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]
|
And that’s only trivially because Patrick deals with other countries besides the UK. The deeper reason why all should periodically attend to UK Transport is that what it says about transport often applies with equal force to the rest of the universe. Consider the following, from a posting yesterday about airline seats.
I think there are archive problems over at UKT, because I couldn’t make the first of those two links work. Here’s the stuff I mean:
It may be that left to its own devices the market will solve the problem. But, of course, these days markets are not left to their own devices. Right now, at an airline near you the following conversation could be taking place:
“Why don’t we increase seat sizes?”
“Because, the government is thinking of introducing some new regulations.”
“How does that affect us?”
“Because, if we go ahead and change all our seats we could find they’re too small and have to replace them again.”
“Oh. And if they’re too big?”
“Then with the new regulations, everyone will assume that the problem has been solved and we’ll lose any competitive advantage we might have had.”
“So, we’re better off waiting for the government?”
“Precisely”
So, the change will be late, you won’t have a choice and the state will take the credit.
Now I think that’s about a great deal more than just airline seats, don’t you?
Last night (Thursday July 11th) I attended a lecture organised by the Adam Smith Institute (note that their website now has no “uk” at the end – it’s just “www.adamsmith.org”), and given by former Chief Schools Inspector Chris Woodhead. It was a strange occasion, in some ways extremely encouraging and in others somewhat frustrating.
Woodhead patiently explained why, in his very well informed opinion, state education, academic improvements are because the exams are getting easier. The national curriculum, which he said he used to support, has allowed real subjects to be replaced by nonsense subjects, and he now thinks it should be scrapped.
Nor, said Woodhead, will the present government’s various “initiatives” make any difference. Lowering class sizes has had little impact in the USA. Parents don’t want specialist schools, they just want good schools which are good at everything that matters. Bringing in “private sector management” won’t help if the managers aren’t allowed to sack any of the existing teachers.
So, having spent most of his career working for the “top down” (his own oft-repeated phrase) state education system, he now wants the freely choosing citizenry rather than state hirelings and bureaucrats to make the key decisions about education.
Well, good. And good on the Adam Smith Institute for fixing it for Woodhead to say such things. But I felt about it rather as I did about high-level (and hence well paid) “critics” of the Soviet empire, at the time when that was also falling apart. Could you not have arrived at some of these conclusions a little sooner? And some of Woodhead’s proposed reforms were decidedly naïve. Education vouchers? He said that the entire state education machine, and especially the unions (“the blob”), is unanimously against vouchers. Indeed. So might not something a little more cunning, if only because more cunningly worded, be preferable? There was also the suspicion that Woodhead’s own inability to get his own way from his former position of supposed power, and the general unpleasantness he suffered from the many and various enemies he accumulated within the system, had a lot to do with his conversion. Sour grapes in other words. But one shouldn’t carp too much. It will certainly make a difference that a major ed-celeb has come out in favour of moving education in a much more free market direction. And besides, what better way could there be to learn about the horrors of the politicised and state-centralised provision of education than by experiencing and observing these horrors at first hand and face to face? Better late than never.
Another reservation that many libertarians would have felt (and which one questioner stated out loud during the Q&A session) concerned the fact that Woodhead’s proposals were all about parental choice, and about the reestablishment of old-fashioned education and old-fashioned academic standards. The Woodhead plan was simply that the children should be told to do different things by different people. But what of the children’s own wishes? What of their freedom?
This bothers me less (although Brian’s Education Blog may change my mind about this!). First, Woodhead has a point about the value of basic skills, especially of the simple three Rs variety. Learning to read and write and add up is a far better basis for individual freedom than being kidnapped and made to muck about with plasticene, or to be taught literacy and numeracy very badly.
And second, it seems to me that in practice children can have a huge influence over the choices that parents supposedly make on their behalf, far more than they could ever hope to influence the state. Eagerness to follow Alternative Plan B and severe temper tantrums and adolescent bolshiness directed at Parental Plan A means that Plan A in practice stands little chance of being followed, no matter how certain parents may feel about its superiority. That so many children get bossed by their parents is because most children are either unthinkingly obedient, or else only bolshy. Children lack freedom, that is to say, not because they are in a prison, but because they themselves give insufficient thought to alternatives.
A month after the September 11th attacks I posted a long article on the Libertarian Alliance Forum which prophecied/threatened/feared/was-trying-to-prevent-by-threatening a possible Western slaughter of Muslims. All Muslims. It caused quite a ruckus there. The grammar was a bit overwrought but it still reads well. What did it say? Pretty much what J. J. Johnson says in this.
Summary: if the Good Muslims want to go on being treated like Good Muslims, then they had damn well better sort out the Bad Muslims.
There’s no denying that there’s an extra frisson to Johnson’s piece that comes from him being a black man. He mentions how he and his fellow Good Blacks of American are now sorting out the Bad Blacks of America more energetically than they used to (instead of blaming it all on White America), and cites this as the kind of example that the Good Muslims ought to follow.
A few days ago my phone line went silent. I rang BT (British Telecommunications plc). After about ten minutes and several phone calls later, trying to dodge past multiple choice computers and computerised music, I eventually got to talk to some helpful humans. Do you, they asked, have any extensions on your line? (One badly behaved extension can shut everything down, it seems.) Yes, several. Unplug each one, they said, one at a time, and see if things improve. The extension in my bathroom was the culprit. It had got wet. When I unplugged it, all was well again. So, aside from the difficulty of getting through to the helpful humans in the first place, a good result. Another of the humans rang me the following day to check that all was well, which it was. Thank you gentlemen, great job, wonderful.
But then earlier today I had another call, from a market research company calling “on behalf of BT” wanting to ask me more questions about my “experience” with the fault I’d reported. I told them the story you have just read, minus the complaints about the multiple choice computers and the moron music. I said that I was very satisfied with the advice I’d been given, and that my problem was solved. No, no engineers had called. No worries. Okay?
No. Not okay. Would I mind “answering some questions” about all this? What?! I thought I just had. This would apparently take “about five minutes”. I said yes I would mind. I’ve just told you the story, for heaven’s sake. Write that down.
What was depressing about this call today was that although this was clearly an intelligent human doing the talking, he, unlike the people who had actually helped me, was obviously reading from a script, and this script had beaten all the commonsense out of him. I just couldn’t face five minutes (or more) wading through this conversational treacle just when I had got deep into doing something else. So, I said I would mind, and that was that.
Afterwards I felt bad about this. BT had helped me. Why couldn’t I answer a few questions? I felt guilty, and then angry about being made to feel guilty. Grrrr!
So, having snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, by telling me (eventually) how to handle my phone problem, BT then snatched defeat back again by trying to inflict an annoying conversation on me, and then making me feel bad about having said get lost.
Now that I think about it, it also annoys me intensely when BT calls me to ask whether I’d like my phone bill reduced. Yes, I say. Then please tell us which numbers you use most often. This is insane. They know the answer to that at least as well as I do, because they list it all on my phone bills. And after I’ve told them that, how many more questions will there be? I say: “If you want to cut my phone bill, then cut it. When you’ve decided about that, I’ll decide about whether I go on using BT. Put that in your questionnaire!” Jesus. But of course they can’t, because there’s no question that goes “Is this call driving you insane?”, and no box for “Yes it f***ing is!”, in this particular idiot script. You can feel BT’s market share collapsing during calls like these, right in front of their idiotically self-blinded eyes.
BT are fine at installing phones. Their engineers are fine, and great to deal with. But when it comes to the ancient and ignoble art of using telephones to drive people crazy, BT’s “marketers” and “market researchers” are, in my experience, among Britain’s leading offenders. It’s ironic when you think about it. Britain’s biggest phone company uses its own product to drive its own customers crazy.
*
Dealing with and being dealt with by big organisations on the phone doesn’t have to be like this. BT should take some lessons from Viking Direct, from whom I and the Libertarian Alliance get our office supplies.
When I call Viking Direct it’s a human who answers, not a machine with a recorded humanoid voice, and she usually does this straight away. Sharon (“This is Viking Direct my name is Sharon how may I help you?”), or whoever, is most definitely the product of her training. But she uses her computer to make things easier for me rather than more impersonal and pre-scripted, for example by checking exactly which printer toner cartridges I ordered last time and ordering the exact same ones again, or by volunteering that there’s a special offer on A4 paper so I can have it even cheaper than usual, which, chances are, makes me order a couple of extra boxes.
Note that, BT. She tells me about the price cut, and immediately arranges for me to get it. There’s no nonsense about me having to tell them which item I order most frequently.
Nor does Sharon try to bash me into a pre-scripted conversational prison. We simply talk, like the two humans that we are. There’s the big clever machine, and there’s Sharon and me making maximum use of it, two people working intelligently together, both of us on the same side.
And nobody ever rings me up later to pester me about whether Sharon and her computer have been helpful, presumably because if they want to know this, they simply stand behind her and listen, or perhaps listen in on another extension.
Another for our “triumphs of capitalism” collection, don’t you agree?
*
You will not be amazed to learn, if you don’t know it already, that whereas BT is a quasi-governmental, heavily regulated organisation which it is complicated and costly to take your business away from, Viking Direct, although big and bureaucratised, is nevertheless out there every hour of the day in the freest bit of the free market, the bit where me taking my business elsewhere is as easy as me picking up a different catalogue and trying a different number. Which is all part of why I haven’t and don’t plan to.
BT on the other hand, I may be switching from …
Most of the news I hear from South Africa is bad. AIDS. AIDS denial. Crime. And black politicians blaming everything on white racism and trying to impose equal outcomes by the force of law, as opposed to equality before the law with the outcomes coming out as they will. As a sports fan, I particularly noticed what sounded like a truly vile quota rule, insisting that there had to be at least one black player in the national cricket team. They also, I learned today when digging deeper, had a rule that provincial cricket sides had to have at least four “players of colour” in them.
The good news is that they are now scrapping these quotas. South Africa’s Sports Minister is having “talks” with South Africa’s United Cricket Board. But assuming that talk is all that ensues, that the Minister is reassured rather than determined to over-ride and over-rule, and that the quotas will indeed be got rid of, this is the best news I’ve heard from South Africa for quite some time.
Positive discrimination rules of this kind perpetuate the process of judging people according to skin colour and collective racial membership rather than on individual merit. The South Africa cricket quota rules were bound to give rise to the suspicion that individual players, even players who in fact fully deserved international recognition, had in fact only got into the national team because of “politics”.
Quota rules are especially depressing in sport, because sport has traditionally been an arena where, because results matter so much and because individual merit is so hard to ignore, hitherto disadvantaged racial groups have time and again been able to make their first big strides towards social and legal equality, lead by their greatest individual sportsmen. From a TV documentary screened in connection with the recent soccer World Cup about the great Pele, for example, I learned for the first time what a big part the unavoidably brilliant talent of that great sportsman played in breaking down the racism so powerful in Brazil in the nineteen fifties. (Brazil won the recent World Cup, with a team containing, of course, numerous coloured players.)
Assuming that the South Africans really have now dumped their cricket quota rules, I am even willing to say, retrospectively, and despite their obvious ghastliness, that I can see why they had these rules, temporarily, and that I can see what they may have achieved with them. By flagging up the issue of non-white participation in cricket in this aggressively interventionist manner, the South African cricket authorities at least made it clear that they were serious about involving all South Africans in cricket and not just white South Africans. The quotas may now have ended, but the UCB has made it very clear that all the other efforts South African cricket has been making to achieve greater equality of cricketing opportunity (and thereby in due course lots of non-white international representation on merit), such as new pitches and new coaching schemes in non-white areas, will continue.
This charter has been forced from the king. It constitutes an insult to the Holy See, a serious weakening of the royal power, a disgrace to the English nation, a danger to all Christendom, since this civil war obstructs the crusade.
-Pope Innocent III (Papal Bull of August 1215 – referring to Magna Carta)
On BBC News 24 in the early hours of Monday morning they were reporting on “creationism” in the USA.
As an orthodox twentieth century boy, I believe that creationism is bunkum, and that evolution is the truth of the matter. But one thing I do agree with the creationists about is that Christian doctrine most definitely is in head-on collision with modern science.
Most of the Christians I know here in Europe seem to believe that Christianity is about different things to science, and that you can be a completely Christian Christian, and a completely scientific scientist, without any intellectual conflict.
If you go to the “The Church of England’s view on…” bit of the C of E’s website, you’ll find a long list of contemporary political and ethical issues to explore (such as “animal welfare”, “ethical investment”, “defence and disarmament”, “capital punishment”, “euthanasia”, “AIDS”, “the national lottery”, “child benefit”, and many more – plenty for us to get stuck into), but nothing involving the words “science” or “evolution”. Anglicans do not seem to be exercised by such arguments. As far as they are concerned, there is no collision between Christian doctrine and scientific doctrine to be discussed.
But the Book of Genesis makes claims about the origin of the earth and of its biological contents which, as was well understood in the late nineteenth century when these matters were first debated, are in total opposition to the theory of evolution. Either God was the maker of heaven and earth (as I was made to proclaim every Sunday morning when I recited the Creed at school) and men and beasts and plants and bugs, along the lines claimed in Genesis, or he was not.
You can’t have it both ways. Only by completely overturning what Christianity has meant for the best part of two thousand years, as the Church of England seems now to be doing by turning Christianity from a religion into a political sect, can you possibly believe that there’s no argument here.
I’m getting good feedback about Brian’s Education Blog, which is encouraging considering that it doesn’t yet exist. (I’m waiting to see which software to use.) Patrick Crozier gave it an anticipatory mention last Tuesday, in his non-transport blog, which I missed at the time.
And Kevin Marks (no relation of Paul) emailed in response to my piece about synthetic phonics:
Good to see you picking up on this. Some more links:
Read America are a leading synthetic phonics organisation, whose Phono-graphix programme is excellent – they did the research to optimise it for speed of teaching, and it avoids learning complex and fragile rules by rote, which are the downfall of most phonics schemes.
The textbook for parents is great.
Sign me up for an education blog, BTW. I’ll try and persuade Dad to join in too.
Dad would be John Marks, who is an education expert and not anything to do with the John Marks who is a drugs treatment expert. I expect to be supplying lots of links to John (education) Marks’ various campaignings and muck-rakings, about such things as phoney exam results.
I order you to hold a free election, but forbid you to elect anyone but Richard my clerk.
-Henry II (in 1173, to the electors of the See of Winchester regarding the election of a new bishop)
I’m listening at 1 am on Saturday morning to Brigitte Fassbaender‘s remarkable recording of the song cycle by Schubert called Winterreise (“Winter Journey”). This is extremely depressing music. The last song, for example, is called ‘The Hurdy-Gurdy Man’.
Barefoot on the ice he totters to and fro, and his little plate has no reward to show. No one wants to listen, no one looks at him and the dogs all growl around the old man. And he lets it happen, as it always will, …
Not surprisingly, for many decades these songs were among Schubert’s least performed. But now they are among his most performed songs. Why? I have a theory to offer.
People get used to what happens to them. When what happens changes, they find themselves dragged, as the Californian psycho-babblers say, out of their comfort zone. It is even a comfort zone if it’s misery and they get dragged away from misery into happiness. Misery is comfort because they have got used to it and know how to handle it. Happiness is discomfort because they don’t know how to deal with it.
Life in the West has been a lot better during the last half century than it was in the half century before that. All those creature comforts, package holidays, children all flourishing, television, hi-fi, and in general a standard of living for almost everyone that was beyond all earlier popular imaginings. But people weren’t prepared for all this happiness, all this pleasure, all this contentment. They didn’t know know to handle it, how to live with it. What was to be done with all that stoical acceptance of adversity that had been so painfully learned?
Art stepped in. Art now keeps the unprecedentedly affluent and happy West in a comfort zone of imagined misery, just as in the first half of the twentieth century art kept the West in a remembered and adapted-to comfort zone of late nineteenth century happiness, while all around them life was becoming the very definition of hell on earth. The people of the West hummed Viennese operetta and Broadway show tunes while the armies marched and the gas chambers immolated. Now, when the sun shines, the children are fed and the worst that happens is the occasional transport disaster or homicide or sporting accident, drab young men who never smile drone tuneless dirges on Top of the Pops, and our most admired stage directors alter King Lear, just as they did a hundred years earlier, but this time cutting out the nice bits.
Something else people got used to in the first half of the twentieth century was being deafened by repetitious machinery. So, just when the machines were finally being silenced and replaced by other machines that only hum quietly, what do the sons and grandsons of the toiling factory masses turn around and invent? Deafening and rhythmically repetitious, industrial strength rock and roll.
It is commonly said that art prophecies. But art also remembers and celebrates and immortalises and universalises the lost past, however terrible it may have been at the time. The horrors of the early twentieth century were certainly horrible, but at least they meant something. In those days people knew what they were fighting for. The din of the machines was nigh unbearable, but at least there was some energy flying around and banging away and serious minerals being manhandled, by real men. Art remembers these things, and, comfortingly, keeps them going for a few more decades.
Well, it makes a change from just talking about ID cards.
Not a phrase to grab you by the heartstrings, is it? But these are the words to listen out for if you want your child to learn to read properly. “Synthetic phonics” tells you that this is probably being done properly. If, on the other hand, they tell you that they’re using “eclectic” or “a mixture of” methods, watch out. “Dyslexia” looms.
I also put “dyslexia” in inverted commas, because what we have here is that very common modern phenomenon, a damaged brain diagnosed as caused by its own inherent damagedness when actually it is a brain that has been damaged by having damaging signals thrown at it from outside. The mental radar screen registers muddle not because it is muddled, but because it has been muddled.
The situation is actually a little more complicated than that, or the problem would probably not have got as bad as it has. There is just enough physical basis for the notion of “dyslexia” for the false claim to persist that dyslexia and dyslexia alone causes all reading difficulties, and for a multi-billion pound industry to spring up to fail to solve the problem. The reality is that good teaching automatically gets around almost any inherent, genetic predisposition towards reading difficulty, and teaches virtually all children to read successfully. Bad teaching, on the other hand, is something that the majority of children can hack their way past. They do it with difficulty, but they do it. The become literate despiteall the muddle they are subjected to. But not so the “dyslexics”. They don’t “crack” reading. They don’t get its inherent nature, because they have not been explicitly taught it.
And the explicit nature of reading that is not taught to an appallingly huge number of children these days is that each letter has a name and makes a sound or sounds (the name and the sound(s) not being the same! – obvious point but frequently overlooked), and that when you are confronted with a word, that is to say with a string of letters, the way to spell it out is to spell it out, one letter (or letter group like “ch”) at a time. Don’t guess. Don’t read only the first letter and then guess. Don’t look for the pattern of the “whole word”. Read. That’s synthetic phonics. Dee Oh Gee spells duh- o- guh- DOG.
Why don’t they teach that in all schools? Because they are ess tee you pee eye dee? Because they are mostly parts of a N-A-T-I-O-N-A-L-I-S-E-D I-N-D-U-S-T-R-Y? Both, and much more that’s far too complicated to explain in a posting that would keep anyone’s attention.
So what brought all this on? Partly of course, I’m getting into the swing of having arguments that will eventually find their proper home in ‘Brian’s Education Blog’. But the particular provocation was a really good article in last Sunday’s Observer (Review Section, cover story).
You can also chase up the synthetic phonics story in more detail by going to the website of the Reading Reform Foundation.
I love this, from the “in fact” section of the July 2002 issue of Prospect (quoted in its turn from The Guardian World Cup guide):
In Paraguay, duelling is legal if both participants are registered blood donors.
This sublime example of the art of contriving to practice a politically incorrect past-time by attaching it to something politically very correct is an inspiration to all. What next? Feminists Against Income Tax? (Nice Acronym, that on.) Gays For Globalisation? Guardian-readers for the Right to Hunt? (We already have Feminists Against Censorship and those gay gun guys in America called, if I recall it right, the Pink Pistols.)
And this is the first sentence of an excellent review article in the same issue of Prospect by Malise Ruthven, called “Radical Islam’s failure”.
The attacks of 11th September were the last gasps of a moribund Islamist movement. Terror is a sign of failure, deployed when political mobilisation has failed.
With each passing day, the number of intelligent people focussing their intelligence on 9/11 and all that grows. If this article is anything to go by, the whole mess may get settled sooner than pessimists like me now fear. I do like Prospect.
|
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.
|
