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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While some of its members may genuinely believe they are doing good by their fellow human beings in protecting health and potentially dangerous things, as they think genetically modified plants to be, the dangers of the Precautionary Principle are highlighted to a stark degree by the activities of Greenpeace activists in Canberra, Australia. According to a report, trials in producing GM wheat have been badly damaged.
The persons who did this will, hopefully, be caught and punished with the full weight of the law. Remember, if these guys had their way, the Agricultural Revolution that took place in the decades leading up to the Industrial Revolution might not have happened, or at least to the same degree.
Here is an article by the excellent Ronald Bailey on the GM crops issue.
“Brecht, an East German, was allowed by the Communists to keep his wealth and live at ease in Switzerland – a show dog of Communism. His accomplishments, however, must be seen not as an indictment, but as a ratification of the power of free enterprise. As must the seemingly ineradicable vogue for the notion of Government Control. The free market in ideas keeps this folly as current as any entertainment reviled by the Left as “mindless”. But the fiction of top-down Government Control, of a Command Economy, is, at essence, like a Reality Show, which is to say, a fraud. The Good Causes of the Left may generally be compared to NASCAR; they offer the diversion of watching things go excitingly around in a circle, getting nowhere.”
David Mamet, page 3 of his book, The Secret Knowledge. I love his line about NASCAR. The whole book is stuffed with one-liners such as that.
Here is what I wrote a little while ago about Mamet.
“Revulsion, however justified, is a dangerous counsellor.”
– Bruce Anderson, on the continuing saga of Rupert Murdoch. A good article overall, somewhat spoiled by a daft remark about Australia.
Christopher Hitchens – I hope he can fight his cancer as long as possible – has this crackerjack of a piece about Patrick Leigh Fermor, the soldier, explorer, journalist and raconteur who recently died at the age of 96:
“Now the bugle has sounded for the last and perhaps the most Byronic of this astonishing generation. When I met him some years ago, Leigh Fermor (a slight and elegant figure who didn’t look as if he could squash a roach; he was perfectly played by Dirk Bogarde in Ill Met by Moonlight, the movie of the Kreipe operation) was still able to drink anybody senseless, still capable of hiking the wildest parts of Greece, and still producing the most limpidly written accounts of his solitary, scholarly expeditions. (He had also just finished, for a bet, translating P.G. Wodehouse’s story The Great Sermon Handicap into classical Greek.) That other great classicist and rebel soldier T.E. Lawrence, pressed into the service of an imperial war, betrayed the Arabs he had been helping and ended his life as a twisted and cynical recluse. In the middle of a war that was total, Patrick Leigh Fermor fought a clean fight and kept faith with those whose cause he had adopted. To his last breath, he remained curious and open-minded to an almost innocent degree and was a conveyor of optimism and humor to his younger admirers. For as long as he is read and remembered, the ideal of the hero will be a real one.”
Marvellous stuff. I have one of Fermor’s books on the shelf, as yet unread. I really look forward to dipping into it soon.
Well, the reactions to the decision by Rupert Murdoch to shut the News of the World, and try and halt his empire collapsing, continue. Fraser Nelson, editor of the Spectator, used to have a weekly column for a paper once known as “News of the Screws” (for non-Brits, this paper was obsessed by the sex lives of the rich, powerful and celebs). Nelson has thoughts about it at the Spectator’s own website. I think he gushes a bit too much and as the comments suggest, readers are not happy at Nelson’s defence of much of what the NoTW stood for over the decades. But never mind that. The great thing about the Spectator commenters is that they are often splendidly barmy, if not quite as consistently rude as over at the Guido Fawkes site.
This one, by a “David Lindsay,” wins the prize for me. I quote it all, for its genuine insights and wrong-headed, state-worship of a kind that might make an old Soviet functionary blush (although it is entirely possible that Lindsay is a certain kind of “High Tory” who sentimentalises working class life). This comment reminds me of a piece of dialogue of that brilliant Peter Sellers film, “I’m All Right Jack”, when Sellers, playing the union shop steward constantly at loggerheads with “the bosses”, is praising life in Stalin’s Russia. Take it away, Mr Linsday:
“In the farewell souvenir edition [of NoTW ed], it was heartbreakingly easy to trace the decline in the writers’ educational and cultural expectations of their readers. Murdoch is not solely to blame for this. But he is hardly blameless of it, either.”
As the praise for the News of the World from George Orwell on its own final back page indicated, this was a paper of the wider culture of working-class self-improvement underwritten by the full employment that was itself always guaranteed, and very often delivered directly, by central and local government action: the trade unions, the co-operatives, the credit unions, the mutual guarantee societies, the mutual building societies, the Workers’ Educational Association, the Miners’ Lodge Libraries, the pitmen poets, the pitmen painters, the brass and silver bands, the Secondary Moderns (so much better than what has replaced them, turning out millions of economically and politically active, socially and culturally aware people), and so much else destroyed by the most philistine Prime Minister until Blair, who in her time as Education Secretary had closed so many grammar schools that there were not enough left at the end for her record ever to be equalled.
For the first hundred or more years of its domination of the Sunday market, that domination coincided with a high degree of weekly churchgoing in this country. Its strongly working-class readership must have contained a well above average proportion of what are now called traditional Catholics, but in the days when there was no other kind.
Well, with no more competition from what the News of the World lately allowed itself to become, why not one or more People’s Papers again, affordably hooking people in with a bit of entertainment in order to educate and inform them on the premise that they deserve nothing less than the human dignity and respect of education and information? Central and local government, the trade unions, the co-operatives, the credit unions, the mutual guarantee societies, the mutual building societies and the Workers’ Educational Association all still exist. Just for a start.
What are they doing “to give to the poorer classes of society a paper that would suit their means, and to the middle — as well as the rich — a journal which due to its immense circulation would demand their attention”?
I loved the patronising lines about brass and silver bands. I wish Peter Sellers were still alive now; how he would have loved this sort of comment and used it for his material. I am not sure if Mr Lindsay would get the joke.
“Recent theater encounter: Trailer for “Battle Los Angeles”. Some fat angry looking woman starts hissing. I shout “I didn’t pay $10 to listen to you. Save your opinions for that blog no one reads. Not even your friends.”. After that, not a peep. If you want to save our culture you’ve got to stand up to the barbarians.”
A commenter called Guan-ju, writing about an article at the Big Hollywood blog concerning the oafish behaviour of some cinema-goers. Well said indeed.
In my fortunate experience, I have generally not suffered from chatty couples, paper rustlers or smelly eaters. However, I often will be sitting in front of someone who keeps kicking the back of the chair. My usual response is to turn around slowly, and give the offending idiot my best attempt at the “Clint Eastwood stare”. Sometimes works, sometimes doesn’t. (Alas, the use of something handy, like a taser is banned in the UK. Shame. It would be brilliant). The trouble is, of course, is that if you go to a cinema quite late, a lot of the audience will be fairly merry, indeed drunk. At least in the UK, anyway. And of course the type of film will affect this: if you are watching a French art house film, it is probably less likely to be an issue than if you are watching something like Transformers or Dumb and Dumber, or somesuch. On the other hand, the louder the movie (think Iron Man 2) and the more crazy the action, the more the usual pin-heads are dumbstruck into silence.
Of course, while watching a Michael Moore “documentary”, I reckon that loud heckling is mandatory.
James Bartholomew, author of the splendid “The Welfare State We’re In”, weighs on on the subject of Sweden, long a poster child for socialists and possibly, even a certain type of right-winger:
“Sweden is iconic, like Marilyn Monroe or Karl Marx. It is supposed to stand for something special: a kind of paradise where socialism and a big welfare state go together with being a successful, rich country.”
Another paragraph:
“The main trouble is that, when Sweden was as close as it ever has been to being a socialist welfare state, it went bust. For a while it may have seemed like a great model, but the Swedish government ran out of money. Why? Because Sweden found, like Britain, that if you pay people to be unemployed, take early retirement or be sick, you get a gradually decreasing number of people who claim the relevant benefits. And if you have sky-high taxes, people don’t work as hard, or they cheat, or they leave.”
Read the whole thing.
“Poor old Dave, he tries to mix with some common folk and look what happens.”
A commenter, “Percy”, at the Spectator’s Coffee House blog, talking about the arrest of Andy Coulson, former press advisor to David Cameron.
It has been a bit of bad summer for Mr Cameron. He’s lucky he has been up against such a weak opponent.
I came across the following in a research paper about the benefits of “clustering” of financial services and other industries:
“Singapore is a country, which, 40 years ago had the same GDP per head as Uganda. Now, it is the richest country in the world, with GDP per head of $57,238 I 2010, according to the IMF, putting it ahead of the US, Japan, Hong Kong and Switzerland.”
Seems like a classic example of how some places are actually blessed by a dearth of natural resources.
As regulars will know, one of my pet dislikes is “Rod” Liddle, a man who likes to think of himself as a sturdy Leftie but who, in fact, increasingly sounds like the sort of BNP supporter that you might encounter in a bar and who insists on telling you about how so many of our problems are the fault of “the blacks”, etc. Liddle has strayed, arguably, over the line before, but like a man emboldened by his own seeming ability to keep pushing his agenda without severe damage to his bank balance, he has finally gone over the top with all the mad brio of Prince Rupert of the Rhine charging at Cromwell’s infantry in the English Civil War.
In a particularly stupid article for the Spectator (behind a subscriber firewall), on page 17 of the print edition, Mr Liddle reflects on the problems of Greece, and its horrendous debt. He rightly regards Greece’s decision to join the euro as a disaster, as Greece has proven itself incapable of handling the sort of interest rate more suitable to Munich or Lyon. However, in his clumsy way, he reflects on the differences he sees between southern Europe and the more “puritan” North. His title for the article (possibly written by a sub-editor), is: “How did I get it right on the euro? Easy. I was racist”.
“Insofar as I understood the economic permutations of what it would mean to be in or out of the single currency, I was vaguely opposed to joining. But my real reason for objecting to our membership of the euro was, and still is, I’m afraid, straightforwardly racist. I didn’t want to have the same currency (or government, effectively), as people in the south of Europe, who, I thought were, in the main, lazy, hot-tempered and uncivilized.”
(Emphasis, mine).
Here’s another gem:
“But it cannot be mere coincidence that the countries in trouble are those in the south, and that the further south you go the worse these problems become, until you reached the dislodged chunks of marble and the flaming fast-food shops of central Athens, where one protester said to the camera crews: “We don’t owe any money, it’s the others who stole it!”
What is so cretinous about Liddle is his use of the word “racist” instead of what would be more accurate – “culture”. It is, arguably, the culture of some countries – by no means all – that helps explain such things. But the idea that there is some sort of general rule that says the further south you travel, the worse the population behaves, is bunk. My wife’s small country, Malta, which is even further to the south than Greece, has a conservatively-run banking system, strong public finances and a relatively strong respect for property rights and the rule of law. It is also a member of the euro-zone. Maybe all those years of Malta being under the British Empire might have helped, as our “leftie” Mr Liddle might argue, but Malta exhibited many fine qualities long before the Brits, in the form of Lord Nelson, showed up. It is bizarre to claim that the further towards the Equator you get, the sillier, more corrupt and naughty people become. As Liddle must surely recall, in chilly Scotland, once famous or infamous for its puritanical version of Christianity, for example, a large chunk of the populace now lives on benefits, and many of the traditional characteristics once associated with the land of Adam Smith, James Watt and David Hume seem to be notable for their absence. This is a cultural, economic and political development which cannot be explained by reference to some glib reference to geography, much less the race, of the people in question. Even more unfortunately for Liddle’s notion is the example of Iceland, and its catastrophe of failed banks. Those blue-eyed folk with their blonde hair seriously screwed up.
Good ideas can be discredited by bigots purporting to advance them, if we allow these people to speak without rebutting their biases and showing them for the fools and knaves that they are. And Rod Liddle, however amusing he can sometimes be, or correct about something like the euro in one sense, is a bigot, and the kind of friend Eurosceptics can do without (I sometimes wonder whether he is working for the other side). Well, now he is on the record – he’s a racist, and seems to be proud of it.
“Politics is a lagging indicator of American society”.
– Nick Gillespie, of Reason magazine, talking about his new book, co-authored with Matt Welch, at CATO. An interesting presentation, if you can spare the 40-odd minutes to watch the talk and Q&A.
Look, I know that firms such as Cisco value the massive potential earnings from China, but this sort of story – if it is true – does leave a nasty taste.
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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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