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Just to make the point that the Liberty Conference on Human Rights, Civil Liberties, etc., this coming Saturday (June 8th), which I mentioned in an earlier post is not just warmed over Bolshevism, Chris Tame flagged the event up on the Libertarian Alliance Forum with the following introductory spiel:
Please note that this year’s annual conference of LIBERTY (The National Council for Civil Liberties) is quite historic, in that it features speeches and debates by libertarians and non-socialists, including myself, Marc Glendening of the Democracy Movement, Michael Gove of the Times and others.
Quite so. I won’t be there myself, even though the Libertarian Alliance (i.e. Chris Tame) offered to pay my entrance fee, but Tom Burroughes has just emailed me saying he will, and that he intends to supply a report for Samizdata.
By the way, as not mentioned earlier (and sorry about that), the Conference is in Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, London WC1, starting (as I did mention) at 10 am and going on ’til 4 pm.
More from the Lemley family of California, in answer to an earlier question I posted:
My youngest daughter (5) plays soccer, and my oldest (8) doesn’t. (My oldest is more of a bookworm.) My youngest played her first year last year, liked it, and she’s going to play again next year. (The leagues play in the fall.) It’s pretty low-key, like “here’s the ball, and you go this way … not that way, this way.” She has fun with it, and we play in the backyard from time to time. The hope for her, and most girls her age, is that they have fun with the game and keep playing for as long as possible.
What this little report illustrates is why “soccer” has done so well. It’s simple. You just need a ball and a willingness to have fun kicking it this way and that. This is not a capital intensive game. You can practice it anywhere, and wear just about anything while you’re doing it. Hence the legendary successes that can be achieved by countries who are failing at virtually everything else. Argentina’s economy is a global embarrassment just now, yet they are among the favourites to win the World Cup. And hence football’s capacity to spread. “Soccer” is catching on in the USA, even as the more unwieldy and expensive “American” version of football (which is more like our rugby) fails to ignite over here or in mainland Europe, except as a way to entertain US expats.
By the way, the USA ladies team are the world champions, no less. (I heard a Channel Five commentator on US baseball mention this last night.) And in general, it seems that, like Russ’s daughter, most of the Americans who get interested in soccer get interested in playing soccer. Over here “football fever” has tended to mean millions of couch potatoes or travelling fans who merely watch soccer, a numerical fact reflected in the TV adverts which have in recent years become sodden with a truly depressing worship of football fandom. Hurrah, say these adverts, for the “real” fans, who waste their entire lives getting worked up about the results of games in which they do not play, and who might on the basis of this mania be persuaded to buy this or that beer or snackfood and thus sink even further into bloated immobility. Now I like to watch football myself, but please don’t tell me that this is the most profound thing I do. Happily it seems that my sense of being insulted and patronised rather than befriended by these adverts may be quite widely shared, and that this era of British football watching emotional excess may be fading. Most of the adverts in this genre that I most hate were actually on TV a few years ago rather than right now, and meanwhile “ITV Digital” has discovered that there are limits after all to the televised football appetites of Britain. But how much more pleasing it would be if “football fever” meant Britain’s football clubs each having a dozen amateur and youth teams playing every weekend.
What’s the betting that some time during the next two decades the USA wins the World Cup? And what’s the betting that when they do, most of the USA hardly notices?
Russ Lemley of Torrance, CA, and more to the point USA, emails this charming vignette of the family life of a Samizdata reader, thus:
I was probably one of 30 people (maybe that’s too high) on the west coast of the US who saw any portion of the US-Portugal game live. The game started at 2 am LA time. I got to bed last night kinda late, so I didn’t get up until 3, at just about the beginning of the second half. I actually waited a minute before turning on the TV because I was afraid to see the score. When I turned it on and saw the score was USA 3, Portugal 1, I got lightheaded and almost fainted. Then I kicked myself (figuratively) for missing the first half!
The second half I was on pins and needles. (Soccer (er – football) is boring – bah! I’m a baseball nut, and even I fall asleep watching pitching duels sometimes. Even with one own goal, that second half drove me nuts!) Although the US was playing defense to hold their lead, they held up very well considering their opponent. When the game was over, I was so ecstatic that I could hardly contain myself. But I had to. Do you know how hard it is to jump and down in elation without waking up your wife and two daughters at 3:46 am? I figured it out, and hopefully this will be good practice for the US games against Korea and Poland.
Bring on Italy!!!
Maybe not all our readers quite get what a result this was, and how good Portugal are. Luis Figo is Portuguese, and he is one of the most highly regarded players in the world. Or try this, from our good friend The Guardian, from this morning’s sports section:
In Group D the US look to be one of those teams that are always at the World Cup but never contribute much. Anything but a defeat against Portugal would be a major shock.
I’ve feel as if I’ve been reading for ever about the USA’s “soccer mums”, mostly in connection with which way they would vote. My attitude was: vote how you want ladies, where’s the soccer? I have my answer. And I’m told the US ladies soccer team is pretty good, yes? Russ, do your daughters play soccer by any chance?
They’ve just scored a final minute equaliser against Germany. Final whistle! 1-1! Let’s hope I’m as wrong about England.
Well would you ever? It seems that one of those little no-hope teams from somewhere in the north-of-Brazil region has just beaten Portugal 3-2. This is the biggest drama since Senegal beat World Cup holders France in the opening game, a result already noted here. I’ve been looking for another team to support when England get bounced out by Argentina on Friday. (Ireland are, even as I blog this, being disposed of by Germany.) I may just have found it.
This (in the New Scientist and which was posted last Saturday on the Libertarian Alliance Forum) is really a story for expert Adriana to comment on, but it sounds good on the face of it.
Computer activists in Britain are close to completing an operating system that could undermine government efforts to wiretap the internet. The UK Home Office has condemned the project as potentially providing a new tool for criminals.
Of course it could just be that the Home Office is writing it, and wants to round up lots of would-be secret persons into one pen, so that it can snoop on them all with greater ease, and save itself the bother of trawling through the emails of all the people like me who don’t give a prune about secrecy.
Why the caution David? Because if they do start chucking H-bombs about the subcontinent I don’t want to add a feeling of extreme foolishness to all my other unhappinesses. It reminds me of yet another P.G. Wodehouse quote, where Bertie Wooster (I think) notes the occurrence of some ghastly modern practice or other and says something to the effect that if it catches on Western Civilisation will collapse. “And then what a lot of silly asses we should all look.” I love that.
Changing the subject, to all this royal stuff that’s going on just now (which you also mentioned in another post, David), I find myself noting the emotions that millions of my fellow countrymen now seem to feel, of fondness for their stubbornly traditional country and its stubbornly traditional head-of-state arrangements, but not sharing them. I’m a puritan. I think constitutions should describe the realities of power, not surround reality in an aerosol spray-canned mist of sentimental heritage flummery, which was once the real system but which is now just a fading memory. I’d like to live in a country where the official story of how we are governed approximates to reality.
It is said that Royalty confers respectability upon the sordid manoeuvres of politics. Exactly. That is precisely my objection to it. Let the sordid reality of politics be looked in the face, not funked. And then, you never know, people might just be persuaded to change it for the better. I don’t think that our Monarchy is better than the predations of democracy; I think it protects them. (Hans-Hermann Hoppe argues for the reality of Monarchy, not the shadow of it as we now have.)
However, there is the matter of Europe. The Europe issue is real. Royalty is just an argument about interior decor by comparison. If I have to choose between Britain becoming a sordidly real province of the European Union, and remaining a sentimentally heritaged flummery in a state of at least some political detachment from that Union, then I go with the flummery.
I summarise my objection to Britain’s “membership” of the European Union with one question: What British problems will it solve? Only career problems among the elite, it seems to me. With luck, some of them will get to run what they fondly hope will become a superpower to rival the USA. No more grovelling to Uncle Sam. No other problems will be solved that I can think of. What problems might British membership of the EU cause? Infinite. As some clever French conservative (identificatory emails welcome) once said: “When it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.”
That’s how the Royals always do it. They quietly allow themselves to become identified with whatever in the country is being complained about, and all the complainers forget about any flummery objections they might have had (and in this case there were damn few complainers to start with).
The Conservative Party is finally making a difference to all this. It is keeping its hated mouth tight shut. This is helping. An anti-Blairite atmosphere may now finally be coalescing, and the Conservatives must wait in silence, and let it grow.
(I’m right now watching the Falklands Play, and I’m taping it too. Very interesting.)
Yesterday four of us stuffed a Libertarian Alliance mailing, chez moi. It will be going out second class mail (don’t ask), on Wednesday (Monday and Tuesday are Golden Jubilee Bank Holidays). Libertarian Alliance publications are written and edited so that they can stand any amount of delay, so I’ll tell you about them when Sean Gabb’s computer is back in business (British Telecom are messing him around royally) and we have them up on the LA website.
However, one of the fliers added to the mailing, about a conference next Saturday organised by Liberty (formerly the National Council for Civil Liberties) will hit hall carpets a lot later than would have been desirable.
This conference is bizarrely entitled “Human Rights v Civil Liberties”. What’s the “v” about? I guess by “Human Rights” they mean robbing people to pay for other peoples’ education, hospital treatment, etc. But the worst things about the conference are that you have to pay GBP35 to get in, and that it starts at 10 am (lasting until 4 pm.) That’ll keep the riff-raff away, including me. Maybe Tom Burrroughes – wearing his Reuters hat? – can talk his way in for a better price, and at a time to suit himself.
The “Workshop” subjects give you the flavour: “Hunting, Shooting, Fishing: Neglected Freedoms?”, How do Libertarians defend equality?”, “The European Union: A threat to our freedom?”, “Libertarian Right v Liberal Left: Insurmountable differences?” Speakers include: Louise Christian (Christian Fisher Solicitors), Claire Fox (Institute of Ideas), Mark Glendening (Democracy Movement) , Lord Peter Goldsmith QC (the Attorney General), Michael Gove (Times columnist), Imran Khan (solicitor), Claude Moraes (Labour MEP), Professor Conrad Russell (Kings College London), Steven Norris (former deputy chairman of the Conservative Party), Rabinder Singh (Matrix Chambers), and John Wadham of Liberty itself.
NCCL, as it was, was started by Bolsheviks for their own entirely Bolshevik reasons, and remains overwhelmingly left-of-centre. But as you may have noticed, three of those four workshop subjects push libertarian buttons, and they are apparently making genuine attempts to extricate themselves from the tag of being Blairite poodles. I asked Sean Gabb if he was going? “Oh no, a bunch of lefties chattering amongst themselves.” And in truth that is probably what it will be. Nevertheless, they are trying. (The Libertarian Alliance is affiliated to them, for its own reasons.) But what do you do if your side is now the ruling class and hence the people now most vigorously violating civil liberties? What do you do if you have friends of friends whom you are now supposed to be campaigning against? What if the man who is now stitching up asylum seekers or fox-hunters came to your wedding?
Libertarian Alliance Director Chris Tame will also be one of the speakers at this conference, so he at least will know some of what transpires. Marc Glendening, a long-time anti-EU campaigner, is also a cordial acquaintance. Maybe I’ll be able to extract something in writing from one of them about it all.
If you’re interested, ring 020 7378 3667, or email zoe@liberty-human-rights.org.uk
David Carr is his usual pessimistic self concerning the possibility of nuclear war between Pakistan and India. I am my usual (cautiously) optimistic self. As I said to David face-to-face over the weekend, and as he said I should stick up here, there is one huge difference between nuclear weapons and the previous sort. Nuclear weapons can kill Presidents, Prime Ministers and Generals, as well as the lower ranks. Would World Wars One and Two have proceeded as they did if, every time you (one of the grand fromages) launched your Grand Offensive from the safety of your French Chateau or your German or British or Russian command bunker, there was a one in five chance that you personally would die a horrible death. Would the Cold War have remained throughout its duration so cold without nuclear weapons concentrating the minds of the Great People?
So. Okay. Like right now, for example, the Haitians need to come to America. But some people are all: “What about the strain on our resources?” But it’s like, when I had this garden party for my father’s birthday, right, I said R.S.V.P. because it was a sit-down dinner. But people came that, like, did not R.S.V.P. So I was like totally buggin’. I had to haul ass to the kitchen, redistribute the food, squish in extra place settings, but by the end of the day it was like, the more the merrier. And so, if the government can just get to the kitchen, rearrange some things, we could certainly party with the Haitians. And in conclusion may I please remind you that it does not say R.S.V.P. on the Statue of Liberty. [Applause] Thank you very much.
-Cher (Alicia Silverstone) in the movie Clueless
I just noticed that UK Transport now has a hit counter, and I pushed the little cross, expecting just a number. But as most readers of this probably know far better than I, what you actually get is a whole new page of numbers. And the news is that the UKT cup is either almost completely empty, or else starting to get definitely, detectably damp at the bottom, depending on how you look at it. VISITS: Total: 869, Average Per Day: 29, Average Visit Length: 1.10, Last Hour: 5, Today: 24, This Week: 240.
You can see how a regular journalist, looking at numbers like those, would say, forget about that. I, and I hope Patrick, with our backgrounds in unofficial paper pamphlets stuffed into envelopes and the like, are more easily impressed. I definitely am. Compare Total with This Week, or Average with Today (that was at 11.30 am today), and maybe you’d agree. Patrick seems to be excited, because (as Natalie Solent also noted) he was up at 6.43 am this morning. This is about when I go to bed.
There’s a mass of recent UKT stuff to look at, and Patrick does write beautifully, with a decent sprinkling of human being outbursts and idioms to enliven what from other keyboards would be uninterrupted number and date crunching. What I like about Patrick is: he’s honest. You always feel that he’s saying it like he’s seeing it. If he’s confused, he says so. If he deviates in his head from the libertarian orthodoxy (e.g. on Compulsory Purchase Orders being necessary to build railways) he deviates right there on UKT. Which means that when he does express a strong judgement that counts for something.
Nevertheless, of all the recent stuff on UKT, the thing that most impressed me was an email from Tim Hall, whoever he is. It’s full of insider knowledge about the sad fate of brand-new but never used railway carriages, or something, and what it means is that UKT looks like continuing its slow but steady rise to significance. Patrick doesn’t have to write the entire thing himself. He may not know as much about roads and planes and ships as he does about trains, but there are surely others out there ready to fill in, as soon as they hear of UKT’s existence. In a year or two, he could have himself an entire ideologically simpatico circus of regulars. Patrick is a one-step-at-a-time sort of person, and he’ll probably say something like: you’re very kind Brian, let’s hope you’re not too kind, wait and see, etc, etc. Which is all part of why I’m starting to get seriously optimistic about UK Transport.
Yes, just as Perry said at the end of my earlier post, I now have this quote nailed, although I have to say it wasn’t just the blogosphere – more like the Internet as a whole. And it happened in less than an hour, or so it seemed. It’s like having your own personal global Tannoy system. But it also needs the good-will of humans, not just technology..
John Daragon emailed thus, with admirable terseness:
Book 3, Chapter 5, pg. 127.
Steven Galaher e-mailed that while he couldn’t give me the chapter and page number, he could give me an expanded version of the quote:
“The Enemy, of course, has long known that the Ring is abroad, and that it is borne by a hobbit. He knows now the number of our Company that set out from Rivendell, and the kind of each of us. But he does not yet perceive our purpose clearly. He supposed that we were all going to Minas Tirith; for that is what he would himself have done in our place. And according to his wisdom it would have been a heavy stroke against his power. Indeed he is in great fear, not knowing what mighty one may suddenly appear, wielding the Ring, and assailing him with war, seeking to cast him down and take his place. That we should wish to cast him down and have no one in his place is not a thought that occurs to his mind. That we should try to destroy the Ring itself has not yet entered into his darkest dream.”
Neither email on its own would have been enough, but put the two together (the speciality of the Internet, after all) and it wouldn’t have taken me much longer. However, the man whose email I am publishing in the first place (and whom I had also personally e-mailed), Michael Drout of Wheaton College, Massachusetts, as well as giving almost all of the same expanded quote that Steven Galaher supplied, also settled the whole thing for me thus, and I’m going to “publish” all of this too (i.e. elsewhere and not just here) because it is informative:
Citing the Lord of the Rings is tricky because there are so many textual variants (due to multiple printings and re-printings and Tolkien’s tendency to revise each set of galleys sent to him). A “clean” text was only finally developed in the late 1980’s, so most people just cite by Volume, Book, and Chapter number. Thus the above would be: TT, Bk III, ch v. But if you want a more traditional cite, it is page 100 in the Hougton Mifflin hardback edition, the closest thing we have to a “standard” edition in Tolkien scholarship.
Hope this was helpful.
Indeed it was. Thanks also to Antoine Clarke for showing willing, and to anyone else who was half way to the answer when Perry told everyone to stop.
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