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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Sometimes the story is something that never happened. And what never happened to me is that I neither filled in nor ever sent in my census form, whenever it was. They sent me a census form, so they do know where I live. I kept the form in case things ever turned nasty. I didn’t treat it as pure junk mail and bin it at once, but I never did anything about it. I vaguely remember them sending me a follow up letter saying something like: oh go on, please, if you haven’t … But I still didn’t, and since then: nothing. No threats, no men knocking on the door. My plan was never to actually defy the government and refuse to fill it in. I was never going to send letters to the local paper and insult local magistrates and refuse to pay the fine on principle. It was just to fill it in only when they really made me. “Oh you mean you really wanted me to fill it in? Why didn’t you say? Goodness. Silly me. Sorry, won’t happen again.” That was going to be my line. But it never came to that. Peculiar.
I think what pissed me off about the whole exercise was the slogan at the top, which went: “Count me in!” There was a little child’s hand sticking up, as if I was just begging to be included, and as if the thing was actually a spontaneous exercise in participatory democracy. It was as if the census was really a mass eruption, every ten years, of the popular desire to tell the government how many people one lives with and what one’s religion is, and how much money one earns. ” I can’t help myself, I simply have to tell them! Please, please, give me a form!” For some reason, I didn’t get swept up in this national emotional spasm. Instead, I said to myself: okay if you’re telling me it’s actually voluntary, then that means I don’t have to do it, right? It turns out I didn’t, and it was voluntary.
I don’t know what this proves. I think what it shows is that officially administered British life is now getting fuller and fuller of things that you must do, but which actually you don’t have to do.
I’ve noticed in radio debates recently that quite large swathes of the very law itself are now sliding into this must-do-but-don’t-actually-have-to-do Twilight Zone. Drugs for example. People are adamant that drugs (and you know the ones I mean, I’m not talking about aspirin) shouldn’t be “legalised”. But, on the other hand, they don’t think the police should actually do anything nasty to people who use drugs. It’s just that saying that you are allowed to use drugs would “send the wrong message”, or some such. When someone in a radio yack-in says that drugs should “remain illegal”, I press for clarification. What should happen to you if they catch you doing them? Oh, that’s not the point, the point is they’re very bad, very dangerous, they stick around in your body, blah blah blah. Yes, but should you be arrested, punished, fined, sent to prison? It’s not about that, blah blah blah. Isn’t it? Well no it really isn’t. That actually does now seem to be the law with drugs. Drugs are illegal, and you mustn’t do them. But, on the other hand, actually you can. Like I say, peculiar. This time it’s you-mustn’t-but-actually-you-can, which is the opposite of filling in your census form, but the principle, if you can call it that, is the same.
No links to this. I thought of this story all by myself.
Chris Cooper’s Blog is slowly getting into its stride. It may never proceed at faster than a slow walk, which is fine by me. So far the postings have been longish and rather scholarly, in keeping with the new title at the top, Blogosophical Investigations. If Chris sets a slow pace but sticks to it, then all honour to him, I say. On current evidence I recommend a visit about once a week, with Friday being the day when the most seems to happen.
The latest posting is a meta-contextual comment on the abortion issue, which concludes thus:
There is no such thing as a right answer here. That’s not sitting on any fence: pointing to the existence of a hundred-foot high fence isn’t the same thing as sitting on it.
So chew on that, objectivists. It means that in a free society, people are going to divide into communities of divergent moralities, and the anti-abortionist ones are just going to have to live alongside communities of people whom they regard as murderers. As they already have to do, of course – but they’re not reconciled to the fact.
A week ago, there was a piece, with lengthy quotes, concerning the argument between Bjørn Lomborg and the Scientific American. No sitting on that fence either.
That’s it, that’s the story. Most libertarians know the arguments for pricing roads sanely instead of insanely. This Sky News report tells us that the RAC (Royal Automobile Club), a big fragment of the British road lobby, now ‘gets it’ as well. Perhaps some of the people there even realise that road pricing, far from being “anti-car”, will in reality usher in a new golden age of the car, and put the present dark age of gridlock behind us.
Over at the Liberty Log Alex Singleton comments (“Attack enemies, not friends” – May 16) on the ruckus between the Libertarian Alliance and the Daily Telegraph. Alex is not impressed by the LA’s anti-Telegraph stance, and notes that Andrew Dodge is likewise unimpressed. For whatever it may be worth, I agree with these criticisms.
However, far more dangerous than the occasional spasm of Libertarian Alliance activity that I personally find embarrassing would be the absence of activity. I got a phone message the other day from Patrick Crozier who writes UK Transport and is also the Transport Spokesman for the Libertarian Alliance. He wanted my “approval” for a letter he had in mind to send to a newspaper about some railway matter, and regretted that I wasn’t in to bestow it. I listened to him regretting my absence and I said, out loud: “Send it mate, send it! It’ll be fine!” “I’ll send it anyway” was how his message concluded, to my delight. And of course the letter (“Nationalisation is NOT the Answer”, posted on UK Liberty – May 14) is fine. In another recent phone conversation with Patrick I recycled for his benefit a business slogan which I’m fond of: “Load! Fire! Take Aim!” Do stuff. Think about what worked and what was stupid. Then do more stuff, and more. Shins get kicked. Feet sometimes get tripped over. (I don’t suppose my LA colleagues have loved everything I’ve written here, or always agree with the line I may take on the radio, e.g. this morning when I was defending Political Correctness). But every time we make one of these little efforts and or strike some spark or other the LA website counter creeps upwards, and the word about liberty and libertarianism gets around.
I did well enough to blog about it, so here goes. I took the line above, that sometimes Political Correctness isn’t going all that mad, it’s just people trying to be correct and not hurt each other’s feelings. I also mentioned that when I was helping a friend run some maths teaching classes some while ago, I took some photos of the children and my friend asked me to stop, because, you know, it might not look good, so now I’ve outed myself as a paedophile. Oh goody.
Mention was made of the phrase “nitty gritty”, which the British police are apparently not allowed to use now as it’s some kind of reference to slave ships. I’d been told this was going to get a mention, but as usual you only think of what you should have said afterwards. And what I should have said is that “nitty gritty” is objectionable not because it’s racist, but because it is a massively overused managerial cliché. If the PC brigade could also decide that “at the end of the day” is offensive on account of being a disparaging reference to Muslim daily prayer habits and that “the bottom line” is also verboten because it causes fat women to be unhappy about the size of their bums, then good riddance to those two cliches as well.
I’ve just fixed to be on the Mike Dickin Show, on Talk Sport Radio, just after 12 noon today. I’m to be asked about various varieties of “political correctness gone mad” stupidities, like a grandad being stopped from videoing his grandkids at a party, because he might be a paedophile, or something … What will I say? I look forward to finding out.
Talking of Sport, did any of you Samizdata consumers see the Zidane goal for Real Madrid in the Champions League Final last night? It was one of those “worth the price of the ticket alone” moments. Basically the ball went ballooning up into the air and took an age to come down, but when it finally did ZZ volleyed it into the top left hand corner, in a manner which would be extremely hard to do on a practice ground. To do this to win the biggest cup final in the world outside of the European National Championships and the World Cup is astounding. Like all the very best goals, it didn’t look to be seriously on until it had been scored. But I won’t be talking about sport on Talk Sport. I’m one of the token political commentators that they have to justify their franchise. Sadly, broadcasting in Britain is still heavily controlled by the politicians, although radio less so than TV. Soon, this kind of stuff (i.e. stuff like Samizdata) will be spoken as well as written, and the radio “professionals” will be bitching, just like the print pros bitch now about blogging.
Last time I boasted about the fact that I was going to be on the radio an Australian dominatrix tuned in. What exotic persons will listen this time? Sorry, no link to that, because I’m in a hurry, and I still find it complicated doing links back within Samizdata. If I do well, I’ll maybe have a brag here about it. If I don’t brag about it, draw your own conclusions.
Got an email the other day from, I think, a Mr (and I’m betting it is Mr) E. Palmeri, who signs himself “erp”. He refers to the story I began to tell in a previous posting about Pfizer and its support, via such things as the Pfizer forum, for capitalism and for the free market. Like I say, it is a story, and I ended my posting with those exact words. Which erp took exception to.
“And written or not, like I say, it is a story.”
Like it or not, it’s always as I said, it’s never like I said.
His emphasis on never. erp implies (and this is what got under my skin and provoked all the thoughts that follow), that I don’t know the regular as-I-say rule. Actually I broke this rule on purpose. I was trying to suggest an air of unfinishedness about my thoughts, of me talking aloud rather than presenting the finished article. I was trying to push people into thinking about Pfizer, into finding out about Pfizer, into telling me and the rest of us about Pfizer, not to nail down the final truth of the matter. To this end, I deliberately used the frequently heard by me and quite often said by me unruliness of “like I say”.
erp knows the kind of thing I mean, because the second and final sentence of his email to me goes thus:
Love your blog anyway.
And there goes another grammatical rule, the one about sentences like that one having a subject, in this case a first person pronoun. But we can all see why erp dropped the “I”. Fearful of being thought a pedant and nothing else, he ended with a deliberately colloquialised attempt to soften the blow, which he didn’t intend really to hurt, and as far as I’m concerned it worked fine. Glad you like it mate. Thanks for the kind words.
Why do I make such a fuss about this? Partly it’s a technique thing. erp is complaining about one of the very things that we Samizdatans regularly go out of our way to do, as do a thousand other bloggers. This is a blog that likes to talk in different tones of voice to suit the occasion, and to suit the different voices of the different writers. What, asks Perry in the spiel at the top left, is “on the minds” of the Samizdata people?
This is a good question. And what’s on our minds is not always perfectly grammatical.
One of the best ways to persuade other people to share your thought processes, in our case libertarian thought processes, is to describe your own thought processes accurately. You persuade by writing out how you really do talk in your own head about what you are truly persuaded of. As an editor, I constantly find myself saying to a writer whose writing has got gummed up: “Step away from the keyboard. Tell me, out loud, what you’re trying to say.” Time and again the next thing I say is: “Great. Put that.” If the price I and my writer have to pay is that what’s being said doesn’t get enough of a grammatical polishing to suit all the erps out there, well, so be it. At least there’s a recognisably human voice being used.
Besides which, all these rules can be and are all the time being broken. erp is mistaken. Quite often these day, it is“like I say” whether erp likes it or not. English is not, thank goodness, one of those languages where if you ever stray from the official tracks some committee of erps will tell you to behave yourself or else, which is surely one of the reasons why it has spread so luxuriantly. (The contrast with French is painful, to the French. “But we control our language so much more carefully! Why isn’t it winning?” That could just be one of the reasons it isn’t winning, sunshine. Ever thought about that?) The English language is the ultimate anarchy. If I and thousands of others are saying “like I say”, and the people we’re talking to or for that matter writing for in a blog get what we’re saying (which everybody does including erp, even if they don’t all like it) then there goes that never, never to return.
If you want to be a good writer you probably need to know what most of these rules are, as I do, but you don’t have to follow them slavishly. Writing which is perfectly grammatical can be rather like the music written by all those contemporaries of Mozart, which obeyed all the rules but achieved little else. Mozart, meanwhile, who knew the rules inside out and every which way, would regularly have fun and games breaking them. For a famous and easy-to-find example, try the first few bars of Mozart’s “Dissonance” String Quartet K465. The erps of the day all had seizures.
I’m not saying: “Mozart broke the rules – I break the rules – so I’m Mozart”. I’m merely saying, you can do it. Grammar goblins won’t chase you to hell if you omit a noun or pronoun from the start of a sentence, or if you put like instead of as, or if (to mention some other rules I know about but break from time to time) you end a sentence with a preposition, or if you dare to – sparingly, and when you’ve got a good reason, like when an adverb absolutely has to be right next to the verb it qualifies without so much as a “to” in between, or when you don’t want any confusion about the adverb referring back to something else just before it so you put the “to” between it and what you’re wanting to separate it from, or if, as I am here, you’re having a laugh – split an infinitive.
Life is full of “rules” which in fact aren’t. I still remember the joyful moment when I realised that you don’t have to read a book by starting at the beginning and reading all of it in order. You can start anywhere you like, and stop anywhere you like. If you do this, no one will arrest you. Some dead schoolteacher may be yapping away inside your head when you break such “rules”. If so, think about what he’s yapping, and if you decide you’re not going to do what he wants, tell him to shut up.
Now don’t misunderstand me. I’m not putting a different rule in place to the effect that you should never read a book straight through from beginning to end. I’m just saying, you don’t have to.
This like-as business is trivial but the fact that it’s trivial isn’t so trivial. An essential part of living the free life (and thereby not being inclined to try to inflict unfreedom on others) is deciding which rules you really are going to stick to because you really believe in them, and which rules you’re going to allow yourself and everyone else you have dealings with to play harmless games with.
Loved your email anyway.
Combinations of wickedness would overwhelm the world, did not those who have long practised perfidy grow faithless to each other.
-Dr Johnson, ‘Waller’, Lives of the Poets, 1779-81
Via Instapundit, I went to i330.org (13 May 2002 20) for this ‘distrousering’, as my late father would have put it, of Matthew Engel, for writing silly things about the USA and its guns. I remember Engel as a very funny cricket writer. I used to buy The Guardian just for him during test matches (that’s cricket internationals for all you uncricketpersons out there). Then he became the Editor of Wisden, the annual cricket bible. I think the difference was he likes cricket, whereas he isn’t, as The Guardian’s man in the USA, allowed to like the USA, except the bits of the USA that don’t like the USA either.
We ought to do this kind of thing. Not with British correspondents in the USA but with US correspondents here. Are there any? I bet if there are they get all kinds of things wrong.
Alex Singleton of Liberty Log rang me at 5 am this morning (not quite, but it felt like that) to check that I’d got a cheque he had sent me for travelling expenses (yes thanks), and he also mentioned that they’re thinking of starting some kind of campaign up there concerning the alleged superiority of Muslim culture. He mentioned a Reason online article. I’m in the middle of reading it now and I enthusiastically recommend it. It’s called “In Praise of Vulgarity” and is by Charles Paul Freund, which is probably a name known to lots of Samizdata’s readers but is one I haven’t attended to before. The article was published in March, but better late than never if like me you missed it the first time around.
I’ve just finished the bit about the USSR’s “stilyagi” subculture of the immediate post-WW2 era, and am about the read the bit about Algeria, and the use of pop culture there to get back at the Islamist suppression of the everyday pleasures of life.
I just checked the Liberty Log link above to make sure it worked, and they link to this article too, and you can see Alex Singleton’s brief comments on it.
Every age has a language of its own; and the difference in the words is often far greater than in the thoughts. The main employment of authors, in their collective capacity, is to translate the thoughts of other ages into the language of their own.
– Augustus Hare, Guesses at Truth (1827)
One of the many joys of blogging is that you don’t have to say everything, you can be content to say something, and the something I want to say here is that I want to add my little voice to the chorus now saying that Brink Lindsey’s recent book Against The Dead Hand – The Uncertain Struggle for Global Capitalism is very good.
I’ve not read all of the book yet, but Lindsey’s description (see for example chapter 2: “The Industrial Counterrevolution”) of the wider public policy atmosphere around 1900 is as good as I’ve ever encountered. You can read detailed blow-by-blow descriptions of the “Economic Calculation Debate” which are as good, and far more detailed of course, but a persuasive sense of how it all fitted into the big wide world out there, then and since, is harder to come by.
I’m now dipping into the more current stuff, which is much enriched by the fact that Lindsey works at the formidable Cato Institute. Here’s a typically good quote (on page 192):
… if – as is perfectly obvious – the world today is a jumble of market-oriented and anti-market elements, and if markets are recognized as efficient and useful while full-blown-collectivism is counted a failure, why blame markets and not the remnants of discredited collectivism for the fact that the current jumble is sometimes volatile?
By way of a personal footnote, I’ve also recently dug up an old piece of propaganda I did for a libertarian-conservative gang of stirrers at the University of Exeter, circa 1992, written by my wise and wonderful self. It’s a list of 37 reasons Why I am a Libertarian (Libertarian Alliance, forthcoming Real Soon Now), each starting with “Because”. Here’s Because Number 24:
Because if total state control is a mess, and a “balance” between state control and liberty is half reasonable, then total liberty would be totally reasonable.
Which is pretty much the same meme. And good memes can’t be bounced about too much and too often.
But I digress. My basic message here is, if you’ve any time at all to do it: Read Brink’s Book.
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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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