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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As I have seen before, a lot of political news coverage in the UK (and in the US, for that matter) rather resembles sports coverage, if without the tone of hysteria covering the media’s reporting on England’s World Cup horror show. For instance, over at the Spectator’s Coffee House blog on the issue of public spending cuts, it goes into a lot of the arguments about who said X or Y about cutting A or B. In fairness, the Coffee House crew are pretty good at teasing out the statistics – Spectator editor Fraser Nelson has been excellent in hammering the former government over its debt – but there is something a bit missing from its analysis. And that is this: the scale of the shift that we might see from public sector jobs to private sector. If is true that hundreds of thousands of public sector jobs are to go, and the private sector is going to be encouraged to pick up the slack by new job creation, that is surely good news.
We are not admirers of Cameron’s style of Conservatism here at Samizdata (that’s putting it mildly, Ed), but I’ll give him and his finance minister credit if, at the end of the current parliament, there has been a significant shift away from the state and towards the private sector. We libertarian ideologues are hard to please, but such a shift will be pretty tough to pull off. If it means we have to put up with a certain amount of political BS along the route, I don’t especially mind. It is the general direction that counts.
Update: Guido Fawkes points out that certain leftist publications, reliant on public sector job ads, such as with the Guardian, have an obvious reason to fear the axe. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!
I have visited Germany several times – I lived there for about a month while a student (in the Moselle area) and briefly attended a Gymnasium school in the town of Ahrweiler, but have not yet been to Berlin, the capital. I have always had a good time in the country – the Rhineland is as impressive as the photos suggest – and this article by Tyler Cowen at his Marginal Revolution blog definitely makes me want to get on an aircraft and go there. I’d probably avoid it in the height of summer, though, not to mention the harsh Prussian winter.
Talking of Berlin, here is one of my favourite Michael Caine films. And of course David Bowie did a lot of his best work while living in the city.
Inevitably, when the name of Berlin comes up , it raises the issue of that palaver of 1939-45. Anthony Beevor’s book about the attack on Berlin in 1945 is a must-read. I remember there was an old guy who used to live in my parent’s village who was on pathfinders (Mosquitos) during WW2, and he played a part in the near-flattening of that city.
And of course, like many people of my generation, I vividly remember those scenes as beamed around the world of the Berlin Wall coming down, and imagining the joy of people in the East who were no longer treated like cattle in their own nation. I sometimes wish, naively, that there was more sense of shame among the hard left about its support for such a state of affairs. Let’s not forget that that overrated smart alec, JK Galbraith, made light of the wall and what it represented.
Proof that the US remains a very different nation to the UK at the moment. I just caught this Supreme Court decision via Bloomberg.
Basic logic is something that Mr Richard Murphy, wonderfully flayed by the indefatigable Tim Worstall, is blissfully unaware of. As Tim points out, Murphy reckons we can use inflation to somehow “wash” out massive debt (by shafting savers and others on a fixed income) while he also vents about the terrible plight of pensioners and the need to protect them.
It might be easier to deal with Richard Murphy in the same way that you might an old, very ill dog. Don’t worry, Richard, there would be no pain.
“No one died in any of these imperial takeovers of British soccer teams, no wildlife killed, no beaches littered with tarballs. But perhaps the outraged columnists in the UK should inform their football-obsessed readers that, like BP, most everything is globalized these days—from the strikers on their favorite club, to the companies headquartered in London. BP is a multinational corporation with American subsidiaries and workers, Swiss well operators, and a gaffe-prone Swedish chairman. And McDonald’s—that often-invoked symbol of American cultural hegemony—is no longer run out of Ray Kroc’s garage. The dreaded hamburger giant uses local products, employs regional officers and franchisees, is staffed by high school students from Flanders and Dortmund, and is eaten by almost everyone on Earth. Sarah Palin’s lame attempt at vilifying “foreign” BP, or Barack Obama’s subtle attempt to underscore the company’s non-American roots, is little different than former BBC reporter Andre Gilligan complaining that London is “owned by Americans,” with its streets “lined with New York Bagel shops, Manhattan Coffee Company outlets.” The stakes are different, of course, but the sentiment is much the same; if the city goes to pot, if the oil well explodes, it ain’t our fault. Obama is a blame-passing protectionist. Palin is an attention-seeking populist. And the poor British columnists are giving me reflux, that fashionable and incredibly painful American disease.”
– Michael C. Moynihan
His right, of course. Given the amount of anti-American BS that regularly comes out of the UK intelligentsia (or what passes for it), a certain amount of “take some of that, Limeys!” is understandable. Another point that adds to the angst here, of course, is that so many British people imagined, naively, that that post-racial, leftie POTUS would not lower himself to the sort of nationalist rhetoric allegedly indulged by his Texan predecessor. But then we should remember that even a supposed “progressive” such as Gordon Brown was able to come out with lines such as “British jobs for British workers”, a remark that must have surely raised a sour expression among the many US expats who work in the City over here.
One of the issues that comes up with a space that no-one owns, as in private property, is the so-called “tragedy of the commons”. As no-one has to bear the long-run costs of pollution or reaps the rewards of rising property values, so there is an incentive for people to over-farm, or over-fish, or pollute and generally muck things up. This occured to me when I read this article about the amount of junk that there now is in orbit around the Earth. The article, at Wired, also contains some rather cunning ways to deal with the problem. We cannot assume, for instance, that all this stuff eventually falls down and burns up during re-entry (although a lot does). There have been some potentially catastrophic near-misses in space.
So if any of you are star-gazers and think you have spotted a new planet, it might instead be an old satellite that is now out of commission.
“It is typical of the spin era that the first serious “crisis” in relations between General McChrystal and President Obama occurs over a few disobliging words the General and his team spoke about the President and his team. The endless rounds of deaths and dangerous patrols, the delays in finding political settlements on the ground and the ubiquitous ability of the “insurgents” to reappear are not apparently worthy reasons to recall the General for talks, but a magazine article is.”
– John Redwood, MP and blogger.
I am addicted to the Jack Reacher novels of Lee Child (I have read practically all of them). On Child’s website is a nifty collection of the cover art for his novels, taken from all around the world. Cover art is a much under-rated aspect of design, in my opinion.
A few weeks ago, I got my hands on an old Ian Fleming hardback – You Only Live Twice. It is a US first edition that I bought for £25, which I reckon is a serious result. It was printed in the early 60s, and its cover is deceptively simple. (Here is a collection of all the hardback covers of that novel.) The first edition Bond novels that were released first in the UK often go for a bloody fortune. The first edition of Casino Royale will cost tens of thousands. The cover art on those novels is great.
And SF cover art is often excellent. Here are some ones I like on this link.
Well, here is a good way to start the week.
The photo reminded me of a joke I heard somewhere. Back in the 1950s, the-then President, Eisenhower, was famed for enjoying his golf. There was apparently a bumper sticker around at the time that said something along the lines of, “If We Wanted A Golfer President, Vote Ben Hogan”. That’s quite funny, but at least Ike, given his pretty weighty military record and – in my view – pretty decent performance in the Oval Office – was a better president than the current occupant. (H/T: Instapundit)
David Friedman has a thought-provoking item up on whether politicians in the 1850s would have acted differently had they known of the carnage that was to be caused by the US Civil War of the following decade. He runs some interesting scenarios.
Counter-factual history is a genre in fiction, of course. I remember Philip Chaston wrote about this issue some time ago. Sean Gabb, one of the current leaders of the Libertarian Alliance, has thoughts related to this about the Second World War (as readers may recall, I find his revisionist perspective unconvincing, as does Patrick Crozier).
By “ourselves”, of course, I mean supporters of the English football team. Tonight, in the group stages of the World Cup “soccer” tournament, England’s not-entirely-convincing team takes on the might of Algeria. The English team failed to beat the USA a few days ago, conceding a soft goal due to a horrendous mistake by our goalkeeper. But England were not as terrible as some media commentaries suggest: some players such as Glenn Johnson, Aaron Lennon and Stevie Gerrard were good, in my view.
So far, I have quite enjoyed watching the tournament. I don’t get all that bothered by the endless din of the horns that the South African fans insist on blowing. If it drowns our some of the more moronic chants or even the banalities of the commentators, that is no bad thing. The local fans look as if they are having a great time, although as no doubt Samizdata commentators will point out, they are ultimately also paying for a lot of this razzmatazz. I have not checked all the details, but I assume that the government of South Africa, and hence the taxpayers, are funding some of the cost of all this.
So far, my prediction is that the finalists will probably be drawn from the following: Brazil, Argentina, Germany and possibly England (you’re mad, Ed). France lost big last night to Mexico; Spain, which has been considered among the favourites, was stunningly defeated by Switzerland, which brought a gleam to my pro-tax haven eye. Even so, Spain could and should probably progress to later stages.
As for England, all I can hope is that we don’t give away possession easily, give plenty of the ball to Wayne Rooney, and hope the goalkeeper remembers the old adage – keep the body behind the ball.
Here is what Brian Micklethwait wrote about the previous World Cup, back in 2006. I don’t remember a lot about it as I was getting married at the time.
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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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