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]
|
My area of central London – Pimlico – has not, yet, been hit by the mayhem engulfing many boroughs of this great city. My friends who live in or near these areas are safe, as far as I can check. (I heard from Michael Jennings, who lives in Southeast London, and he’s okay). I have been interested in the sort of reactions from Americans and others from abroad. Clearly, fewer than 12 months ahead of the Olympic Games, this violent disorder comes at a terrible time for the organisers of that pointless junket:
“As an American in London, I am seeing it first hand. Your statement about the welfare state’s death convulsions are true — there is a small business owner on BBC news talking now about a restaurant of his getting trashed in Ealing, a rather nice part of West London. He noted that despite all the talk of this being a response to poverty, the looters are wearing designed tracksuits and communicating by I-Phones. This family has had a furniture business in South London for 140 years. No longer — it is burning to the ground right now. There even was a street fire in my neighbourhood of Notting Hill. One difference from the US is that in London, there is much more mixing of socio-economic groups than in the US. So I think we may see a long night.”
(Via Instapundit). Another point is that UK homeowners and business owners are not allowed to use deadly force in self defence, a point that has been made regularly, of course, by this blog.
In the meantime, these books are worth reading, in my view, if you want to understand what has gone wrong in the UK:
Life At the Bottom;
The Welfare State We’re In.
Mind The Gap.
Guns & Violence: The English Experience.
I’d add that a common complaint – sometimes made by libertarians and conservatives – is that our police are more interested in political correctness than enforcing the law severely. There may be some truth in that, but I am not sure that this is the issue here. And I am struck by the BBC’s coverage. The Labour MP, Diane Abbott, was interviewed this morning on BBC Breakfast television and instead of making any sort of excuses, such as the usual crap about Tory “cuts”, was pretty blunt about the need to deal with these thugs. Interesting.
I think the conclusion of this paragraph by Daniel Johnson is overly gloomy:
“The present hysteria obscures the fact that the most unaccountable power in the British media culture is not News Corp. but the BBC. Funded by a poll tax, driven by a leftist mindset, and ruthless in its use of monopoly power, the BBC has been using its saturation coverage of the phone-hacking story to destroy its main competitor. If the BBC succeeds in its aim of driving News Corp. out of the UK market, the British public will be the losers. There is a real danger that the case for the free market, Judeo-Christian values, and Western civilization will no longer be made in Britain.”
I am not so concerned as Johnson is. If Murdoch did pack it in, leaving a vacumn in the sort of space he has filled, someone else could and would fill it. I think that in the age of the internet and a profusion of blogs and other outlets, that the barriers to entry into the media business have been dramatically lowered.
Like Johnson, I have not joined in the general baying for Murdoch’s blood, sensing that some of those who wanted him done down were looking to strengthen the armlock of the BBC and throw out an upstart who upset their cozy world. (My goodness, he wasn’t even Bwitish!). Other news organisations besides those run by Murdoch have done bad things, and given the weaknesses of any organisations run by human beings, those failings will remain. The best insurance against such abuses is the widest possible array of choice in media so that consumer power dominates. Remember, Murdoch decided to shut down the News of the World when advertisers threatened to pull the plug on him. Subscribers can and did cancel on him. With the BBC licence fee, there is no such way that irate consumers of television can vote with their wallets.
Anyway, here’s another paragraph from Johnson that I liked:
“How precisely the closure of a newspaper serves the cause of liberty, such commentators cannot say, any more than they can justify their implied comparison with the butchers of Tripoli and Damascus of the man who not only gave the British press a new lease of life by defeating the print unions, but also lavished tabloid profits on the upscale Times and the highbrow Times Literary Supplement for over 30 years. The News of the World, though beneath the contempt of today’s pundits, was loved by George Orwell. He begins his great essay “The Decline of the English Murder” by evoking a scene of postprandial bliss: a working-class Englishman following his Sunday lunch of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding by opening the News of the World to read about the latest, most lurid murders.”
On an optimistic note, I’d add that one of the trail-blazers in new media, Glenn Reynolds, marks 10 years of Instapundit today. Well done him. All hail to the King of Knoxville.
I got this via Pajamas TV. Well, it’s Friday:
“Warning: This segment contains graphic images of Matt Damon discussing tax policy.”
And the footage of Damon sharing his profound thoughts on the “upper class” etc is not for people of a nervous disposition.
Let’s not forget that magnificent movie and its treatment of Damon, Team America.
“Flowers begin arriving past night and bidding starts before dawn. To ensure their lilies and hyacinths are ready for the auction block, growers move them from cold storage onto carts in the early morning, or else rush them from Schiphol after overnight flights from Quito, Nairobi, and Tel Aviv. It’s impossible to see, much less make sense of, the Aalsmeer at eye level, as the floor of its central warehouse is a thicket of carts bearing blooms, all waiting their turn. This is the world’s largest commercial building at ten million square feet, more than twice the size of Chicago’s Willis Tower or Merchandise Mart….” (Page213).
“From a catwalk running above, you can study the crazy quilt of tulips, sunflowers, azaleas and hydrangeas bleeding into daubs of orange or pink on the horizon. The quilt constantly changes colors and patterns as burly Dutchmen at the wheel of one-man tugs trail daisy chains behind them.” (Page 213)
What is interesting about these passages, concerning the marvels of the vast flower-auction market in Holland, and the global reach of this business made possible now due to aviation and refrigeration, is that the author does not fall into the usual stale bromides about how all this aviation-led trade is killing the planet. I liked this passage, on page 232-3:
“Food miles cannot begin to compare in toxicity with flatulent cattle. Anyone who’s read the Omnivore’s Dilemma can recite chapter and verse on the perils of force-feeding corn to livestock in feedlots. Cows produce methane, a greenhouse gas thirty times more potent than carbon, as a by-product of digestion…..A breakdown of the Big Mac revealed that nearly a third of its [carbon] footprint stems from feed production, another third from storage, and much of the rest from slaughtering, frying, and baking. Food miles contribute 3 per cent.”
Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next, Greg Lindsay and John Kasarda. 2011.
Nick Gillespie, who when he is not pointing out how American politics is changing rapidly with his fellow Reasonoid Matt Welch, has an interesting essay up about how much of what passes for the “artistic community” was left looking pretty lame in how writers, painters, sculptors, film-makers and even poets responded to 9/11. (Yes, it is almost a decade ago). He makes a number of good points. Tim Sandefur weighs in with some thoughts of his own and makes this pretty blunt point:
“That is largely due to two factors: for one thing, much of the artistic community, and especially its elite, sympathize more with the perpetrators of the attacks than with a United States that they hate for its “commercialism,” “materialism,” dynamism, secularism, industrialism, and so forth. The artistic world is dominated by romanticist ideologies that see science, technology, free markets, and human progress as essentially evil things—precisely the ideology that produced the September 11th attacks. What is an artist, who has spent his or her career producing work to condemn capitalism, going to produce to mourn the loss of the World Trade Center at the hands of anti-capitalist terrorists? They certainly aren’t going to produce a second Mourning Athena. As Robert Hughes says, American artists particularly are obsessed “with creating identities, based on race, gender, and the rest. These have made for narrow, preachy, single-issue art in which victim credentials count for more than aesthetic achievement. You get irritable agitprop…. The fact that an artwork is about injustice no more gives it aesthetic status than the fact that it’s about mermaids.” Relatedly, the artistic world is dominated by aesthetic notions that preclude powerful artistic commemorations of anything, really. The elite artistic world produces work that is simply not accessible to average people—the people who actually do mourn September 11th and rightly see it as an attack on everything America and they stand for. This is especially true in public monuments, which, since Maya Lin, have been minimalistic, sterile, and unmoving. (As is often true of art, Lin’s Vietnam Memorial is damn good—powerful and effective and brilliant; it’s her followers and imitators who have mucked it up.) Since the artistic elite have abandoned representationalism and powerful emotional appeal for cold abstractions, they also belittle the works of representational artists who might produce works friendlier and more moving to general audiences—and the political leaders are going to listen to the elite, not to the remaining believers in representationalism.”
For me, the only really telling film made about 9/11 has been Flight 93. I watched it several years ago and remember it as a powerful, if flawed, production.
As Sandefur says, the inadequacy of art in relation to a terrible event such as 9/11 is a broader reflection of how art has arguably, degraded in recent decades. For what it is worth, I am one of those old grouches who finds a lot of what passes for Modern Art to be mind-erasing garbage. But then again, my “modern” tastes in things like science fiction, and all the whizz-bang art that can come with it, don’t necessarily make me old fashioned, either.
As an aside, I came across these photos of Civil War memorial art. Worth a look. It adds to Sandefur’s point on representational art, I think.
This paragraph from a good posting by Victor Davis Hanson, at the National Review’s Corner blog, applies not just to the US, but also to the UK:
“The strangest thing about the current paradox of cash-flush companies and little or no economic growth is the administration’s puzzlement over the lethargy — as if no one outside Washington ever listened to what the administration has said or noticed what they have done the last three years.”
Exactly. I’d also add to VDH’s list of things that have stymied recovery: the still-lingering and damaging impact of the Sarbanes-Oxley law on things such as initial public offerings and the foolish FASB tampering with share option payments that have crimped venture capital startup businesses. (I can, by the way, recommend this book by Dale Halling about why US entrepreneurship is stalling – it controversially argues that a key problem has been the erosion of patent law in the US, an argument that is bound to get some libertarian opponents of IP excited).
VDH’s points apply in Britain, too, such as what he says about demonisation of some businesses, as well as things like bailouts, Green regulations and so on. Of course, a key problem here is the European Union and all the red tape that comes from that.
Regime uncertainty, if I can use that term, is a big problem. We have a tax authority (HMRC), given the power to decide, as it goes along, what constitutes tax “avoidance”, so that avoidance is now seen as wrong, as is tax evasion. This relates to a wider problem of uncertainty. Even the daftest tax laws are more tolerable if they are predictable. The problems get even worse, though, if officials have the ability to retrospectively decide that this or that business practice is wrong and should be shut down. Our tax code remains one of the longest and most complex in the world.
We need far fewer laws, and those that remain should be simple, easy to understand and enforce. Sometimes though, doing things the simple way seems to be so hard.
“Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money for any other currency without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home. For that matter, a foreigner could spend his life in this country without permit and without informing the police. Unlike the countries of the European continent, the state did not require its citizens to perform military service. An Englishman could enlist, if he chose, in the regular army, the navy, or the territorials. He could also ignore, if he chose, the demands of national defence. Substantial householders were occasionally called on for jury service. Otherwise, only those helped the state who wished to do so. The Englishman paid taxes on a modest scale: nearly £200 million in 1913-14, or rather less than 8 per cent. of the national income. The state intervened to prevent the citizen from eating adulterated food or contracting certain infectious diseases. It imposed safety rules in factories, and prevented women, and adult males in some industries, from working excessive hours. The state saw to it that children received education up to the age of 13. Since 1 January 1909, it provided a meagre pension for the needy over the age of 70. Since 1911, it helped to insure certain classes of workers against sickness and unemployment. This tendency towards more state action was increasing. Expenditure on the social services had roughly doubled since the Liberals took office in 1905. Still, broadly speaking, the state acted only to help those who could not help themselves. It left the adult citizen alone.”
– AJP Taylor, historian. The funny thing is, that AJP Taylor was a lifelong socialist and therefore, supported policies and ideas that led, directly and indirectly, to the destruction of some of the liberties he wrote about in this much-cited passage, on page one, from his classic, English History, 1914-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970).. Like many of his generation, he was naive about the Soviet Union, to put it kindly, although he did break with communism while remaining a lifelong member of the Labour Party. But as he would respond, much of the damage to British freedoms mentioned in this passage had been done by the calamity of the First World War and its aftermath. And piecemeal changes – starting in the late 19th Century and arguably hastened by the arrival of the mass franchise, made these liberties vulnerable. But are we being starry-eyed about Victorian-era liberties? Is he describing a myth or a reality? There’s a question to stir up the commenters.
I see that Ed Driscoll of Pajamas Media liked this quote too. I imagine it resonates with American readers quite as much as with a Brit.
“Little does Barack Obama understand that he has forever branded himself as an incompetent and failure. His narcissism and lifelong history of receiving public adulation will not allow him to comprehend the damage. He does not understand that now few will listen to his speeches, no matter how well delivered; that few will believe what he is saying, as he has lied and obfuscated the facts so often. Many world leaders have already arrived at the conclusion that Barack Obama is a leader that cannot be trusted, the citizens of the United States are beginning to understand that he is a man without a core set of principles thus incapable of guiding the ship of state. The media, increasingly realizing their culpability in the nation’s current state of affairs, has begun to ask more penetrating questions and grudgingly question Obama’s fitness for office. Columnists once infatuated with his ability to deliver a speech and skin color have finally begun to admit their error. The Left has become more open in their criticism, as they now understand that the hero upon whom they vested so much hope is a hollow shell.”
– Steve McCann.
In front of an admittedly pro-“Austria” crowd at the LSE, it seems that academics defending the free market views of the late F.A. Hayek managed to fairly heavily beat those speaking up for JM Keynes.
This may not amount to much, but what I think these things accomplish is to remind the defenders of people such as Keynes (such as Lord Skidelsky, his biographer), that there are now hundreds, in fact thousands, of smart young economics and politics graduates and undergraduates who regard, say, Keynes and other economic interventionists, as wrong. Some of these people will become teachers and lecturers themselves, or, if they want to make serious money, work in banks and the like. Slowly but surely, all those people teaching stodgy, wrong Keynesian ideas are getting older and greyer and newer people with other ideas are taking over, however slowly at first. This LSE debate is the sort of event that makes me think that while the 2008 financial crash might be seen, in one way, as a supposed setback for “unregulated capitalism” (yeah, right), it has also pushed attention on ideas that got out of focus in the lazy, fat years of the dotcom boom and the early parts of the past decade. (And then of course there are all those tens of thousands of book sales of Atlas Shrugged, etc).
Libertarians and other non-socialists like to moan how our places of Higher Learning have been gradually taken over by people with bad and wrong ideas. We need, I think, to realise that that argument can cut both ways. People with good, insightful ideas can also enter these institutions, however slowly at first, and make a key difference. I think this is happening more than people realise. I know that optimism is deeply out of fashion these days. Wallowing in despair is, in my view, a cop-out.
“I close this sermon with these words: Avoid anger, recrimination, and personal attack. Those with whom you are angry are probably (taken by and large) at least as filled with or as empty of virtue as you. Moreover, they are the very ones you might wish later to welcome as your allies. Avoid panic and despair; be of good cheer. If you’re working in freedom’s vineyard to the best of your ability, the rest is in the hands of a higher authority anyway. If you can see no humor in what’s going on (and even at times in your own behavior) you’ll soon lose that sense of balance so important to effective and reasoned thought and action. Finally, take comfort in the thought that the cause of freedom can never be lost, precisely because it can never be won. Given man’s nature, freedom will always be in jeopardy and the only question that need concern each of us is if and how well we took our stand in its defence during that short period of time when we were potentially a part of that struggle.”
– Can Capitalism Survive? Benjamin A. Rogge, page 300. Originally published in 1979 and republished by that splendid organisation, Liberty Fund.
I have been reading this book, Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next, by Greg Lindsay and John Kasarda, and it is full of gems. We take the ability to order a book or other item online and have it delivered in days for granted, and perhaps tend to forget how much we have got used to this unless, that is, such services are disrupted by things such as security clampdowns or Icelandic volcanic eruptions.
Here’s a couple of paragraphs:
“Despite its handicaps, LAX has been the catalyst for the city’s metamorphosis into America’s premier trade entrepôt over the last 30 years. It was during those decades that the industrial fulcrum of California first shifted north – out of the hangars of Hughes Aircraft and into Silicon Valley – and then west, all the way to China. We have LAX to thank for our iPhones and iPods being `designed by Apple in California, assembled in China,’ as they advertise on their backs. Not just Apple, but every Valley company that began life combining transistors there – think Intel, Hewlett Packard, Sun, and Cisco – long ago began outsourcing work from its messy, depreciating factories to ones across the Pacific. Now they wait for airborne freighers to land in Los Angeles with the first samples of their latest holiday smash in the hold.”
(Page 29)
“Anyone lucky enough to have hitched a ride aboard a freighter or been taken under the wings of the `freight dogs’ who pilot them could tell ou enough stories to pass the eighteen hours to LA from Singapore. At any given moment, there are aloft `incomprehensible quantities of the mundane,’ in the words of one such witness: 160,000 pounds of roses leaving Amsterdam, 25,000 wiring harnesses bound for auto plants around the Detroit, or 5,000 pounds of Grand Theft Auto games inbound for LAX. Another writer babysat a stableful of horses in transit between O’Hare and Tokyo, including a dozen Appaloosas bound for a Hokkaido ranch. One pilot recounted the tale of a mysterious ice chest, insured for millions, which he later learned was the vessel for the first HIV drug cocktail.”
(page 33).
“White extremists are rightly shunned by mainstream politicians. Muslim extremists are courted by the likes of Ken Livingstone. White fundamentalism and Muslim fundamentalism need each other. But white fundamentalism, unlike its Muslim counterpart, does not have a presence in legitimate institutions. The white Right should not be ignored by the security authorities – but it would be dangerous to divert our attention from the real threat.”
Andrew Gilligan, journalist, reflecting on the wider implications of the horror in Norway. I would add that security authorities should also not forget such threats as from remnants of the IRA in Northern Ireland, Deep Greens, and parts of the Far Left. There is, alas, plenty of fanaticism out there.
I have a few Norwegian friends and they are, thank god, safe, but in a small country, almost everyone in that fine nation has been touched by this act of mass murder. By the way, do any Samizdata commenters know about what the laws are about firearms in that country? I am appalled at how easy it was for this man to kill so many without challenge for so long. But then this bastard had clearly planned out his attacks, knowing that it would take time for the police to get to the island.
|
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.
|
