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It may be silly that sport affects politics, but it does. In 1966, England won the soccer World Cup, and it definitely did rub off on the Labour Government then in power and on Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson. British proles can do it, who needs the bloody toffs?, etc. etc. Wilson certainly milked that win all he could for his political team.
So when, in the quarter-finals of the next World Cup in 1970, the England soccer team was gut-wrenchingly beaten 3-2 (after being 2-0 up) by the very same opponents they’d beaten in the 1966 final, West Germany, they were widely debited/credited with tipping the balance in favour of the Conservatives at the general election held very soon afterwards. The proles weren’t so cool after all, you see.
The England soccer team has never since scaled the heights of 1966, but the infusion of television money and foreign stars nevertheless gave English soccer in the 1990s a glamour and a cultural clout that it had probably never had before. Soccer now completely dominates the sports pages, having utterly routed the now very forlorn cricket as England’s “national game”. And (“New”) Labour has once again made use of all that in its propaganda about rebranding and modernising and generally being Cool Britannia.
There is now another World Cup approaching which may have a similar, although more muted, political effect, in the form of the Rugby Word Cup, which kicks off next Friday when host nation Australia plays Argentina in Sydney. England are strongly fancied to win this, although the truth is that any one of about half a dozen closely matched teams could win, of whom England are just one. If England do win or at least do very well (by winning through to the final in grand style and then being heroically and narrowly beaten, say), this could have party political vibes back here in Britain. If England disappoint, ditto, in the sense that the dog I am about to describe won’t have barked after all.
Basically, it would suit the Conservatives if the England rugby team were to triumph, while many Labour supporters would probably prefer England to make a humiliatingly early exit. → Continue reading: How the Rugby World Cup might influence British party politics
This is like something out of a comic novel:
The players know who they are, the media knows who they are and, thanks to the internet, millions of members of the public know who they are.
But yesterday, despite fears that fans of the clubs involved in the Premiership rape allegations would publicly finger the suspects at the tops of their voices, football crowds showed uncharacteristic restraint.
Just to make sure, sound engineers turned down microphones to prevent obscene chanting being heard by television viewers and radio listeners. But there was no need. Football fans, armed obviously with a better working knowledge of the law of contempt of court than the editors of some of the websites and papers they read, kept any taunting of the players involved in the 17-year-old girl’s claims to themselves.
So, no chanting on matters that are sub judice.
I’ve just bought a new digital radio and it’s wonderful. Finally, I can receive BBC Radio 3 without analogical interruptions, which are perpetual where I live, in London SW1. You’d think that London SW1 would get good radio signals, wouldn’t you? But no. Too many towers? Too much electro-wizardry protecting the Queen and her Ministers? The weird weather conditions here in inner London? You tell me. (Truly, do tell me. We have a famously informed commentariat here.) Whatever the reason, until now I simply could not listen confidently to a Prom, say, without having to get up and fiddle with the damn radio every ten minutes, and as often as not all my fiddling would be powerless to stop the bonfire noises and the distortions.
But the new radio is fabulous. The sound is damn near as clean as a whistle, with no hint of an interruption. And it is especially fabulous when attached to my existing lo- to medium-fi CD playing system, thereby enabling me to tone down the treble and tone up the bass, which is how I prefer things. For some annoying reason, portable radios and CD players no longer seem to have treble or bass nobs built in to them. Is this the influence of the rise of Pop and the fall of Classical? (There goes another opportunity to distinguish yourself with a pertinent and informative comment.)
Talk of treble and bass makes me sound like a hi- rather than medium- to lo-fi-er. But so long as the sound meets my minimum quality threshold, I’m content, and my minimum quality doesn’t cost that much. The main thing is that treble/bass thing. I certainly don’t need to spend the many hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of pounds that you see mentioned in the review pages of hi-fi magazines, or in the hi-fi pages of the classical CD mags at the back, where loudspeakers look more like Daleks than the rectangular little boxes that I have.
The new radio is little handbag type object and it only cost a hundred quid, reduced by twenty at Dixon’s. It also has a built-in CD player, which means, what with my previous portable CD player having conked out, that I can now again play CDs quietly in my bedroom or living room, instead of having to switch up the main system in the kitchen whenever I want to listen outside the kitchen, and infuriate my neighbours. The treble/bass thing is a nuisance, but some kinds of music are more vulnerable to this limitation that others, so I’ll be fine. Harpsichord music, for example, doesn’t seem to worry about what would normally be too much treble.
So this is a quantum leap in my listening pleasure, like being given a vanload of unfamiliar CDs. And I also think that my pleasure throws light on three apparently rather separate sonic issues of the last few decades.
� First, hi-fi-ers were disturbed by what they regarded as the sonic imperfections of CDs compared with the old vinyl gramophone records.
� Second, the recording industry itself is infuriated by the apparent indifference of the public to the new Higher Figher formats like SACD.
� And third, there is the fact that the fastest growing sector of the music business is “historic” reissues on CD.
What gives? → Continue reading: Adequate sound is adequate: what matters is not being interrupted: thoughts on digital radio, SACD and the historic reissue business
Patrick Crozier reflects on the privacy dilemmas of celebs, in this case the soccer celebs who are being accused of gang rape.
He concludes: (1) privacy for such people is dead (“I found out the name of the club involved in 10 minutes”), (2) for a celeb simply being cleared is not enough, (3) this affects the club(s) hugely (well yes! – BM), and (4) If Patrick were an accused celeb he’d tell the truth in public (either way) quickly.
The whole thing (not that much longer than this) is here.
Today’s New York Times has a useful piece comparing and contrasting the legally enforced privacy (and unprivacy) implications of various different kinds of cable TV, internet use, etc. What are the powers of the IRS? What are the legal rights of the music industry as they go after music piracy? That kind of thing. If that’s what you want, go here.
Nowadays the gadgetry available even to quite non-rich people is advancing at a hectic rate, and the people in the shops selling these gadgets can’t keep up with it. The very thing that makes you want to go back to the shop to ask them how the hell it works is the exact same reason why they can’t help you. They can’t keep up with what’s in all their boxes any more than you can quickly work out what’s in your box. If the bloke in Dixon’s was smart enough to explain all the nuances of digital radio or Norton anti-virus software, he wouldn’t be working in Dixon’s, now would he?
So what do you do? Read the manual? Yes, but only as a last resort. The real trick with new technology is to watch what your friends are using, and if it works, get one of those yourself. That way, any new discoveries made by any of you about whatever it is can become common knowledge for the entire group of you. You can also share things like discs and data cards. This is how standards emerge in the free society. They aren’t imposed. People buy them, by buying what their friends also have. And people are being smart. Other things being equal, which they often are, get the same stuff as your mate down the road.
I mention this now because a user group may be starting to form in my little bit of the blogosphere, around one of the Canon range of digital cameras, the Canon PowerShot A70. → Continue reading: Buy the Canon PowerShot A70 and explain it to me – that’s what friends are for
The Adam Smith Institute has assembled a group of economic forecasters to prognosticate about the British Economy. Their findings aren’t yet up at the ASI site, but the latest ASI email Bulletin helpfully sums up their findings, thus:
Gordon Brown has sown the seeds of his own destruction. At this rate he’ll soon have to put the economy in his wife’s name.
There are bad times just around the corner. Will there be better times around the corner after that corner? I live in hope.
More creepy Big Blunkettry, this time from Scotland (on Sunday):
EVERY secondary school pupil in Scotland is to be issued with an ID card bearing his or her name, age and address, under a controversial government scheme branded last night as an assault on privacy.
The ‘entitlement cards’ will be issued to 400,000 12 to 18-year-olds from March next year and will be used for a range of services including school meals and leisure centres.
Nice trick. Get a card, or go hungry.
But the scheme – which has already been piloted in Aberdeen – was condemned yesterday as a cynical ploy to introduce national identity cards for adults by the back door.
The bit of this Scotland on Sunday story that did most to threaten my digestion was this:
An Executive spokesman told Scotland on Sunday that the scheme, officially called ‘Dialogue Youth’, would see 400,000 cards given to all Scotland’s 12-18 year olds. The spokesman said they would not be compulsory.
Dialogue Youth. Puke. And they won’t be compulsory. It’s just that if you don’t carry one, you won’t be able to do anything or buy anything.
Being a rather lazy person about everything except thinking, I love to think about how to ensure that the few feeble bursts of libertarian effort I manage to put in every few days actually have some beneficial impact. The well known link between fondness for strategy and fondness for sitting in armchairs is no mere coincidence.
So I was delighted when Alex Singleton chose, for the talk he gave at my most recent last-Friday-of-the-month meeting in my London SW1 home (email me if you want to be notified of future events in this infinite series), the subject of libertarian tactics and strategy, winning the ideological war for libertarianism, etc. etc. (Like me, Alex continues to use the L-word.)
Despite the word war being in the title it was a relaxed and good humoured evening, and not just because Alex is a relaxed and good humoured person, although that helped. More importantly, Alex is optimistic about the difference that free, self-controlling and even self-funded individuals or tiny groups of individuals can make to the libertarian cause. Because of that, he felt no urge to lay out a master libertarian strategy which all must be commanded, which in practice means begged, to sign up to. We were presented with no Big Central Plan for Libertarian Success. Which makes sense, given that we are so suspicious about Big Central Plans for other things.
Alex made much of that familiar scenario where there exists a universal statist consensus, which one individual then breaks. Peter Bauer breaks the consensus that Foreign Aid is an automatically Good Thing. Terence Kealey breaks the consensus that in the modern world Pure Science must be funded by the government in order to proceed satisfactorily. E. G. West breaks the consensus that The State was responsible for the rise of mass literacy and mass education in the now rich world, and that without State funding for mass education, mass education would cease.
In his own recent line of business, Alex and his small group of collaborators at the International Policy Network have been busily helping to chip away at the widely held belief – nothing like universal in this case (thanks e.g. to Peter Bauer) – that “globalisation” in general, and international free trade in particular, is a bad and scary thing, and that the only answer is a gigantic global tax system. (Not all globalisation is bad, it would seem.) A huge number of delegates can assemble for some international drone-fest in some First World enclave in the Third World, but it only takes a quite small number of cunning activists to piss very visibly into the consensual soup that is served up on such occasions, if only because the media do so love an argument. Free Trade bad? Just find a handful of local Third World farmers who love Free Trade and whose only complaint about it is that there isn’t more of it, tell all the media about them, and take some good photos of them and stick them up on the Internet.
The Internet has helped all this tremendously, as I surely don’t need to say here but will anyway, by putting professional presentation and idea-spreading into the hands of individuals and small groups, who now need only to be canny operators with the gift of the gab. Appropriately enough, Alex is about to start another job with another quite small group of schemers, namely the Adam Smith Institute (he’s already their blogmeister), who are likewise regularly assumed by those familiar with their ideas and impact but not with their working conditions to be a whole lot bigger and grander and better funded than they really are.
Plenty more of interest got said by those present, but that will do as a first reaction to a most convivial evening. I meant to stick this up on Saturday morning, but got diverted from doing that by not doing it. Luckily, there are some ideas in this world that are good enough to last a few days, the significance of individual and small team action definitely being one of them.
The Adam Smith Institute Weblog seems to have hit the ground running, and Jonny Fraser’s piece about harassment in the USA by cops and bureaucrats and stupid laws is provoking a fine old comment fest. Quote:
On entering the country, with no matter what passport, you are treated like a criminal or socio-economic migrant. Several forms need to be filled in, many of their requirements duplicated, unnecessary and arbitrary. This practice does not stop at international boundaries. There are occasional police checks on interstate roads, and even occasionally at state borders. Post 9/11 fear is all encompassing.
Rights are being eroded and regulations piled on like cheese and freedom fries at a burger joint. It seems that obesity and laughable laws have a bizarre relationship. In America, you can die for your country at 18, but you cannot buy a beer until you are 21. In America you can kill on the roads with reckless driving at 15 in some states, but experienced drivers usually have to stay below 55 miles per hour or risk a ludicrously overpriced speeding ticket.
California is the worst state for this sort of thing. Their claim to liberalism extends as far as a blanket ban on smoking in public places, …
I particularly liked Kevin Carson’s comment, responding to American critics of American critics. Final paragraph:
Well guess what? I DO have a bad attitude. It’s because of people with “bad attitudes” that we’re not still working on chain gangs to build a pyramid, or eating our lunches standing up during a sixteen hour shift on an assembly line. For every liberty that sets us above the level of a slave, you can thank somebody with a bad attitude. Rights are not granted by government; they are forced on it from below.
It is good that the ASI blog is not confining itself to municipal bus privatisation and such like. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
David Sucher has another post on ubiquitous computing. He quotes from the sales puff for one manifestation of this stuff:
IntelliBadgeTM: Towards Providing Location-Aware Value-Added Services at Academic Conferences … The major characteristic of this project is the fusion of RFID technology, database management, data mining, real-time information visualization, and interactive web application technologies into an operational integrated system deployed at a major public conference. The developed system tracks conference attendees …
Sounds like another one for Natalie’s list.
It’s one thing to promise not to pass on data to other organisations, and it’s another thing again not to pass on data to other organisations:
JetBlue Airways passengers, more than a million of them, have been unsuspecting guinea pigs in a Defense Department contractor’s experiment in mining commercial databases to assess the risk of a person turning out to be a terrorist. The airline admits it violated its own privacy policy when it acceded to the Pentagon’s request to give passenger records to Torch Concepts, a private technology business that was ostensibly creating a program to enhance security at military bases.
That’s paragraph one of a New York Times story today. This is the final para:
This misstep only feeds legitimate consumer fears that companies and governments are too quick to use private data in unauthorized ways. It is worrisome, in this regard, that the Homeland Security Department has already backtracked from its original vow to use its passenger-profiling program only to fight terrorism. There is now talk of turning it into an all-purpose law-enforcement tool. For its part, in addition to ascertaining what actually took place, Congress may also need to consider new legal protections for consumers’ privacy.
Mission creep, in other words.
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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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