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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Ever before I wrote this, I was on the lookout for Fixed Quantity Of… theories, and even more since then. Usually these theories are fallacies. Often, changing how something is done, and in particular changing the rules or the overall setting within which something is done can quite dramatically change, for the better or for the worse, both the quantity and the quality of whatever is being argued about.
Here is another such theory/fallacy, the Fixed Quantity of Education fallacy. Toby Young takes aim at it here. He and some friends of his are setting up a “free school”. Their critics in the state education sector object, because this new school will suck educational excellence out of their schools and make it available only to a privileged few.
In particular, it is said that this new school will draw middle class children away from state schools, to the educational detriment of these schools. State educators who talk like this sometimes make it sound as if most of the good teaching that goes on in their schools is done by middle class children rather than by educationally expert adults. Perhaps they have a point.
But the amount of satisfactory educating going on is very variable, depending on how relaxed or restrictive are the rules about how it may be done and who may do it. (For instance, if it were forbidden for parents to educate their children at home, that would, I believe, sharply diminish the supply of good education.) Toby Young says that the real reason the detractors of the educational venture he favours are so vocal is that they fear being shown up as bad educators, by a new school that creates a vast new surge of educational excellence, thereby proving that they could be doing this too. No upper limit on the total amount of available education is stopping them, only their own stupid educational ideas and habits. I am sure that he has a point.
Too many of our internet dreams depend on the internet being far less vulnerable to governments than it actually is.
– August, commenting on a posting at my place about Bitcoin.
I suggest comments about what August says about the internet: here. Bitcoin comments: there.
I see that my fourth (approximately, I think) cousin John Micklethwait, Editor of the Economist, whom our own Paul Marks disapproves of so severely, is this weekend attending a meeting of the Bilderberg Group.
I learned about this list of potentates thanks to a link to it from Guido Fawkes, and I consider it rather significant that such an august media personage as Guido should be positively drawing our attention to this gathering.
When the internet got seriously into its stride, and particularly blogging, at or around the year 2000, you would have thought that observation and analysis of the global elite would have exploded. After all, detailed analysis of these persons and their thinkings and their doings was the quintessential Story They Don’t Want Us To Know, in other words, a story that was ready-made for the internet.
Yet, actually, very little was said about these persons and their meetings and their secret thinkings aloud, by regular people as opposed to the people who were already fascinated by such things. Oh, I’m sure that the people who had been banging on about the evil Bilderbergers for the previous quarter of a century immediately started publishing vast screeds about these persons on the internet. But, or so it seems to me, very few other people paid such talk very much attention. And so, pretty much, it has continued.
Why? Was it because bloggers who dipped their toes into these hitherto forbidden waters were visited by sinister people in sinister raincoats at sinister times of the night? Did those who mentioned the Bilderberg Group on the internet suffer mysteriously fatal road accidents?
I can’t speak for others, but the thing that kept me away from talking about Bilderberg meetings and similar things was not the fear of Them, but the desire not to be thought completely mad, by people generally. → Continue reading: Is the globe now ready to start thinking seriously about its elite?
Newspaper headlines photoed by me today, in London:
For a more considered view of the economic picture, try Detlev Schlichter, who now seems to be the unofficial Samizdata economics correspondent, who has another posting up today, about, ah yes, inflation.
But the good news is that not all prices are rising.
Photoed by me yesterday, in London:
The original price of this book was £10.99. I guess people now realise that it didn’t have a happy ending.
Perhaps the answer is going to be to keep warm by burning books.
My favourite bit in the Eagleton piece that Natalie links to below is this:
British universities, plundered of resources by the bankers and financiers they educated, …
Does it not occur to Eagleton that perhaps the British universities that all these wicked bankers and financiers attended educated them rather badly? While at university, Britain’s future financial elite were taught to accept a false view of the economic world. Now this elite “plunders” (as in “cuts the government grants of”) its educators.
The educators educated the elite. The elite screwed up horribly, and now the educators are getting screwed themselves. The educators are appalled at this terrible ingratitude, this horrible injustice. What have they done to deserve this? I say: quite a lot. You teach financially ruinous ideas. The people you taught them to turn round and ruin you. I say: it serves you right. I say: that’s just about the most perfect punishment there could be for what you have been doing.
My only worry is that things are actually not as bad as Eagleton says, and that Britain’s universities are in fact not being punished nearly enough for the financial ruin that they did so much to unleash upon the rest of us.
Aren’t we all?
I always knew there was money being made by various people, out of all this Health and Safety activity there has recently been. Someone, I have long been muttering to myself, is making a fortune printing all these signs. And there are “consultants” making a fine living explaining all the legal complications involved. Big building contractors, in particular, have lots of money and no huge public popularity, and if they break even one letter of one of these laws I imagine it can get very expensive.
This snap, taken a fortnight ago during that canal trip I went on, confirms my suspicions:
Another Van of the Times, to put beside this earlier one.
It seems that these guys began just selling legally mandated fire extinguishers, but you get the feeling that they are now branching out, don’t you? The company name certainly says to me that they always saw fire extinguishers as their way into a much bigger market, which they knew was getting bigger all the time.
Indeed. A nice (or maybe not) confluence of vehicles, snapped by me this afternoon in Rochester Row, London SW1:
Click on that to get it bigger, and to read the words on the small white vehicle.
A moderate Muslim has not understood Islam.
– Sam Solomon, twenty five minutes into a remarkable video interview of him by Ezra Levant.
Solomon, who was raised a Muslim but is now a Christian, explains, in particular, just what is so explosive about the threat to Islam of Christianity. Built into Islam, says Solomon, is a huge bundle of falsehood about what Christianity actually says. Simply learning about Christianity by reading the Bible, whether you accept in or not, will automatically undermine your Muslim faith.
The Internet threatens their power and perks. That’s far more important than problems that merely threaten the world’s wellbeing.
– Instapundit comments on a piece called As world burns, G8 leaders fiddle … with the Internet. Seriously?
Indeed. Ignore the messages. Silence the messenger.
Besides which, it’s asking a lot to expect the people who caused the problems, and whose first attempts to solve the problems multiplied the problems, to solve the problems.
“Robbers perform surgery on God inside this domain (or stately home).”
– Antoine Clarke’s translation (see the comments) of the French bit of a multilingual sign warning against thieves, that I recently photoed in the Brick Lane part of London.
Usually we like to joke about how the foreigners get English wrong. So, it’s good to notice when we get one of their languages wrong.
Here is one of those quotes where you add “read the whole thing”:
But next time you are told that Osborne is imposing savage, reckless cuts on the UK, remember that the figures tell a different story. So far, spending is still going up. The plan is for total spending to go up in cash terms overall this financial year and to fall by 0.6 per cent in real terms (the measure that really matters). This will hurt, especially given that debt interest payments are soaring, reducing the funds available for public services by a lot more than the 0.6 per cent overall cut. But this should also be put into context. Barack Obama, who was in London yesterday, wants to cut public spending by 3.8 per cent next year, more than the 3.7 per cent pencilled in over four years by Osborne. In other words, Obama’s cuts – which many in the US want to make even larger – are four times larger than the average annual cuts proposed by slowcoach Osborne.
So it is no wonder really that the UK’s credit rating was downgraded yesterday by (wait for it) Chinese rating agency Dagong, which cut the UK by one notch to A+, from AA-, and placed it on a negative outlook. You may snigger – but unless the UK is able to deliver on its fiscal austerity not just this year but for the next four, our creditors will soon start panicking again, with good reason.
That’s Allister Heath, writing in the London giveaway newspaper, City A.M., which he edits. His point being that the journey in question has only just begun.
Read the whole thing. The above quote comes at the end. Before that come a few of the facts and the figures.
I suppose the optimistic take on all this is that you can’t wrench a graph that is going up onto a downward path, just like that. But how much wrenching is actually going on?
Indeed:
It’s a pub, across the road from Camden Town tube station. But, unlike the people Perry had a chuckle about yesterday, their End is, I presume, a place rather than a time. End as in: here your journey stops, rather than now everything stops.
Looking the other way from the tube exit, I wondered if these guys were trying to tell us all something similar, about the likelihood that the world will not be ending any time soon:
I was in Camden to meet a Goddaughter, and the two of us then walked west along the Regents Canal. Recently, I watched a TV show about the revival of Britain’s canals as desirable places to have fun on and to live next to, following their eclipse as the dominant mode of transport by the railways and their descent to wet slum status and dereliction. We saw plenty of evidence of this revival. In particular, we saw many, many canal boats, most at rest, many in motion.
The river boat we saw that the readers of this blog will probably approve of most strongly was the one called this:
Although, the boat name that I found the most intriguing was this:
Compass Rose was the ship that got sunk in Nicholas Monsarrat’s novel about the war in the Atlantic, The Cruel Sea, which was then made into a very popular movie of the same name, starring Jack Hawkins. I don’t believe that to be a coincidence.
We saw many other sights. I liked the floating restaurant, that was doing brisk business. I was intrigued that for long stretches of the canal, roads and railways near to it are at a significantly lower level, often spectacularly so (as at the point where the canal is crossed by two big elevated roads, one on top of the other, in the Paddington area) and quite a few houses and business buildings next to the canal had basements below canal level.
Later in the afternoon, I liked how a curve in the elevated M40 juts out over a curve the opposite way in the canal, but without them crossing, like this:
And we both enjoyed photo-ing the birds in the big bird cage designed by Princess Margaret’s ex, which is right next to the canal. I did not know this.
By the time the sun was setting, we had reached Willesden, where I had further fun photoing the sunset through incomprehensible railway clutter. Click on the picture below if you’d like to see it bigger:
At which point we were both pretty tired, so we sat down in a Chinese and ate, and then went home. And I’m pretty tired now, so I will leave it at that.
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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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