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Samizdata, despite Antoine’s admonitions, has been getting very depressed and depressing lately, so time for some more sports news. It’s only a game, it doesn’t matter, no dead bodies or territory changing hands, good way to let off fascist steam, blah blah blah. Too bad the English news isn’t that good there either. Oh well. Anyway, cricket. (That’s the one of which an American once said to Brit interviewer and sports journo Michael Parkinson: “And they do all that on horseback?”) I wish I’d told you earlier in the year what I thought of the England batting, which is that it is a collective Graham Hick. Graham Hick was the Zimbabwean who never quite did as well as he should have as an England batsman, and who got lumbered with the soubriquet of “flat track bully”, that is, good against bad bowling, but bad against good bowling. During the last couple of years, England have been racking up big scores against second-rate test bowling attacks, with very few flops, and it was being said that this time, this time, the Ashes series in Australian this winter just might be different. I thought then that this was folly. How you murder second-raters says very little about how you’ll fare against the likes of McGrath, Gillespie and Warne. As Warne said before the first test in Brisbane, England will hold their own if they are at their absolute best, but if they slip up Australia will be all over them and they’ll crumple. Too right mate. England had one good day at Brisbane, but in the end were humiliated. And now at Adelaide they started with a good batting day and duly held their own, but then they had two bad days and are heading for another crushing defeat. I saw this coming half a year ago. I did. But how can I prove it? I can’t. I said it to Antoine, I think, but will he back me? Antoine? I doubt it. Maybe I imagined that I even said it. So? What of it? Well, I can now see another disappointment being cobbled together by over-optimistic English sports commentators. England have just defeated New Zealand, Australia and now this afternoon South Africa at rugby, all at Twickenham (which incidentally is the town-stroke-suburb where Patrick Crozier lives), the English national stadium. The first two they only just squeaked past by the narrowest of margins. South Africa they did slaughter, but the South Africans played for an hour with only fourteen men. All three visiting teams were manifestly using these more than somewhat insignificant fixtures to test new men and new moves and new combinations. But never mind all that. Hurrah!! England are going to win the World Cup!! I don’t believe a word of it. England always peak between World Cups. And someone in the Southern Hemisphere, usually Australia, peaks at the World Cup. France play badly but not badly enough in the early games, then play one dazzling game, then get knocked out, and a Southern Hemisphere team wins it. England always contrive to look tired at the World Cup, presumably because they always are tired. All that peaking when it doesn’t matter takes it out of you, I guess. You read it here first. I guess I’ll have to cheer myself up with some more politics. November 23rd, 2002 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Yesterday, chewing gum was in the Eye of the Beholder who quoted from this story, about some US-Singapore trade negotiations:
I know how the Singaporeans feel. The relentless disfiguring of London’s public spaces with chewing gum deposits is one of the things that most often makes me wish that “public” spaces were more frequently privately owned than they are. Occasionally a fresh deposit actually sticks to your shoe, which is horrible. You later have to scrape it off with a knife. Usually the deposit has dried and just remains there, a black blob on the floor. It’s the sneakiness of it that gets me. The chewing gum droppers know that in the grand scheme of things their petty little misdemeanour doesn’t rate very high on the wickedness scale. And it is exactly this that they exploit. In a world of terrorist outrages, ever rising crime of the more usual sort, ghastly new laws that won’t do anything about crime but will be ghastly, ghastly new … well, just read every second posting on Samizdata (which seems to be going through a rather grim phase just now, for some reason), … in such a world, who has time to moan about chewing gum? Only me and the government of Singapore it would seem. If the chewing gum miscreants don’t drop their chewing gum on the floor, they stick it on a strategically chosen spot in an advert. The first few times you see this it can be funny, but for me this joke stopped being funny years ago. What’s going on here? No doubt a lot of chewing gum misbehaviour is sheer thoughtlessness, perpetrated by otherwise blameless and worthy people, but not nearly all, I surmise. I think what we may also have here is a particular example of the pathetic-person-making-an-impact syndrome. Another example of this is people who make a point of crossing roads just in front of motorists who they know will slow up and be inconvenienced, because that way the regular (car-owning) world is forced to pay attention to their otherwise meaningless existence, if only for a moment. Take that! I’m not so insignificant now, am I? Chewing gum misbehaviour is even sneakier, because it is anonymous. Ha! That was me, but you’ll never know, will you, hee hee hee! Chewing gum as clandestine self-expression, a subculture of secret Jackson Pollocking. And why are there so many pathetic people who can only make an impact on the world by annoying it anonymously with chewing gum? The answer to that would be a bigger and grimmer Samizdata posting. I merely flag up the problem. Other gum scum (I like that – that’s my heading for this) scatter their chewing gum as part of a more general pattern of nastiness and parasitism and not-so-petty aggressions. Presumably what the Singaporeans also feel, in addition to simply not liking gum dropped everywhere, is that if it’s chewing gum droppings today, it may be bricks through windows tomorrow and robbing old ladies for small or not so small change the next day. This is the “zero tolerance” theory, which I think is also right. I know what you’ll say, all you people who can only make an impact on the world by leaving clever little comments on blogs (which I do agree is better than gum dropping). There’s a difference between possessing chewing gum and chewing chewing gum, and dropping chewing gum. (Cue the great Gum Control debate of Christmas 2002: “The majority of gum users are in fact responsible people, and we should not allow a small anti-social minority to be the excuse for suppressing the harmless pleasures of the law-abiding majority …” blah blah blah.) True. But not my point here. Have a nice day. November 21st, 2002 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
More stuff from my Brian’s EDUCATION Blog beat that deserves the Samizdata treatment. Daryl Cobranchi picks up on a “state repression of home-schoolers” story. Here are the first two paragraphs of it:
Dennison is, legally speaking, quite wrong, or so something called the Home School Legal Defense Association argues (see their Nov 13 2002 story). Sadly, these days, something can be wrong, legally speaking, but still be true, factually speaking. Nevertheless, for what it’s worth (and I hope it helps the home-schoolers of Illinois), Regional Superintendent of Schools Bruce Dennison, you are now also being denounced on the other side of the Atlantic. November 19th, 2002 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
Michael Blowhard has been making movie lists again, this one being of New York movies that portray the “arts scene” there. Here’s one that a lot of Samizdata readers will know all about:
I always felt that Cooper was miscast in this. Cooper’s “manliness” seems to me to have been of the unnatural, aspirational kind. Fighting the good fight, facing down the bad guys, is not something that the Cooper character ever did because he enjoyed it, or because it came naturally to him. It’s the lips, I think. So female and “sensitive”. On the contrary, Cooper embodies heroism precisely because he is actually something of a girlie boy, who’d rather be indoors. It’s not that he lacks the physique to do the manly stuff, nor is he stupid. The problem is that his mind is not the heroic sort of mind. He’s not naturally quick and decisive. His natural metier would be something like academia, where he would have time merely to think about things, without scary deadlines. He wouldn’t win any Nobel Prizes, but he’d make a comfortably, unstressed living. But High Noon, or whatever, looms, and he must deal with it. And he doesn’t funk it, no matter how much he is tempted to. The Cooper character typically says little because he hasn’t yet worked out what on earth to say. Other more obviously manly stars – I’m thinking of someone like Clark Gable – say little because, although they could say a lot and occasionally do under pressure, what’s the point? Talk is cheap. Action is what counts, and Mr Real Man has already decided what he’ll do. Cooper spends The Fountainhead communicating to me not intellectual certainty, but bewilderment and confusion that any man could possible be this confident about anything. He says all the Howard Roark words and goes through all the Howard Roark motions not because he believes in it, but because he can’t think of anything else to say or do. That can’t be right. But then again, maybe it is. Maybe Howard Roark can’t think of anything else to say or do either. If so, that can’t be right either, but that’s a different argument. November 19th, 2002 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
Daryl Cobranchi blots out “The Kingdom” (i.e. Saudi Arabia) from the story he’s quoting from and says: Guess where this is? The quote he copies and pastes says all the usual things about how private sector education in these parts works better and costs less than the government’s efforts. I guessed India, through having already done a piece about Indian education for my new education blog. I was also going to hide this posting away in the same place, but then I thought Saudi Arabia? That’s definitely Samizdata territory. That’s of a lot more than merely educational interest. So here I am here with it, and here’s the paragraph that follows the ones that Daryl recycled, from Arab News:
Abdul Rahman Al-Rashid‘s use of the word “essentially” reminds me of how Kingsley (novelist father of novelist Martin) Amis used to say that “essentially” is another word for “not”. The grammar doesn’t quite work out with the above quote, but that aside, if this man is not an enthusiast for the privatization of education, it makes you wonder what a Saudi Arabian who is an enthusiast for the privatization of education would be like. November 18th, 2002 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
The England cricket team, having been utterly smashed in the first test match at Brisbane last week, is now being broken into even smaller pieces by the Australian second eleven, prior to heaven knows what humiliations in the rest of the test matches. England are also now being hammered by Australia in the rugby at Twickenham (oh, hang about, England have scored sixteen unanswered points and now lead by 32-31 with ten minutes left – so forget that) but, the Old Country – sorry, make that “Ancient Enemy” – is still the one dishing out the punishment where it really matters. Take a look at this:
Although whoever wrote all this tries hard to dress up the Mont Pelerin Society (whom we have listed on our links page for ages) as an ultra-secret conspiracy, he actually ends up describing how it has operated really quite well. November 16th, 2002 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
Tim Blair has noted an arkward fact about the Bali bombing for the Australian left to deal with, namely that the Australian left’s (entirely reasonable) campaign to free East Timor from Indonesia was one of the things that provoked the bombing, according to the latest production from Bin Laden Records and Tapes.
Good question. November 15th, 2002 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
Last night I attended a discussion evening in an upstairs room of the King George IV pub in Portugal Street, hosted by the London School of Economics Hayek Society. Very good. Very high quality talk, very smart group of people, from many different countries, Americans, Scandinavians, an Italian, and enough Brits for it not to be a completely non-local event, about twenty people in all. There was no set speaker, we just took it in turns, but as Mr Visiting Libertarian I was given extra pontificating rights, which I trust I did not abuse too annoyingly. They asked me to come again so I must have behaved reasonably well. The topic was along the lines of “Does libertarianism imply an optimistic view of human nature?” I voted no, but not with any huge confidence and with less after the discussion than I had before. It made me think, in other words, as all good meetings do. For what it may signify, the vote went about two-to-one for no. But that was just a fun way to wind up the discussion, it wasn’t the point of the thing. This wasn’t one of those ghastly Oxford Union type debates where everyone is training to be or pretending already to be a cabinet minister. We just sat around in a circle and talked, gently but firmly chaired by one of the Americans. The Hayek Society has been chugging along for some years, and in general it is fascinating how university groups, once founded, often seem to stick around, even after two or three complete personnel recycles. The significance of the Hayek Society is thus hard to overstate. I don’t know exactly where in the British university pecking order the LSE comes but it’s not far from the top. In the past, it has made a lot of mischief all around the world, and was I think started to spread collectivist economics. Like France, it is often deeply annoying but it remains a great institution and is a great intellectual prize, a great meme machine. So for us to be getting our memes into it in a big and quality way is, well, big. The person who invited me to this meeting was Nick Spurrell, and last night he mentioned something about “setting up a website” for the Hayek Society. Either I misheard him (in which case grovelling apologies) or he doesn’t know that there already is one, which was last updated on April 3rd 2001. He must know this. I must have got that wrong. Anyway, I’ll clarify all that soonest, and link to whatever new operation gets going as and when, giving any new material they produce the push here which I’m sure it will deserve. Meanwhile, email Nick Spurrell to signify that you’re interested in meetings like this, if you are. There doesn’t seem to be any problem about non-LSE folks joining in but sort that out with him. At the moment the meetings happen every Thursday evening, and there’s also a bigger set-piece meeting happening next Wednesday afternoon (1pm – 3pm), which I may also go to. I got to know Nick Spurrell through him coming to a couple of my last-Friday-of-the-month meetings. As usual, meatspace continues to matter. November 15th, 2002 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
This is an absolute classic, picked up and copied in full (I think) by Natalie Solent. Which is a good thing because the link to it supplied by Natalie was also a horse’s arse when I tried it. The piece in question is both an utterly convincing and an utterly hilarious explanation (based on the size of the standard horse’s arse) of why the standard railway gauge throughout the world is 4ft 8.5 ins, and it has a delightful space age postscript. Increasing the chances that everyone on earth reads things like this is one of the basic purposes of Samizdata, as far as I’m concerned. Instapundit: do your thing, if you haven’t already. UK Transport (quiet at the moment – I believe Patrick Crozier is moving house) eat your heart out. November 14th, 2002 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
For the last few days various people have been asking me what I thought of the big LA/LI conference last weekend that several of us have been going on about, here and in other Britblogs. How good was it? (Lowered voice: What was wrong that should be better next time?) What I think is that these things are hard to organise, and especially so if you also have a life you’re fighting with full time. Since I have little in the way of a life to fight but did little to help, I’m not entitled to criticise. LA Director Chris Tame (who has a very aggressive life to contend with but who nevertheless did the bulk of the organising) deserves all the credit going for what went well, and none of the blame for any defects. Nevertheless in this posting, I want to focus first on my one big regret about this event. Things happen the way they happen and all that. Some speakers let you down and others have to be juggled, and so on. But, I wish that Richard Miniter‘s speech at the final dinner, so well described here by David Carr, had instead been one of the conference talks that it was originally intended to be. First, if it had been there would have been a chance for questions. And second, if there had been questions I believe it would have become clear that although this man undoubtedly spoke very eloquently and interestingly, he did not really speak for the libertarian movement as a whole, and in particular, not for the European libertarian movement, which is just as split about US policy towards Iraq as libertarians are in the USA. November 14th, 2002 | Comments are closed
This is rather startling. Martin Walker is a lefty, but he’s no mug. I’ve read his book about the Cold War, and although lefty, it’s not bad. This is Walker reporting from Washington for UPI, November 13th:
They were wrong, the diplomat continues, about Bosnia, and about Russia accepting NATO enlargement and Missile Defense. They were wrong about the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972 and the Kyoto Protocol. They were wrong about the European Union’s new common security and defense policy. They were wrong about Reagan and the Evil Empire, and they helped vote the US off the UN Human Rights Commission. They whine about the US Farm Bill when they are the world’s prime protectionists.
Thinking about it, what I find startling is not what it says, but the fact that it says it, in a boring old wire service. I have only one thing to add. Read the whole thing before it disappears from easy view. November 14th, 2002 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
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