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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One of the better ways to learn about policy trends, in any policy area, in any country, is to read something by someone who disapproves.
This article, about what its author thinks is wrong with all the various directions which Indian education is heading in, reads to me like a catalogue of all that is right about it.
Two trends in particular struck me as especially encouraging. First this:
A self reliant India needs very different intellectual support from the kind of intellectual labour envisaged by a government that in its enthusiasm for selling out to multinationals could only dream of bringing some outsourced functions of these multinationals into our country. …
“Self reliant” reads to me like “futureless backwater”. So, what I take this to mean is that Indian education is now turning out people who are very employable indeed, and on the world market where the real money is to be made and where so much of India’s economic future will be created.
And second, there is this:
A self reliant and democratic India also needs its citizens prepared for the globalised world not as cogs in the wheel, fulfilling some technical function, but as thinking beings able to defend and safeguard democracy. …
… which the guy put in italics of his own, meaning that this was his biggest point. “Preparing for the globalised world not as cogs in the wheel” sounds to me like preparing them against the globalised world. So what this all says like to me is: “The education system isn’t turning out enough political mischief-makers.”
There is also much complaint in this article about “para-education”, which sounds to me like free enterprise education, rather than the state-provided shambles which most Indians were stuck with until recently.
So, then: India doing really well. This has been one of the decade’s great Global Stories. Long may the story continue.
During the last few days, the British media, all of them, have been making much of D-Day, and quite properly so. The survivors from among those who fought that day who still remain with us now will mostly be gone ten years hence, so now is the last big moment of public thanks and public acknowledgement for these gents. And today will surely not pass without further mentions here of the sacrifices made on June 6th 1944, and the great purposes for which those sacrifices were made.
But the bit of the story that I keep thinking about is … the weather. How pleasing that one of our great national obsessions should have proved so extremely pertinent, at that time of all times.
The story is well known. The weather during the first few days of June 1944 was vile, and Group Captain Stagg, the man whose job was to analyse and present the weather news to those in charge of Operation Overlord, was the bearer of these bad tidings. On June 4th, D-Day, ready to happen on June 5th, was postponed, because of the weather, by one day.
But it could not be postponed for much longer than that. Too many men were revved up to go. A serious postponement would do dreadful things to that most crucial of military variables, morale.
Then, the miracle. Stagg discerned a magical moment of calmness in the middle of the weather system that was causing all the headaches, and through the eye of this meteorological needle Supreme Commander Eisenhower was able to thread the Normandy Landings. And they were all the more of a success for the fact that the Germans knew for certain that they just could not be done when they actually were done. As it turned out, the weather for D-Day was perfect, and all the more perfect for having seemed to be so imperfect.
My main purpose here is not to salute those ageing D-Day survivors, although I do salute them in passing, of course I do. No, the point I want to make here is that weather forecasting is one nationalised industry that really does seem to work, and to have been working well for some time now. → Continue reading: Weather forecasts are up there with dentistry
Whenever, as is happening just now, a small Political Party seems about to get a big result, the Big Parties orate loudly about how a vote for the Small [fill in the name of the small party] Party will be a “wasted vote“. What does this mean?
To me what it means is that the Big Parties have run out of good arguments to stop people voting for this Small Party in embarassingly unsmall numbers, and are instead resorting to a ridiculous argument which they hope will pack a punch despite the fact that it makes no sense whatever.
A large number of people in Britain have just recently realised that Britain is in the process of becoming a small clutch of provinces of a new country, EUrope. They have never wanted this, but until recently they did not notice that it was happening, so they saw no need to vote against it. Now they realise that it is happening, despite all the mendacious protestations of the Big Parties, and a Small Party has stepped forward to enable them to register their disapproval. And depending on how many people vote for the Small Party, the Big Parties will either perhaps change their policy of British provincialism, or definitely not change it. → Continue reading: The myth of the “wasted vote”
Our own Natalie Solent posted a really good piece at her personal blog last night, about the fact that many, many bad things continue to be done to the world, but that the difference is that they are soon liable to be done with equal relentlessness everywhere, spread around the world evenly, in a way that will make it much harder to notice and complain. Time was when evil was done with maximum ferocity in country A, but hardly done at all in countries B and C, and the evil done by the evil was eventually obvious to all, even to those at first most inclined to support it. Sometimes it was even easier than that:
… To help you along to this conclusion the goddess History primly laid out several countries split into communist and non-communist sections so that you could watch one half sink and one half rise and draw appropriate morals. …
But not any more. Will the day come when that same goddess ordains that we are all to be governed by the same benign, suffocating, righteous, repressive elite, and no comparisons between them ruling and them not ruling will possible, because everywhere will be theirs?
What I fear is that a time will come when there will be no significant examples of difference left in the world. That possibility is still far off but for the first time in history the technology is in place for it to happen. Think about that. …
She mentions that extraordinary moment in history, notable for the fact that hugely important and portentous things were made to not happen:
I am haunted by the tale of the fleets of Zheng He, recounted in Guns, Germs and Steel. China’s vast program of exploration, greater than anything Europe ever had, was turned off click! because of some otherwise obscure quarrel between two factions at court. The reason that there was only one switch was that China was unified.
And the worry is that, unlike the blood-sodden grindings and thrashings of evil in the twentieth century, the clicks we are about to be subjected to will be inaudible.
It is a beautiful and melancholy piece. David Carr rewritten by Jane Austen. It contains at least another half dozen sentences I wanted to copy and paste here, but since it is all there, go there, and read it all.
It is a long time since I have contributed anything to White Rose. And it is a long time since this article by journalist and novelist Alexandra Campbell appeared, in the Telegraph, on May 14th. Apologies on both counts, but better occasional contributions and late reports of White Rose relevant material than never, I hope you agree.
This article did not just appear in the Telegraph. It was also reproduced in full, in the “last word” slot, towards the end of the “all you need to know about everything that matters” magazine (i.e. lots of good bits from all the different British newspapers) The Week, of May 29th, Issue 462. That was where and (approximately) when I first read the piece.
Ms. Campbell, on the basis of vague CCTV “evidence”, was falsely accused of a crime, and it took a scarily long time for the system to stop persecuting her.
Concluding paragraphs:
“In theory,” said Mark, “it’s innocent until proved guilty. In practice, whoever makes the allegation first is believed.”
Now that we are all picked up on CCTVs up to 300 times a day, and can also easily be identified electronically through swipe cards (health clubs, the office, season tickets, etc), there is a real risk of someone linking you to a passing resemblance on a fuzzy CCTV image and making an allegation against you.
It had taken about eight months to get to this point of the inquiry and I was terrified of enduring months’ more worry before I was cleared, but the police followed up my brother’s statement quickly and dropped the charges. However, they told me that current policy is to leave fingerprints, pictures and allegations permanently on file.
Checking subsequently with the police press office, I find that “fingerprints may not be held for more than 42 days”, but I find it scary that nobody really seems to know. I suspect our civil rights are being chipped away all the time in the name of crime and terrorism prevention.
The whole thing, I discovered, was based on a breach of the Data Protection Act. Companies using CCTV are supposed to show images only to authorised people, such as the police. The supermarket involved should never have allowed the receptionist and the credit card victim to see footage on demand. The receptionist, himself in charge of CCTV, should have known this. He wasn’t even following his own company’s code of practice, which asks staff who are suspicious of members to take the matter to a manager first. But he has done nothing illegal.
And neither have I. But while I struggle to have my records deleted from police files, he has drifted on and cannot, so far, be contacted. Nobody knows if he made the allegation out of boredom, spite, or genuine, if misplaced, civic-mindedness. It’s Kafkaesque, said friends. It’s a joke, said others. But it wasn’t fiction and it wasn’t funny. I was actually very lucky.
I might not have been able to prove where I was. If I’d been a lawyer, police officer, accountant or worked in financial services, my career and livelihood would also have been on the line, and if I’d been a celebrity, the story would have been splashed all over the papers before it was disproved. If the allegation had been connected to terrorism, I would have been jailed immediately.
I used to think that if you didn’t break the law, you had nothing to fear from it. Now I know that if this can happen to me, it can happen to anyone.
Cecile Dubois begins a longish post here with a discussion of the fact that her classmates, teachers, etc., have now found out about her blog, and are all reading it. Where will that lead? Somewhere interesting, I feel sure. Her English teacher is reading all of it.
So what will her English teacher make of this, which comes at the end of the very same post? Here’s Cecile taking a pin to the Great Blimp bimself:
… Michael Moore is my idol. His posters plaster my walls, and I’m dying to see his next film. I seriously like want peace in the world, and we should so elect him as president. Kerry is such a Nazi for me – we should kick his arse, man! We shouldn’t have any enemies at all! I think we should instate Muslim traditions so another 911 doesn’t happen, that way those funny people (heh heh) over there don’t nuke us, and can freely migrate over here. Don’t you just love France? I want to bring their culture here! I love America – but to make it even better, we should have more diversity! Let’s celebrate the Palestinians – I’m going to dress up as a suicide bomber – it would fit me so cool. Don’t I look sexy in that belt? I’m da bomb! (Tee hee!) Ah, Michael Moore. Amen to him. We shouldn’t have guns. If a burglar comes in with one, I’ll just roast him a pig and kiss him on the cheek – let him come in and steal my TV set – I so don’t deserve it. We should also welcome the proletariat to power! We rich people are scum. Yo dude? Yeah, I’ll meet you in front with your Mercedes Benz. OMG, did I say Mercedes Benz? Whoa! I meant electric car – gas kills! Peace out! …
What she should make of it is that Cecile must be encouraged to stick with the writing.
This looks really interesting. I have just learned about it by reading this:
A right-wing think-tank will this week launch a national chain of cut-price primary schools in a drive to open up private education to middle-income families.
The first New Model School will start work in September, charging less than half the average fees of many independent primary or “pre-prep” schools.
Teachers have already been appointed, and tomorrow the school starts advertising for pupils to join the inaugural class of five-year-olds.
So what are these people trying to accomplish?
The New Model School Company aims to establish a chain of local schools, each subscribing to the same ethos and curriculum. A New Model School can be created wherever there are enough interested parents to start one. Organisational structure and support will be provided by the New Model School Company. Curriculum materials will be developed by its sister organisation, the New Model Curriculum Company.
And who are they?
The individuals who have formed the New Model School Company were brought together by the social policy think-tank Civitas (www.civitas.org.uk). Our aim is not just to set up a single successful school, but to provide a model of excellent and affordable schools which will improve the lives of many children and their families.
Our ambitions for the school are far wider than success in exams. The final aim of education is the formation of strong moral character, good manners, and the development of well-informed judgement. Good citizenship is not a subject of the school curriculum, but an aspect of conduct and behaviour that arises from a knowledge of the foundations of the culture, its history, values, and institutions.
If you would like to know more about us, you can telephone Matthew Faulkner on 020 8969 0037.
Because of my continuing interest in such matters, I plan to stay continuously interested in this venture, and will certainly be phoning that number myself in due course. But I think I wlll wait a while before doing that, because something tells me that this guy’s phone will be ringing fit to burst for the next few days.
I especially like that it is being set up by a “right wing think tank”. The idea of saying that was presumably to discredit the whole venture, as, maybe, is the slightly derogatory expression “cut-price”. (like there is something wrong with that). The more likely effect will be to make all “right wing think tanks” look better, if this is the kind of thing they do.
Also, by branding these places “right wing”, the Indy will scare lefties away from teaching in these places, and the political tone of them will undoubtedly be more free market in orientation than your average school. When these people talk about “history, values and institutions” that is not merely code for higher taxation and caving in to public sector trade unions.
I love it, and will almost certain have more to say here about this in the future. I really hope it works.
Not everyone who reads this blog will be particularly keen to know what the new EUropean Parliament building in Brussels looks like. But if you would like to know about this, I have a posting up at my Culture Blog which starts with a huge aerial photo of the place taken by someone else, and then has twenty four thumbnail photos you can click on to get to bigger photos that I took myself of this vast building when I was myself in Brussels not long ago.
It has taken me more than two months to get around to exhibiting these photos, for which apologies, but I presumably things have not changed that much since I took them. Partly this was because until recently I had much to learn about how to do this – “thumbnails” etc. (merci Monsieur) – and partly it was that, even if you do know how to stick up a mass of these thumbnails, it is still (for me anyway) a very unwieldy process to actually do, and to actually arrange them in a semi-coherent order, especially since this was the first blog posting effort along these lines that I have attempted.
The building is a scarily impressive edifice, or rather, agglomeration of edifices. I really missed not having a wide angle lens. As it was, it was like trying to photograph an elephant in a crowd. All I could do was assemble lots of details (hence the need for lots of pictures), with only occasional views that got the bigger picture, and none of the whole thing.
Which is only appropriate, considering that this is the EU, and that this entire building is itself only a relatively minor part of the big EU picture, which is itself utterly impossible to get in one snap.
Thoughts here have turned towards what good news might consist of, what with most of the news from Iraq lately having been so bad. Do we really want the media to be dominated by the stuff? I mean, might good news not be rather … boring?
Personally, what I dislike is not bad news as such. It is the drawing of wrong conclusions from it. Yes, there has been a terrible flood in the Dominican Republic, and I want to be able to read the details of it. But this does not mean that all the people out there live all of their lives in a state of permanent Tidal Wave of Mud Terror. You think that is an exaggeration? Well, I was living in a hotel in Krakow for the first weekend of the Iraq War, the easy bit. All I had to learn about the war was BBC 24 hour news, and this was, as I am sure you all vividly remember, the exact mistake that the BBC made. Hey, here are some soldiers who have been ambushed! Ergo, Iraq is one Great Big Ambush. No, it was just an ambush, and actually, even I could deduce that, despite all the gloomy commentary, My Team was winning big. Here was a classic piece of good news that the BBC truly did misread and misreport as bad.
But unlike the good news of how well that war was actually going, a lot of good news is genuinely dull, compared to bad news. → Continue reading: Bad news and good news
This is tragic. Truly tragic. In fact I am extremely surprised that David Carr has not had a chortle about it at least six hours ago:
Today a painful task will begin in Leyton, east London: picking through the remains of a devastating fire which destroyed a huge warehouse containing priceless works of art.
Many of the lost works are from the collection of Charles Saatchi. It is thought that they may include Jake and Dinos Chapman’s Hell.
Tracey Emin’s famous Everyone I Have Ever Slept With may be another: the tent appliquéd with the names of her past lovers was the star of the famous Royal Academy Sensation! exhibition and to many became emblematic of the endeavours of a generation of young British artists. “I don’t know what specific pieces have been lost,” Mr Saatchi said yesterday. “So far it has been a day of many rumours.”
The warehouse belonged to Momart, the country’s leading art handlers, who undertake storage and transport for the Tate, the National Gallery and Buckingham Palace, as well as Damien Hirst and Rachel Whiteread.
The confusion about which pieces have succumbed stems partly from Momart’s uncertainty about what was stored in the building, Mr Saatchi said. Work by Sarah Lucas, famed for substituting parts of the human body with poultry, fried eggs and vegetables in her pieces, was also feared to have been destroyed.
No no no. This was not “devastating”. This was an art happening. These people need to dispense with their outdated ways of seeing so-called “reality” and instead look at the world in a new way. This fire did not destroy, it merely moved some objects from one state of being to another … We need to think beyond “specific pieces” to the totality of life …
As for all this “uncertainty”, well, what I say is can one ever really be “certain” about anything? Surely we have learned by now not to seek an illusion of certainty in an inherently uncertain world. There is no certainty. There are only different ways of looking at things. We need to get away from the single point of view, the one fixed, bourgeois way of seeing everything, within one fixed frame … blah blah blah … etcetera etcetera etcetera … insert Carr-isms at will.
Sometimes Modern Art contrives a happening which really hits the spot and grabs the headlines. Sensational or what?
Although, I would advise Buckingham Palace to think about making other arrangements for its art transport needs.
Here are two snippets of news from the BBC today.
Snippet one:
Train drivers’ union Aslef has suspended three of its officials after an alleged brawl at a barbecue at its north London offices.
The alleged incident involved general secretary Shaun Brady, assistant general secretary Mick Blackburn and president Martin Samways.
Snippet two:
A 14-year-old schoolboy has been arrested after a teacher was attacked, police have said.
The youngster was arrested after the incident at a school in Scarborough, North Yorkshire, on Friday 21 May.
He was later released on police bail pending further inquiries, a force spokesman added.
Police said the teacher, a 54-year-old man, was taken to hospital for a check-up after suffering swelling and bruising to his face.
Both of these events occurred in Britain. They prove beyond doubt that Britain is a continuous maelstrom of violence from one end of the country to the other.
We should get out now.
… and the reason I was listening to Radio 4 (see below) was to hear one of my favourite programmes, which is called Quote Unquote.
Some recycled quotes, then.
Apparently, a newspaper whose name I did not catch had on the front at the top, everyday, the following slogan:
As independent as resources permit.
I requote this in my turn because (a) I like it, and because (b) I think it says a great deal about blogging.
This was supplied by Simon Jenkins, who then went on to say that he “used to be” a pompous reporter, which also made me laugh. He did later somewhat redeem himself in my ears by reporting this motorway sign:
Emergency toilets 25 miles.
I guess emergency toilets, like newspaper independence, occur as often as resources permit.
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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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