We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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I’ve had half an eye on British TV all evening, and you might be quite surprised how gung-ho it has rather suddenly become. Finally, we are getting all the stuff about what a total bastard Saddam Hussain is, from fearsome looking guys with towels on their heads. On Newsnight they’re now discussing the nuances of the fighting that might happen, with an elderly military guy who sounds confident and expert and who I’ve never seen before. Funny how war seems to cause all manner of total strangers suddenly to pop up in TV studios.
All this makes me remember that there is just one more guess about this “war” that I want now to get on the samizdata record before events overtake me and leave me having to say: “I said that! Didn’t I say that?!” So now let me say it.
There’s been a lot of grumbling in the blogosphere, and from the likes of Mark Steyn and many others, about how absurdly delayed this “war” has been, and what a “rush to war” there hasn’t been.
The dominant explanation of this now is that Dumbo the Elephant alias George W. Bush has been standing like a greyhound in the slips (Henry V – please pardon the mixing of the animal metaphors) and that Tranzi Tony Blair has been restraining Dumbo with a lot of flummery about the UN, World Opinion, and other such foolishnesses not held in very high regard in our corner of the blogosphere.
But what if the reason the “war” has been so delayed is that it has taken a long time to get it ready? If I understand the Americans correctly they’ve been planning this war since 9/12. And one of the things they have been most concerned to achieve is low casualties, on both sides. And one of the most important ways they’ve been setting about how to get that result is by throwing technology at the problem. → Continue reading: What if the wait turns out to be worth it?
War looms but life goes on. I’ve been reading Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. Quite a few surprises already. I didn’t realise quite how vicious and unscrupulous the hostility towards sociobiology has been. But some of the book has been tough going, and in the toilet this morning I dipped into the later stuff I haven’t yet got to officially. I found myself in what I later identified to be Chapter 20, entitled “The Arts”, and in it I came across this (on page 416 of my 2002 BCA paperback edition):
As for sneering at the bourgeoisie, it is a sophomoric grab at status with no claim to moral or political virtue. The fact is that the values of the middle class – personal responsibility, devotion to family and neighborhood, avoidance of macho violence, respect for liberal democracy – are good things, not bad things. Most of the world wants to join the bourgeoisie, and most artists are members in good standing who adopted a few bohemian affectations. Given the history of the twentieth century, the reluctance of the bourgeoisie to join mass utopian uprisings can hardly be held against them.
What is startling is not the sentiments themselves. They are all pretty obvious stuff, certainly to me. What is pleasing is who is saying them, and in what context.
Pinker is a respected scientist and scholar, and a fearless and extremely capable defender of his scientific speciality – and scientific decency in general – against the attacks on it, both from the left (who accuse him and his ilk of being “genetic determinists”) and the religious right (who accuse him and his ilk of reducing the soul to a mere bodily function). The Blank Slate is only one of several very good books that Pinker has written. He’s relatively young, a personable and winning TV presence, and a terrific scientific synthesiser and populariser. To encounter notions that you usually expect to find only in the windy and ignorant writings of people who have swallowed the entire right-wing package and nothing else, and are booming forth with it in something like The Daily Mail or The Sun, is most pleasing. → Continue reading: Steven Pinker on modern art
The Parliamentary Conservative Party is filled with people who despise principles too much even to see the value of pretending to have any.
– Sean Gabb in Free Life 43
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw was shown on TV yesterday afternoon saying something particularly interesting, to my ear. I don’t mean to suggest by this that Straw is normally dull, but this particular thing really got my attention. He used the phrase “Prime Minister Blair”. I’ve never heard a British Cabinet Minister refer to the Prime Minister of Britain in this particular way.
Straw presumably assumes that if he just said “Mr Blair” or “The Prime Minister”, which would be the usual way for a British Home Secretary to talk about a British Prime Minister, a significant slice of his audience might be confused as to exactly who he was talking about. Only by him identifying and placing together in the one phrase both the name and the office can he be confident of avoiding any such muddles among those he is seeking to communicate with. Either that, or he’s been talking so much with Americans in the last few days that their verbal habits are rubbing off on him.
Either way, what I think this shows is how very global politics is becoming. Yes it’s partly that Mr Straw is just now up to his neck in a particular global crisis, but as all we political pundits have been telling each other for as long as any of us can remember, more and more political issues now have a global angle to them, to the point where it makes more sense to speak of them as having local variations.
This is happening because of the continually plummeting cost of international communication. A system of global wires and waves that was once the privileged preserve of millionaires and statesmen, such as Jack Straw, is now available for us all to use at will.
Hence, for example, this weekend’s world wide anti-war demonstrations mentioned just before the report of Mr Straw’s odd little soundbite. Anti-capitalism and (savour the irony of this) anti-globalisation demos have been global ever since e-mail got into its stride. → Continue reading: A verbal straw in the wind – reflections on the globalisation of politics
Patrick Crozier at Transport Blog links to a piece about the perennial tendency of all concerned to prefer railways to cars, except where their own personal travelling arrangements are concerned. Cars take you where you want to go. Trains can’t take you to almost any of the places you want to go. Work is spread out in the suburbs. Trains can’t be spread out in the suburbs, because they only stop at stations. If you could jump off trains at any point, the way you can jump off the old London double decker buses with the wide-open back doors whenever they slow down, and if trains did slow down quite often, then trains would be much more convenient things. But you can’t do any of that.
So, people actually use cars. But what they vote for and politick for is trains. People don’t like cars, in the sense of liking their combined effect. They prefer the train system to the car system.
Why? Whence the train fascination? Why does even Transport Blog obsess about trains, when trains are such economically stupid things compared to cars?
Part of the answer is surely aesthetic. Trains go in those lovely elegant curves. Trains don’t get stuck in train jams and produce nothing but fumes for twenty minutes. (They do get stuck from time to time. But mostly they don’t get stuck.) Above all, trains don’t need huge, huge train parks to park in. They just carry on trundling around.
Cars, on the other hand, have turned a substantial percentage of the surface of the earth into a place whose only purpose is to be purposeful. The biggest bridges and the most intricate motorway interchanges have genuine beauty and grandeur. But most car infrastructure is every bit as dull and clunky and messy and uninspiring as the word infrastructure itself is.
In particular, car parks are an almost total aesthetic negative, in most people’s eyes. Car parks pave paradise. The more exciting a building is, the greater the price that seems to have to be paid in meaningless tarmac expanse surrounding it. And which is now uglier: a full car park or an empty car park? You tell me.
But it doesn’t have to be like this. → Continue reading: The aesthetics of car parks – let’s have some!
Today I got an e-mail from Alex Singleton. I asked him if I could put it up here, and had no objection. I asked this because, as I said to him, it reflects very well on the Liberty Club and its activities up there in Saint Andrews University.
On Monday night the Liberty Club had as its speaker Dr Mark Pennington. He was speaking on “Can globalisation be good for the environment?”, and gave a very well structured and well presented talk. There were 45 or 46 in the audience, with many people there belonging to the environmental left.
The after-talk discussion was heated at times, but always courteous to the speaker, and some people said that their views had changed as a result of the talk. (We booked the room 8pm to 9:30, and there were still questions coming at 9:30 when we wrapped things up.) We then moved to Broons, a local bar, where the speaker demolished neo-classical economics and economic forecasting! All in all an excellent evening.
There’s no report on the Liberty Log as yet, but there may be something soon. Meanwhile I’ve nothing to add to Alex’s report, except to say that this is just what intellectual activism and indeed life at a University is, or should be, all about. My congratulations to all concerned.
I’ve know for some time that there was a modernised movie version of Hamlet out there, starring Ethan Hawke. Yesterday, for just £9.99 I finally got my hands on a DVD copy of it, and although I haven’t yet had time to watch all of it, I have watched the first few scenes of it. So far, I’m impressed.
For starters, I wasn’t sure if they’d even kept the original Shakespeare text. There’s nothing wrong with keeping the plot but updating the script of a Shakespeare play. It happens all the time. But I wanted it to be the original script by Shakespeare, and it is.
The trouble with ‘authentic’ productions, which make it very clear that the original Hamlet lived in earlier times than ours is that although you can revive the old language and the old costumes, you can’t revive the old audience. And that means that actually even the language and the costumes have to change. The more linguistically impenetrable lines get cut, and the costumes aren’t so much genuinely ancient as ancient-looking-to-us.
I once saw a production of Hamlet in which they all wore genuine Elizabethan sticking-out trousers. It looked utterly ridiculous. Shakespeare done in merely antique looking (but in fact totally anachronistic) tight-fitting modern leather trousers can look splendid, however daft it would have looked to an Elizabethan audience.
But there is a deeper problem than mere costumes. In order to understand all the private griefs and calculations of characters in a play like Hamlet, you have to take their public power struggles seriously and to have an instinctive sense of how important and overbearing these struggles can be and how brutally they can intrude into the would-be ‘private’ lives of the characters. → Continue reading: A Hamlet for our time
I like this posting by Michael Jennings, about portable phone etiquette.
This piece (via slashdot) on how social customs in Japan (particularly amongst young people) are evolving due to near ubiquitous mobile phone use is quite interesting. Amongst the customs discussed is the fact that members of social groups of younger people are contacting one another constantly throughout the day to keep in touch with what their friends are thinking and doing. For doing this, text messaging is a much more important medium than voice. This is interesting, and is an application that the designers of cellphone networks did not anticipate. At all. The same thing has happened in Europe. (The greatest social sin that can be made is now to forget to bring your cellphone, or to allow its battery to run out).
Two other things are mentioned that I have also noticed. Firstly, people no longer have to arrange times and places to meet one another, but plans can be fluid and decisions are gradual rather than at once. Being late is no longer a cardinal sin, as long as you keep people informed about where you are and when you will (or will not) arrive. (I have certainly noticed this. It is probably the number one reason I have a mobile phone). Secondly, people are sending text messages before making a voice call, to check that it is a good time for a conversation. The telephone is a relatively intrusive technology, interrupting you from what you are doing and demanding attention. Sending a text message is much less intrusive, and doing this first is much more polite. (I do this myself, although typically only at times when I think there is a strong chance a voice call will be inconvenient, such as late at night or around meal times. At other times, I will just make the call). Here though is a situation where mobile phones are adding subtlety to etiquette rather than taking it away. Lots of people consider the mobile phone to be a technology that has increased crassness. This does not have to be so, and here is an example.
→ Continue reading: On portable phones and their various uses and impacts
This is quite a story:
A Muslim cleric who urged followers to kill non-believers, Americans, Hindus and Jews has been jailed for nine years.
Jamaican-born Sheik Abdullah el-Faisal, 39, was told he had “fanned the flames of hostility”, as Old Bailey judge Peter Beaumont delivered the sentence.
The judge recommended that el-Faisal, from Stratford in east London, should serve at least half of the sentence and then be deported.
El-Faisal – who said it is permissible to use chemical weapons to kill unbelievers – stretched out an arm to a group of around 12 shocked-looking supporters as he was led away.
I’ve spent many minutes of my life opposing jail sentences like this. Clearly there is a point where words and actions can’t be separated, but I’m not convinced that this man crossed it. On the other hand, if we are to take these people at their various words over the years, they are at war with us, and the usual punishment for being at war against my country and having the misfortune to get captured is imprisonment for the duration, even if you actually did nothing except wear an enemy uniform. So you won’t see me at any demonstrations on this guy’s behalf.
Two further quotes from the BBC story caught my attention. There was this …
Defence lawyer Jerome Lynch QC, said it was unfair that people such as controversial cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri had been seen by police and not brought to court like el-Faisal.
… which sounds right to me! And then comes this gem:
Mr Lynch said of el-Faisal: “This was a man who, although misguided, was not malicious.”
I love that. He wanted all infidels murdered, but he wasn’t being nasty about it or anything. → Continue reading: On hate-speaking and law-making
So, just three things here so far today, one very short and two rather serious. So here are a couple of curiosities.
First, there is this map, which was originally claimed to have been taken posthumously by Columbia before it burned and crashed. You want this to be true, don’t you? As did Michael Jennings. But as I commented at Michael’s, those killjoys at snopes.com have now killed this particular joy. But it is still a thing of beauty, and certainly has my little country looking its best. Snopes says it is “false”, but their map is even bigger than the one Michael put up, so they liked it even as they trashed it.
And the other is a beating heart, courtesy of b3ta.com. Who are those guys?
When you consider all the metaphorical baggage that has been loaded onto the human heart over the centuries, it turns out to be very small and yucky, and you can swap yours for another with “you” carrying on pretty much as usual. It’s just a pump.
And a picture is just a picture.
Modern Architecture just gets better and better – although when you think how bad it was three or four decades ago this has not been hard to contrive. It looks as if I will be writing about new London architecture a lot on my new Culture Blog, and my most recent post there is about a superb new London building that is now nearing completion.
This is 30 Saint Mary Axe, formerly know as the Swiss Re Building (Re meaning Re-insurance), and still known unofficially as The Gherkin, which is a bit unkind because it is a deal more elegant than that, I think. My congratulations to Sir Norman Foster and his partners. This elegant new tower makes a distinctive contribution to London’s skyline, and is just as impressive close up.
I know that these things are a matter of opinion, but I think that this building is extremely beautiful. I also believe that the chances – on the whole and with many exceptions – are improving all the time that the next big new building where you live will be likewise. It didn’t use to be at all like this, but now, it is.
Why all this beauty, all of a sudden, and in a style that used to be the very definition of brutish ugliness? Big question. Short answer: they are now, at least, trying to do beauty.
Two delightfully silly things, no doubt with strangely profound cultural over- or do I mean undertones attached to them if only I could think of them, are to be found linked to and exhibited at 2Blowhards today. There are singing horses (be sure, as Michael says, to click on the various horses), and there is the Americanised Mona Lisa.
Alice agrees. (And while you’re there check out her libertarian defence of the Stone Age – press “HOME” on the left if you are doing this so soon that the Blogger archiving idiocy blots it out because it’s the newest posting – google are you listening? I’m bored with libertarian arguing, so I haven’t commented on this, but all those still excited by libertarian arguing should comment away.) Alice and I also seem to agree that the LOTRhymes rappers aren’t so good. Personally I dislike rapping and am also Bored of the Rings, as the pun goes, never having been that excited by them in the first place, so I think it’s a LOT of cRap.
But the horses are great, as is the ML’s new cleavage.
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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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