Just because you have a Self doesn’t mean you should express it.
– Amy Alkon
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June 25th, 2003 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
 In a characteristic Samizdata posting, Perry de Havilland regrets the modern use of the phrase “Big Brother” to describe reality TV shows, and harks back to Orwell’s original coinage, with grim pictures of CCTV surveillance cameras outside primary schools, and of propaganda for CCTV cameras in the form of big posters in the London Underground. All this anti-surveillance thinking over at Samizdata is connected to the recent launch of this new blog, which will be concerned with civil liberties and “intrusive state” issues. I’ve already done a couple of posts here, the most substantial of which concerned organ donorship, and I intend to contribute many more similar efforts. The boss of White Rose is one of my closest friends. However, I have long been nursing heretical thoughts about this total surveillance stuff, which it makes sense to put on a “culture” blog rather than on a politics blog. Because what I think is at stake here is a sea change not just in state surveillance, but in the culture generally. What is more, it is a sea change which places programmes like Big Brother right at the centre of what is happening. → Continue reading: Reflections on “Big Brother”: the total surveillance society and the prescience of popular culture June 25th, 2003 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
From what I have observed over the years, one of the things in the world that annoys lefties more than almost anything else in the world is a somewhat drunk and somewhat old guy singing My Way, the song made famous by Frank Sinatra. The reason people sing it is because they understand freedom and what freedom is all about. The right to do things your way, your pride when you have, the fact that this will involve mistakes, but so what? That’s what the song is all about and we all know it. And that’s why lefties hate it so. For them, it is the sound of defeat. It is the sound of people who have consciously and deliberately turned their backs on lefty bullshit and have decided to do things their way, as often as not with their own money. Ask yourself this. How often do they get drunk and sing this song at NGO/tranzi conferences? Not often is my guess, or if so only with post-modern irony, which doesn’t count. So, thanks to Dave Barry for linking to this story, which shows that in the Philippines people take this song seriously, just as people do everywhere else. Basically someone wasn’t singing the song very well, and was stabbed to death.
He sang more truly than he knew. June 25th, 2003 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
From the Radio Times (paper only) of 14-20 June 2003, on the subject of the BBC4 TV programme “High Rise Dreams”, shown on Thursday June 19th:
In the Radio Times of 21-28 June 2003, on the subject of the repeat showing on BBC4 TV of the same programme on Sunday June 22nd:
Well that removes the obvious political bias, but I’m afraid that if the idea was to make this puff less wrong-headed, it scarcely begins to deal with the deeper problems of it. The implication, still being assiduously pushed on the quiet by the more blinkered sort of dinosaur partisan for the Modern Movement in architecture, is that the failures of the Modern Movement were all externally imposed, by penny pinching bureaucrats and by horrid, politically motivated politicians like the hated Margaret Thatcher, and that if only more money had been made available and they’d been allowed to get on with what they were doing unimpeded by their mindless enemies, all would have been well. A logical (if not moral) equivalent would be if the Radio Times were to talk about how a group of idealistic Nazis tried to improve the world, inspired by the philosophy of Adolf Hitler, but about how they were thwarted (a) because not enough resources were devoted to doing Nazism, and (b) because Nazism’s opponents decided, for who-knows-what wrongheaded and arbitrary reasons, to barge in there and put a stop to it. With more money and less silly opposition from ideologically motivated enemies, all could – and would – have been well. (I dare say there are still a few old Nazis around who think this.) The truth is that if (even) more money had been made available than was, the devastation cause by the Modern Movement in architecture in Britain would have been even more devastating. The Modern Movement was animated by numerous seriously bad ideas (and by just sufficient good ones to make all the bad ones catch on seriously). It would require an entire specialist blog to do full justice to all these errors. I’ll end this post by alluding to just two such ideas, among dozens. The Modern Movement is shot through with the idea that to put up an “experimentally designed” block of flats and immediately to invite actual people to live in it is a clever rather than a deeply stupid thing to do. Experimental-equals-good is the equation they swallowed whole. This is rubbish. Many experiments are excellent, as experiments. But what they mostly tell you, the way his numerous failed lightbulbs told Thomas Edison, is what not to do. Imagine if Edison had gone straight to production with his first idea of what a lightbulb might be. That was sixties housing in Britain. No wonder so much of it had to be dynamited. The idea of a “vertical street”, also made much of by certain Britain’s Modern Movement architects, is also rubbish. Streets have to be at least a bit horizontal or they don’t work. Think square wheel. I’ve chosen those two notions in particular because they were emphasised in the programme itself, the general tone of which was decidedly different from the puffs in the Radio Times. I think I’ve found the culprit. June 22nd, 2003 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
There’s a good piece in today’s Sunday Telegraph about the British government’s unceasing determination to introduce ID cards. This time it was yet another “consultation procedure”, the purpose of which was to demonstrate overwhelming public support for the idea:
One of the many things this episode illustrates is the great power of quite small groups, whenever any politician claims that there is “overwhelming” support for anything. You can prove that wrong just by opening your mouths and mouthing off, and if they’re wrong about that, what else are they wrong about? “Unanimous” support, which often takes the form of some ass in a suit saying that “nobody is saying” what you then proceed to say and prove that you’ve been saying for years, can be even more easily punctured. June 22nd, 2003 | Comments are closed
About twenty years ago – Binghamton University in upstate New York – a paved plaza between the main library building and the computer center building – an installation of assorted works of “modern art” sculpture is scattered about this plaza as part of some arts festival. There is an empty cement base near the entrance to the computer center, apparently the sculpture that is supposed to be there has not yet arrived. There is a construction project at another part of the campus, at least half a mile away. During the night some unknown group of pranksters hijacked a huge section of concrete tube – perhaps six feet in diameter and eight feet in length – and somehow transported it to that empty base. Hundreds of people passed it every hour as students went from class to class. Most ignored it, just as they ignored the other sculptures, but many paused to glance at it, even to stop and study it, discuss it. Everyone assumed it was another example of modern art. (I must confess that I fell for the trick; to me it didn’t look any stranger than any of the other “works of art” on display.) Several days passed before the organizers of the art exhibit realized what had happened. The temporary work of art was returned to its intended use at the construction site and campus security was ordered to investigate. The arts community was in an uproar. The perpetrator of this crime against society must be tracked down and punished! I don’t know if campus security took this seriously or not. (I think that they probably just enjoyed a good laugh over the matter.) The culprits were never caught. Jim June 21st, 2003 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
If White Rose is all about how little bits of bad news add up to a bigger, badder picture, then my experience today of some things that were said during a BBC4 Radio programme to be broadcast in the autumn is, I think, relevant. The programme is to be about organ donation, organ selling, etc. I was arguing for the right of individuals to sell their body parts, but the dominant attitude was that donation for free would be quite sufficient, provided that presumed consent replaces the rule of presumed non-consent. This was what Dr Michael Wilks, the Chairman of the Ethics Committee of the British Medical Association, said, and as you can see from this 1998 BBC report, he has been arguing for this switch for some time. At present, if you want it to be known that your bodily organs are available for transplant in the event of your death, you are urged to carry a card to this effect. What Wilks wants is that if you do not want your organs used thus, you must carry a card to that effect. Or maybe, by way of an alternative, that you must put your name on a national computerised register of the unwilling, so to speak. I don’t know exactly how huge a change this would be. As infringements of civil liberties go, this one is quite subtle, quite deft, quite gentle. But as with so many proposed new arrangements, much depends upon the people running the system being both highly competent and highly trustworthy. Wilks said something else rather creepy, which explains a lot about the way the law is increasingly being misused in Britain to impose new arrangements of questionable value. He said that in practice, reversing the principle of presumed consent wouldn’t make that much difference, because what really mattered was for the NHS to spend more (i.e. be given more to spend) on transplant surgery. The reason we do less transplant surgery than certain other countries (Spain in particular was held up for our admiration) is not that we still presume non-consent, but that we spend less on transplant surgery. So, in other words, this national donor card system or this national computerised register, which you must carry or register on if you do not want your organs being transplanted after you’ve finished with them, would, in Britain, be somewhat superfluous. So why bother with it? Well, the nearest to an answer we got was that switching the law around like this would stir up some good publicity for the general cause of transplant surgery, and thus indirectly make it more likely that those “increased resources” of which he spoke would in years to come be forthcoming from the aroused taxpayers of Britain – it being easier to change the law than get all the money he wanted. But I got the distinct impression that if offered either the law change or the money, but not both, he’d take the money in a blink and leave the law untouched. This is our old friend “law as sending a message”, law as the way to scare up a “national debate” which lots of people take part in because the law is threatening to mess them about, law change as the answer to “apathy” (a word that was much used in this particular debate). Wilks is not the only one to think like this about the law. Indeed, proposing legal change simply to get attention for one’s particular enthusiasm is a national mental disease right now, I would say. It’s one of the many reasons why we have so many laws, and so many more laws than we should have. And having lots of laws means that the idea of only the guilty needing to fear increased state surveillance doesn’t work, because all of us are bound to be guilty of something. But I digress. Personally, face to face, Wilks was civility and sanity itself. He was just the sort of GP that you’d want, and in fact used to be a GP. That he thinks like this is not, I should guess, because he is in any way a wicked person, but merely because he breathes the same intellectual air that the rest of us do. It’s somewhat off the message of this blog, but I can’t resist adding that after Wilks had gone, a rather more down-market contributor to the programme – a lady Jehovah’s Witness no less – pointed out that part of the reason that Spain excels in transplant surgery, more so than Britain, is that they are worse drivers than us, and thus have a greater supply of nice fresh young organs, of the sort that the transplant surgeons prefer. Hah! June 20th, 2003 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
This from today’s (well yesterday’s now ? I was trying to get something up before midnight) Telegraph:
What a world of misery and sleaze is captured in these few paragraphs. And how about Nepad? Don’t they realise that “Nep” is the start of other words, which suggest anything but “good governance”, but which instead involve such practices as nominating one’s successor from within the ranks of one’s own family? → Continue reading: Africa? A suggestion June 20th, 2003 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
In a comment on this posting by David, I promised to say when Sean Gabb’s then promised piece on the abolition of the office of Lord Chancellor by the current British government appeared. What is interesting is Gabb’s objection to this move. He doesn’t mind all that much when it comes to substance. What he dislikes is the abolition of the office itself, that is to say of its title. Such moves, says Sean, and there have been many others, cut us off from our past and destroy our sense of our national history. And this is probably deliberate, he says. It is an article, you might say, about the power of words. But don’t take my word for it. Read the words yourself. It’s quite short. June 18th, 2003 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
As I stated in my original post on Patrick’s entry, I do believe that blogs at least influence people, if not convert them. Yet. I was a libertarian prior to finding Samizdata, but over the 18 months or so that I have been reading Samizdata, I have been directly influenced by what I have read. I used to be a reluctant voter thinking that to be a libertarian meant being a Libertarian (i.e., member of the American Libertarian Party) and that taking part in the political process was the only way to be a libertarian. When I read Samizdata, I saw people who didn’t really care that much which political party was in power, but were in the business of changing ‘meta-contexts’ and going around the state, rather than through it. Further, I saw people who were influenced by Mises, Popper, and Hayek rather than the usual Rand and Rothbard that you find in America, yet arrive at the same basic conclusions on most issues. I saw people who were proud of Western culture. I saw people who were proud of defeating the Nazis in WWII rather than simply seeing it as just another state war, with all of its side-effects. These were all things that made me believe that it was okay to be a libertarian and agree with those ideas. Since this is a culture blog, let me mention that the ‘culture’ of Samizdata had a lot to do with its success. Yes, the brilliant writing on the blog is vital to convert readers. But the culture is also essential. Pictures of Samizdatistas drinking, acting goofy, fondling women, and making fun of war protestors gives the impression that libertarians aren’t angry gun nuts from Montana (the stereotype in America), but are simply regular, everyday people. And the last way in which Samizdata influenced me is to start my own website with similar characteristics – a group blog focused on Austrian economics, with a ‘laid-back’ non-angry-gun-nut atmosphere, and periodic ‘off-topic’ content. I was already a libertarian, and perhaps I’m not the best example of blogs influencing, if not converting people, but the blogosphere is young. If our ideas are better than the rest, then they will rub-off with time. After hearing Perry being on a forum with ‘mainstream’ media on BBC last week, I really think that Samizdata has a chance to be something special. And it’s a classic libertarian strategy: carve a new niche, go around the established paths, and succeed on what you do best. The blogosphere is the new niche, and Samizdata is at the top. Jonathan Wilde June 18th, 2003 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
This article by Mick Cleary contains what is for me the best sporting quote so far of the new century. To get it you have to get the setting. Last Saturday England played and very narrowly defeated the New Zealand All Blacks rugby team, in Wellington, New Zealand. Either side could have won it, but England did, and it’s only the second time that England have beaten New Zealand in New Zealand, the last time being in 1973. The episode of the game that is already starting to be a rugby legend was the ten minutes early in the second half when two key England players, Dallaglio and Back, were off the field for ten minutes for infringements. New Zealand were encamped on the England line, and a New Zealand try looked like a pushover, literally, followed in all likelihood by another. Game over, in other words. But for the next ten minutes the six remaining England forwards stood firm against the eight New Zealand forwards, and not only prevented a New Zealand try but contrived to get England up the other end and enable England goal-kicking wonder boy Jonny Wilkinson to kick yet another penalty goal. I can remember when eight New Zealand forwards would prevailed against twelve Englishmen. As I say, the stuff of legend. → Continue reading: What was going through Martin Johnson’s head? – a sporting reply to savour June 16th, 2003 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have placed my bets. I am now a blogger, and I intend to die a blogger. And how will that work? “Today folks, I want to take another crack at the crisis in the Middle Ea………..UUUUURRRRRGHHHH!!!!” Crash. Head hits keyboard. Interestingly, funny random typing, thus – “;ldsrh;rg;gfmj’o;sarl’mj;gdvlklkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk” – is what you might then expect. But it turns out that if your head does hit the keyboard, almost or even absolutely nothing happens. Try it. Pressing random keys one at a time, monkey-Shakespeare style, gets you a mess of letters as above. Pressing just one key continuously gets you kkkkkkkkk, also as above. But pressing fifteen keys at once and holding them all down continuously while keeping the head motionless seems to achieve nothing. Delete the above two paragraphs only if they crack immortality soon enough to include me, and if that happens I intend to blog for ever and ever. (And how might that work in the decades and centuries to come?!?!?) What I’m saying is that I think blogging can only get bigger and better until it conquers the whole world and there are blogs everywhere about everything. Samizdata’s readership seems to be creeping ever upwards. Yes there are numbers dips, which apparently afflict the whole blogosphere, but they are soon corrected and the underlying upward trend then resumes. People taking walks in the early summer sunshine after a war, like animals after they’ve been hybernating, for a few days, and such like. That’s all that is. My reason for thinking that the blogophere is expanding is basically that, so far as I can see, it is. New blogs (thankyou Instapundit just when I needed you) are being started. Semi-sleeper blogs that have going a while are starting to really come alive. Long time scoffers give up the unequal fight, and start blogging as well (and yes there should be a link there alsol but I don’t know of a recent example – maybe commenters can chip in there). I really don’t think that this is CB radio. And these people certainly seem to agree with me. I wonder who they are. But, question: Has anyone abandoned blogging with extreme prejudice? → Continue reading: Bloggers! – The future belongs to us June 13th, 2003 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
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