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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I have loved Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto ever since I first heard it in my early teens, and I must have about twenty different CDs of it. My absolute favourite recorded performance of this piece is the CBS Lazar Berman/Claudio Abbado/London Symphony Orchestra version. Early reviewers complained about the “recording balance”, but for me the piano’s the thing and the piano is well to the front. (This was what the reviewers were complaining about.) And Berman plays it like a god.
The fashion nowadays tends to be to play this piece, yes, quite noisily, but basically too gently and carefully, as if vacuum cleaning around sleeping kittens, a state of affairs I hold Sergei Rachmaninoff himself responsible for. He was a fabulous pianist, one of the twentieth century’s best, but he was, I believe, shy about his own concertos, even when playing them. It was as if he couldn’t face going for broke when performing these majestic works (Number Two is also a super-popular piece), because what if people then didn’t like that? So, he would toss them off in a slightly detached albeit pianistically miraculous manner (described now as “aristocratic”), too quietly, too quickly, in a way that didn’t expose his own ego too much. Take it or leave it, folks. No skin off my soul!
Berman doesn’t make that mistake! By God he doesn’t. He storms the heavens, especially in the great first movement cadenza, and in that tempestuous passage near the end full of thunderous bass octaves that they made such a fuss of in that film about the mad Australian piano player played by the bloke who then played Queen Elizabeth I’s Spymaster in Elizabeth.
As Sod’s Law would have it, Lazar Berman’s is about the one recorded performance of this amazing piece of the classical repertoire that is not available currently on CD. It used to be, because about a decade ago I borrowed it from Pimlico library. And, I have it on a disintegrating CBS “cassette”, that technologically grotesque apology for a classical music recording medium. The number of the cassette is, if I’m reading the right bit: MYT 44715. It’s in the CBS Maestro series, and was recorded in 1977. CBS is now owned by Sony, of course.
Berman either became very fat and died of too much Russian-type drinking, or he is now very fat and will soon die of too much drinking, I forget which. Maybe this complicated his professional relationships, with e.g. the Sony Corporation, and keeping this performance available may have been too much bother for them. Or maybe Sony just didn’t like that he mostly recorded for Deutsche Grammophon. Or maybe those damn critics with their poor recorded balance nonsense have caused all those classical music sheep out there who have to read a critic before they know what they think not to want this wonderful performance.
A year or two back, BBC Radio Three did a “Which is the best version?” spot on CD Review, choosing, inevitably, Martha Argerich on Philips, which is very good I do admit, although personally I don’t care for the recorded balance – you can’t hear the piano clearly enough. But amazingly, the Berman version was mentioned favourably, even though it’s not now available. This is not something CD review does on regular basis and is high praise. At last, I thought. Maybe now they’ll reissue it. But no, still nothing doing.
The Internet is my obvious answer. But I’m not the brightest button on the corduroy jacket when it comes to this Internet stuff. I can write okay, but when I surf I tend to sink. I’m still paying by the minute for my phone calls, God help me. So, if anyone out there likes me, and also understands the Internet, please, please, get on your electric surfboard and find this CD for me! My limit is about £25. Preferred price: £0, from someone wanting to get some other personal preoccupation mentioned on Samizdata. In my opinion, the libertarian meta-context definitely includes discussion of personal preoccupations.
It doesn’t have to be an original Sony or CBS CD. A CD copy would do fine. (I still have the notes from my cassette.) I can’t believe, given that this CD is unavailable in the shops and that I’ve already paid for the cassette, that any sane person in the music business could object to that. Course not.
(There’s also a Berman performance of Rachmaninoff PC3 done live with Leonard Bernstein and the NYPO, which may still be available if you also buy a ton of other Bernstein performances, but I can’t go to about £150 for all of that, much as I’m tempted. I’ve not heard this, but an original or copy of that CD would also be extremely welcome. Same terms as above.)
Email me at brian@libertarian.co.uk if you can help.
Last Tuesday night I had supper at the recently established Tim and Helen Evans home, the occasion being one of the trips to London made by the guys from the University of St. Andrews (in Scotland) Liberty Club, this time represented by Alex Singleton (who is English), Conyers Davis (Yank), and Marian Tupy (from Slovakia – unnervingly perfect English – reminded me of the actor Oscar Werner (Spy Who Came In From The Cold, Fahrenheit 451)). Great night. The combination of a real kitchen table in a real kitchen and bought-in food worked perfectly, what with Tim and Helen being very hardworking people themselves.
St. Andrews Liberty Club has, of course, a fine website (www.libertyclub.org.uk), and before doing this I took a look at their “quotes” section for the first time.
My favourite one, I think, because I hadn’t heard it before and because it’s quick, is: “An economy breathes through its tax loopholes.” – Dr. Barry Bracewell-Milnes. Dr. BBM is everything someone with a name like that should be. Elderly. Often bow tie. Posh voice. Knows everything to be known about the British tax system and the harm it does. (His latest publication, Euthanasia for Death Duties, is published by the Institute of Economic Affairs and is about the case for abolishing the British version of inheritance tax.) My favourite other Dr. BBM quote was said by him to me some years ago, about a piece called “Taxation is theft” (now Libertarian Alliance Political Notes No 44) by Libertarian Alliance Director Chris Tame. Said BBM, after a judicious pause: “This is one of the best pieces entitled ‘Taxation is Theft’ that I have ever read.”
Tim and I showed the St. Andrews trio how blogging works, of course using this as an example. They were impressed, and started to talk about maybe doing something similar themselves. With luck then, the world may soon be able to eavesdrop on all their rowing with their Vice Chancellor and with their local feminists, on their profound thoughts, their lives, their universe and their everything, even more easily than it can already via their website.
St. Andrews University is a big deal for the cause of liberty, because this is where the founders of the Adam Smith Institute met up and first got thinking around the late 1960s. (Alex Singleton has himself worked for the Adam Smith Institute.) Could something as big as that be emerging from the same place, again?
Something will surely come of it. One effect of blogging, the Internet, etc., seems to be to enable social networks, which got established and firmed up when the members of them were in daily physical contact, to remain in creative touch when their members disperse – a solution to the “How can we carry on doing this without stunting the rest of our lives?” problem common to all good times at University.
To recycle another Liberty Club Quote, this time from Edmund Burke: “When bad men combine, the good must associate.”
I have been a long time Japan watcher. From a big distance, you understand. Unconfused by too much detailed knowledge. I’ve never been there. But Japan is a big noise in the world, and if you keep your ears open …
Japan, it seems to me, does things unanimously. It moves unanimously, from one unanimous policy to another. It takes an age to change its mind, but once it does, the impact is, for good or for bad, electrifying.
Consider that late nineteenth century moment when, virtually overnight, they suddenly started wearing western suits and top hats. They went from a nation of Kurosawa extras to a nation of Oddjobs, just like that. And with that sartorial switch went a basic switch of worldview, from isolation to looking outwards, from ignoring the West to competing fiercely with it by copying everything it did that seemed to work. One moment, an American admiral is humiliating them by driving a modern warship into one of their ancient harbours. In a blink, the Japanese have their own warships and are knocking seven bells out of the Russians. Japan does all it can to try to catch up with and overtake America peacefully, but America isn’t having it, or so it seems to them. So kaboom!!! Pearl Harbour. Instant conquest of the Pacific. After humiliation in war and further humiliation in the peace that followed, the Japanese mutate from a people who despise modern consumer comforts to people who make the best consumer goods on earth. One moment Japan is making “notoriously shoddy goods”. A blink of an eye later (kaboom!!!), Scottish electronics companies have to call themselves things like “Hinari” in order to do any business.
But now the elite-guided-crony-capitalist status quo which presided over the creation of the Sony Walkman is running seriously out of steam, seemingly with Japan’s entire elite unanimously powerless to reverse the steady drift towards catastrophe. To solve their Keynesian mess, all they now seem capable of is more Keynesianism.
The Economist of February 16th 2002 (print edition) expressed the kind of pessimism about Japan that is now the orthodoxy. The cover shows a Japanese face with a tear falling from its eye. On the contents page (p. 5) the picture is elaborated upon with the following caption:
Japan is sliding slowly downhill. The sad thing is that the Japanese don’t seem to mind. Or if they do, they certainly aren’t doing anything about it.
In the leader article on page 11, The Economist ruminates on all the things that the Japanese should do, but reckons they won’t do it:
How much easier it is simply to muddle through, slipping downhill more or less gracefully…Japan now looks to be an irrelevance…
Now, I agree that things in Japan will have to get worse before they get better But then, get better they surely will. Japan will be back.
When Britain gets into trouble, or faces a big decision, we have a huge and very public row, like the row we’re now having, still, about the EU, and we go out of our way to embroil foreigners in our rowing. (Look at the way British anti-EU’ers are now using the Internet to badmouth the EU in America.) And we never completely settle the matter. In Britain, when you say “we”, you are always leaving lots of people – who continue stubbornly to say “I” – out of your generalisation. Same in the USA, yes?
In Japan that’s not how they do things. They do not wash their dirty linen in public. When crisis strikes, they don’t all ring The Economist and argue their particular corners against each other. No, the Japanese elite goes into an endless succession of secret huddles where it sits cross-legged on the floor in big circles, drinks about a trillion gallons of tea and has untranslatable conversations about how worrying it all is. Slowly a New Approach emerges. Slowly. Very slowly. It is reflected upon from all angles, it strengths pondered, its drawbacks thought through. It is tweaked. Then the underlings are drawn into the New Approach, in their own tea circles, lead by those who have participated in the higher tea circles. They contribute their own untranslatable murmurings. More tweaking. More tea circles. And then, just when the outside world has completely given up on Japan, that’s right: kaboom!!!
Do you really believe that the Japanese are content to sink slowly into the ranks of the “irrelevant” nations, and then stay there for ever? I say: Just because we can’t see anything happening just now, that doesn’t mean that nothing is happening. I assume that another Japanese kaboom!!! is even now being got ready, very slowly.
Japan will, as always, do whatever its rivals are now doing that seems to be working best. The Japanese are even now roaming the earth, mentally speaking and probably literally too, searching out “best practice”. They’ll then knit together all the bits of best practice that they can find into a new combined national entity so well-crafted as almost to amount to a new invention. That’s what they did with photocopiers, motorbikes, luxury cars, cameras. That’s what they’ll eventually do with Japan itself.
“Best practice” now consists of, among other things, free market economics as “extreme” as can be contrived. This is the economic policy lesson now being absorbed with such bad grace by the European elites. This is what the Japanese are also learning, but unlike the Europeans they are learning it in secret. Once the lesson is learned, they will apply it with extreme thoroughness.
Japan can’t copy the USA exactly, because they’re too different. Too small, too resource poor. And in any case it wouldn’t want to, because the USA isn’t actually all that “extreme”, only relatively so. My guess is they’ll look at Hong Kong in its glory days, and turn Japan into a cluster of Hong Kongs. They will surely deregulate their banking system, and free up their domestic markets. But whatever they do, it will, I believe, be massively good news for free market supporters everywhere.
Imagine the impact on the world of Japan embracing free market economics with its own unique brand of unanimous enthusiasm, and imagine the further impact when that policy is a triumphant success, as it surely will be.
It won’t be completely libertarian, no way. Too much “we” for that. If you are a foreigner and not part of the Japanese “we”, your participation rights may still be limited, even if not so much as now. Our own Admiral Perry won’t be satisfied. But even so …
Well, we’ll see. I wonder if any real Japan experts will find time to comment on this. It would be great if someone like that did give us a reaction. But don’t expect any Japanese to join in.
Lists of wisdom culled from half a lifetime of banging around doing this and that are all the rage on the Internet just now, and why not? They can be a good laugh, and coming from libertarians they can even smuggle bits of the libertarian meta-context into the mainstream of polite society. So here are some of my bits of attempted wisdom of this sort, in no particular order:
(a) The importance of a country is inversely proportional to the splendour of its postage stamps.
(b) Nothing ever happens in rooms with matching chairs.
(c) Nothing guarantees the ruin of a large institution more certainly than the construction for it and by it of an architecturally magnificent custom-built headquarters. (I got this many years ago from a book by the famous Professor C. Northcote “work expands to fill the time available for its completion” Parkinson. But two questions: What was the Enron HQ like? And: How come Microsoft is still staggering onwards?)
(d) Speculative booms spike and begin their plunge downwards at the exact moment that the rule which all the suckers were following (“being a Lloyds name is a license to print money” (see (c) above), “you’ll never lose if you buy bricks and mortar”, “get your money into dotcoms, mate”, etc.) gets to me.
(e) Movies advertised with quotes in big letters from movie critics, rather than the names in big letters of movie stars, are best avoided.
(f) Any movie described by a movie critic as containing no ideas is packed with ideas, but of a kind that the movie critic disapproves of.
(g) “Courageux” is the French for stupid.
(h) Anything described as “the new rock and roll” is not now very big, and is about to get smaller.
(i) “Interesting” is English for stupid. (Well maybe not always, but it is when my mother says it.)
(j) Bad food is bad for you. Good food is good for you. To avoid doing bad to yourself when you eat bad food, eat an equal amount of good food, thus cancelling out the badness of the bad food. (This one is untrue. Sorry about that (see (m) below).)
(j) Whenever an “alternative” view is promised, it will be the same damn view as the last one, and the one before that, and the one before that …
(k) Whenever anyone says “there is no question of ” whatever it is, it means that there is and someone has just asked it.
(l) Actually following your dream is fine, but avoid using these words out loud. “Following your dream” is American for stupid.
(m) “Sorry” is the English for, well, pretty much anything an English person happens to be thinking. It seldom means that he’s sorry (see (j) above), although it does sometimes.
Unlike most of the psychotic telephone bullies who hang yelling and screaming from the tits of our current British Government, my friend Tim really is a Spin Doctor. He spends his day using media messages actually to change (without being in any way a member of it) British government policy, health policy being his stamping ground. And the other sign that he’s a real Spin Doctor is that if I told you the rest of his name you probably wouldn’t have heard of it. Anyway, he emailed me today to tell me that Liberty Fund have launched a superb web site for libertarians/classical liberals. Check it out, he said. I did. It looks good.
I checked out in particular a piece by one of my favourite libertarian gurus, David Friedman, on the economics of crime. Here’s how it starts. It sounds familiar doesn’t it? But he didn’t get it from us any more than (until now) we got it from him. This particular truth is simply out there to be got, by anyone.
Economists approach the analysis of crime with one simple assumption—that criminals are rational people. A mugger is a mugger for the same reason I am an economist—because it is the most attractive alternative available to me. The decision to commit a crime, like any other economic decision, can be analyzed as a choice among alternative combinations of costs and benefits.
Consider, as a simple example, a point that sometimes comes up in discussions of gun control. Opponents of private ownership of handguns argue that in violent contests between criminals and victims, the criminals usually win. A professional criminal, after all, has far more reason to learn how to use a gun than a random potential victim.
The argument is probably true, but the conclusion—that permitting both criminals and victims to have guns will help the criminals—does not follow. To see why, imagine that the result of legal handgun ownership is that one little old lady in ten chooses to carry a pistol in her purse. Further suppose that, of those who do, only one in ten, if mugged, succeeds in killing the mugger—the other nine miss, or drop the gun, or shoot themselves in the foot.
On average, the muggers are winning. But also on average, each one hundred muggings of little old ladies produce one dead mugger. Very few little old ladies carry enough money to be worth one chance in a hundred of being killed. Economic theory suggests that the number of muggings will decrease—not because the muggers have all been killed, but because some of them have chosen to switch to safer professions.
If the idea that muggers are rational profit-maximizers seems implausible, consider who gets mugged. If a mugger’s objective is to express machismo, to prove what a he-man he is, there is very little point in mugging little old ladies. If the objective is to get money at as low a cost as possible, there is much to be said for picking the most defenseless victims you can find. In the real world little old ladies get mugged a lot more often than football players.
This is one example of a very general implication of the economic analysis of conflict. In order to stop someone from doing something that injures you, whether robbing your house or polluting your air, it is not necessary to make it impossible for him to do it—merely unprofitable.
As you can see, if you need a quick high quality ‘fix’ of dispassionate rationality, it is well worth checking out the Liberty Fund website.
My friend Adriana Cronin has already been indirectly responsible for an interesting posting here a few weeks back (about that computer game which is having “real world” economic impact), which Perry de Havilland actually did the posting of. Adriana is ‘Something in the City’, as we in London say of mysteriously rich and powerful or heading-that-way financial folks, and was also one of the normal women featured in the blog bash photos. (Her attendance fee is, I understand, in the post.) She will be joining Team Samizdata officially Real Soon Now.
Meanwhile, Adriana has emailed me about two items of libertarian interest. One is about Reagan and can keep a day or two until she is blog-connected. The other is more topical, and concerns the fact that the Libertarian Party of Illinois have, it would appear, been spamming little old ladies with anti-gun-control propaganda.
You can take this complaint from a British media source two ways. One: the Libertarian Party of Illinois are making enemies needlessly among the normals with their bad netiquette. (This is Adriana’s take on it.) Or two: the normals are by definition idiots about gun control who deserve (a) to be mugged every day and twice on Sunday, and (b) all the anti-gun-control propaganda our side can spam at them, and that these Illinois guys are damn good! (Adriana says I am wrong even to suggest that. Spam is evil evil evil, even if you are God spamming Satan. What can I say? She knows all this 21st century stuff a lot better than I ever will.)
We’ve given this blog a “G for Guidance” rating, because it contains material which some libertarians might feel would be unsuitable for younger conservatives.
The blogger bash was great, great fun, but not, in my view, as significant to humanity as a whole as the magic mouthwash story concerning which I blogged on February 21st. (By the way, I omitted to include the link to the Ananova story.)
To recap a little. Tooth decay is caused not by sugar as such, but by bacteria which thrive on sugar and which are also responsible for tooth decay. The magic mouthwash replaces the tooth decaying bacteria with genetically engineered alternative bacteria who beat the crap out of original bacteria and steal all their sugar, but don’t cause tooth decay. They presumably just sit around discussing such things as bacterial nature and the essential sugarness of sugar. Like I said, amazing.
Now okay, I agree, when the historians write up the next thousand years, Samizdata as a whole will obviously loom far larger in their thoughts than the mere detail of exactly when, and exactly by whom, “tooth decay” was abolished. But humans now can surely be forgiven for not quite seeing the larger picture. People now are excited, even some of the Token Normal Women whom Our Great Leader had persuaded by some means or another to attend the Bash. Amazing, said one Normal Woman with whom I shared the magic mouthwash news, echoing my exact word in my first blog. And no less than two e-mails flooded in to OGL on the subject.
Andy Spring emailed thus:
“Something isn’t right here. If the new strain of Streptococcus mutans can take over an entire ecosystem, i.e., my mouth, from the old strain, then it’s all around genetically superior to the old strain. If that’s the case, why hasn’t some natural mutation of the old strain already made this evolutionary improvement? Is it just because the new strain is so genetically ‘distant’ from the old that it couldn’t have arisen from the usual sources of genetic variation (mutation, genetic drift, etc)?”
This is a strange email. Andy Spring (1) expresses doubts about the basic rightness of the universe, (2) asks the question that has caused him to have these doubts, but then (3) answers (2) with what I’m sure must the right answer. Where, Andy Spring, is point (4): “All right, relax everyone, the universe makes sense after all’?”
No matter. Andy Spring has advanced our understanding of the magic mouthwash, and I am grateful to him.
Gene 6-Pack takes the story a significant stage further by asking:
“Would the benevolent bacteria in the mouthwash also be spread by kissing?”
I instinctively feel that the answer to this question must be yes. Welcome to the world of Sexually Transmitted Cures (STCs).
The mouth will not be the only human orifice into which new and magically engineered fluids will be squirted in the years and decades to come. We need only factor in the greediness of state-monopoly doctors and of crypto-statist drug corporations lobbying for the perpetuation of their captive markets (nationalised monopoly not-free-any-more-at-the-point-of-use health “services”), and the general unhappiness of the medical profession about all their patients suddenly not being as ill as they might be, all of which we can confidently rely on, to see that the world is about to become a very different place.
Do you want some magic bugs, to cure whatever ailment ails you? You can either: go to a doctor, wait several months and part with several hundreds or even several thousands of pounds. Or: you can catch your cure from someone who has already acquired it, by obtaining the relevant bodily fluids from that person, perhaps parting with a far smaller sum of money to this person. The more sex you have and the more people you have sex with, and the more sex they had and the more people they had sex with, and so on, the less ill you will be.
The genetic engineers will unleash a General War of good new bugs against bad old bugs, fixing the odds in favour of the good bugs, who will destroy the old bugs and then either just sit about loafing and doing us no harm, or, even better, will buzz about inside us, doing good.
The contribution of non-medical persons to all this will be to create the globally unified fluid battlefield within which the bad old bugs will have no fluidically isolated human bodies in which to hide. An orgy of sexual abandonment in other words.
Parents will encourage their offspring to make-out and sleep around, early and often, if only so as not to interrupt their own wife-swapping parties.
“I don’t want to see you back home before midnight!”
“Remember not to use a condom!”
“From now on, you’re going to go out every night for a month, and with a different boy each night!”
“She seemed like a nice girl. So dump her and have a fling with that nymphomaniac in number 22.”
The ultimate super-bug -the Great White Whale of the genetically-engineered-bugger’s art – will be the all-purpose cure for everything: Acquired Immunity Sufficiency Syndrome, AISS.
At first there will be problems. Gays and Africans will find it much each to get AISS than the straight community, for reasons I’d rather not dwell on. For a few years, gays will be famously healthier than the rest of us – and apparently far more numerous, for the world will become heavily populated with men who are only passing as gay but are secretly straight. No self-respecting girl would dream of having sex with a man who’d never had sex with another man. But in due course, I feel sure, it will be possible to catch the latest version of AISS from a toilet seat.
I’ve just finished chairing one of my Friday talks. Patrick Crozier on the railways. Good. And all the better for the presence of a couple of French people, Christian Michel and Francois-Rene Rideau, who runs bastiat.org and also helps out with bastiat.net, and who made several very wise points. The reason for this blog, however, is simply that another friend wanted to know how blogging is done and I am showing him. Incidentally I had to go back and edit this, and I showed people how that was done also. David Carr helped me do the links, which is a first for me. I used to have to beg our Great Leader to do that for me. Progress.
[Ed: links now fixed by The Great Leader so that they actually work]
I heard about it last weekend on the BBC TV news, and Perry, informed of the needle, was impressed. He searched the haystack, and found it for us.
A genetically modified mouthwash has been developed which could effectively eliminate tooth decay, scientists claim.
The mouth rinse contains a friendlier GM version of the bug that rots the teeth which does not produce enamel eroding acid.
When the solution is squirted into the mouth, the good bugs take over from the Streptococcus mutans bacteria and prevent them from returning.
According to the researchers, a single five-minute treatment costing less than £100 would last a lifetime.
Professor Jeffrey Hillman, from the University of Florida, said: “If this approach works as well as we hope, it has the potential to eliminate the majority of tooth decay.”
The new strain appears to stay permanently on the teeth, preventing other bugs from gaining a foothold. “It is genetically stable and should be safe for humans,” Professor Hillman added.
He hopes to start clinical trials this year, using a solution squirted on to the teeth of adult volunteers. The mouthwash would be most ideally suited to infants cutting their first teeth, he added.
Amazing. Absolutely amazing.
I followed the link Perry gave us re the Metric Martyrs case, and read the piece by Helen Szamuely with interest, indeed fascination.
Now I realise that nothing involving the EU is ever quite what it seems, but my understanding of Helen Szamuely’s understanding of the case is not that the EU now rules Britain, but that the EU now rules Britain on British sufferance, which can, any time we like, be unsuffered. The basis of EU rule in Britain is that Britain switched it on with a Parliamentary Statute, and Britain can switch it off. The British Parliament is and will always remain sovereign.
At the heart of the EU project is the claim that once you’re in, you can’t leave. Not so, say our judges.
The Metric Martyrs lose, not because the EU says so, but because the EU says so and we say, for the time being: okay. But in the future, we could decide to say: not okay. Britain is not yet a province of the European Superstate, according to these judges. It would be complicated to unravel, very complicated, and it would require a great and highly self-conscious, so to speak, Parliamentary convulsion, in the manner of, say, contriving a new amendment to the US Constitution. But, say Their Lordships, we could unravel it if we chose to, and declare national independence again.
Which means that, in a sense, they just did.
It’s important for us libertarians to celebrate the fun that free people have and the good that they do, and not just to bitch about politics.
Natalija Radic is handling pornography very capably, I’m sure we’d all agree. Dale Amon and I have done stuff about music. Science and technology have been celebrated here, by both David Carr and Perry de Havilland.
But sport is one of life’s great pleasures, both to do and to watch others doing. Yet sport has here mostly been complained about, by David again, picking on a sport he doesn’t like.
Last weekend’s sport was, for me, mostly good, but it started badly. I awoke on Saturday to learn from my Ceefax that England had just been slaughtered in a one-day cricket game by New Zealand. Was this an omen? At Twickenham later in the day, England were to play Ireland at rugby and experts were tipping England to win heavily. But Ireland killed Wales two weeks back, and the last time heavily-tipped England played Ireland, Ireland won. Might they sneak it again? No worries. England routed Ireland with a huge first half display (31-6) and went on to win 45-11 despite appearing to lose interest with half an hour still to go.
With this win England went top of the world rugby rankings, jumping ahead of … New Zealand! I can remember when England couldn’t lose at cricket to New Zealand in their worst nightmares, and couldn’t win at rugby against New Zealand in their wildest dreams. The New Zealand rugby team, remember, is no mere gaggle of sporty blokes who happen to like a bit of rough-and-tumble on a Saturday afternoon. This is the mighty All Blacks, the very definition of New Zealand nationhood and manhood. And now England are better than them. But worse at cricket. Strange times.
Chelsea, the club which plays the sport (football) which David Carr does like to watch, were meanwhile beating Depressing Northern Town Who Used To Be Far Better 3-1 in the sixth round of the FA Cup, and on Sunday my Tottenham Hotspur beat Post-Industrial Wasteland Rovers 4-0. Chelsea and Spurs were then drawn against each other in the quarter-finals. I’ll keep you posted about that, and perhaps David will too.
On a more serious note, I’m struck by the parallels between what David was objecting to about the Olympics and what Natalija’s opponents were saying about pornography. Both were opposing the thing in question because of what it looked like, and what it might lead to. Porn is sometimes faked up to look like something truly nasty – non-consenting sexual aggression – and hence might lead to that truly nasty thing for real. And sport often looks like Nazis being nasty, so what might that lead to?
But isn’t the point of sport that it takes a whole facet of the human psyche (especially the male human psyche) and sucks it into a morally neutral cul-de-sac with no real-world consequences? Those athletes marching through the stadium with their flags and anthems, or those fans baying in hideous, collectivist unison may be behaving a lot like Nazis, but they are not in fact Nazis. Sports fans like me talk about people getting “slaughtered”, “routed” or “murdered” (see above), but that’s only metaphorical. No actual countries are going to be invaded. No Jews are going to be gassed. Okay, sport plays with psychological fire, and sometimes it gets out of hand. In South America, footballers miss crucial World Cup penalties and get murdered by crazed fans. In Britain, unpleasant political collectivists spend their lives trying to turn the pseudo-mayhem of football into the real thing. But the real-world mayhem that results is nothing compared to the horrors of big-time political collectivism, in those miserable parts of the world where such stuff still matters.
In the fantasies of collectivist politicians, huge crowds shouting in huge stadiums only shout in their honour. Such persons must hear the roars in a British football stadium with something close to despair. They slog away at organising their silly political meetings and party rallies, and at most a few hundred political hacks and obsessives show up. Yet thousands turn out for a dreary, lower division football game. The biggest crowd in Europe in recent years was in Paris, but it wasn’t for any politician; it was when France won the World Cup.
I believe that in Iran not long ago, the government made a collective, collectivist fool of itself by trying and failing to stop an international football match. Too much collective adoration of something that wasn’t them or their boring and annoying opinions, you see. Sport only gets political if the politicians take against its essentially non-political nature, or try to use it by pretending that the crowds are really theirs. Wise politicians, even collectivist ones, leave well alone. At least, they say to themselves, the crowds aren’t shouting against us. (Might that be why some libertarians also dislike sport? Big crowds expressing hostility to the wrong things?)
Most sports fans know that sport is only sport. They go mad, scream at each other, smash into each other (if they’re playing), … and then meet up for a drink afterwards. It may look nasty for the duration, but it’s only a bit of fun, to be wallowed in when your team wins and shrugged off as only a game when they lose. We’re just blowing off steam. It’s not real. Well, it is real. In fact it’s great. It’s great fun. But only, in the end, that.
Which is exactly the libertarian defence of pornography. That too only has a tiny few nasty real-world consequences. Mostly that too is just fun.
With sport as with porn, we libertarians should draw our lines carefully. On the one hand, there is that which merely looks evil, might lead to evil, might evoke memories of evil, might lead people down the path towards evil, and which is perhaps therefore in some sense morally evil now. We can argue about the nuances of all that, but no one should be sent to prison if they lose such arguments. And then there’s that which is uncontroversially, aggressively, definitely evil, now, which should be prevented or failing that be punished, either by the law or by force of arms.
I refuse to end on that grim note. To end instead with some more consequence-free fun and to ram home just how much fun sport can be, let me tell you what my sporting highlight of the weekend ended up being. It happened not in a rugby game, or a football or cricket game, but in David’s accursed Winter Sports. The however-many-metres-it-was five blokes’ skating race. Four blokes were racing in a bunch for the medals. Bloke five, an Australian, was way behind. Then, just as they were all about to flash over the winning line, blokes one, two, three and four all collided with each other in a crazy, slip-sliding tangle. Bloke five, being far enough behind to skate around it all, but not too far behind, won. The silver and bronze medallists got their gongs by sliding over the line horizontally. David would surely have enjoyed that and maybe he did.
I’ve just had one of those “builders nightmare” conversations. You know the one. “We paid them X thousand pounds and the roof had a hole in it and the floor caved in, and then we waited Y months, and paid Z more thousand pounds …” This particular story ended up in the High Court of the Isle of Man, where my friend did at least get himself a semi-happy ending and isn’t too much out of pocket. But until then, it must have indeed been a nightmare. (I decided to do this blog even as I talked with him, and told him to expect this piece here, and that I would email him how to get to it, which I did. So watch out for a surge in our viewing figure from 90 million to 90 million and one, any day now.)
Why are there so many stories like this, and especially in Britain? First, is it only a British thing? Do Croatian builders do this to Croat householders? Is it like this in Belfast (which is still, just, part of the “UK and Northern Ireland” state)?
Possible answer: UK tax law bullies everyone into “buying” somewhere to live if they can possibly afford this (by going deep into debt), and into not renting as soon as they can afford to buy. If there was no tax advantage in buying rather than renting, much more building repair work would be supervised by large, specialist home-owners whose repeat business would not be something to piss on, the way it is with the wretched individual, building-ignorant UK home-owner.
In general, the relationship between owning-or-renting and freedom is surely the opposite of what it is so often said to be by British Conservatives. Renting equals freedom, not owning. Most home “owners” in Britain are about as free as a bird locked in a cage, which is why your British Conservative so loves his “property-owning democracy”. It puts him and his friends in command of British society. (Or it would, if only they could get the democracy bit right.)
Did you know that during his one lifetime Ludwig Van Beethoven moved house over fifty times? In Victorian England, it is said that people would decide to move, load all their possession onto a cart, and then go looking for a new place. In that order.
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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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