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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Musically inclined Samizdata readers will be familiar with the reportage we’ve had over the months, from Dale Amon especially, about what computers, the internet, etc., are doing to the orthodox music business. Basically, the orthodox music business is finding it harder to do business. I found this reportage strangely unsatisfying. Okay, this is the kind of music-making that computers, the internet, etc., are making more difficult to do, and more difficult to profit from. I didn’t doubt the truth of this, but something was missing from the story.
Then I read an article in NY Times by Kevin Kelly (to make this link work you have first to register with NYTimes.com, but this worked fine when I did it), which contained sentiments like this:
If this … power of the digital copy were to play out in full, the world would be full of people messing around with sound and music much as they dabble in taking snapshots and shaping Web pages. The typical skepticism toward a scenario of ubiquitous creation and recreation of music is that it is always easier to read than to write, to listen than to play, to see than to make. That is true. Yet 10 years ago, anyone claiming that ordinary people would flock to expensive computers to take time from watching TV in order to create three billion or more Web pages — well, that person would have been laughed out of the room as idealistic, utopian. People just aren’t that creative or willing to take time to create, went the argument. Yet, against all odds, three billion Web pages exist. The growth of the Web is probably the largest creative spell that civilization has witnessed. Music could experience a similarly exuberant, irrational flowering of the amateur spirit.
This was more like it. Dale and his ilk had been telling me what the music business would not be like any more. But Kelly was telling me what it would be like.
I mention this because Instapundit, which has always been strong with the “impact of technology on the music business” stuff, is now also onto this, the creative rather than the destructive side of the story. Glenn Reynolds, himself a musician, links to another musician/blogger, Eric Olsen, who makes a similar point to Kelly’s:
The parallels between music-creation software and blogging are unmistakable: both enable “ordinary people” to enter into areas of creativity and, equally important, distribution, that were only previously available to select professionals: those who were allowed to pass through the portals of either the press or the record labels by the guardians at the gates. By enabling a large number of people to engage in these activities, both technologies are democratizing their respective fields and battering the barriers between “creator” and “consumer” in both directions.
Maybe, Tom Burroughes, this is where the next bit of British popular musical excitement will come from.
Britpop now is as musically dead as it has ever been, at any time since the arrival of the Beatles. Mostly, it’s just an excuse to dress up and have a bop around, led from the stage by a lipsyncing group of formation dancers who have abandoned all pretence of being able to play any instruments. Does anybody remember an old TV show called “Come Dancing”. That’s what Top of the Pops is subsiding into: elaborately dressed young(er) people dancing about for the entertainment of dewy eyed oldies. Half the tunes in the hit parade now were written before the current performers of them were born. Kylie Minogue’s music is mostly just an excuse for us all to gaze at her cute smile and state-of-the-art bottom. Rap, which is often offered as the answer to where interesting pop music is going these days, is all about words and rhythms. It doesn’t actually need music to be attached to it at all.
There’s nothing wrong about any of this. There’s nothing wrong with boy and/or girl groups spending five hours rehearsing dance moves to every hour they give to rehearsing music. There’s nothing wrong with pre-teen girls caring what pop stars look like and move like, rather than what they sound like. There’s nothing wrong with black versifyers versifying, accompanied only by drum machines. Kylie Minogue’s smile is delightful and her bottom is one of the great glories of contemporary British culture. It’s all very entertaining. It just isn’t very fascinating musically.
Will a new generation of Britbloggers change all that, by putting the music back into music?
First the print media. Now music. For the next big-media green bottle to fall (when our computers have all got big enough to accommodate the results), see David Carr‘s Libertarian Alliance Cultural Notes No. 44. This is called “DIY Hollywood“!
Responding to my praise for golf, Steven Gallaher (of I don’t know where, but his email has “us” at the end of it, so I’m guessing somewhere in the USA) says this:
On the other hand, my observation of the golfers I get paired with on those occasions when I go to the course alone is that most do not care to suffer the consequences of their actions, and so they don’t. Lies are improved and mulligans are taken. Short puts are never attempted; they are assumed to be made. Per-hole score is capped in one way or another (often twice par).
Which presumably means that you don’t score yourself as having taken any more than eight shots on a par four hole, even if you actually took eighteen. I don’t know what a mulligan is, but it sounds equally sneaky. This all reminds me of the stories about Bill Clinton’s dubious self-scoring habits as a golfer.
Perhaps our approach to golf is a reflection of our approach to life. If so, what does that say about our culture?
As usual, Steven, the news about our culture is not good. We’re all doomed, doomed. According to reliable eyewitness accounts, Western Civilisation has been in headlong and uninterrupted decline at least since the time of the ancient Sumerians, i.e. ever since anyone has ever kept reliable eyewitness accounts of anything. Either that, or you play all your golf in Arkansas.
This was posted today by Alan Forrester on the Libertarian Alliance Forum, but is perhaps better suited to a blog such as this. It deals with one of the great issues of our time: Which one is better, Salma or Friedrich?
I once met Friedrich Hayek. Some time in the early to mid nineteen eighties he tottered into the Alternative Bookshop (where all his books were on sale and were among our least-worst sellers), at the age of about ninety five. I got him a chair. (It was a very wobbly chair, one of our worst, and terrible headlines flashed through my mind: “Free market bookshop kills world’s greatest free market economist.” Luckily the chair did not collapse.) “How are you?” seemed like the proper thing for me to say, so that’s what I did say.
Being Friedrich Hayek he took this question very seriously. He apparently took all questions seriously, from everybody, no matter how seemingly insignificant. One of his life principles, deeply embedded both in his personal behaviour and in his theoretical ideas and writings, was that the opinions of non-academics (“tacit economic knowledge” and all that) are just as important as academic opinions like his, and often more so for some important purposes, quite possibly even those of an insignificant assistant bookseller like me. (Leon Louw once told me about a South African expedition with Hayek during which Hayek cross-examined game wardens and park keepers for hours on end about the mysteries of their various trades.) So: here was this young person, perhaps a young person who was deeply knowledgeable in new and surprising ways that he, Hayek, had not yet heard about, asking him, Hayek, how he was. So: how was he? He gave it some thought.
Eventually he answered roughly as follows. Well, he said. I get up in the morning, and I do some work on my book, and then I write a letter to The Times and then I write an article and then I have breakfast, and then I work some more on my book and then I go to see some politicians, and then I prepare my talk for the next Mont Pelerin Conference, and then I have lunch and give a talk at the Institute of Economic Affairs, and then I write another letter to the newspapers and talk with some more politicians and do some more work on my book and then I talk to a journalist … It went on like this for several more minutes. What did this have to do with how he was?
Eventually this was revealed. After he had finished describing all his activities for one entire day, a look of extreme resentment came over his face. “…and in the evening”, he said plaintively, “I feel tired!” This was evidently a new experience for him and he didn’t like it one bit.
I felt tired just listening to him. Moral: great men are not just great for doing great things. They are great because they do a lot of great things.
Blogosophical Investigations (I preferred “Chris Cooper’s Blog” because that’s what it is) is definitely worth an occasional look. Say, about once a month. A rather good contribution from Chris to the now rather good Libertarian Alliance Forum reminded me of his blogzistence.
His bit about Scab Pride is there (July 23), as well as on the LA-F. Some teacher trade unionists in America have been saying that non-unionised teachers should pay the unionised ones Danegeld or teacher-geld or whatever, on account that the unions got them their wages also. Says Chris:
The right of the non-unionized to undercut their unionized competitors is a sacred right.
Chris says unionized and I say unionised, but otherwise of course I agree. He also includes a rather good comment from new LA-F regular Anton Sherwood.
I also liked this, from July 17th, which I think is further evidence that BI’s original name would have sufficed:
Women pride themselves on multitasking
As I come in from walking the dog, I walk past my daughter’s room. A CD is playing full belt: someone called Pink, I later discover. But my daughter is in the next room. She’s sitting on the piano stool watching TV while listening to the music. The TV sound is right down, but it doesn’t matter because she’s seen this episode of Ally McBeal before – probably three times. It doesn’t matter anyway, since she’s talking on her phone. After a while she decides not enough is going on, so she starts playing on the piano with her free hand.
My god. I’ve just realised. I do this. I watch Ally McBeal repeats with the sound off and the Bruckner (or some such preferred alternative to Pink) up, while tapping away at my keyboard. I’m a woman. Oh well. All the libertarians I know agree that we need more of those.
Adam Breeze emails us from Cheshire, one of England’s golfier counties, thus:
Following on from Brian’s comments on Tiger Woods and his views on freedom of association, I just wanted to draw fellow readers attention to David Duval – last year’s Open winner (and one of the best golfers in the world for the past few years) who cites The Fountainhead as his favourite book. See this feature at jacksonville.com.
Is there something intrinsically libertarian about Golf? The individual’s never ending struggle to conquer nature etc…
I suspect that there is something libertarian about golf, and that it’s not just the accident of it being the socialising and deal-making game of choice of the Chamber of Commerce types.
As Adam says, golf is the ultimate individual’s game, in which every predicament the player finds himself in is the consequence of his own previous actions. In golf, you make your choices and you deal with the results of your own choices. There’s no one else to blame.
There can be few greater tests in sport of an individual’s character than to have to play a very difficult golf shot immediately after – and as a direct result of – having just played a very bad shot. Ernie Els passed this kind of test during the final play-off hole that won him The Open last Sunday. I know it’s only a game and all that, but the statistics both of the money involved and of the numbers of folks watching, both at the course and on TV, were presumably vast. Els went into a bunker. But he got himself out to within three feet of the hole, and sank the putt. And all this having earlier lost what looked like a secure lead late in the final regular round, which caused him to have to compete in the play-off holes in the first place.
Someone called Patrick Sullivan visited me this afternoon, sent to me by Sean Gabb who has been teaching him. He is a promising young libertarian writer who showed me two pieces he had done. One was very long and rather dull-looking, full of sensible opinions about pension reform and the EU, of the sort that have been said many times before. But the other was about the British soap opera Eastenders, and was, I think, of real interest.
We don’t have nearly enough libertarians commenting about TV drama. We have lots with opinions about pension reform, but not so many who know what happened on The West Wing last night, or who is just about to be expelled from Big Brother. So here is Patrick’s piece about Eastenders. It’s called “Why Eastenders leads to Big Government”. Any month now Patrick will have blogs and websites charging off in all directions, but for now this is all there is, so no links, just a piece of writing.
Every week 13 to 17 million people across the nation tune into Eastenders. This programme is often derided as trash. I would not agree. Eastenders is very clever television. The production values of the show are high, and it skips very cleverly between story lines at least every 90 seconds, which means that the viewers are able to keep numerous plot threads in their minds at once. Eastenders also carries a message. This message is: “Your life is miserable. No matter what you do, it will go on being miserable. You are unable to look after yourself, therefore you need the state to look after you.” Eastenders creates a demand for an intrusive government.
In Eastenders a person in a suit is almost always a villain. This must cause many of those watching the show to distrust men in suits. Men in suits are often businessmen. Whenever a big corporation pops up in Eastenders it is more often than not to cause trouble for the cast. Big corporations never seem to offer jobs and opportunities for individuals in the fictional world of Albert Square.
The cast of Eastenders are always in a perpetual state of misery. They never seem able to surmount the obstacles in their way. Whenever a cast member seems to find a problem too overwhelming to deal with, the state is generally expected to solve the problem.
Eastenders also pushes the Blairite constituional agenda, and seeks to undermine the institutions of this country which protect liberty. New Labour has so far failed in its attempt to abolish trial by jury. In Eastenders, the character of “Little Mo” was found guilty of attempted murder even though she was innocent. “Little Mo” was found guilty by a jury of her peers. The message this gives out is that trial by jury doesn’t work and that a centralised judiciary would do a better job.
In Eastenders nobody seems to better themselves substantially. There appears to be little room for entrepreneurial vigour in the world of Albert Square. When a character leaves Eastenders, it is not to pursue opportunities elsewhere. It is due to death, going to prison or the desire to flee from some problem or person.
Compare Eastenders with the Australian soap Neighbours, which is also shown every week day on British TV. Neighbours offers viewers a positive message: “Life isn’t miserable. Hard work will get you somewhere. You don’t need the state to solve your problems. There are opportunities if you seek them out.” . In Neighbours, characters often leave due to opportunity elsewhere. The state rarely appears, and when it does it is usually a nuisance. Alas, the production values of Neighbours are lower than those of Eastenders, and Neighbours only attracts an audience of 7 to 8 million viewers per episode.
If you sat two children of identical background and mental health in front of a television set for a year, with one watching Neighbours and the other watching Eastenders, the child who watched Neighbours would be less dependent and happier than the child who watched Eastenders.
Patrick Sullivan
Yes, here’s the latest crop of Libertarian Alliance publications. They were posted out some weeks ago on paper but getting them up at the LA website has been delayed by LA Webmaster Sean Gabb having recently had to upgrade his computer while simultaneously being engaged in moving house, a vexing combination of circumstances. Since the LA’s stuff is for Posterity, not to cause a stir next week (although we don’t object if that happens), I let Sean take his time and didn’t nag him unduly after I’d given him the files. But now, here they are.
They’re only in Acrobat format, I’m afraid. Sean told me the other day that HTML is a format of diminishing importance, and that Acrobat files can now be searched by the best search engines. Or something. The gist of it being that maybe Acrobat will suffice. But can you cut and paste stuff, the way you can with another blog? Surely not, but what do I know. Please feel free to quote from these pieces at will, at whatever length you like, unless doing that is too laborious.
Since there’s so many of them, I’ll keep this blurb very brief and let the titles speak for themselves, which I hope they do. Suffice it to say that the pieces by Perry all appeared first here on Samizdata, and that almost as soon as my piece about blogging (Personal Perspectives No. 17) was published, either my opinion of the Libertarian Alliance Forum changed for the better, or the LA-F changed for the better. A bit of both, I suspect. Unfortunately all references in these publications to Samizdata are to the old, pre-Movable-Type version of it, which I hope in due course to correct.
Political Notes No. 177. Neil Lock, State Your Terms! On The Mis-Use of Language to Convey Subtle Collectivist Messages, 2pp.
Political Notes No. 178. Paul Anderton, The Real Nature of and the Abuse of the Drugs Problem text here, 10pp.
Political Notes No. 179. Perry de Havilland, I Do Not Fear The Immigrant: A Critical Response to Hans-Hermann Hoppe and Ilana Mercer, 2pp.
Political Notes No. 180. Perry de Havilland, Citizenship: The State’s Way of Saying It Owns You text, 2pp.
Political Notes No. 181. Brian Micklethwait, I Am A Libertarian Because …, 2pp.
Economic Notes No. 94. Kevin McFarlane, Why “Trader Sovereignty” Makes More Sense Than Consumer Sovereignty, 2pp.
Philosophical Notes No. 63. Peter Richards, In Defence of the Freedom to Fish, Shoot and Hunt, 4pp.
Legal Notes No. 38. Peter Tachell, Why The Age of Consent in Britain Should Be Lowered to Fourteen, 2pp.
Cultural Notes No. 47. Perry de Havilland, Tolkein’s Ring: An Allegory for the Modern State, 2pp.
Historical Notes No. 41. Gerard Radnitzky, The EU: The European Miracle in Reverse, 6pp.
Historical Notes No. 42, Roderick Moore, The History of Civilisation and the Influence of the Environment, 4pp.
Educational Notes No. 33. Brian Micklethwait, The Failure of Politics and the Pull of Freedom: Reflections on the Work of the Reading Reform Foundation, 4pp.
Tactical Notes No. 29. Perry de Havilland, Giving Libertarianism a Left Hook: How To Make The Traditions of The Left Our Own, 2pp.
(This link doesn’t work yet. Please be patient. Should be okay in a day or two.)
Foreign Policy Perspectives No. 38. Roderick Moore, The Limits of Humanitarian Intervention, 4pp.
Personal Perspectives No. 17. Brian Micklethwait, Losing, Blogging and Winning, 4pp.
Pamphlet No. 27, Miranda Matthews, Why “Sex Work” Can’t Be Unionised and Shouldn’t Be “Legalised”, 4pp.
 
Two rather different looks for Sarah! If you want to know who and what Sarah Lawrence is – and if you want to know about one of the smartest and most effective libertarian propagandists alive then you do want to know who and what Sarah Lawrence is – then read “The Burqa Incident”, subtitled “How I was expelled from the Libertarian Party convention and (allegedly) narrowly escaped spending the night in jail being interrogated by the FBI”. (This girl is clearly a graduate of the Brian Micklethwait School for Putting Unwieldy But Accurate Titles On All Articles (Or Subtitles If That Is Preferred) So That They Always Know What It’s About And Don’t Have To Guess.)
Sarah was due to speak at the Libertarian Party National Convention, held in Indianapolis in July of this year, which she eventually did, on a subject that included “burqa” in its title. So, she thought she’d stir up a little interest for it by walking around beforehand in a burqa. This is an impressive costume (see below).
The joke at the centre of this characteristically Sarahesque episode is that when our Sarah, dressed in her burqa, tried to enter the premises being used by the Convention, she completely freaked out the security people, who had been scaring themselves about a possible terrorist attack on just such a place as this (lots of people assembled in one place) for the previous several days. However, this was what they said to her:
“If it is not part of your religion to wear that, take it off or leave.”
As Sarah herself points out, the guy had it the wrong way around. What he was saying was, in effect: if you’re a genuine terrorist then walk right in ma’am and do your worst, but if it is just a stunt and therefore no threat and no problem, go away.
It seems that not even someone genuinely suspected because of her costume of perhaps being about to let off a bomb may meanwhile be subjected to insulting and religiously demeaning costume restrictions.
I suppose all wars take a bit of getting used to. It must have been rather like this here in England at the end of 1939, when we were still getting used to fighting that war. Let’s hope this war never gets as deadly and as deadly serious as that war did, and remains stuck at the (mostly) farcical stage for the duration.
Sarah’s article has also just been published in The Laissez Faire Electronic Times, under an even more accurate title.
Tiger Woods (who had a nightmare round at The Open yesterday but who was back to his usual form today with a final round of 65) has recently said some interesting things about freedom of association. He has been defending the right of a men-only club to keep women out. (My thanks to Al Baron of the LA-F for the link to this story.)
Tiger’s line was that this was unfortunate, but that it was their prerogative. The right of people to do something unfortunate, on the grounds of “prerogative”. Impressive.
In this particular matter I’d go further. The right of men, and women, to spend some of their time only with other men, and other women, is something that should be permanently insisted upon, not just as something that is “unfortunate” but which ought to be legally tolerated on freedom of association grounds, but as something that for many can be positively liberating – essential for their peace of mind even. Human females and males are not the same, and at times (or at some times), they (or some of them) need a rest from each other and from all the stresses and strains of competing with their own gender for the attentions of the other one. (Gender and race are very different matters from this point of view, as Tiger Woods gets but as most of his interlocutors seem not to.)
Happily most people realise this, and gender segregation is a relentless feature of everyday life. Most people know that there are some occasions and institutions which are for the other gender only, and that their only contribution is to stay away and leave the boys, or the girls, to do their thing. But it now tends to be only the women whose right to keep the men out on some (or, if they want this, all) occasions is explicitly asserted in everyday “political” conversation.
This is not a blanket assertion that it is always wise for men to exclude women from everything they now control. In particular, it is surely most unwise to exclude the other gender from the administration of an activity, such as a sport, which the other gender has started to play in serious numbers. Here, it is the fact of male and female differentness which says that both points of view should be attended to in administrative decisions. I am glad, for example, that the Marylebone Cricket Club has recently decided to allow women to become members. And I dare say that Tiger Woods was right about the unfortunateness of the particular matter he was being asked to comment on.
But this only made his assertion of the principle of freedom of association all the more impressive. No way should the right to exclude particular people from your company ever be confused with an argument about whether exclusion in this or that case is wise, or necessary, or nice, or logical, or anything at all except the right of those doing the excluding.
Just went awandering, via Natalie Solent and a mention of an open letter, which I never got to) about Algeria. (Natalie says that it would have been better for the Algerian fundamentalists to have kept their election win and taken Algeria down the Iran trail, which eventually, if Iran itself is anything to go by, gets better. I think I agree.)
Anyway, what I actually found was this fascinating report about the recent huge forest fires in the USA. It turns out that the enviros may have severely contributed, by legally contesting every second scheme the foresters proposed for cutting back trees to make firebreaks, and such like. What’s more, local politicians are actually starting to say this. It would seem that the “noble ends justify any means” philosophy of the average green is backfiring. So to speak.
Changing the subject completely, when Perry was over here yesterday we invented, or probably re-invented, the word “blogule”, which is of course rehash of globule. Usually you already have the meaning and then devise the word. In this case we have the word, but what exactly does it mean? I think it may be a single blogged idea. A meme of the blogosphere, which only achieves blogular status if it gets circulated. If so, then this posting contains two definite blogules, and an attempt at a third. My spellchecker is getting very excited.
This is just to get the hang of the new blogging procedures, which Perry is demonstrating to me right here, right now.
But this is a great story, from yesterday’s Times (T2 – Monday July 15 – sorry, The Times is unlinkable these days). It turns out that all the medical advice we’ve all been deluged with over the last half century about not eating fatty foods could be the reason why so many people have recently become so very, very fat. It works like this. Fat doesn’t make you all that fat, but it does make you feel full. As a result, if you don’t eat any fat, you don’t feel full, and you do eat more of the stuff (carbohydrates etc.) that do make you fat. Ergo … Classic.
I met up with Tim and Helen Evans yesterday. After several years at the Independent Healthcare Association, Tim is now the President of the Centre for the New Europe, which is pro-free-market but neutral about whether the EU as such is a good thing, which, when Britain is finally and irrevocably swallowed up by what Freedom and Whisky calls the Holy Belgian Empire, is what I will probably end up being. Tim is now connecting with lots of excellent European libertarians, including a lot of well placed academics. How come continental Europe’s libertarians are so excellent? Simple. They have to be.
Tim also reminded me of an email I received a few weeks back from his CNE colleague Richard Miniter, following a plug I put here for two forthcoming books by him. Apparently a long lost friend of Richard’s saw my mention of him and got back in touch, much to Richard’s delight. I asked Richard if I could mention this also – Samizdata brings people together again, etc., etc. – and he said yes fine. After all, if you’re someone like Richard, getting your books plugged is easy enough. Keeping in touch with all your cool friends is harder, and he was genuinely grateful. But then I forgot about this. Meeting Tim again is my excuse to mention this touching reunion now. Said Rich:
The friend, Steve Bodio, wrote a excellent piece for the Atlantic Monthly last year entitled “the eagle hunters of Mongolia.” He spent some time with those fiercely independent steppe riders and watched them bring home dinner with their trained eagles. He is also a gun expert and genuine authority on birds. And, of course, he loves freedom and despises “priggish authority” in all its forms.
People who habitually watch birds in countries other than their own are as likely as not spooks of some kind, in my opinion. After all, what better way is there to spy on metal birds and their habitats, and such like, than to pretend to be looking only at regular ones? And this bird man is also a gun man. Add the fact that one of Richard’s forthcoming books is about Bill Clinton’s (mis)handling of al-Qaeda and is apparently full of juicy revelations, and you get the picture. These guys may not have spook ranks and spook serial numbers, but they definitely have good friends who do.
Some libertarians say that we should never make any friends among the spooks, even the part-time ones, all of whom are the statist spawn of Satan. What tripe. For starters, not all of these people advertise themselves as flamboyantly as some of them do, so how can we know who to avoid? And more seriously, they (or their for-real friends and contacts) work at the darkest heart of the state and spy on the rest of it, and they know how it really works, and doesn’t work. They know that the state is an anarchy, and they are mostly individualist anarchists themselves, in their everyday working lives if not in their beliefs. So if we’re right about what the state is really like – and we are right, right? – then the spooks should be moving our way. The question the spooks mostly ask me is not: Are you sure that the state is really that crazy? It’s: How could a totally free market in spookery actually be made to work, given that it’s such a nice idea? (I’m working on it.)
Think what would happen to the course of history if all the spooks and semi-spooks (or even a decent percentage of them) did become hard-core libertarians.
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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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