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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So if, for the time being, we can’t conquer space, maybe we can conquer Delaware. According to Brian Doherty at Reason Online Hit and Run (I hope I’ve got that roughly right), there’s a plan for libertarians to descend en masse on Delaware and take the place over and generally let utopia erupt.
According to the Delaware News-Journal:
If successful, by 2010 an army of 20,000 will move in, ascend to power and eliminate virtually all taxes – along with nearly all government programs and regulations. No public schools, no health, welfare or social services, no liquor laws, no gun control or land use laws. Smoking would be allowed nearly everywhere, as would almost all forms of gambling and prostitution.
The free market would run riot.
Doherty reports all this without really saying whether he thinks it makes much sense.
For me, this scheme is almost the definition of how not to try to do things. The right way to do things is to combine long-term background education with short-term opportunism. You read and write and propagandise. And, you grab that job on the local paper that someone offers you, or grab control of that local committee that suddenly seems grabbable and do what you can with that. You see the chance to become President of Portugal, and you take it. Nigeria comes up for sale and you can afford it. What you do not do is make big, public, medium-term “plans” like this one, which depend on 20,000 libertarians all agreeing about what plan they’re all supposed to be following, before anything of any value can be achieved.
This is not to say that something like this won’t happen. But if it does happen, it will happen naturally, with each step making sense for its own sake. A few libertarians will gather in some little spot for some particular reason or other, and then they’ll make a nice place and attract more libertarians (perhaps because they’ve set up an attractive propaganda operation which can use and will appreciate more talent), and suddenly, without any big shared plans that anyone has been stressing and straining over, they find that they can have a lot of local influence without any great fuss, so they duly have it.
But don’t plan it. Just let it happen. And in the meantime try to increase the odds of things like this happening everywhere, somewhere, but nowhere in particular.
THIS is a tragedy, too. What makes the Columbia‘s loss more striking than the deaths of train passengers is that space exploration is forward-looking, not just part of ordinary life, and such a loss is a setback to something important, and noble. It’s not that astronauts’ lives are worth more than those of anyone else; it’s what they do, and what it stands for.
– Glenn Reynolds yesterday
We all know about those archetypal laws. Parkinson‘s – work expands to fill the time available for its completion. The Peter Principle – people get promoted until they reach their level of incompetence. They’re useful laws. They answer basic questions. Like: Why all the crap? Why is everything done so badly?
Well, I think I may have discovered another one of these universal laws, which answers the question: Why are so many people who you would think ought to be happy instead so miserable? I give you: Micklethwait’s Law of Negotiated Misery.
It starts with the observation that more and more people are “self-managed” these days. Even people working inside giant business or governmental bureaucracies are being encouraged to think of themselves as free trading entrepreneurs, providing services in exchange for payment, in cash or in kind. Horizontal networking, self-starter, internal markets, intrapreneuring, etc. etc. blah blah blah.
Okay. You’re a self-manager, and maybe even self-employed.
There are four kinds of work you think about maybe doing.
- There’s work you love and are good at.
- There’s work you hate and are good at.
- There’s work you love and are bad at.
- There’s work you hate and are bad at.
The world pretty soon decides that you must stop doing (3) and (4) and of course, you are delighted to stop doing (4). If you insist on doing (3) you are going to have to do it as a hobby.
Which leaves (1) and (2), the stuff you are good at, and either (1) love or (2) hate.
How much do you get paid to do (1), work you love and are good at? If you are a good negotiator, then plenty, because you are good at it, and demand lots of money.
But what if you are a bad negotiator? You jump at the job and accept bad money.
How much do you get paid to do (2)? Chances are you get paid good money. Why? Because you will only consent to do work you hate if you are paid good money. So, with no great effort, you hold out for good money (even if all you thought you were doing was Just Saying No), and, because you are good at the work, you get paid good money. Eventually, someone makes you an offer you can’t refuse, and you take it.
So, if you are a bad negotiator, unable to repress your natural desire to do what you love and to avoid what you hate, you get paid bad money to do work you love, and good money to do work you hate.
Bad negotiators can have semi-good lives if they can afford to oscillate between work they love and work they hate. For a while, they do that. But, by the end of that period the only way they know to make good money is to do work they hate.
Then factor in the following circumstance. They switch to a life in which they then have to make continuously good money. Wife, kids, mortgage. Maybe an addiction to an expensive type-(3) hobby. Or maybe the life they lead just happens to get much more expensive. Clang. The gates of the prison slam shut. From then on they must do work they hate, continuously.
Result: An inexorable tendency for the “self-managed” classes to negotiate themselves into lives of permanent misery.
Is this a truth about the world? I think it is. Am I the first person to have noticed it? Surely not. Certainly not in so many words. But maybe I am the first person to have nailed this extremely widespread experience down into a simple law with a simple name.
(If so, hurrah! I love it. And how much was I paid? Bugger all.)
Comments and links please.
In the course of my duties as a occasional and strictly-when-I-feel-like-it culture blogger, I watched, with a view to commenting on, a short profile that was shown on BBC2 TV last Monday night about the great conductor/pianist Daniel Barenboim, a musician I’ve admired and enjoyed the recordings of ever since I first heard him in the nineteen sixties. The show only lasted half an hour and there wasn’t time for much to be said, but one very interesting thing was said, by conductor/composer Pierre Boulez, who, perhaps somewhat surprisingly (trad classical musician versus enfant terrible avant guardist, etc.), is a close friend of Barenboim’s, as well as a musical collaborator from way back.
Boulez pointed out that Barenboim is unusual in being a musician whose repertoire and general interest in the world and its affairs have both broadened over the years rather than narrowed. And it’s true. The typical top-flight classical music career starts in a blaze of somewhat indiscriminate fireworks and political pontifications, and then as age sets in our wunderkind becomes a not quite so wunder-mensch, cuts out the political posturing and the extraneous repertoire, and homes in on a gradually diminishing core of favourite pieces, and then disintegrates and dies.
Barenboim is doing the opposite. He started out as your typical sheltered prodigy who loved the great classics of classical music to distraction, and ignored just about everything else. But his repertoire has never stopped expanding, and simply as a result of being an A-list classical musician, and especially in his capacity as boss of one of the Berlin opera houses in the years since unification, he has found himself reflecting, if not quite on the wider world as such then most certainly on the place of classical music within that wider world. (You don’t conduct the first Wagner ever played in public in the state of Israel without thinking about that very carefully!)
To this end, he writes. Go to his website (see the link above) and you’ll see what I mean.
Barenboim is not an actual blogger. He is no daily diarist. Nevertheless, his writings are referred to at his website as a “journal”, and had this site been set up only a few years later, it might have included a bona fide blog. After all, these classical musicians are having to sing for their suppers, to fight for their arts council grants and their permanent recording contracts, and they know it. (And if your appetite for supper is anything like Barenboim’s, you really have to sing, let me tell you. Old style opera in the newly wilting German economy. That’s one hell of a sell.)
So, Barenboim writes. My question is: are any genuine Barenboim-level celebs actually finding the time to blog, in approximately the kind of way that we guys do?
I rule out writers, because that is not enough of a sideshow to really be a sideshow. But how about sportsmen? Do any movie stars blog? Perry mentions film producer/occasional blogger Brian Linse here from time to time, and he could become very famous if things go well for him. But, unsurprisingly, Linse seems like he’s too busy to put frequent postings on his blog. Either that, or he just can’t match that Barenboim level of energy. (Few can, let me tell you. That’s no big criticism.)
I’m guessing that some pop stars blog. But are they any good? Also, I tend to discount them because, if they write lyrics, that sort of makes them writers too.
But that’s my question. Who is the most famous blogger? Not famous for blogging, but who happens to blog about the life that does make him or her famous. Anyone?
Natalie Solent (“brain like a planet” – Alice Bachini) has this to say today about farm regulation:
Note the vague and subjective nature of the criteria by which the officials make these decisions – “Is the farmhouse character-appropriate?” “Is the residential aspect in balance with the farm?” If one has high taxation one needs a complicated regime of rules to allow wealth to be created at all. Once the regime of rules becomes sufficiently complicated it collapses under its own weight and becomes a regime of the personal judgement of officials. And personal judgement must frequently mean personal whim, personal caprice. We are edging back to the lord administering justice as he pleases in his own demesne.
Apart from the word “edging”, which I would probably have done as “moving”, I agree.
But now here’s a thought. If it is true that any year now the public sector will be carved up again into slices of property which the ruling official can rule as he pleases, might this perhaps be a way that classical liberal ideas could smuggle themselves back into society again? Might not some of these local lords of the manor decide to preside over a genuinely free market, and if they do, would they not attract lots of business? And might it not then start to spread?
If the very laws themselves are now more and more being enacted upon the whims of individuals, and they are, might not laws in due course find themselves being abolished by the same mechanism?
A further relevant thought, which I often find myself repeating because it has so many applications and resonances. When I worked in that free market bookshop in Covent Garden in the eighties that I’m always going on about, we found that some of our most loyal, knowledgeable and ideologically simpatico customers were people in the upper reaches of the civil service. Why? Because, whereas outsiders still tended to hope for the best from the government, these people all knew the worst. They knew that government screws up almost everything it touches, because time after time, they’d been right there when it was being done. Often these people start out very statist in their thinking, which is why they started out working for the state. But if they are well educated (and they mostly are) and intellectually scrupulous (which some certainly are) they find themselves compelled to revise their statist opinions.
So it is not so very fanciful that at least some of these high state officials who mutate into lords of the manor might well be our kind of people, and want to do our kinds of things.
At just after 11 pm London time, in about half an hour or so as I begin to compose this posting, NFL Super Bowl XXXVII will blast off, in San Diego, Southern California – and I will be watching it on British Channel 5 TV. In the last few years, Channel 5 have shown lots of American football, but not the Super Bowl itself. Sky TV would nip in and buy the Super Bowl, leaving Channel 5 with a stupid little highlights show the day after, and I eventually stopped bothering about any American football. But this year, probably because Sky has finally devoured all its adversaries in the shark tank that is British pay TV and doesn’t need to spend money on such things any more, regular Channel 5 is showing the Super Bowl as well as having shown lots of the preceding games. They of course flagged this up loudly beforehand, which means that this time around I’ve been paying attention to the entire NFL season.
Something similar has happened with rugby. All of the Six Nations games this year are about to be shown by the BBC. For the last few years regular TV only showed highlights of the England home games at Twickenham, but now I’ll be able to see all the England games in their entirety. Deep joy.
I don’t much care who wins the Super Bowl. I’ll be watching for the Americanness of it all, for Shania Twain at half time (although ST’s recent album is a huge disappointment to my ear), for the astonishing skill of one guy chucking a ball forty yards, and another guy running full tilt and catching it without breaking his stride, which means that the ball must have been thrown exactly right, several seconds earlier, at a completely blank piece of pre-selected grass. Being a successful NFL quarterback must be about as easy as being a First World War fighter ace. Amazing. And I’ll be watching because I like it when the people I hated at school inflict pain on each other instead of on me. The crowds that watch these games are exuberant, but not psychotic. The commentary is expert, but good humoured. The game itself combines immense intellectual complexity with raw human muscle power. The dancing girls on the touchline are great, as is the aerial photography of the stadium and its surrounding localities. Channel 5 TV reception in my home is very bad, but I don’t care.
I do, however, have my criticisms of American football, most of them centred on what is called “parity”, and when rootling around for a website link to include here I discovered that my doubts are shared by some Americans. → Continue reading: Super Bowl Sunday – parity in the USA and life in England
“I hate Uncle Sam – I’m so over older men.”
– Jack (Sean Hayes) in Will and Grace, discussing his income tax situation.
If you have a spare half hour, you might consider reading a long essay by Bill Whittle entitled CELEBRITY (on Eject! Eject! Eject!) about silly Hollywood stars mouthing off about politics and not being challenged by the media but just being allowed to say it and get clean away with it. Power without responsibility, the prerogative of the whore throughout history, as I seem to recall a pre-WW2 British Prime Minister once saying about the media themselves, of his time.
Example: Viggo Mortensen. He played a good guy in Lord of the Rings, but is now, it seems, batting for the bad guys, arguing for “peace”, that is to say for the rights of despots not to be knocked off their perches, and the duty of the victims of despots to just go on suffering indefinitely. Apparently Mortensen recently said that many more people died in Afghanistan as a result of the US bombing there than the (just under) 3,000 who died in 9/11 attack on New York, when the true Afghanistan number is generally reckoned now to be about 500. As Whittle says, this person should most emphatically be allowed to say such things, but only in a world where the Viggo Mortensens of it are used to being worshipped, regardless of what they say, do such things get said by them so loudly.
There are many interesting responses one might have to this long essay of Whittle’s, but one of the more interesting things about it for me is that it is indeed long, around twenty or so scrollings-down of my computer screen. But since Whittle was nailing down a whole cart-load of thoughts that many others were three-quarters of the way to nailing down for themselves, many people, including me, found it great reading, and just kept reading and reading until they finished it. When I started work on this posting there were already 68 comments, and now as I’m giving this its final polish there are 73, so I definitely am not the only one to have read this thing.
What I think this demonstrates is that blogging is not a particular way of writing; it is just a technology to enable writing. How you do the writing is up to you. Samizdata has half a dozen postings or so per day, of Samizdata type length. That’s us. Whittle has pieces of very variable length, from Samizdata-short to massive, every day or two, with absolutely none of those rat-tat-tat fusillades of very short postings that Instapundit specialises in. That’s him, and that’s Instapundit. Blogging doesn’t have to be done any particular way, except that, I would say, it helps a lot if you can find a way of doing it that suits you, and you then stick to it. Sustainability is all. But I guess if you’re good enough you can even break that rule. I seem to recall writing here about this before. Yes. Do I now contradict myself? Somewhat.
One final thought. Those 68 rising to 73 comments included some interesting speculations about the possibility that saying things which are way to the left of regular public opinion might actually harm an actor’s career by making the regular public stay away from his/her movies, with, in particular, Alec Baldwin’s recently faltering movie progress being put under the spotlight. So, I wonder what will now happen to Viggo Mortensen’s career. Will all those working stiffs on aircraft carriers whom Whittle writes about so vividly and respectfully, and their millions of land-locked ideological brethren, want to see Mortensen pretending to be someone like them (or like they’d like to be), when he has now so plainly declared that actually he isn’t one of them in any way except physiology (or physiological aspiration)? I genuinely don’t know, and will be genuinely interested to see.
Julius Blumfeld, a home educator himself, believes that it may be a while before the right to home educate in Britain is seriously eroded. (“Ask me again in ten years time.”) But I recommend also this rumination by Michael Peach about the future of home education in Britain, and on how to defend it. Says Peach:
Currently in England, although most Local Education Authorities would like you to think otherwise, we are pretty free to educate our children as we see fit. School is not compulsory, there is no legal obligation to inform the LEA of your decision to take your children out of school, you don’t have to let LEA representatives into your home, you do not have to let them see any of your child’s work, and you do not have to complete a pile of forms just to satisfy them that you are doing a good job (A statement of educational philosophy should suffice). From what I can tell we currently enjoy probably the most freedom in this regard anywhere in the western world.
So far so good, in other words. Which is also pretty much what Blumfeld had said:
At the moment, home education in the U.K. is off the Government’s radar. It’s just a quirky thing for a small minority. It’s nothing to worry about and it’s not worth bothering with.
But as Blumfeld had gone on to say:
… as more parents home educate their children, it will become increasingly visible. And as that happens, the pressure will grow for the State to “do something” about “the problem” of home education. The pressure will come from the teaching unions (whose monopoly it threatens). It will come from the Department of Education (always on the lookout for a new “initiative”). It will come from the Press (all it will take is one scare story about a home educated ten year old who hasn’t yet learned to read). And it will come from Brussels (home education is illegal in many European countries so why should it be legal here?).
As I say, Blumfeld preceded that by saying that in in ten years time things may have changed, and home-education might have become a “libertarian issue”, i.e. a political battleground.
Ten years? Peach thinks that things may be about to get nasty a lot more quickly than that. → Continue reading: The British home-education debate – is it about to hot up?
This is a terrific idea, and this is how nytimes.com reported it (scroll down to where is says “Sam’s blog”):
A new online diary made its debut on Jan. 1. Yes, there are already millions of such personal Web sites. But this diary belongs to Samuel Pepys, who lived from 1633 to 1703, long before “Weblog” cracked the lexicon.
Pepys (pronounced peeps), a British naval administrator, was a compulsive diarist who recorded his life in detail for nine years beginning on New Year’s Day 1660. The resulting diary is the most comprehensive personal account of life in the 17th century. The site, The Diary of Samuel Pepys (pepysdiary.com), posts Pepys’s entries in a Weblog format as if they had just been written – a new one is added each day – with the goal of allowing people to read along for nine years.
Phil Gyford, a Web developer in London, set up the site because he had always wanted to read the diary but found it “daunting and uninviting” in its long form. “I haven’t read much further ahead than what’s on the site,” he said by e-mail. “I’m enjoying reading it along with everyone else.”
Mr. Gyford also had the inspired idea of allowing site visitors to annotate the entries. The annotations can be personal comments or explanations proffered for obscure terms and historical references. The result is like reading a book along with a group of clued-in friends.
Still, Pepys should not be taken as a model by today’s online diarists. Although “Pepys’s diary shows us that the smallest of everyday details can be fascinating a few hundred years in the future,” Mr. Gyford said, “I wouldn’t want to encourage Webloggers to put even more of the details of their lives online.”
Gyford started this project on January 1st of this year. Pepys himself started on January 1st 1660. To make a start yourself, go here and scroll down.
I have a small personal link to all this through the late Robert Latham, one of the editors of the latest edition of the Pepys Diaries, and, it seems pretty generally agreed, the best and most complete one. Before going to Magdalene College Cambridge to work on Pepys full time, Robert Latham, a memorably jolly man as well as a great scholar, was a Professor at Royal Holloway College, Englefield Green, which was a walk away from my childhood home, the Lathams and Micklethwaits being good friends. Robert Latham’s son went to the same preparatory school as me and my elder brother.
I wonder what Robert Latham would have made of this project. He might have had mixed feelings, because the edition that Gyford is using is, alas, not his, but an earlier and less complete one, simply because only the earlier one is now out of copyright.
I’ve always meant to read Pepys but have never quite got around to it. This is my chance. All sorts of people are congratulating Gyford for having embarked on this project, but Pepys himself kept at it for nine years, and I will save my heartiest congratulations for the year 2012 when Gyford is scheduled to complete the job. So far he’s managed just over a fortnight of it.
For the last month or more I have been paying occasional visits to Michael Jennings‘s blog. One day a picture of him appeared at the top, making him look alarmingly like the bearded bloke on They Think It’s All Over. And then it was there at the top the next day, and the next, and I jumped to the conclusion that he was on holiday and not blogging, because if he was blogging, the photo would have moved down, and have been replaced by further entries. Or so I deduced. But, I do sometimes get matters intenetted slightly wrong (see the comments). It turns out that under the picture he’d been blogging away like a mad thing.
Yesterday, for example, with an unerring eye for the main story, he focussed in on the alleged doom facing the banana. Apparently, bananas are all clones of each other, which means that they can’t do evolution properly, which means that they are now about to be completely wiped out. This was national news in Britain yesterday, and for all I know, everywhere else that bananas are cared about.
Michael notes the supposedly ferocious consumer resistance in Europe to genetic engineering, but goes on to note that banana-wise Europeans – Germans in particular – may face an agonising choice.
Actually this could be interesting. Imagine the scene in 2012. Normal bananas are extinct. Those of us who have been following the ongoing EU banana war for the last couple of decades know that the Germans have an almost legendary appetite for bananas. It may be that they will be faced with a choice: accept genetically modified bananas, or move to some other fruit. My money is on the genetically modified bananas.
Michael also had a posting at the beginning of the month about cricket. For Zimbabwean mass murder reasons I want the entire blogosphere immediately to become fascinated about this strange game, and it can plug itself into an elaborate discussion via Michael’s posting about which international cricket side was the best ever, who the all time best Australian (and English and West Indian) side(s) would consist of, and so on, also involving Iain Murray. And then when all of blogdom everywhere is lusting to watch the World Cup, others whom we have also been instructing, but this time on the political dimension of this tournament, can dig up all the pitches.
It is certainly true that modern civilization has created environmental problems, but the key enviromental issue is addressed in this one question. Is our technology’s ability to solve environmental problems advancing faster than are the environmental problems themselves?
– Michael Jennings
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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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