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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 greatly enjoyed this article by Kevin D. Williamson about Thomas Sowell. Sowell is now in his eighties. When somewhat younger, he looked like this:
Here is what is probably the key paragraph in Williamson’s Sowell piece:
Because he is black, his opinions about race are controversial. If he were white, they probably would be unpublishable. This is a rare case in which we are all beneficiaries of American racial hypocrisy. That he works in the special bubble of permissiveness extended by the liberal establishment to some conservatives who are black (in exchange for their being regarded as inauthentic, self-loathing, soulless race traitors) must be maddening to Sowell, even more so than it is for other notable black conservatives. It is plain that the core of his identity, his heart of hearts, is not that of a man who is black. It is that of a man who knows a whole lot more about things than you do and is intent on setting you straight, at length if necessary, if you’d only listen. Take a look at those glasses, that awkward grin, those sweater-vests, and consider his deep interest in Albert Einstein and other geniuses: Thomas Sowell is less an African American than a Nerd American.
My strong is Williamson’s italics.
I’d never thought of Sowell as being anything like this guy …
But yes, I guess maybe there is a resemblance. Here is link to a brief snatch of video of Moss saying something very Sowellish, about the importance of getting a good education.
By the way, I am not calling the actor and director Richard Ayoade a nerd. I don’t know about that. But I do know, as do all who enjoy The IT Crowd, that Ayoade’s TV creation, Moss, most definitely is a nerd, and a nerd first and a black man way down the list, just as Williamson says of Sowell.
Although, as a commenter said of this bit of video: “Richard has a bit of Moss in him.” A bit, yes. But what has really happened is, surely, that Ayoade was a nerdy kid, and has kept hold of it for comic purposes.
I suspect Sowell did something similar, and, as Williamson suggests in his article, in a more courageous and significant way. He too was a genuinely nerdy kid, who could understand truth better than he understood the demands of fashion. Then, when he got older and started to tune into the zeitgeist, he had to decide if he was going to shape up and get with the liberal (in the American sense) fashions of his time or stick with that truth stuff he had got to like so much. He stuck with the truth.
Also, I don’t believe Sowell would ever remove a water tank (see the second of the two video links above) and then be surprised that his plumbing no longer worked properly.
By the end, we may see profligate politicians hanging from lampposts. But there’ll be a lot of bad stuff, too.
– Instapundit
LATER:
But all joking aside, if the current profligacy continues, and America winds up in a Greece-style (or worse) collapse, politicians may not wind up hanging from lampposts (we don’t really do that here), but they will at the very least likely face the kind of investigations, prosecutions, and social opprobrium normally reserved for child molesters and Bernie Madoff types. I don’t think they fully appreciate that. If they did, they’d be acting differently.
Indeed. Press release from these guys:
Good luck with that.
Seriously, good luck with that.
I will try to be there.
I cannot avoid coming to this conclusion – that there are too many great men in the world; there are too many legislators, organizers, institutors of society, conductors of the people, fathers of nations, etc., etc. Too many persons place themselves above mankind, to rule and patronize it; too many persons make a trade of looking after it. It will be answered – “You yourself are occupied upon it all this time.” Very true. But it must be admitted that it is in another sense entirely that I am speaking; and if I join the reformers it is solely for the purpose of inducing them to relax their hold.
– from The Law by Frédéric Bastiat (on the penultimate page (54) of this pdf edition)
Ah yes. To fight politics, you have to do politics. And before you know it, you are what you were earlier warning the world against.
As was flagged up by this recent SQotD, I have been reading The Last Crusaders by Barnaby Rogers, the point of this posting being that some of these Last Crusaders were also the first global explorers. This can’t be a review, because I have only reached page 50 out of 481, but I will be very surprised if my good opinion of this book now is in any way challenged by the experience of reading the rest of it.
A question that had always vaguely puzzled me, in a very not-thinking-about-it-carefully way, was: why Portugal? How come Portugal, of all now rather insignificant little backwaters, was the country that lead the way in the European conquest of so much of the rest of the world, a gigantic epoch only now drawing to a close?
It is of course not at all hard to see how this should be. Portugal may now be a backwater (I’ll say more about that at the end of this posting) but in the fifteenth century, from the point of view of exploring the world, it was a frontwater. All you need to do to understand how Portugal led Europe into the big wide world out there is to stop looking at the Portuguese East Indies or the various Portuguese parts of Africa or South America (which is what I had been doing), and look instead at Portugal itself, and its immediate surroundings. Once you do that, Portugal making the first big steps in the when-Europe-ruled-the-world story is not just explicable, it is close to inevitable.
Time for a date. In 1415, Portugal captured and, even more significantly, subsequently held the North African trading city of Ceuta, just across the Straights of Gibraltar from Gibraltar itself. They hoped this would drop into their laps all the trade that was done between West Africa and everywhere else through Ceuta. But not for the first or last time, grabbing the physical place turned out not to mean effortlessly controlling what had previously gone on there. Nevertheless, it was a start, by which I mean a start in the process of Europe confronting Islam not in the obvious way, but the other way. The obvious way was to bash on against Islam in the Eastern Mediterranean and surrounding parts, the Balkans, North Africa and what we now call the Middle East. The other way, of course, as we now all know, was to go round it.
Forget for a moment all the European nations who subsequently did this, and forget all the many places the world over that they arrived at and did business in and with. Consider only the very first steps in that process, that needed to be taken in the early fifteenth century. What did they consist of? Basically, someone European needed to sail down the coast of West Africa, establishing bases and trading relationships along the way.
If this had been easy, Portugal would probably never have lead the way. Spaniards, Genoese and Venetians, even though preoccupied with that Islam bashing in other parts of the Mediterranean world, would probably have overwhelmed those very early Portuguese efforts. But crucially, it was not easy. The Atlantic was a huge barrier, requiring huge efforts before even the possibility of profit could cut in. So far so obvious. But what is less well known nowadays (certainly not known by me until now) is that something similar applied to the West Coast of Africa. → Continue reading: How Portugal led the world past the Cape Bojador barrier
Incoming email from newly signed up Samizdatista Rob Fisher (who can only do emails right now) about how Oxfam is proposing a global shipping tax. Watts Up With That? has the story.
Says Rob:
This is extraordinary. Read the whole thing but in particular the money flowchart diagram.
Bishop Hill calls this Oxfam creating famine.
Says Anthony Watts:
These people have no business writing tax law proposals, especially when it appears part of the larder goes back to them. This is so wrong on so many levels.
Says Bishop Hill commenter ScientistForTruth:
These [snip – please tone down the language] are in principle no different from the pirates operating out of Somalia, wanting to skive money off international shipping. And just as Oxfam would be solicitous to ensure that no-one gets their hands on the dosh unless they sign up to an eco-fascist agenda, so the pirates will be sure to share the booty only with their mates.
I do enjoy those Bishop’s Gaff Bishop’s Rules bits in his comments section. Perhaps “what a bunch of total snips” will catch on as an insult.
Listening to Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater is like drinking champagne with God.
– HC Robbins Landon
Quoted on BBC Radio 3 today, by music scholar Lionel Sawkins, in a programme about Le Concert Spirituel, which seems to have been an eighteenth century French version of the Proms. Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater was the single most popular piece played at these concerts.
Knowing my fondness for pictures of London’s Big Things, taken from irregular places, South African blogger 6k (a scroll down there is recommended) has just emailed me with a link to this Daily Telegraph picture, which is a view from near the top of London’s BT Tower, of such things as the Gherkin, the more distant Docklands Towers, and the now nearly completed Shard. Yes indeed, well worth a click and a look. I know I’ve said it many times before, but I love how, with this new internet thing they’ve installed recently, people six thousand miles away can email you to tell you about interesting things in your own back yard.
But the real story here is not the view from the BT Tower. It is what the view of the BT Tower is going to look like from now on, and why:
BT Tower press officer Ian Reed said: “The huge dishes are synonymous with the tower and it truly is the end of an era. With the introduction of fibreoptic cable, the satellites have been defunct for many years and have reached the end of their lifetime. People will remember the dishes from when they were children – they were responsible for 90 per cent of the TV shown in the country. They were a landmark and could be seen all over London.”
I had no idea this was going to happen. [LATER: And either the DT or Ian Reed has it wrong also. As commenter Roue de Jour explains: “They’re not satellite dishes they’re microwave dishes. They point to similar dishes on masts on a line-of-sight. Satellites are not involved in any way.”]
Here are a couple of before and after shots of the Tower, how it looked and how it now looks. And here are two shots I took of this tower, with its big dishes, in February 2006.
I wonder what will happen next? Will they just fill in the gaps with dreary windows and office space? Or will new and different high tech contraptions be installed? I fear and expect the former, but hope for the latter.
LATER: See also another amazing London tower picture, the very first one of these. Those are the Docklands towers.
Paul Mason, BBC Newsnight’s economics editor (and the guy who fronted that Keynes v Hayek radio show we’ve blogged about here), picks Detlev Schlichter’s Paper Money Collapse as one of his five economics books to give people for Christmas.
Mason begins his Guardian piece thus:
Two questions predominate in this year’s slew of books on economics. The first is the most obvious: how do we get out of this mess? It’s a question that has set authors along many roads but they all lead to the same destination: a bigger role for the state and the need for renewed international co-operation.
Which, alas, explains why Detlev Schlichter is so pessimistic about good sense prevailing in financial policy before ruin engulfs us all. The world’s rulers have pushed the world slowly but surely into a huge hole, and all that Mason’s authors (aside from Schlichter) can recommend is digging the hole ever deeper.
A “bigger role for the state” is not the solution to the world’s problems just now. That is the problem, and it has been for many decades.
At least Schlichter’s kind of thinking is getting around, and, as this piece by Mason proves, in some somewhat surprising places. Mason may not fully understand Austrian economics to the point of actually agreeing with it, but he does seem (as I said towards the end of this earlier posting) to respect it. He knows it is saying something important.
Schlichter has been unwavering in his pessimism about the world getting “out of this mess” and he is being proved more right with every week that passes. When total ruin does arrive, we can only hope that he and people with similar opinions to his will then be listened to rather more.
Reading this piece, linked to by Instapundit today, we see that politics in the USA, and in fact everywhere, is a trialogue rather than a dialogue. All parties to the trialogue (definitely including me) believe that the other two camps are wrong, and many in each camp believe that the other two camps are actually one camp.
The three camps are:
Camp 1: Capitalism is fine, so long as the government stays in charge of it and does a few more of the right things and a few less of the wrong things. The mixed economy is fine, if only we can just mix it right, and meanwhile preserve confidence that all will be well. No need for radical change. Trust us. No, we’re not convinced that’ll work either. Camp 1 is very powerful, very clever, very unwise. For now.
Camp 2: Capitalism is an evil mess. This crisis was caused by capitalism – naked, unregulated, unrestrained – being let loose by neo-liberal fanatics. What should be a poodle has become a wolf. Do whatever it takes to make capitalism a poodle again. Yeah, yeah, we need a bit of capitalism, to make stuff, but not nearly as much as we’ve been having lately. Anyone who gets in the way … boo! We hate you! No, we don’t think that’ll really work either, even if the people were willing to give it a go. They won’t, so boo! And if they did, it would fail horribly, and we’d have to blame capitalism even more. So … boooooo. Camp 2 is very stupid, but horribly numerous.
Camp 3: Capitalism would be great, but what we’ve had has not been capitalism – unregulated, unrestrained, as hoped for by us neo-liberal fanatics – but capitalism mixed with statism in a truly horrible way. What we’ve seen in the last few decades has been crony capitalism, capitalism with politicians in its pocket, so that whenever a big chunk of capitalism looks like failing, most notably a big bank, the politicians squirt more money at it. Which ain’t proper capitalism. Meanwhile, capitalism even of the crony sort makes better stuff. Capitalism, the real thing, should also be allowed to make better money, the kind that is allowed to fail if it does fail. The adjustment process will be horrific. No, we’re not sure that will work either. If we could do it, it would work great. But will we ever be allowed to do it? Camp 3 is right. But maybe not numerous enough or clever enough (maybe not wise enough) to win, and prove itself right. → Continue reading: The three way argument
“Sir Jasper Finch-Farrowmere?” said Wilfred.
“ffinch-ffarrowmere,” corrected the visitor, his sensitive ear detecting the capitals.
– from the short story Meet Mr. Mulliner by P. G. Wodehouse, quoted by Stephen Fry, in an essay by him about Wodehouse published by the Independent in 2000.
Leo Hickman of the Guardian is apparently angry (as Bishop Hill mentions here) that the Spectator published an article by sea level expert Nils-Axel Mörner, an article I recycled the concluding paragraphs of as a(n) SQotD here on Thursday, and Leo Hickman isn’t the only one. The general mood in the CAGW camp is: get Mörner!
To this end a commenter (“schoolswot” – today 11:10am) at Delingpole said this of Mörner:
This is the guy that claims that dowsing works but doesn’t actually want to prove it?
To which commenter “rastech” (circa 1pm) replied:
Dowsing does work, and you can prove it yourself (everybody can do it, some are just better at it than others).
The guy that taught me how to do it (yeah I was surprised I could do it), was a water well driller. He told me exactly where the springs were that he was going to drill, where two springs crossed, their depth (18ft and 24ft), how much water an hour they would produce to start with (it improves the more you pump), PLUS, where there was an even better spring to drill, if those two didn’t work out (it would have been twice as expensive to drill it, as it was almost 50ft deep) too reliable, as they were both in sandstone (but ideal for drinking water as it is beautifully filtered – you should taste the tea!).
He was spot on (you know when you hit a spring as the colour of the rock changes as you go through it – I watched every stage from start to finish on many wells with him, as all my neighbours had boreholes drilled by him and I helped him with them, as he got me practicing the dowsing on them).
Let me guess, from a position of complete ignorance and inexperience in the subject, you are an ‘expert’, right?
Well don’t feel bad about it, I felt exactly the same until I felt that damned divining rod dive for the deck with me holding it.
PS. What convinced me to try him, wasn’t a money back guarantee. I didn’t have to pay him AT ALL until he had delivered a good water supply. He got years of work in the area from that borehole, and he never let anybody down.
So, it’s now officially official. Dowsing, like cold weather, is now right wing.
All this in a comment thread attached to a Delingpole piece about Jeremy Clarkson, and about how all the shouting about Jeremy Clarkson is really about diverting attention from the fact that the recent public sector strike, some time last week, was a failure. Although, Guido reckons Clarkson is now laughing all the way to the bank. They haven’t so much diverted attention from the failure of their strike as given a ton of free publicity to someone who said, admittedly in his characteristically OTT manner, that the strikers were idiots.
Please try to keep your comments on topic. The topics being: Leo Hickman, the Guardian, Nils-Axel Mörner, dowsing, whether tea really does taste better if made with water filtered through sandstone, James Delingpole, the BBC, public sector strikes, Jeremy Clarkson, whether it’s okay for Jeremy Clarkson to joke about people being taken out and shot without really meaning it, Guido Fawkes, how to get tabloid publicity by the ton, paper money collapse … well, I didn’t mention paper money collapse until now, but I thought I ought to.
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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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