are different. They think differently and they live in different circumstances. They rear their children differently. How could it possibly be otherwise? It cannot. Yet if this possibility is seriously pursued, as Liz Kendal thinks that it should be, there is no logical end to the process. → Continue reading: The micro-management of parenthood – and of everything
The other day, I snapped the following photo, in the London Underground. I tried as hard as I could to get the entire thing in my picture. Had I stepped back any further I would have been (a) electrocuted and then shortly after that (b) run over by a train.
I have not read this book, which is by Jason Burke. But: Naom Chomsky? “Rumsfeld and his clique”? Something tells me that whatever the nuances of the truth here revealed, America will get the blame for it all and Islam hardly any.
William Dalrymple should not be confused with Theodore Dalrymple. Read what Theodore has to say about William (no relation), in this article, this sentence being the one that seems to me to matter most:
… Dalrymple comes perilously close to condoning what he is trying to explain…
I did an earlier posting about William Dalrymple, and the comments there are also well worth looking at to learn more about the man and his views.
Politicians do love their Olympic Games. They make them feel so important. There are people to be expelled from their home, blameless businesses to be relocated into bankruptcy, photogenic new sports stadia and shiny new transport links to be constructed, opening ceremonies and firework displays to be arranged, all at vast public expense, and involving vast opportunities for grandiose displays of political self-importance, to say nothing of more private sorts of gain.
Nevertheless, the following story about the mutual impact of the Olympics and politics takes this natural affinity to a whole new depth of creepiness. I am rather surprised that David Carr has not beat me to noticing it. I guess (see immediately below) he has other worries on his mind:
London’s mayor, Ken Livingstone, today called for his term in office to be extended if the capital succeeds in its Olympic bid.
Mr Livingstone was speaking after an intense hour-long grilling by Conservative London delegates at the Tory party conference in Bournemouth.
Speaking of his hopes for a successful Olympic bid following forceful lobbying by a team spearheaded by the Olympic gold medallist and ex-Tory MP Sebastian Coe, Mr Livingstone said that if London won, the mayoral term would need to be extended by a year to ensure that preparations for the games were not disrupted.
I know that it is not received opinion here to be any sort of admirer of democracy, but I actually do rather admire it, basically because it is so vastly preferable to civil war as a method of swabbing out one bucketload of politicians who have become frightful beyond all redemption, and squirting in another lot who are not yet quite so terminally disgusting. And I believe that it has other benefits, many of them quite subtle, and unexpectedly non-collectivist, despite the fact that at the heart of democracy lies the brutal and morally repulsive idea of majorities – more precisely their elected representatives – being able to do whatever they please.
See for instance this New York Times article, which argues that democracy, far from depending on economic development, is actually the way to get economic development. For reasons I hope Real Soon Now to be writing about here, I am greatly attracted by this hypothesis, despite the fact that, in terms of the stark principles involved, democracy is just the latest of many negations of the idea of individual liberty.
But if democratic politics is to work, even by its own crude standards, one of the most basic rules is that the rule for when the next election is to be held must be stuck to. Postponing an election, for whatever reason, is a step down a very slippery slope indeed, at the bottom of which lies naked tyranny.
Has any elected politician in modern Britain ever made a suggestion like this before? Except during a major war? If any has, I missed it.
Personally, I’d be delighted to live in a country where happily married gay couples had closets full of assault weapons.
– Instapundit showing why it is wrong to call him right wing
Since no one else here seems to have much to say about the Great Debate, let me chip in with a few meandering thoughts. If you do not like meandering, stop now. Strong meandering warning. I have now read the rest of this, and believe me, it meanders. It nuances hither and thither like some damned diplomat who has been at the drugs.
Okay. So far as I am concerned, I thought John Kerry won it. My opinion of him could only improve, and it did. And I have got to admit that not only was I impressed, in the sense of feeling that others would be, by the air of coherence he brought to stating his case. I also think he may actually have an alternative policy that might count for something.
The general opinion in our part of the blogosphere/internet is that the idea of the USA ‘forming alliances’ better with the ‘international community’ is a load of old sneer quotes. Lileks said it yesterday. On what planet is Kerry living? Does he really think that the rest of the world will suddenly swing into line behind President John Kerry, and win/settle the War Against Terror? Will it bollocks, says Lileks, although a little more politely than that.
But I do not think it quite so unlikely as Lileks does that the rest of the world, by which I mean Europe, actually will swing obediently into line, like an eager little Euro-dog. Even those Moderate Arabs may feel less culturally slighted, and contribute somewhat more than they are contributing now. → Continue reading: Some nuanced reactions to Bush-vs.-Kerry Debate One
Catching up with Croziervision, the other day, as you do, I came across this posting, which contained a kind reference to something I had said, which on further investigation proved to be an essay by me, attached as a comment to something Patrick himself had written earlier. There is nothing like the blogosphere for prodding you into writing, roughly and readily but as best you can, That Thing You Are Always Talking About.
Patrick did this to me by himself sketching out the Hockey Stick Theory thus:
What the hockey-stick model says is that often when the state intervenes whether by nationalisation, subsidy, taxation or regulation it will, every now and then, for a short time, improve matters. Then things start to deteriorate and eventually they end up even worse than they were in the first place. And the hockey stick? Imagine an (ice) hockey stick standing on a level surface. The blade represents the short up swing of state intervention and the handle the long subsequent down swing. I suppose to get the model just right you have to imagine the handle burying itself into the ground.
Or to put it another way, the state does this:
And, thus prodded, I then amplified, in the manner that follows. At the end, I even said that I ought to copy and paste this stuff into a Samizdata posting, but then I forgot about that. Now here it is. What follows is basically what I originally put in that comment, but I have changed a few things and added another hockey stick, so no italics. → Continue reading: How hockey sticks explain the relative attractions of statism and of free markets
This is a great story:
British researchers have trained dogs to detect bladder cancer by sniffing human urine, opening up the possibility that dogs – or electronic noses modeled on their snouts – may one day be used to detect the disease.
The study, published in the British medical journal BMJ on Saturday, is the first to demonstrate scientifically that dogs can detect cancer through smell, its authors said.
Animals. Diseases of the rich. What more could you ask for in a news item? I agree that sex, celebrities, bad behaviour by an American Presidential candidate, Nazis and football are all absent, but several of these themes could be woven into this yarn in due course.
At the risk of being accused of saying that Chinese people are dogs, which is not at all what I am trying to say, I have long understood that Chinese doctors use smell – of urine, breath and so on – as a major diagnostic tool. So it does not surprise me a bit that dogs, with their famously keen sense of smell, might have a lot to contribute to medicine. This is not a “How very odd” story. It is not odd at all. I am only surprised that no one has thought to study this possibility sooner. I suppose such research depends on moderately cheap diagnosis by other means to be researchable without enormous expense. On the other hand, if the other diagnostic methods were already very cheap, there would be no need to bother with dogs.
My favourite bit of this New York Times report is this one:
In an intriguing side note to the British study, all six of the dogs detected cancer in the urine of a man who was thought to be cancer-free and was used as a control. When he was tested further, he was found to have a kidney tumor, and his life was saved.
That is the best sort of scientific evidence: the killer (to use a wildly inappropriate metaphor) anecdote.
More here, with links to the BMJ article and to a BBC report last week.
Alert readers will have noted that I often write here about education. What happens is that I dash off a piece for my Education Blog, and then say to myself: this will just about do for Samizdata. And since I now find writing adequately for Samizdata harder than for my private blogs, and since Samizdata has many more readers, here is another such piece which I hope will suffice for here, provoked by an essay I am in the middle of reading, by Paul Graham. (Thank you Arts & Letters Daily, a daily resource without which I could not now do.) The first few paragraphs of this esssay grabbed my attention, and I am now about half way through it.
In that previous reaction to Graham’s essay, I made much of the idea of an essay being “persuasive”.
I am right, and wrong, says Paul Graham. Yes, a lot of education is rooted in legal education, but, he says, too much. An essay, he says, is not – or should not be – lawyering:
Defending a position may be a necessary evil in a legal dispute, but it’s not the best way to get at the truth, as I think lawyers would be the first to admit. It’s not just that you miss subtleties this way. The real problem is that you can’t change the question.
And yet this principle is built into the very structure of the things they teach you to write in high school. The topic sentence is your thesis, chosen in advance, the supporting paragraphs the blows you strike in the conflict, and the conclusion – uh, what is the conclusion? I was never sure about that in high school. It seemed as if we were just supposed to restate what we said in the first paragraph, but in different enough words that no one could tell. Why bother? But when you understand the origins of this sort of “essay”, you can see where the conclusion comes from. It’s the concluding remarks to the jury.
As I often find myself saying, to justify my enthusiasm for argument: my dad was a trial lawyer, and so were both my grandfathers. My family’s basic activity when dining, when we weren’t eating or listening to classical music on the Third Programme or Family Fun Chat on the Home Service, was arguing. And if no one was disagreeing with a dominant consensus, someone would, just for the fun of it. “Defending a position” is, I think, a pretty good way to get at the truth, provided more than one position is being defended, which is exactly what is happening when a jury is involved. The adversarial principle is, I would say, a whole hell of a lot better than a “necessary evil”.
Think only of the clash of conclusions – of, in Dan Rather’s words, “political agendas” – that recently got the truth of the Rather documents fracas out into the light of day in the space of a few hours. → Continue reading: On how legal traditions shape teaching traditions
My nuanced prediction a week ago to the effect that President Bush is going to win huge and that Kerry is going to be put through the electoral mangle is starting to look rather (if you will pardon the expression) silly. It is not so much that the prediction is wrong, more that it is looking more and more obvious by the day. I sold my few remaining Kerry stocks when the Kerry graph was already in free fall.
In addition to the insights I offered in my earlier US election posting – that Bush is clever at suckering his enemies into ground of their choosing, but also of his, and then killing them, and that he is doing this just now (a) in Iraq to the Baathist/Islamofascist/Moonbat tendency and (b) in the USA to Kerry and his cohorts – there are about another two dozen reasons why Bush will win, most of them to do with all the many different ways in which Kerry is a stupid, ignorant twat. Every time he opens his mouth the Anyone But Kerry vote gets that bit bigger.
And since so few people actually seem to like the guy, the fact that he is conducting himself so ineptly in all the pseudo-crises, that must necessarily be heaped upon a non-incumbent Presidential candidate to check out how good he is in actual crises (and the more crass these tests are the more of a test they are), becomes yet another reason not to vote for him, which only intensifies the larger crisis that his entire campaign has now become. He is losing, and do we want to vote for a loser to be President? No. Anyone but Kerry.
I always enjoy reading what Mark Steyn has to say about things in general, and about John Kerry and his supporters in particular, but this piece, of course also linked to by Instapundit which is how I got to it today, is especially fine. → Continue reading: Mark Steyn trashes John Kerry but is too kind to the Old Left
This sums up the case for university top-up fees very nicely:
The new higher education minister, Kim Howells, today stormed into the education debate with a warning for universities that top-up fees would create a “cut throat” market.
Wow, a rabid free marketeer telling the universities that they are going to have to get their act together, not because little old he merely says so or else, but because there is now a market out there.
But it turns out that Kim Howells is against this market:
In his first speech since joining the Department for Education and Skills, Mr Howells risked the ire of his boss, Charles Clarke, with a series of negative remarks about the direction education policy had taken since he was last an education minister in 1998.
This is a classic case of something that happens a lot, namely a good idea being spread by someone who vehemently disagrees with it.
And here comes another combination of rightness and wrongness:
He questioned the government’s focus on the economic benefits of education and admitted that sending his children to university had left him “broke”.
In characteristically colourful language, Mr Howells told an audience at the University of Westminster in London today: “We’ve become very utilitarian in the department for education. I’m in a lucky position of having returned after six or seven years.
“Learning for learning’s sake is something we should criticise very warily. People want to learn simply because learning is wonderful and it’s the second best thing I know in the world.”
Howells has a point about learning for learning’s sake. But just because something is wonderful doesn’t mean that other people ought to pay for it. I think that classical music is wonderful, and governments around Europe pay a lot of people to entertain me at way below what it might otherwise cost me. But is this right, just because I get wonderfulness rather than usefulness?
There is also the fact that, I think, classical music would actually be very different and much better if it was not subsidised at all. Ditto education, especially of the “wonderful” sort.
The proportion of “wonderful” education that is now subsidised is now declining rapidly, thanks to the Internet, which is all part of how much more wonderful it has now become.
I have just attached a comment to this posting by Bill Hobbs. It could all, as I explained in it, be nonsense, but since postings here have been a little thin of late, I thought it worth a copy-and-paste to here. But please understand that what follows is a think-aloud guess that only just now occurred to me, and that I would not feel personally wounded if it was immediately comment-banged into oblivion.
I am a Brit, living in London, and have watched the Dan Rather forgery story with fascination.
But until now, like Dan Rather himself, I had assumed that George Bush’s conduct in the National Guard was indeed not to his credit. But now I am starting to believe that this might have been entirely made-up nonsense.
Two things I am learning about your President are that (a) he loves to win, and that (b) one of his favourite methods for winning is to sucker his opponents into a battleground where they think they will win… and then kill them.
I get the feeling that Bush is now doing this to the Sadaamites in Iraq. Let them (and their cheerleaders in the West in general and among the Democrats in particular) think they are winning and that Bush is losing, let them choose what they think is the perfect battleground, and then crucify them. Operation Crucifixion is just now getting underway, if I understand present circumstances in Iraq rightly. Interesting timing, eh?
What this latest ABC story suggests to me is that maybe Bush is also doing something very similar to the Kerry Campaign re Bush’s service in the National Guard. He has suckered the Democrats into a frenzied focus on Bush the skiving daddy’s boy and fake warrior, only now to hit them with the story, at just the right moment, that this was actually one of Bush’s more honourable early episodes.
I hereby place a bet on your forthcoming Presidential election: f**cking Bush landslide. Thermonuclear. If Kerry thinks it is bad now, let him see how it all looks in another month. 25 point poll difference. Meltdown chez the Kerry campaign. Bush looking so smug the Democrats will be jumping off ledges.
As I say, I am only a watcher from a distance and this comment could itself all be made-up nonsense, and the worst sort of wishful thinking. But … well, we shall see. Just some late night thoughts.
Forgive me, I am not a regular reader of this blog [i.e. of Bill Hobbs’ blog], and if it and its regular commenters have explained/demolished all this at length already, then my deep apologies for the repetition.
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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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