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Two of my blog-colleagues are struck down with computer-related grief.
Natalie Solent, who has been unable to blog since last Saturday, has asked Samizdata.net to pass on to as many of her regular readers as we can reach that she has not abandoned them on purpose, but has been wrenched away from them, by an attempt to upgrade from Windows Complicated to Windows Even More Complicated which has proved to be very complicated indeed. But she will be back, just as soon as it’s all sorted.
And if you’re wondering why it’s techno-moron me telling you this rather than Perry de Havilland, well as you may have guessed already from his recent blog-silence, he too is having computer-related troubles, this time involving a hardware failure. It isn’t going to be too expensive (it’s one of the small connecting boxes rather than the big box itself which has collapsed), but the problem is proving to be time consuming, while Perry queues with other afflicted souls for the services of his computer-guru. He too is doing all he can to get back on line.
Yesterday I found myself reflecting on that monstrous half-truth, consumer sovereignty. It’s a half truth because the places where consumers do their consuming are also sovereign. (I seem to recall the late Murray Rothbard having some good things to say about “The Myth of Consumer Sovereignty” in Chapter 7, I think it is, of Man, Economy and State). Shops can also do things as they wish, and if you don’t like this then ultimately your only course may be to run away. I don’t favour shop sovereignty extending to the point where they can bolt the door while you’re still there and force you to do things their way, take back what you just said, buy things you don’t want, and so forth. But short of that I like the occasional shop where the constomer has to walk on egg shells to avoid a proprietorial tantrum or to avoid knocking huge tottering piles of random items all over the grubby floor.
Sure, there must be proper shops where the customer is always right and which are helpful, clean, efficient, full of good stuff well displayed and reasonably priced, etc. etc. But not all shops should be like this.
There used to be a wonderful place in Dover Street, just off Seven Dials (a bit to the north of Covent Garden tube station), which was crammed to the ceiling with hardware of every kind you could possibly want or imagine, provided it could be found.
I remember three things in particular about this place, aside from the general mess and dirt and confusion and lack of walking space.
First, the front window was literally a rubbish dump. There it was, displaying a kind of archaeological system of sediments from previous eras of the shop’s history. Nails from the late nineteen fifties, drill bit sets from the early sixties, crushed cardboard boxes, rolls of insulating material, bags full of obscure and complicated joinery items, long discontinued workbench kits, and of course inch upon inch of genuine actual rubbish. All this could be clearly enjoyed through the front window of the shop. → Continue reading: Retailer sovereignty
Faith and philosophy are air, but events are brass.
– Herman Melville (Pierre – 1852)
Today I had lunch (a sandwich and coffee anyway) with my friend Kristine Lowe, who is a journalist – you know, one of those people who writes stories for a “newspaper”, which is “printed”, on a Big Machine somewhere in London. The newspaper that Kristine writes for is called the “Daily Express”. She had a story in it today, about the improving business performance of a company called London Clubs International, which is now doing better than it was, because of the relaxing of the British regulations concerning gambling which apparently occurred last August. (So something is being deregulated here, even if it’s only gambling.)
The reason I am reporting for Samizdata.net on this meeting is that, much to my surprise, I found that I was able to tell Kristine things – about business, about the big wide world, about the world of men trying to damage each other – things which she didn’t know much about and which I knew somewhat more about, as a result of me being a blogger. I talked of Glenn Reynolds (K: Who is he? What does he do when he’s not blogging?”) and of Trent Lott (“Who’s Trent Lott?” – this despite Lott having finally made it to the British TV news shows last night), of the arguments about data copying and patent protection, in connection with the music industry and the pharmaceutical industry. I told her of particular bloggers to pay attention to, such as Stephen Pollard (pharmaceutical patents and intellectual property generally), Michael Jennings (telecommunications), my recent discovery China Hand (China), and Reynolds of course (for the Lott story, and for his very different take on intellectual property).
I had assumed that my blogging activities would be a matter of at most polite interest, but basically indifference – like amateur dramatics talk to a real professional actor. But actually Kristine started scribbling things down and didn’t stop until her lunch hour did. Interesting. I wonder if anything – Daily Express-wise – will come of this.
We haven’t become The Media. But we are starting to be a part of The Media’s nervous system.
A healthy nation is as unconscious of its nationality as a healthy man is of his bones. But if you break a nation’s nationality it will think of nothing else but getting it set again.
– George Bernard Shaw (in the Preface to John Bull’s Other Island – 1904)
Michael Blowhard hits a very important nail on the head with this:
In fact, art and science have little in common. However much science is influenced by such factors as personality and culture, it’s empirically based; it’s testable. The powder goes ka-boom when a match is touched to it or it doesn’t. Actual progress is made; disputes between rival views are finally adjudicated. If you understand the science of today, you basically understand all of science. (And let’s set aside for the moment the kind of babble about “uncertainty” and “chaos” that art intellectuals love to indulge in. As far as I can tell, they’ve got no better a grasp on the scientific meaning of those terms than I do.)
In art, none of this is the case. Testable? Well, the success of “Star Wars” certainly demonstrated something about what movie audiences were ready for in the mid-’70s, but “McCabe & Mrs. Miller” has probably meant more to actual filmmakers. A lost weirdo painter (Henry Darger) is discovered and causes a sensation; a previously unknown art tradition (Tuva singing, for instance) gains notice. A prominent artist – Longfellow, for instance – is forgotten.
In the field of art, all this is normal. In science, it wouldn’t be. A great discovery remains a great discovery; and no one’s reviving the theory of phlogiston.
There were various comments afterwards trying to say that science is more like art than people think. But people (and Michael) are right and these commenters are wrong. Science is all about communal progress. Art is all about individual responses. Scientific theories compete according to which of them, in the collective opinion of the scientific community, constitutes the most progress. That science progresses, in the words of one of these commenters, “one funeral at a time” just means that scientists can be stubborn idiots, not that science is a matter of subjective individual whim. Truth, in the end, is a communal matter. The truth is what you and I and everybody else who is paying attention have, in the end, to agree about. Artistic excellence on the other hand …
One commenter even suggested that Michael Blowhard ought to read more Feyerabend. This comment is my nomination for the silliest and most potentially disastrous blog comment of the year 2002. Michael Blowhard’s brain is an important blogosphere resource, but although I’ve never met him I sense that he’s the sort of person who would read Feyerabend, just because some twat anti-philosopher of anti-science had suggested this on Blowhards. Michael might emerge from the experience mentally unscathed, but the downside risk doesn’t bear thinking about.
The importance of all this, as Michael himself explains very well, is that if you do accept that art “progresses”, then you immediately install a “taste mafia” in power who are there to tell you where art is just now, and where it’s been, and where it’s going. After all, if art is like science, that means we all must all defer to the art scientists, doesn’t it? And a vertical third finger to that. Or maybe the second finger also, Agincourt longbowman style.
Tomorrow I hope to be meeting with my Little Man who will be installing my Cullture Blog for me. So far the operation has resembled the sad time about ten years ago or so when I tried to install a shower. While this worked, it had the two standard British shower settings: Far Too Hot and Far Too Cold. Then it stopped altogether. I do hope that my Culture Blog grief is all happening now, and that soon it will start and then just get better and better the way a British shower never would.
The Blowhards have both inspired me and relaxed me about this project. They have inspired me by their very existence, and they have relaxed me by doing a proper culture blog so properly that I don’t have to worry about doing that myself and can just have some fun with my one, as and when I feel inclined.
Perry de Havilland gave a talk about “a year in the life of samizdata”, last Friday, at the Tim Evans Parents household, which which got me thinking about the rise of amateurism generally, and the rise of the amateur Foreign Correspondent in particular. I found myself arguing that the present tendency of the blogosphere not to have real foreign correspondents is surely temporary.
Yes, the blogosphere is now a whole lot stronger, as Perry said, in editorial comment on the news than it is in news gathering itself, but soon, I surmise, there will be many new “foreign correspondents” blogging away. I might have added, but did not, that for many of us the majority of bloggers are already foreign correspondents on account of so many of them living in the USA, and many of us not.
How on earth would I have found out about Trent Lott, and about what an imperfect person he is, had it not been for the blogosphere?
(And yes, that is a fine double monosyllable to be called isn’t it? “The name’s Lott. Trent Lott.” But apparently he’s not that kind of forthright, no nonsense person at all. Very nonsensical indeed it would seem. This I have learned from the blogosphere’s numerous American correspondents, lead of course by the ultimate foreign correspondent, Instapundit.)
And the network is growing. One of the more exotic ones is a (for me) recent discovery called China Hand. Here are the concluding paragraphs of a recent piece from him about the recent rise of Chinese Christianity:
I should have seen the writing on the wall in the 80’s when my old teacher, a rabidly leftist ex Red Guard, suddenly started sending Christmas cards. Even today when I passed one of the glitzy new department stores in Huizhou – its whole forecourt is covered in Christmas trees.
→ Continue reading: The rise of the amateur Foreign Correspondent
Yesterday I saw an advert in the London Underground that I think said something interesting about the differences between different countries, namely the cost per minute of ringing them up.
The advert was for something called Alpha Telecom which is apparently some sort of internet something-or-other for ringing people up in foreign parts.
I can’t explain how that works, but I can give you the different prices for the different countries with which we Brits would appear to be in regular phone contact, because I jotted them down. The numbers don’t say which countries are the best. But perhaps they do say something about which countries work the best. It would seem that distance has nothing to do with anything here, which I guess because this is the Internet we’re talking about. The INternet murders distance. What seems to matter is degree of serenity or confusion at the destination of your call.
All measurements of differential national merit strike me as interesting. What does it cost to become a citizen legally? What does it cost to become a citizen illegally? (Do some countries pay you to join?) Who gets the most sporting medals? What are the different credit ratings of different national governments? What proportion of people are wearing shoes? Driving cars? Connected to the Internet? Can read and write? Who scores highest and lowest, in the opinion of some bunch of people in Washington DC who measure “freedom” in different countries, and which countries have changed their scores the most since last year or in recent years? When does each country’s “tax freedom day” arrive, ditto? And so on. Well, maybe this cost of phone calls thing is another such score, albeit a very crude one.
So here are the scores, in pence per minute I assume: Austria 4, Somewhere illegible (Canada I think) 4, France 4, Germany 4, Hong Kong 7, Ireland 4, New Zealand 4, Pakistan 20, Spain 4, Sweden 2, USA 3, Australia 4, India 20, South Africa 8, and: Internet 1.
So, if I’m right about what this all means, the most efficient country in the world is the Internet, followed by Sweden, followed by the USA, followed by all the brand-X Western democracies. I think that Sweden and Hong Kong are the most interesting scores, the former for being so low, the latter for being rather high. Ireland and Spain have reputations for incompetence that they would seem to be shedding fast. I also wonder if Hong Kong, and maybe also South Africa, have gone or are going up, and whether either India or Pakistan are coming down from their current twin peaks.
But maybe I’m quite wrong, and it means either nothing at all, or something very trivial. I’m sure our many techy readers will elucidate. If you do, gentlemen, could you include an explanation of what this system actually is and does, because I can’t make it out at all. Surely a telephone is a telephone, and the Internet is basically something you look at and type into and get email in and out of with a computer, with occasional videos and tunes as decoration. How can you phone the internet?
The following posting was written with my education blog in mind. However, although in general this enterprise is rattling along fine, it is for the time being ungettatable. I’m hoping that this is (a) because this is now Sunday afternoon and every internetter in the world is internetting and my blog empire’s hardware can’t cope, or even better (b) because Atlas (he knows who he is) has unshrugged and is finally getting Brian’s Culture Blog going, but in a way that has interrupted normal service. Alternatively, (c) one of Richard Branson’s slaves read what I put about his Lord and Master on Transport Blog the other day and has turned the Virgin army of hackers loose on my life, in which case it was nice knowing you all.
Anyway, I read what follows through again and found that it will do okay also for samizdata.net so here it is:
Joanne Jacobs links to the following piece of dialogue, originally posted on Notes From The Ghetto Teacher on October 29th.
Today, we were discussing 15th century literature and the invention of the Gutenburg Press. I asked them to write a short essay on what they’d learned from the chapter and lecture. One of my students tentatively raised his hand:
Student: Miss?
Me: Yeah, baby?
Student: When was the 15th century?
Me: Between the 14th and 16th, baby. Do you mean what years are in the 15th century?
Student: Aww … dawg … naw … I’m sayin’ … what century was the 15th century in?
Me: [pause] Write it down a piece of paper then read it back out loud.
Student: [writes it down slowly] Fif-teenth century.
Me: Right. So, what century is that?
Student: That’s what I be aksin’ you.
Some days, I just want to throw my chalk.
Now I have far less experience of teaching in a ghetto than does the Ghetto Teacher (she presumably has quite a lot and I have none), but what I want to know is: what would have been the problem with just giving the answer, along the lines of: “The fifteenth century means the one hundred years between the year 1400 and the year 1500”?
→ Continue reading: Well when was the fifteenth century?
In among blogging up as much of a storm as I could manage during the last few months, I’ve also been ploughing my way through a book, which I’ve had cause to mention here several times before, but do not apologise at all for mentioning yet again: Peter Hall’s magnificently blockbusting Cities in Civilization.
It is full of delights beyond numbering. Recently I enjoyed a thrill of patriotic pleasure when I got to the end of the chapter dealing with the birth of Rock and Roll (“The Soul of the Delta”).
The Story So Far: Rock and Roll has arisen, in Memphis, as a creative collision, fertilised by the newly active music radio, between Delta Blues and Country and Western. But the New York Los Angeles Axis of Evil (bland pop with no mention of Black People) is fighting back and threatens to submerge R+R in a tsunami of upbeat but basically middle-class woolly cardigans and Christmas albums. But, riding to the rescue, yes, it’s the British Cavalry:
Understood or not, these British groups left no doubt about their debt. Indeed, they went out of their way to record it. When the Beatles first came to America they told everyone they wanted to see Muddy Waters and Bo Diddley; one reporter asked: ‘Muddy Waters … Where’s that?’ Paul McCartney laughed and said, ‘Don’t you know who your own famous people are here?’ Eric Clapton quoted Little Walter, Chuck Berry, Bib Bill Broonzy, Robert Johnson, and Blind Boy Fuller, but above all B. B. King; Muddy Waters was discovered by white America only after the Rolling Stones took their name from one of his tunes. John Lee Hooker understood when he said: ‘It may seem corny to you, but this is true: the groups from England really started the blues rolling and getting bigger among the kids – the White kids. At one time, fifteen years back, the blues was just among the blacks – the old Black people. And this uprise started in England by the Beatles, Animals, Rolling Stones, it started everybody to digging the blues’.
I guess most Americans who care about such things knew this story already, but I didn’t realise this until now. I just thought, you know, the Brits went to America and sold a lot of tickets and a lot of records and got drunk and drugged and had a good time, playing essentially the same kind of stuff as their US rivals. That they played such an important part in the nurturing (if not the birth) of Rock and Roll, I did not know.
It’s a frightening thought that, world impactwise, this is probably about the last truly interesting thing that Britain has done. Are there any other more recent Big Things that have originated in or even been partly done in (like Rock and Roll) this little land of ours? I’d love to be told, but fear that the comments won’t add up to much. (And before Rock and Roll, you have to go back to Bomber Command.)
Our current popsters – and I know I sound like an old fart here but there you are, I am an old fart – are an embarrassment, not just musically to my Rolling Stones trained ear, but also commercially. I’m told that Britpop is doing no business at all in America. Right?
I thought Robbie Williams made a promising start, and I loved his performance of “I Hope I’m Old Before I Die” on Top of the Pops about a decade ago, but his latest single is, I think, as exciting as cold washing up water. I further understand that some Idiot Old Record Company has just paid him 4 billion quid for his next fifty albums. I believe that They Will Regret This.
On the other hand, I bought a DVD of the Rolling Stones recent “Zimmer Frame Tour” (no, the “Bridges to Babylon Tour 97-98”, which is but a blink of an eye ago in Rolling Stones time) and there was a new track on it which I hadn’t heard before, in among the old classics, called “Flip The Switch”, which I thought was great.
Have a nice weekend.
Michael Jennings tackles, albeit only in passing, one of the late twentieth century’s most enduring and to many most mysterious of questions: why did Molly Ringwald, given the excellence of her performances in such fine movies as Sixteen Candles and Pretty In Pink, never make it as big in the movies as she should have? Why, from the late eighties onwards, was the Ringwald career ride mostly down hill?
I think I can throw some light on this problem.
Molly then
Ms. Ringwald was a totally convincing and attractive teenager, certainly from where I was sitting. However, she did have one drawback. She was one of those females who, through no fault of her own, gives the impression of being just one misfortune away from bursting into tears. In a teenager this quality is tolerable, even endearing. Why can’t those bigger boys see what a fine and sweet girl Molly is? Why are those rich bitches from the posh side of the tracks being so nasty to Molly? Poor Molly. Somebody do something. You, handsome rich boy, dump your shallow girlfriend and give Molly a ride in your red Porsche. And as for you Andrew McCarthy, for once in your life show a bit of backbone!
Unfortunately for Molly, however, as teens turned into twenties, and then thirties, and then whatever the lady is now, she still gives off the same victimhood vibe, and whereas this used to tug at the heartstrings; now, on those rare occasions when we still witness it, it merely gets on the nerves. What had formerly seemed innocently melancholy – an artless appeal for aid and comfort – now seems frozen into a manipulative routine that ought to have been caste aside. Girl-girls are fine, one of nature’s greatest bounties. But girl-women? Let’s just say that this is the kind of thing that has to be done right. So when Molly the Woman hove into view, still with the exact same lacrimosity threat problem, the reaction was: Grow up woman. Stop your whining. This is not the stuff of which lady film stars are made.
Molly now
Please understand, Ms Ringwald (after all we’re talking about a woman who may now have time on her hands and could well be reading this – especially if she thinks she might learn from this posting how she could become a movie star), please understand that I am not offering a personal criticism of your personal qualities, which are probably not at all as I have described them. I am talking about your screen persona, the way you come across in the cinema, in front of the cameras. You come across, on screen, as one of life’s victims, and what is worse as a victim not so much of circumstances as of an inadequately developed character. Sorry, but there it is.
(It occurs to me that another bratpacker of that vintage and another would-be movie star, Rob Lowe, now to be seen in the political TV drama “The West Wing”, has suffered in recent years from a rather similar problem. Coming of age, beautiful. Come of age, not convincing. Not the finished article.)
But please understand also, Ms. Ringwald, just how fabulous you were in your all-too-brief years of glory. Sixteen Candles and Pretty In Pink are two of my all time favourite movies.
Remember the days when I was going on here about Brian’s Education Blog, but when there was no actual Brian’s Education Blog to go and look at. Well, now there’s another Brian Blog opening up Real Soon Now: Brian’s Culture Blog. I had been saving this posting or something like it for that. But when Michael opened up the Ringwald issue over at his place I decided that my analysis of this should be made public, now, and of necessity here. I hope that was the right thing to do. As for what’s holding up BCBlog, I won’t mention any real names but will say that the Atlas who carried the load so manfully when BEdBlog was getting started seems, temporarily, to be shrugging.
Following up another story about the extermination of some weird garden weed (don’t ask), I came across news from the BBC of a public meeting tomorrow afternoon organised by Privacy International on the subject of those compulsory ID cards that our government is so determined to introduce willy nilly, by hook or by crook, or by any other cliché that will work the trick. Bottom line, at the end of the day, when push comes to shove, they’re probably going to go the final five yards on this and bring home the bacon, but let’s at least put a spoke in their frying pan, eh?
In July, the Government announced a six-month public consultation on proposals to establish a compulsory national Identity Card to establish entitlement to benefits and services, including healthcare, welfare benefits, education and public housing. The consultation period ends in January. This event at the LSE will be the only public meeting during the consultation exercise.
The proposals involve issues of vital importance for everyone living in the UK. The government envisions a compulsory registration of the entire population, backed by a national database of “biometric” identifiers such as digital photographs, fingerprints and retina scans. The scheme will form the basis for the matching of personal information between government and private sector organisations, and will involve a legal requirement to produce the card in a wide variety of circumstances. Failure to disclose your card will result in denial of access to a wide range of essential services such as healthcare and education.
Wednesday 11th December 2002, 2.15 – 5.30, The Old Theatre, London School of Economics, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE. Chair and session summariser: Simon Davies, Director of Privacy International. Speakers: Lord Falconer of Thoroton, QC, Minister of State for criminal justice; Baroness Sharples (Conservative); Simon Hughes, MP, Liberal Democrat Shadow Home Secretary; Dr Nick Palmer MP (Labour); Charles Moore, Editor, The Daily Telegraph; Dr Ross Anderson, Computing Laboratory, Cambridge University; Peter Lilley MP, former Secretary of State for Social Security (Conservative); Terri Dowty, Joint national coordinator, Alliance for Childrens Rights for England; Dr Clarence Lusane, Director of Social Research, The 1990 Trust.
Finally, there’ll be a Q&A with Stephen Harrison, Head of the Entitlement Cards Unit, Home Office. (For more information about the Entitlement Card proposal, see the Privacy International UK ID Card Page.)
Admission free. To reserve a seat, please email london2002@privacy.org or call 0207 955 6579. Media enquiries to 07947 778 247.
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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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