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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If you go to the home page of Talk Sport Radio you’ll find lots of stuff about sport, and only non-sport news if it’s sport related. Someone let off a bomb in Spain yesterday and the Talk Sport Radio homepage notices, because it happened near a football ground. Interesting priorities. On the radio show itself, however, non-sport news does get regularly mentioned, and even talked about a bit.
I never listen to Talk Sport unless I’m on it, but I will be listening to it just after 10 am this morning because I will be on it. I’m to discuss the fact that according to some insane new law it is now, according to the researcher who’s just rung me, illegal to have a compost heap within 270 yards of your house. My memory is surely playing games with me. Our government would never dream of making a law like that. It has to be 270 metres, surely. Either way, we’re in barking fruitbat territory here, with every suburban gardener with a compost heap now breaking yet another idiot law.
The chances are that this particular item of fruitbattery is the result of the idiot collision between the separately sane – but when combined in Britain fruitbatarian – legal traditions of Britain and of Continental Europe. Some Euro grandee says, in some directive or proclamation or fatwa or whatever, that people shouldn’t have violently smelly compost heaps too near their kitchens. Fair enough. Why taxpayers need to pay someone to say things like this isn’t clear, but that’s the price of living in Europe, which by and large is a very fine place as places on this planet go. You nod your head, and get on with your life. You continue to keep your compost heap, if you have one, in the same place as before. All is serene. The big Euro-fromage continues to collect his salary, and God’s in his heaven.
Except in Britain. When Brussels says something, it becomes in Britain the basis of the law. This vague piece of Brussels sermonising is taken away and “clarified”. How smelly? An answer is made up. 94 smelibels. How far away? 270 yds/metres. (Not 250, by the way, which was the number the radio researcher originally supplied to me. 250 would be too round a number. That would sound like they just made it up.) Never mind that about a quarter the suburbanites of Britain have compost heaps stinking to the tune of at least 300 smelibels, and within about 10 yards of their back doors. The point is to abide by our European treaty obligations. And so this law is duly composed, with no more thought given to it than Talk Sport gives to non-sport news, in fact a lot less. Nobody thinks about it. Nobody can be held individually responsible for it. Not the twat who made it up, not his superior (who had 412 new laws to think about that morning alone), certainly not the Undersecretary of State at the Fruitbat and Related Creatures Office who is supposedly in charge of this process. So, the new law of compost heaps, together with all the other laws made up that day, is driven over to the House of Commons in a convoy of articulated lorries, and a few months later the Queen signs something and it’s the law for real.
Members of Parliament? Aren’t they supposed to have “readings” of these things? Yes, but that doesn’t mean that anyone actually reads the stuff. Laws in Britain nowadays are like academic papers in America. The overwhelming majority of them are not actually read by anybody except the drones who write them. Nobody at all.
The remarkable thing about this law is not that it passed, but that someone did eventually read it, pointed out that it was insane, and turned it into a media ruckus and an excuse for me to be on the radio.
There goes the phone. Excuse me while I dazzle the nation …
It turns out that it is illegal to have a compost heap within 270 yards (it is yards) of your house without a license. This is actually just as insane, but a bit more subtle. The insanity will only get seriously under way when the Compost Heap Office opens, and gets swallowed up in financial scandal, and when people with bona fide Compost Heap Licenses, which they just went and got, for seventeen quid, start keeping totally unregulated compost heaps in their kitchens (which used to be sort of illegal). Why has the Minister for Fruitbats not taken immediate action to curb this malpractice? … Why have more resources not been set aside? (That’s spent, to you and me.) Why? … Why? … Why? …
Another radio call. Busy day. Next up: I’m on BBC Radio Scotland at lunchtime, on whether Britain needs twenty three new laws to curb the British National Party. Here’s my plan. Keep a few of the laws we already have against being seriously nasty. Punish people if they break them. Apply them vigorously to the BNP, and to everyone else.
Another call. LBC Radio. Cannabis march on Saturday, you’ve heard about that? (No, being a libertarian these days means that you miss things.) Okay. 2 pm tomorrow.
All this chat radio excitement probably results from Sean Gabb being on BBC Radio 4‘s Today Programme, yesterday morning. Unlike most of the stuff I do, that’s a big one.
Hello Natalie. I didn’t send any money for your keybo8rd because I too am a cheapskate. But keep it all, I say. We’re British. We have our reputation in the USA to live down to. Over there, us Brits are a bunch of sciving scrounging parasitical sciver scrounger parasites, or so it said in The Bonfire of the Vanities. In the film they changed the Brit sciver etc. journo to an American. No wonder it bombed.
We’re scroungers, that is to say, when we’re not tormenting the world’s ethnic minorities in their countries of origin. In connection with David Carr’s spat with the warblogwatchers, concerning another trans-Atlantic stereotype, one of my favourite lines in a TV sitcom was in Dad’s Army (which, for the benefit of uncultured, can’t finish a sentence without a script to read it from, ignorant of everything outside America, cameras on enormous beerguts, Macdonald building, gas guzzling, napalming, friendly fire killing, plastically surgicated and let’s face it just plain crazy Americans) is about the British WW2 Home Guard. Ex-member of the Thin Red Line Corporal Jones the Butcher, during a discussion of the merits of the British legal system, said:
“We always gave the fuzzy wuzzies a fair trial before we shot ’em.”
The British Empire in one line.
I liked Francis Moore’s short sting-in-the-tail posting over at the Liberty Log yesterday. 1), 2) and 3) are familiar enough this-versus-that contrasts (Korea, China, Germany), although deserving of infinite repetition. 4) (Britain) contains the provocative duo. Clue: they do the Liberty Log in Scotland.
Freedom and Whisky is also a Scottish inclined blog. There were two more good postings by F&W boss David Farrer yesterday, about Adam Smith and about the PC menace to Ryanair.
Have all these Scotbloggers been introduced? Presumably. If not, this should connect them.
The classical end of the music recording business has been enduring a slow crisis caused by the fact that the classical repertoire is (a) stagnant and (b) now all recorded. Classical freaks like me now have all we need. We have multiple versions of everything good, and although the newly composed stuff is occasionally worth hearing, most of it is a load of old Boulez. The only serious unfinished task is the recording of the entire operatic repertoire on DVD instead of just on CD.
The usual answer to the plight of high culture is that low culture should subsidise it, but these are also bad times for the economically serious end of the recorded music business. The free internet downloading of pop music is playing havoc with record company profits.
Which means that classical music, just when it is least able to, must now pay its own way. Big classical names are now having their hitherto automatically renewed contracts terminated by the dozen. And as these former titans slide into penury, their cultural centrality disappears. Big star classical performers in 1960 were really something, because the very first stereo recording of a major item of the repertoire was a big event. No matter how good it may be, a recording now (the thirtieth) of the same piece cannot possibly matter so much. Herbert von Karajan was a more central figure in European culture than Karajan’s newly appointed successor at the helm of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Sir Simon Rattle, can ever be, no matter how much “better” the critics may tell us Rattle is.
The politicians are not helping nearly as much as the likes of Rattle think they should. Suddenly the cabinets of the western world consist not of old-time culture-lovers but of ageing Beatles fans. They still dole out arts subsidies but they are cutting back on supporting “elitists”. Instead they are “democratising” arts spending. Instead of giving huge gobs of money to high-culture high-talent parasites, they now prefer to give lots of little gobs of money to lots of no-hoper parasites. Such trends take time to work their way through (hence the continuing significance of who gets to boss the BPO), but you can feel the oil tanker turning, slowly but surely.
Classical music itself will last for ever. This is the great historic achievement of the classical music recording business. But historic achievements don’t pay wages now. What is to be done?
One answer is to cut prices and to cut costs. Wrench the price of new classical CDs (not just of regurgitated old recordings) from the best part of twenty quid down to a fiver, slash the fees paid to the performers and generally cut out the crap. This is what Naxos has done, with great success.
There’s much talk of new “business models” for the recording and “delivery” of classical music, with the copyright and long-term royalty streams remaining with the artists but with any first time round income going to the recording companies. In other words the recording companies no longer place bets on artists. The artists place their own bets, and the recording companies are now bookies. To me this sounds like a thinly disguised pay cut. Or, even more cruelly: vanity recording. (Bloggers won’t need to have this trend explained to them.)
So, when all else fails, go with babe appeal. I give you Hilary Hahn. Now I do not yet get all the subtleties of Samizdata‘s editorial policy, but when it comes to babe photography it is my clear understanding that we are all for it. So here are some Hahn likenesses, taken from her website.
Hilary Hahn is not just a pretty face. She can definitely play. Her recording of three of the six Bach unaccompanied violin pieces is one of my all time favourite CDs, and all her four recordings so far are decently done. But from a business point of view it is clear what is happening here. In the sleevenotes accompanying her latest recording, of the Brahms and Stravinsky violin concertos, released just before Christmas, I counted no less than fifty six photographs of her, together with three of her conductor Sir Neville Marriner, and three of the two of them together. Total number of photos of Johannes Brahms: zero. Total number of photos of Igor Stravinsky: zero.
This is not a long-term answer, either for the classical music recording business in general or for the likes of Hilary Hahn in particular. (That Brahms/Stravinsky disc is already being heavily discounted in London’s HMV stores.) But while it lasts it’s fun to look at.
The epidemic spread of Britblogging is definitely this weekend’s Britblogging story. Perry says he doesn’t want too much blogging about blogging, because, well, even to explain would be to break the rule, nevertheless …
… posted on the Libertarian Alliance Forum at 4.54 pm today, by long time Libertarian Alliance supporter David Farrer: “My new blog is now up and running.”
The first posting was last Wednesday, thus:
Welcome to this new blog. The title Freedom and Whisky links the two themes of this blog: libertarianism and Scotland. The libertarianism will, however, sometimes extend beyond events in Scotland and I shall also be covering non-political news of interest to me north of the border. I have therefore included links to a variety of Scottish sites which I often use.
On Constable Potter’s face was that hard, keen look which comes into the faces of policemen when they intend to do their duty pitilessly and crush a criminal like a snake beneath the heel. It was the look which Constable Potter’s face wore when he was waiting beneath a tree to apprehend a small boy who was up in its branches stealing apples, the merciless expression that turned to flint when he called at a house to serve a summons on somebody for moving pigs without a permit.
-P.G.Wodehouse (Uncle Dynamite, 1948, quoted in Wodehouse Nuggets, selected by Richard Usborne, 1983)
Last Friday was the last Friday of the month, and that meant a meeting at my place. Libertarian Samizdata supremo Perry de Havilland talked about blogging, and many of those present were either blog bosses (Perry, Patrick Crozier of UK Transport, Andrew Dodge of Dodgeblog) or blog contributors (such as Samizdatans Tom Burroughes, David Carr and me).
The dark horse in the herd was Chris Cooper. He has written a number of things for the Libertarian Alliance over the years. One of my favorites of his was the first Personal Perspectives piece we ever published called Mere Anarchy, and he was writing about why Free Market Broadcasting would be a good idea long before most people realised that such a thing was possible, let along desirable. But he has been too busy working, raising a family, etc., to do as much libertarian writing since then as we’d all have liked. An ideal blogger, in other words. So I was especially glad when he showed up on Friday. And, it turns out that for the last month Chris Cooper has been doing Chris Cooper’s Blog (CCB from now on). Having glanced through CCB in amazement on Friday night, I gave it a proper read on Saturday.
Perry made a distinction in his talk between “mezines” and “pundit” blogs. CCB, rather like Natalie Solent‘s Blog, looks to be both. Like Natalie, Chris is an uncompromising libertarian but he doesn’t hit you over the head with it all the time. And when he does it can take a few seconds to register, such a tabby cat does he usually seem, what with writing about other things besides libertarianism.
You’ll probably need a longer attention span for CCB than for your average blog. It’s more like a nineteenth century gentleman’s diary, kept as much for its author’s pleasure, now and in later decades, as for anyone else’s benefit. If you want to read CCB over Chris’ shoulder you’re very welcome, but he’s not begging. But just like those nineteenth century gentleman he can write, I promise you.
CCB has not so far been strong on links, but this may merely be because Chris has yet to master the technicalities of that. I know the feeling. If that’s so, the fact that Patrick Crozier was deep into technical confabulation with Chris over my computer on Friday night could prove significant. In particular, CCB‘s left hand bit, now decidedly blank, should soon come alive.
I shan’t organise my life around Chris Cooper’s Blog, not yet. But I will be giving it a look every few days.
You know those “what I’ve always said” things, which actually thousands of others have been saying for even longer. Well I’ve always said that we, the forces of enlightenment, the good guys, need to get our hands on more stories where the gun hasn’t been in evil hands and done harm, but in good hands and done good. And when we do get our hands on such stories we should spread them in all directions.
So here is just such a story (“Woman shoots, kills armed intruder in West Seattle”) from the Seattle Times, picked up by a very promising blogger fellow named Glenn Reynolds, on a little thing he calls Instapundit. This Reynolds chappie has a definite future as a blogger. The Instapundit hit rate will now explode …
My Norwegian libertarian friend Kristine Lowe has a personal interest in tattoos, and in their tax status, see above. (“Lowe” is Norwegian for “lion”, hence the nature of her magnificent adornment.) Thus alerted to any tattoo-related media item, she sent me the following report, based on a longer piece in the Norwegian Aftenposten:
Is a tattoo a creative work or simply a reproduction? This is a question Norwegian tax officers have to consider carefully when they come to implement last year’s VAT (Value Added Tax) reform. Tattoos, crosswords and fireworks may be exempted from VAT – as long as they have creative value.
The eight page long tax office guidelines document, Art, culture and sport – an orientation, says that creating an image for a tattoo is indeed a creative work. But to burn it into the skin of someone fooled into the tattoo shop by his mates is “only a reproduction of a creative work protected by copyright”. Hail to the Norwegian authorities’ profound respect for artistic and intellectual property rights.
A concert which is just a concert is also exempted from VAT. A concert venue where people can dance, on the other hand, is logically not. Ballet and traditional dances are exempted from VAT. Disco is not. One could be led to believe that only boring culture is exempted from VAT, but the rules are not that coherent. Stand-up comedians don’t have to pay VAT – but lecturers, presenters and commentators do.
At least we finally have an explanation for why it’s so difficult to get through to the tax office in Norway – they are busy reading crosswords, hanging out in tattoo shops, checking concert venues for dancing space and so on and so forth.
Kristine has also had trouble with her legs. Now me, I’ve never had trouble with Kristine’s legs – see below. But she had a bad accident several years ago, and the original doctors didn’t catch everything. So soon she’s off back to Norway to get everything finally fixed. I and the rest of the libertarian movement wish her all the best.
To be a bit more serious about it, and having thought about it some more, I think that my fellow Brian (Linse) is probably right to talk about “soccer”, and that I should stop calling it “football”. In fact I think we should all stop calling anything “football”, without qualification, unless the context makes it entirely clear which variety we’re talking about. There are just so many different varieties. American, “Association” (soccer!), Gaelic, Australian Rules, rugby (union and league), and many, many more I’m sure. Soccer/football is, I now accept, one of those conundra that require that English – English English, I mean – be spoken differently, by the English, in order for us to make sense elsewhere in the Anglosphere.
In Germany, they call soccer “fussball” with the “ss” being done as a Germanic squiggle, a word I smile at. And in the noted American TV sitcom Friends, what we here call “table football” is called “foozeball” (guess spelling). What’s that about? ( I don’t mean: horrid Americans bleah!!! I mean: what’s it about? Why “fooze”? Is it some weird USA-German thing?)
Christopher Pellerito‘s comments earlier today about the relative dullness of the soccer that Americans get to see make a lot of sense. Here in Europe we note big differences in the national styles of the different national soccer leagues. The Italian league is shown regularly on British TV, on Channel 4, but I – and many others I talk to – can’t stand it. It’s too slow. It’s like watching a cross between soccer and armchair philosophy. Hugely skilful, and no doubt hugely diverting to play, but not, for me at least, any fun to watch.
The British Premier League has recently gone from muddy cloggers to world class with the arrival in Britain of a mass of foreign players. A big moment in recent British social history, never mind sporting history, came recently when a British premier league club – I think it was David Carr’s Chelsea – fielded a team for a Premier League game with no English players, or even British ones. I rather think we have the European Union to thank for this. The Premier League has always been fast and furious. Now it’s also very skilful.
However, the ultimate in pace and skill may be the Spanish League, if that wondrous Real-Barca game was anything to go by, which maybe it isn’t.
Interesting thing about France, though. They undoubtedly have the best soccer team in the world just now. Zinedine Zidane (who scored a very clever goal for Real against Barca on Tuesday) is probably most people’s current pick as the best soccer player in the world. But, their league is financially rather feeble, and French clubs seldom figure in the later stages of the European Champions League. I think this may be an African thing. Much of the French team these days consists of players of francophone African origin. And African men, I rather think, and in contrast to white couch potatoes like me, love to play but don’t get nearly so excited about just watching. And the original French French have never been that keen on merely watching soccer, compared say, to the British, the Germans, the Spanish or the Italians. Which is why there are so many superb Afro-French soccer players now playing in Britain, Germany, Spain and Italy, especially in Britain, and especially for Arsenal (the top London club, on course to win this year’s Premier League title).
Brian Linse may also be pleased to know that I also like to watch American football – cheerleaders, million dollar one-off adverts and all – and bitterly regret that Britain’s Channel 5 TV, which has extensive and often live and uncut American football coverage right up until the Superbowl, has stopped showing the Superbowl itself live, on account of Sky TV (Rupert Murdoch’s British and European satellite TV operation) having bought that. C5 only shows a few highlights a day later. The good news, for a cheapskate like me who doesn’t like paying for pay TV, is that Sky, having given “ITV Digital” such a roasting recently, is cutting back on its sports spending in the manner of a victorious army easing back on its ammunition budget. The England home games in the Six Nations rugby have lately only been shown in full on Sky. But now the Six Nations is reverting to being shown in its entirety, live and uncut, by the BBC, for which hurrah! And maybe C5 will also get the entire as-it-happens Superbowl back. If so, double hurrah.
Brian Linse says, among all the other things he said on Monday 22nd, that football (or “soccer” as he calls it) is boring. He proposes a number of USA-type “reforms” to rescue it from its current state of total global obscurity.
Personally I thought that the highlights I watched last night of Real Madrid’s 0-2 first leg victory over Barcelona in Barcelona – an amazing result for Real, which virtually guarantees their place in the European Champions League final in Glasgow, against either Manchester United or Bayer Leverkusen – were about as good as sport can get without my own team being involved and winning gloriously.
But if you agree with the (Ain’t No – pah!!) Bad Dude, probably because you are also an American, or perhaps because you think that blogging and politics and whatnot are more important than “soccer”, then go to Soccernet Europe (the “soccer” disease is spreading I’m afraid) to find out how boring football is when Stefan Effenberg is involved.
Effenberg is currently out of the Bayern Munich line-up for having (a) “long been a controversial figure” and now (b) for saying in a recent interview that unemployment benefit should be cut, and then refusing to take it back.
(My thanks to Antoine Clarke for pointing me to this story.)
Last week, immediately after returning from my trip to France, I visited St Andrews University in Scotland, courtesy of the Liberty Club guys, to speak at a meeting they’d organised. It was all a great pleasure, and not just because the lodgings they shared with me for the night after the meeting are so nicely situated right by the sea or because they are such nice people or because the weather was so nice.
Even nicer is that the Liberty Club is doing so well.
Universities are vitally important places if you’re in the idea spreading business. You’ve got a clutch of bright people relatively early in their lives, selected for their brightness and put together into a community. And, for once, community really means community. As I wandered about the town with Alex Singleton on the day after the meeting, he kept greeting familiar faces. Messages sent out in one part of the place don’t just meander off into the wild yonder. They double back on themselves, and if you keep on with them you can very quickly dose the entire place. Universities are, to use a word libertarians are particularly fond of, meme machines.
So, if you do what the Liberty Club does, and hold a series of different meetings on different topics, and if you get thirty people to each meeting but not always the exact same thirty people, and if libertarianism is the meta-context of the people organising all this, then pretty soon everyone in the university with any interest in such matters gets to hear about libertarianism. You don’t agree with it necessarily, in fact you may disagree with it all the more fiercely on account of understanding it all the better. But for the rest of your life the libertarian attitude is fixed in your head as an attitude that you can have, that other intelligent people do have, and that you could switch to if you ever felt like it.
The Liberty Club is one of the most if not the most active student organisation on the entire St Andrews campus. It is (a) definitely libertarian. It is in particular (b) not conservative. And it is in general (c) not stupid. Its leading lights are not thoughtless, unfunnily self-mocking posturers, of the “we don’t mean this really we’re just students arsing about” variety. They give off vibes of philosophical and political passion and intelligence.
Their Liberty Log is a modest operation, with bits appearing only every day or two rather than every hour or two as here. Before leaving I contributed a piece to it concerning the meeting I spoke at, and there’s only been one further posting (by Marian Tupy) since then. But that’s a pace they can sustain, and their web activity (see also their website), is but the seasoning of the philosophical and intellectual dish they are serving up to their local target community. The meal itself is face to face contact and face to face argument and public debate. What their internet activity does is add a few more libertarian memes to an already meme-rich environment, and supply heavyweight back-up for any who want to pursue libertarianism further, either to agree with it or to attack it.
Like all capable people, the St Andrews Liberty Clubbers worry that they could be doing better. Couldn’t we all? Alex mentioned setting up some kind of organisation for reaching students everywhere, and that might make sense if it could be done without too much strain. But I’d say that what they’re already doing is a model to libertarian groups in colleges and universities everywhere. And thanks to the internet, others really can look and learn. My bet is that they’ve already “infected” several other campuses without even realising it.
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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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