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]
|
Arts & Letters Daily links to this Virginia Postrel article about Friedrich (and I’d thought I’d supply two links here, hence this interruption – I preferred all that to just putting “von”) Hayek.
Quote:
Hayek is fairly well known in Britain, where he spent much of his life, because of his influence on Margaret Thatcher. In the United States, however, well-educated, intellectually curious people who nod at mentions of Max Weber, Hannah Arendt, or Michel Foucault have barely heard of him.
Politics has a lot to do with that ignorance. Hayek drew on the traditions of 18th- and 19th-century liberal thought, leading critics to dismiss him as a man of the past. He defended competitive markets against the champions of central planning, noting that supposedly “irrational” customs, traditions, and institutions often embody the hard-won knowledge of experience. He advocated cosmopolitan individualism in an age of nationalism and collectivism.
But Hayek turned out to be ahead of his time, not behind it. Arguing with the social engineers of the mid-20th century, he grappled with problems equally relevant to the 21st century. He anticipated today’s rage for biological metaphors and evolutionary analysis, today’s fragmented and specialized markets, today’s emphasis on the legal institutions needed to make markets work, even today’s multicultural challenges.
Hayek’s 1952 book, “The Sensory Order,” often considered his most difficult work, foreshadowed theories of cognitive science developed decades later. “Hayek posited spontaneous order in the brain arising out of distributed networks of simple units (neurons) exchanging local signals,” says Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. “Hayek was way ahead of his time in pushing this idea. It became popular in cognitive science, beginning in the mid-1980s, under the names ‘connectionism’ and ‘parallel distributed processing.’ Remarkably, Hayek is never cited.”
I can still remember how a paperback series called “Fontana Modern Masters” did not contain a Hayek volume in it, because the lefty academic in charge of the enterprise simply forbade it. Robert Conquest dissecting Lenin was acceptable. Lenin might be a bit bad, but he was at least important, you see. Anyone writing about Hayek, however critically, was beyond the pale. He was not part of the agenda. He didn’t count. It would seem that, thanks to the championship of people like Steven Pinker, he is seriously starting to. Evolutionary Biology is a bandwagon with too much momentum for a few clapped out Marxists to halt it, and if the Evolutionary Biologists decide that Hayek matters, he matters.
Prediction: in twenty years time most of the biologists will be better economists than most of the economists.
Yesterday’s Guardian contained an article that is an interesting sign of the times.
Says the subheading:
The ‘war on terror’ is being used as cover for a sustained assault on the independence and progressive agenda of NGOs, says Abigail Fielding-Smith
It may seem like a cheap joke to go on about what a perfect name that is for the piece: Abigail Fielding-Smith. Abigail. The hyphen. But I think this name is more than just a joke, because what is happening here is that an entire Ruling Class that was, which was quietly but firmly taking over the world, with no muss and no fuss, is being rudely challenged by a new Ruling Class that is: America!!!
The horror.
The so-called “war on terror” is radically reformulating many aspects of world politics, not least the international nongovernmental organisation (NGO) sector.
“War on terror”. So uncouth, unnuanced and confrontational.
Broadly defined as not-for-profit, autonomous organisations working in the global public interest, NGOs play a pivotal role in international society. They have a strong advocacy voice in intergovernmental politics and are viewed by some as the “third sector” (after intergovernmental bodies and corporations) of international society. Kofi Annan calls them “the conscience of the world”.
Northern governments respected the NGOs’ flexibility, commitment and capacity to respond to (and prevent) international crises in a way that the interstate system could not. Consequently, the proportion of aid budgets given to intergovernmental organisations such as the UN decreased during this period, while funding for NGOs rose steadily. International NGOs now receive one-quarter of the average northern government’s total aid budget; the French government gives them nearly half.
Abigail Hyphen Stroke Money was quietly taking over the world, in other words.
But now those infuriatingly heroic Arabs with their hijacked airplanes have really upset the apple cart, haven’t they? They’ve only gone and got the Americans seriously interested in the big wide world out there. And instead of just paying for them in the old style, the Americans have started trampling all over the shins of the NGOs. With the result that those ghastly Arab resistance heroes, never inclined to make very many fine distinctions, now make no distinction at all between the Great Satan and the Lesser Satans of Oxfam, the Red Cross, and the rest of them.
In Iraq, many NGOs have tried to distance themselves from coalition governments by refusing to accept their money. The attack on the neutral ICRC in Baghdad on October 27 demonstrated the futility of this attempt. As Alistair Dutton, emergencies officer for Cafod, explained: “If our government is the occupying power and we are distributing food, where is the distinction between those who wage war and those who distribute humanitarian goods? Politicians have chosen to coin the phrase ‘humanitarian war’ and they have therefore co-opted us, arguably.”
Distinctions are further blurred in Iraq by the unprecedented use of for-profit organisations in the reconstruction operation.
Those vulgar Americans. Not content with having a “war”, they also want to do trade everywhere.
It gets worse:
Another source of pressure on NGOs’ independence is the political environment of the “war on terror”. While the threat of terrorism is real and important, there is no international agreement on what it is. The concern in the NGO community, particularly in the US, is that the taint of terrorism may be used to discredit the work of politically dissenting international NGOs, or even to stop their funding.
The piece concludes:
Many of these trends existed before September 11. But the “war on terror” has created an acute need for NGOs’ international expertise while at the same time providing justification for glossing over or rooting out their progressive political agenda. At a time when it is needed most, “the conscience of the world” looks vulnerable.
The NGOs are still in business, but they’ve been demoted. They used to be in charge, but now they are only taking orders. It must be very galling.
This posting is about what is happening and about what Abigail Fielding-Smith thinks about it, and it may well be that the lady doth protest too much, and that actually the NGOs are not really being permanently stopped from becoming a new global Civil Service, and that they are merely having to duck and weave a little. But I must tell you that, insofar as what Fielding-Smith says is actually happening, Brian Hyphen Micklethwait (and I do have some hyphenage in my ancestry and quite a few people of the Fielding-Smith persuasion among my cousins) is cautiously optimistic about this trend.
Which is just one more irony. When it comes to her final intentions for the world, Fielding-Smith is a rabid statist, with her as the state. Yet meanwhile, she regrets the decline of “Non-Governmental” organisations. I’m leary of the state, usually, but when the US State barges in on the NGOs, I am, for the time being, delighted. My only worry is: is it really happening? Here’s hoping.
I completely missed this posting at Freedom and Whisky on Boxing Day, until F&W supremo David Farrer rang me on another matter of mutual concern, and he mentioned it. I forget why, but I’m glad he did. (He also gave me some very helpful tips in how to use my Canon A70 camera. He now has a Canon A80, which is the same only rather more so.)
To tickle your fancies, and to ensure that a decent number of you do investigate, try this:
It was all part of this terrible attack on people by those who had nothing better to do than to give advice on all sorts of subjects. These people, who wrote in newspapers and talked on the radio, were full of good ideas on how to make people better. They poked their noses into other people’s affairs, telling them to do this and to do that. They looked at what you were eating and told you it was bad for you; then they looked at the way you raised your children and said that was bad too. And to make matters worse, they often said that if you did not heed their warnings, you would die. In this way they made everybody so frightened of them that they felt they had to accept the advice.
Who do you reckon says that? Clue: look at the categories for this posting.
As an F&W commenter points out, we spend half our lives telling, if not everybody, then at least a great many people how they should be behaving better, so maybe we’re as bad … But, if we don’t, who will interfere with the interferers, meddle with the meddlers, nanny the nannies? Anyway, go there, and enjoy.
Some are real trainspotters, and seek them out in all their literal dullness. I am a virtual skyscraperspotter, and surf the net looking for photos and descriptions. And I have just discovered a new one, the amazing Ryugyong Hotel, in Pyongyang, North Korea. When I say “new”, all I mean is I’ve only just heard about it. The thing has been in existence for well over a decade. I only encountered it because it is on the left here. Good grief, what the upper case top row of my keyboard is that? – I expostulated.
I have my answer. Says Wikipedia:
The Ryugyong Hotel is a towering, 105-story, 1,083 foot empty concrete shell in Pyongyang, North Korea. If the building ever was completed it would be considered the world’s largest hotel, and one of the tallest buildings in the world. Today however, the building remains uninhabited and unfinished.
The North Koreans began constructing the pyramid-shaped Ryugyong Hotel in 1987, reportedly aiming for 105 stories to beat out a structure the South Koreans were building in Singapore. The building was to contain 3,000 rooms and 7 revolving restaurants. The estimated cost of building it ran upwards of $750 million, which is 2% of North Korea’s GDP. It’s generally assumed construction came to a halt in 1991 because North Korea was suffering from famine, acute electricity shortages, and lack of necessary funding. The basic structure is complete, but no windows, fixtures or fittings have been installed. According to http://www.skyscrapers.com, the concrete used in building the Ryugyong Hotel is of unsuitable quality and therefore is unsafe – it cannot therefore be completed as currently built. With annual tourism numbering less than a hundred, some question the logic of building such a massive hotel. Pyongyang’s few existing hotels remain to this day, virtually empty. The 3.9-million-square-foot concrete structure continues to dominate Pyongyang’s skyline.
In other words, this building is going to supply the world with the second most dramatic demolition video ever (I am afraid it will not be the winner), and nothing else. I love that bit about how “some question the logic” of this ludicrous structure. In general, anti-collectivist propaganda does not come any more damning, and is all the more damning here because it is done so delicately. “Some question the logic …” in a country “suffering” (like it just happened to turn out that way) from “famine, acute electricity shortages, and lack of necessary funding”. Yeah, I had heard about that.
I was going to put that this makes our little Dome look like very small potatoes, public-spending-wise. But actually our Dome seems to have wasted about three times as much as the Ryugyong Hotel. (Hah!! You call that wasting public money?) The difference is that we could afford our Dome without very much mass starvation, and even now our electricity supplies are hardly ever interrupted.
Until just now, as I say, I had no idea about this ridiculous edifice, no idea at all. I guess they are not that eager to advertise it, what with it being made of cheese and having no windows and being unliveable in and liable to collapse at any moment.
The sooner President Bush finds a way of shutting down this evil joke of a country and merging it into the sensible one to the south of it, the better.
I have been slightly ill for the last couple of days, and I still am. And one of the consequences of feeling ill is that if you are quite old, you also feel old. And one of the symptoms of advancing age is that you start to fret about how almost all the news seems to be bad. (Well, course it is bad. That is its nature.)
But today, not all. From today’s Independent:
The vast majority of people from ethnic minorities feel British even if they were not born in this country, according to a report from the National Statistics department.
Racial attacks and recent political gains by the British National Party are leading to long-established immigrants becoming increasingly determined to assert their right to be in this country, it is claimed.
The research by the department, formerly the Office of National Statistics, is the first time that ethnic minorities have been asked how they feel about their national identity, rather than about their actual origin. It revealed that both first generation immigrants and those who were British-born had a strong sense of identity with their adopted country.
It would seem that we here all have one thing to thank the BNP for, which is that by claiming loudly that all these newcomers are not British, they have provoked them into insisting that they are.
I recall attending a meeting about five years ago, it must have been, at which we all talked about ethnic issues – issues meaning when people with different coloured skins fight with and shout at each other – and I was struck by the vehemence with which some of the least white people (both visually and sociologically, so to speak) present were most vehement about being British. Struck, and rather pleased. And it seems that my merely anecdotal research has been duplicated nationally, and has come up with the same answer. And I’m very glad.
After all, one of the nightmare futures for this country was that it would stop being one country at all, to the point where different fragments of it became identified not just with different bits of the ex-country, but with different bits of the world. Like the Balkans, in other words, where three different world religions (Eastern Christianity, Western Christianity, and Islam) contend at one explosive meeting point. Was that the future my generation (the last “British” generation) had bequeathed to its descendants? Apparently not.
Of course this new Britain will be – already is – very different from the old one I grew up in, and in which my mother still lives, in the leafy suburbs of the extreme west of Surrey (the bit where Surrey, Middlesex and Berkshire meet, mostly peacefully). But since when was the deal ever that your country remained the same from one century to the next?
In many ways what this means is that Britain has become rather more like the USA, more a country of immigrants and less a country of people who can trace their ancestry back to the Norman Conquest (the Norman Conquest being the event that turned this country into an Anglo-French melting pot).
Many further questions remain unanswered by surveys like this. I wonder, how would the young son or grandson of a family recently arrived in Britain from India, say, have felt watching the brilliant production of Shakespeare’s Richard II that I watched last Monday evening on the television. And I wonder exactly what he would have made of the fact that the actor playing the Duke of Aumerle, one of the doomed Richard’s favourites, was played by a black (Afro-Caribbean) actor? (Maybe nothing at all.) Did that young man feel that this is his history he was watching, as well as mine? I don’t know, but I hope he did.
I went from her to him to this.
Quote of beyond America interest:
The Bush administration’s anti-protester bias proved embarrassing for two American allies with long traditions of raucous free speech, resulting in some of the most repressive restrictions in memory in free countries. When Bush visited Australia in October, Sydney Morning Herald columnist Mark Riley observed, “The basic right of freedom of speech will adopt a new interpretation during the Canberra visits this week by the US President, George Bush, and his Chinese counterpart, Hu Jintao. Protesters will be free to speak as much as they like just as long as they can’t be heard.” Demonstrators were shunted to an area away from the Federal Parliament building and prohibited from using any public address system in the area.
For Bush’s recent visit to London, the White House demanded that British police ban all protest marches, close down the center of the city, and impose a “virtual three day shutdown of central London in a bid to foil disruption of the visit by anti-war protesters,” according to Britain’s Evening Standard. But instead of a “free speech zone” – as such areas are labeled in the U.S. – the Bush administration demanded an “exclusion zone” to protect Bush from protesters’ messages.
And the concluding paragraph:
Is the administration seeking to stifle domestic criticism? Absolutely. Is it carrying out a war on dissent? Probably not – yet. But the trend lines in federal attacks on freedom of speech should raise grave concerns to anyone worried about the First Amendment or about how a future liberal Democratic president such as Hillary Clinton might exploit the precedents that Bush is setting.
Precedents hell. I agree with Kim Du Toit. This is already bullshit. Never mind all the bullshit it brings on in the future.
Education experts are apparently flocking to Belfast. Baaaaaaaaaaaaaa humbug.
The pre-report linked to above includes an intriguing titbit:
Prof Brighouse is expected to recommend that schools and parents of pupils who perform worst in tests should receive extra Government money.
In his speech this afternoon, he will propose a financial incentive for schools to take on poorer performing students.
That could have some interesting incentive effects.
At first it reads like bad news:
China not to pursue profit-oriented education: official
BEIJING, Jan. 6 (Xinhuanet) — Chinese education minister said here Tuesday that China will not place profit-gaining capability as the primary par for education.
At a press conference organized by the State Council Information Office, Minister Zhou Ji said that education is basically a cause for social benefits.
Governmental encouragement of private investment into education does not mean gaining economic returns is the priority for schools, said Zhou, adding that more private funds could alleviate burdens of the government for financing education.
Meanwhile, China welcomes overseas partners who are able to provide quality education service to the Chinese.
A newly adopted law stipulates that private schools are legally equal to their public counterparts.
Statistics show that by the end of 2002, about 61,200 privately-funded schools enrolled more than 11 million students. A total of 712 programs were jointly carried out by Chinese and overseas educators, nine times that of seven years before.
“Profits pursuit in education might endanger equal rights of education for every Chinese citizen,” Zhou said.
What’s going on here? My take: the Chinese government knows it has to have great gobs of education if it is to race ahead economically like it wants to. But (just like India) it can’t afford to supply this entirely out of its tax revenue. So it is going to encourage private sector, profit-oriented education. But won’t encouraging profit-oriented education encourage profit-orientation? No, says the government. We won’t be encouraging profit-oriented profit-oriented education, only non-profit-oriented profit-oriented education. So there.
And the shorter version of the above reads: never believe anything until it is officially denied. In China, as in so many places, “official” is another word for “not”.
The point here is not the answer, which is contradictory waffle. The point is the question, which is: how about all this private sector education? How about it indeed.
I am increasingly starting to believe – and I seem to recall (quick phone call) our own David Carr hinting here not so long ago at something similar – that the next great challenge to statism and statist economic policies may come not from the likes of us, but from the East.
Norman Lebrecht is a name familiar to all classical CD geeks, of whom I am definitely one. He has written vast books full of rage. The air is thick with the sound of nails being hammered on the head, and of thumbs being crushed with that same hammer. Excellent explanations charge headlong into ridiculous explanations for the same phenomenon, the phenomenon to be explained usually being the “death of classical music”, which is the phrase Lebrecht sometimes gives to the current travails of the classical music performing and recording enterprise. He sometimes gets that distinction right, and then in the next sentence quite forgets about it. He knows something important is happening to something important, and he hits nail after nail into the wood pile, hoping eventually to nail it all down. (He reminds me of how I write about Modern Art.) → Continue reading: Norman Lebrecht and the death of classical music
My friend Michael Jennings is looking for a job. At the top of his CV it says:
OBJECTIVE – Find a position taking advantage of my advanced quantitative and computational skills, business and financial knowledge, and expertise in telecommunications and media and use my ability to explain complex subjects to non-technical audiences.
Michael is a one man research department, which is a very cost-effective and useful thing for a person to be. If your company or enterprise is thinking of expanding into new areas, to take advantage of newly emerging trends, technological and/or political, you need someone like Michael to answer your questions, which are liable to be complicated and which must be answered correctly. Answering complicated questions correctly is what Michael does best.
Michael is the sort of person who is easily mistaken for a useless geek, but actually he is a very useful geek indeed. There are several reasons for this. → Continue reading: Michael Jennings – your questions answered
There’s a curious use of a word to be found here, or there is now, as I concoct this, at about 4.40 pm on Sunday afternoon, London time. Maybe it will change soon. I refer to the little heading which leads to this story. The story itself is headed “Blair praises UK troops in Basra” and I have no problem with that. But the bit at the main website that leads to this story says, on the left, just under where it says “NEWS”:
Blair rallies UK troops in Basra.
Rallies. Yes, you read that right. Evidently some twit at the BBC thinks that Britain’s army has just suffered some sort of defeat.
Please understand that I am not in any way blaming Blair for this absurd word, merely the fool who put it up at the BBC website, and as I say it may soon vanish.
These people are starting seriously to believe their own bullshit.
Most of our readers probably know Tony Robinson best as the much put-upon Baldrick at the bottom of the Blackadder pecking order. He has cunning plans, but they don’t work.
However, last night I watched a Tony Robinson effort that was slightly more substantial than one of Baldrick’s plans, and an interesting sign of the times in this United Kingdom of ours, namely a couple of Channel 4 TV shows about the history of the British monarchy.
I missed the early part of the first of the two hour-long shows that airedlast night, but my understanding is that in the first, Mr Robinson started out investigating Richard III and ended up by satisfying himself that the current official Royal Family is descended from a deception, in the form of Edward IV.
Edward IV was born in 1442, having been conceived the regulation number of months before that in Rouen, France. Both the circumstances surrounding that birth, and the gossip which it immediately gave rise to say that Edward IV’s biological father wasn’t the King of England that he should have been, but was instead a French soldier whom the Queen had a brief fling with. Edward IV looked nothing like his official dad. More fuss was made when his younger brother was born than when he was. There’s a line in Shakespeare’s Richard III alluding to the gossip to the effect that Richard III’s rival was a bastard. And so on. Robinson even had himself a bona fide historian on hand to back this up with some new documentary evidence which further proved that the king was nowhere near Rouen when he should have been to be Edward’s biological dad.
It is possible – not likely but possible – that there will be an explosion of comments on this posting from people we don’t usually hear from, because believe it or not, the rights and wrongs of whether or not Richard III was or was not the Bad Thing that Shakespeare, Laurence Olivier, and now Ian McKellen, have portrayed him as remains a live issue among a certain sort of rather eccentric English person. The argument goes that Richard had the Princes in the Tower killed, not because he was a swine and wanted the Real Monarchy out of the way, but because he considered it his painful but patriotic duty to put and end to a couple of nationally disruptive fakes.
So, having satisfied himself that our actual monarchy isn’t our real monarchy, in the second of his two programmes, Robinson proceeded to chase down who our Real Monarch now is. To cut a long story short, this real King of England is a bloke called Mike Hastings, who left England to live in Australia in his teens, has had a great life there, and who actually voted for a Republic in the latest Aussie referendum on that subject. (I’m only making this up if Tony Robinson was too.) Mike and his disbelieving and frankly rather suspicious not to say rather contemptuous daughters were shown chuckling over it all, when Robinson arrived to visit him with a film crew. Although, it’s fair to add that Mike did take his ancestry seriously enough to possess his own chart, which luckily confirmed all of Robinson’s conclusions about his ancestry.
It was a thoroughly enjoyable programme, and on the whole Robinson didn’t try to make too much of things. By their own rules, the monarchs of England aren’t as kosher as they would like. If those rules had worked out differently, things would have been different. That was what he was really saying. His main conclusion wasn’t that Queen Elizabeth II should now be knocked off her throne. It was that we live in a rum old world. → Continue reading: Baldrick’s revenge – Britain’s Real Monarch is an Australian bloke called Mike!
|
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.
|
