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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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Clearly an off day here at Samizdata. So maybe today is the day for a question which I found via b3ta.com. This is a question that has always troubled me, ever since I first encountered the problem.
Warning. If you do not like questions about toilets, and in particular about how disgusting they can be when they are being really, really disgusting, then stop reading now. I mean it. This is not a nice posting. This is a crappy posting. But the way I see it, after the previous posting, I have nothing left to lose, dignity-wise.
Okay, here it is:
German toilets are quite extraordinary. Other European toilets – well, the ones that aren’t merely holes in the floor – work much like their North American cousins. They are shaped a little differently, but the basic principle is the same: the excrement either lands directly in the water or it slides down a steep slope into the water, before being flushed away. Simple, effective and clean. See?
There then follows a picture of a North American cousin type toilet. But now, and this is your last chance to stop reading this if your disgustingness threshold is low, comes this basic and most troubling fact:
Not so the German toilet.
Last chance. Okay, you asked for it.
The excrement lands on a bone-dry horizontal shelf, mere inches beneath one’s posterior. Repeated flushings are required to slide the ordure off the shelf into a small water-filled hole, from which it hopefully disappears. See?
And then there’s a picture of that, in section, as we ex-architecture students say.
And the rest of the piece can be boiled down to a one word summary: Why? What on earth, on the sun, and on all the other planets in circulation around the sun, is the point of this arrangement? Why do they do this???
The Samizdata commentariat has a growing reputation in the blogosphere for its combination of intellectual scrupulousness, technical savvy, and for its general ability to see the larger picture, to sense what are the important things in life and what are not. So people, let’s get this thing understood, and if necessary dealt with. Either we establish once and for all that there is a good reason for this apparently senseless, not to say plague inviting arrangement, and that it really does have a good reason, and then tell the world about it, or we establish that there is no good reason for this arrangement and we set in motion the (if the latter is the case) long over-due process of putting a stop to it.
The internet is a powerful thing, with a global reach. Time to use the its powers for good once again.
Nobody who has read The Road To Serfdom will have been in the least surprised at the increased use these days of the word “Czar” in political discourse. It signals the quite deliberate, conscious and explicit demand for governmental tyranny, not for its own sake, but to cut through all the crap deposited everywhere by previous government officials. Czarism signals the demand that government cease playing even by its own rules, let alone anyone else’s.
To dig a bit deeper into the subject I tried typing “czar” into Google.
I actually didn’t get as many different Czarships as I was hoping for. Not really hoping, you understand, but hoping for the purposes of this posting. I had in mind a posting along the lines of this one, which lists all the different ways in which “the public needs to be educated“. Googling reaped a rich harvest with that one. But czardoms proved to be in relatively short supply. So, in a way, I have good news to report. Not as many czardoms as you might think.
I found this Privacy Czar and a call, reported on here, for him to be replaced by the current US administration. And inevitably there is this personage, who is genuinely scary of course, to be laughed and sneered at only as part of the deadly serious business of running him out of office and abolishing his job, and strangling the fatuous ambitions it is based on.
There is this cybersecurity czar. Apart from that, very little, apparently. Is there a list of czardoms somewhere that I have missed?
In other words, and I’m really very pleased about this, truly, what I actually discovered was what these people at the Cornell University Computing Science Department, way ahead of me, had long ago spotted, which is that czardom in your average democracy is usually only a word, not to say a poisoned chalice. A czar is a commissioner, an under-secretary with special responsibility for, a “co-ordinator”, a gopher, with a grander and scarier sounding title than those, but with none of the means on his desk actually to solve the problem he has been put in charge of, which in any case has only reached the czar stage because it is insoluble.
The Cornell computerfolk would seem to have been watching all this, because they’ve taken to calling their own functionaries “czars” also.
In their case the insoluble problem is somewhat different to those confronted with czardom by your average government. Their problem is to get people to do boring things without being paid anything. And it seems that the thrill of being a czar doesn’t work any better there than elsewhere, as they foresaw.
Replacements have been requested for the following czarships. If you are interested in taking up one of these positions, or would like to have a position listed as available, please contact either the current czar listed for that position or the Czar Czar. Please remember that it is the current czar’s responsibility to find a replacement when they wish to give up a czarship, though the Czar Czar can offer suggestions of people who might be available to fill the position.
Czardom as slavery! You have to find some other poor sap to do it before you are allowed to stop. It would seem that the current Colloquium Czar is anxious to replace himself. He’s got fed up with doing this.
The Colloquium Czar unlocks the lecture hall for the weekly department colloquium and makes sure that any overhead projectors or other equipment that is needed is available. They also close up the room after the colloquium is over.
Well, at least the job is doable, for as long as you can stand doing it.
But of course, having to replace yourself is only a rule, which can be Cut Through like any other piece of Red Tape. The people in charge of these arrangements can’t actually do anything if the slave simply buggers off the plantation while neglecting to entice any other slave to perform his ex-duties. And if there are no volunteers in the first place, what do you do then?
The following czarships are no longer active, due to lack of interest or judgment that they are no longer needed. If you would like to see one of these czarships reactivated, contact the Czar Czar.
That has to be the job description of the century so far:
The overseer of the czarships, the Czar Czar maintains the current list of czarships and their corresponding czars. In addition, they keep track of any information about performing particular czar duties. If a czar wishes to retire from their position, the Czar Czar can help find possible replacements.
The name of the current Czar Czar is Stephen Chong. I know, he/she should be called “Gabor” – glad we’ve got that out of the way. But how long before a “Czar Czar” pops up for real, in a real public sector, somewhere?
Seriously, I congratulate these Cornellians (?) for having (a) spotted something seriously funny and funnily serious going on out there in the real world, (b) deciding to take some appropriate piss out of it, and (c) doing so by having some fun with their own arrangements, thereby proving that they are not taking themselves and their own activities over-seriously either.
A true understanding of the world? A sense of their own relative unimportance in that larger scheme of things? A sense of humour? Can they really be students at all?
The Toronto Star story is here.
Oh dear. It seems that they have a privacy “czar” in those parts. I don’t think of czarism as being especially good for the rights of the citizenry, do you? Be careful you don’t ever get accused of violating it, no matter how sensibly or blamelessly.
On the face of it, this posting by Alan Little is about music:
A performance of Beethoven’s 3rd Symphony, the “Eroica”, by Wilhelm Fürtwangler with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra from 1944. There are hundreds of recordings of the Eroica, dozens of which are probably excellent; but this is supposed to be one of the handful of truly great ones according to well-informed opinion on rec.music.classical.recordings. …
Later in this posting, Little was kind enough to link back to a piece I did on my Culture Blog about how Hitler’s love of classical music did dreadful harm to classical music, and when Little emailed me about his Fürtwangler piece, he probably had in mind that it would get a mere reciprocal mention on my blog. But actually, Little’s posting is more in the direction of the Samizdata agenda.
…I’m feeling distinctly queasy, though, about listening to and possibly enjoying a work of art produced under the Third Reich.
See what I mean? Little continues:
Why? I have no qualms about listening to Soviet music, Shostakovich for example. Yet Stalin was just as much of a monster as Hitler and the Soviet Union in the 1930s was at least as much as a horror as the Third Reich. So why does art produced under Stalin not make me queasy whereas art produced under Hitler does? Do I think the Soviet Union was in some ways a lesser evil than Nazi Germany? There’s not much to choose in terms of crude bodycount. But I still think it’s a good thing that the most important war memorial I’ve ever seen is two Soviet tanks in front of the Brandenburg Gate and not two panzers in Red Square; the people of Russia and Eastern Europe would have had an even worse time in the last fifty years if it had been the other way round. I think there also is a sense in which Hitler was something the German people did – they elected him and were enthusiastic about him for quite a while – whereas Stalin was something that happened to the Russians – the Bolsheviks came to power in a wartime military coup that their brilliant propaganda machine subsequently dressed up as a popular revolution.
This question of which was worse, Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, is one that fascinates me. My gut feeling is that there was indeed something an order of magnitude worse about Nazi Germany, in terms of the moral inexcusability of the people who did it rather than in terms of the destructive results – which were much of a muchness when you add it up, as Little says. Russia, you feel, or at any rate I do, was engulfed in a great wave of ideologically induced stupidity and destructive passion. They knew no better, poor fools. (I feel rather the same way about the Islamo-fascists now.) Germany, on the other hand, did know better, but went bad on purpose. Germany chose evil.
Granted, that is an extreme collectivist oversimplification of what was still a vast and vastly messy assemblage of individual decisions, nothing like all of which were as evil as the worst of them. Nevertheless, to a far greater degree than the Russians, the Germans chose, collectively, all in one conversation – so to speak, to go bad.
That also seems to be roughly how Alan Little sees it.
By the way, Little liked that Fürtwangler Eroica. A lot. “The best performance I’ve ever heard, I think.”
The blogosphere has been pulsating with comment and counter-comment about the dramatic events in Iraq over the weekend. My favourite comment of all on these events comes from Alice Bachini, who yesterday evening put up this posting, which I reproduce in its entirety, on her blog:
I’ve been away …
… and unable to get to any media for the past 24+ hours. Did something happen?
Said her first commenter, of just two so far (but she likes friendly comments so do go over there and add a friendly comment) said:
Alice. We love you.
Indeed.
Some cynical commenter I cannot remember who or where said that this weekend our naughty Labour government would choose now to bury some bad news which it would like out there but ignored. Sunday is a bad day for such trickery, but maybe there was something along these lines today.
However, my inclination is to suspect that the real Story That Just Got Buried, at any rate in Britain (Instapundit was all over it from the start, just before the Saddam Captured story broke, i.e just after he was actually captured), so far, is this, in the Sunday Telegraph yesterday. Okay, not buried exactly. The Sunday Telegraph is not buried. Shall we say: temporarily drowned out, by which I mean ignored, for the time being, by the British electronic media.
Anyway, buried or not, it is a huge story, if true:
A document discovered by Iraq’s interim government details a meeting between the man behind the September 11 attacks and Abu Nidal, the Palestinian terrorist, at his Baghdad training camp. Con Coughlin reports.
For anyone attempting to find evidence to justify the war in Iraq, the discovery of a document that directly links Mohammed Atta, the al-Qaeda mastermind of the September 11 attacks, with the Baghdad training camp of Abu Nidal, the infamous Palestinian terrorist, appears almost too good to be true.
So, ergo, it cannot be true. Right? Too good.
But what if it is true? I know, politicians – Tony Blair even – telling the truth, whatever next? But suppose, just suppose, that the Powers That Be have known all along and for absolute sure that Saddam and Al Qaeda were totally in bed with each other, but that they could not reveal how they knew because had they revealed their evidence that would have jeopardised, you know, ongoing operations, i.e. their source(s) close to Saddam? But could it be that this has now changed, what with SH now being safely in the bag? That makes the most sense of everything to me, not least the curious behaviour of our Prime Minister, apparently so willing to hang himself out to dry over this war, but actually sucking his critics into what a spin doctoral friend of mine calls a “killing ground”? “I told you to trust me. You should have.” I can hear it now.
I do not have time to comment at any more length as I am now off to an impromptu Samizdata social, but Melanie Phillips, to whom my thanks for reminding me that I had read this story yesterday and like her been very struck by it, does comment some more. So go read her.
Written in a rush. So apologies for misprints and/or contorted prose, which I reserve the right to clean up later.
If anything odd happens to the weather, they blame Global Warming and say that therefore it will get worse and that we are to blame. We Brought It On Ourselves. But it must be admitted that it, in this case, is rather startling:
BARCELONA, Spain — A Spanish-American scientific team will be scanning the United States this winter for what might be one of the weirdest byproducts of global warming: great balls of ice that fall from the sky.
The baffling phenomenon was first detected in Spain three years ago and has since been reported in a number of other countries, including the United States. So scientists now plan to monitor in a systematic way what they call “megacryometeors” — or great balls of ice that fall from the sky.
“I’m not worried that a block of ice may fall on your head,” said Dr. Jesus Martinez-Frias of the Center for Astrobiology in Madrid. “I’m worried that great blocks of ice are forming where they shouldn’t exist.”
Ice balls, which generally weigh 25 to 35 pounds but can be much bigger, have punched holes in the roofs of houses, smashed through car windshields, and whizzed right past people’s heads.
How very odd, as we say here. And as you constantly say if you are a regular reader of Dave Barry.
It’s tempting to start speculating where, and upon whom or what, we would most like one of these things to land.
More great news, this time on the Ozzy Osbourne front. He’s not going to die:
Rock star Ozzy Osbourne is breathing unaided for the first time since his quad bike accident a week ago.
The former Black Sabbath singer has been taken off a ventilator and has been able to speak to his family.
And with his old verbal fluency unimpaired, I trust.
Not long ago I caught Ozzy and daughter Kelly doing their Christmas single Changes on Top of the Pops, which is now number one in the hit parade apparently. And then immediately after that Ozzy had to be rushed to hospital following his prang, and Kelly rushes there to see him. You can’t buy publicity like that, because you can’t fake it.
This tune, for me, personifies the way that pop music these days, at least the sort of pop music you see on British telly, has become more and more something that your granny can recognise and sing along with. Not like it was in my day. In my day we used to drive elder brothers and sisters crazy, never mind our parents and grandparents. But now the man who used to bite the heads off bats is in that same celebrity category that used to be occupied by the Queen Mother and now also accommodates England’s rugby darling Jonny Wilkinson. (Although, it seems that many elder brother types are angry about Changes. This angry bloke reminds me of how my contemporaries at Essex University in the early seventies reacted to Donny Osmond.)
With his latest effort Ozzy has apparently set a new pop record, of the Guinness-Book-of variety:
The singer has set a new record for the longest time taken to reach number one during a career, reaching the top of the charts 33 years after his first hit with Black Sabbath, Paranoid, got to number four in August 1970.
Ah, Paranoid. Those were the days, eh? Who would have thought that Ozzy Osbourne of all people would live long enough to break a record like that?
The cost of gathering information determines the size of organizations.
– Ronald Coase, quoted by Everett Ehrlich in
yesterday’s Washington Post
From Dodgeblogium, to Harry’s Place, to this, from today’s Observer:
Not the least of the casualties of the Iraq war is the death of anti-fascism. Patriots could oppose Bush and Blair by saying that it wasn’t in Britain’s interests to follow America. Liberals could put the UN first and insist that the United States proved its claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction before the court of world opinion. Adherents to both perspectives were free to tell fascism’s victims, ‘We’re sorry to leave you under a tyranny and realise that many more of you will die, but that’s your problem.’
The Left, which has been formally committed to the Enlightenment ideal of universal freedom for two centuries, couldn’t bring itself to be as honest. Instead millions abandoned their comrades in Iraq and engaged in mass evasion. If you think that it was asking too much to expect it to listen to people in Iraq when they said there was no other way of ending 35 years of oppression, consider the sequel. Years after the war, the Kurdish survivors of genocide and groups from communists through to conventional democrats had the right to expect fraternal support against the insurgency by the remnants of the Baath Party. They are being met with indifference or active hostility because they have committed the unforgivable sin of cooperating with the Americans. For the first time in its history the Left has nothing to say to the victims of fascism.
Or, as I recall Mark Steyn putting it in a recent piece, the left now echoes Cold War anti-Communist and pro-any-other-anti-Communist USA in saying: “Saddam Hussein may be a son-of-a-bitch but he’s our son-of-a-bitch.”
Following up the somewhat irrelevant but entirely excellent and useful comment number one on the previous post, here’s Ananova:
Reports are coming in that Saddam Hussein has been captured in Iraq.
The reports, from the Iran News Agency and an Iraqi Kurdish leader, claim he’s been arrested in Tikrit.
There has been no confirmation from the US Defence Department or the Ministry of Defence.
“Saddam Hussein was arrested in his hometown of Tikrit,” the agency IRNA quoted top Iraqi leader Jalal Talabani as saying. It gave no further details.
The reports have sparked celebrations by hundreds of people in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk.
In Baghdad, a US spokeswoman told reporters that a “very important” announcement would be made at a news conference scheduled for 3pm local time (1200 GMT) but did not say who would be the speaker.
Here’s hoping it’s true.
I disagree almost completely with George Monbiot’s political ideas, but I share his curiosity about the Revolutionary Communist Party, that’s Living Marxism, no: LM (as LM for Living Marxism as in L for nothing M for nothing), no Spiked, that is to say Institute of Ideas. Who are these people?
Here is the Monbiot version, from last Tuesday’s Guardian:
The organisation began in the late 1970s as a Trotskyist splinter called the Revolutionary Communist party. It immediately set out to destroy competing oppositionist movements. When nurses and cleaners marched for better pay, it picketed their demonstrations. It moved into the gay rights group Outrage and sought to shut it down. It tried to disrupt the miners’ strike, undermined the Anti-Nazi League and nearly destroyed the radical Polytechnic of North London. On at least two occasions RCP activists physically attacked members of opposing factions.
In 1988, it set up a magazine called Living Marxism, later LM. By this time, the organisation, led by the academic Frank Furedi, the journalist Mick Hume and the teacher Claire Fox, had moved overtly to the far right. LM described its mission as promoting a “confident individualism” without social constraint. It campaigned against gun control, against banning tobacco advertising and child pornography, and in favour of global warming, human cloning and freedom for corporations. It defended the Tory MP Neil Hamilton and the Bosnian Serb ethnic cleansers. It provided a platform for writers from the corporate thinktanks the Institute for Economic Affairs and the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise. Frank Furedi started writing for the Centre for Policy Studies (founded by Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher) and contacting the supermarket chains, offering, for £7,500, to educate their customers “about complex scientific issues”.
In the late 1990s, the group began infiltrating the media, with remarkable success. For a while, it seemed to dominate scientific and environmental broadcasting on Channel 4 and the BBC. It used these platforms (Equinox, Against Nature, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, Counterblast, Zeitgeist) to argue that environmentalists were Nazi sympathisers who were preventing human beings from fulfilling their potential. In 2000, LM magazine was sued by ITN, after falsely claiming that the news organisation’s journalists had fabricated evidence of Serb atrocities against Bosnian Muslims. LM closed, and was resurrected as the web magazine Spiked and the thinktank the Institute of Ideas.
All this is already in the public domain. But now, thanks to the work of the researcher and activist Jonathan Matthews (published today on his database www.gmwatch.org), what seems to be a new front in this group’s campaign for individuation has come to light. Its participants have taken on key roles in the formal infrastructure of public communication used by the science and medical establishment.
I am in favour of good science, progressive technology, and I’m pretty sure I like genetic engineering insofar as I understand it. Above all, I’m in favour of what Monbiot calls “individuation”, and despise the idea that this makes me or anyone else who believes in it “far right”, i.e. (the old smear) in league with Nazis (who flatly opposed “individuation”). And “confident individualism” sounds great, and I believe that it is restrained by the confident individualism of other individuals. I’m against gun control, and against banning tobacco advertising.
So, does all that make Spiked/Institute of Ideas good guys? Apparently. → Continue reading: Revolutionary Communist Party as in Living Marxism as in LM as in Spiked and Institute of Ideas – I agree with George Monbiot: who are these people?
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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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