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 a child, I was indifferent at team sports – especially rugby union – and my preference was and is for individualistic games like golf, tennis, squash, martial arts (Bujinkan and fencing), or the odd game of poker (I guess some card games like Bridge count as a team game of sorts). One exception to the Pearce Crapness at Team Games was cricket. I loved playing it, unless some sadist of a captain put me on the boundary at point on a chilly afternoon with no prospect of a bat or bowl. I do not play much any more. My fielding was one of the best parts of my game: I once took a flying catch off a batsman who was beginning to rack up a big score and the catch was the pivotal point in the game. Our lot won. There is also the sensual pleasure of hitting a cover drive on the ‘sweet spot’ of the bat. You get a similar tingle down the spine when you do that in other sports, such as baseball. But cricket was my great team sporting love if only for the entirely selfish reason that I was just about competent at it.
I was reminded of all this by this excellent piece in the Daily Telegraph today. Like the author of that piece, I played cricket at a state school; cricket is being taught and played less in the public sector education system, to the detriment of the national game. Personally, as an advocate of private schooling and of reducing, not raising, the school-leaving age, I would not want to moan if the sport is taught less if that is what the parents, and just as importantly, the pupils, want (some kids hate team sports so much it has scarred their memories of schooling for life). But I would like to think that in a genuine private sector school system, where parents can use their consumer power to drive up standards, that the Greatest Game Known to Man would flourish a bit more.
I would be interested to know what fellow cricket nuts and Samizdata conspirators, Brian Micklethwait and Michael Jennings, have to think about this. Brian recently linked to this book, which looks very much worth a read.
This is what I call gratitude.
On the subject of rare musical instruments, and as a sign of how desperate some investors are to make money away from the standard stock and bond markets, you can even invest in violins. I can see the jokes coming: “So, what do you invest in?” “Violins”. “Hmm, I’ve been on the fiddle myself”.
Groan.
“The Tories are free-marketeers – they have a mechanism to get rid of their leader on a wet weekend. Labour are central planners, so adopt protectionist policies.”
– Fraser Nelson, over the Spectator’s Coffee House blog. His quote makes a fair bit of sense, even if you, like yours truly, wonder about the free market credentials of David Cameron’s Conservative Party.
“We’ve had it with baby boomer politics. We’ve had it with coteries and courts, dens and sofas. But if we are fed up with that private politics, we are also tired of the public face of politics. We are told that modern politics is about TV studios: that poisonous truth may be about to become untrue. Westminster and Whitehall might yet make a come-back, as bastions of decently-argued policy and its delivery. This is a switch away from post-60s trends. But it needn’t be a backward step to snobbery and stuffiness.”
– Richard North
I hope he is right, although I doubt that Westminster and Whitehall have ever achieved a high point of “decently argued policy and its delivery”. Rose-tinted spectacles, and all that.
The new-look Harry’s Place carries this zinger of an article debunking a piece of revisionist tripe from the former editor of the New Statesman. The idea, essentially, is that Britain should have stayed out of WW2 so that the poor, put-upon Mr Hitler could then have shipped those pesky Jews off to some island in the Indian Ocean.
Unbelievable.
Via this blog, comes this awesomely silly story:
The Greek Isle of Lesbos is suing the group Homosexual and Lesbian Community of Greece to stop using the term Lesbian. Seems they are tired of having the term for people from their isle be synonymous with the followers of Sappho. “Our geographical designation has been usurped by certain ladies who have no connection whatsoever with Lesbos,” said Dimitris Lambrou, one of the plaintiffs.
Fantastic. Just imagine how one could play with this. Suppose the town council of Dorking, southern England, sues anyone who is referred to, or uses the pejorative term, “Dork”.
Greece: did not that country once come up with clever chaps like Aristotle or something?
As ever, those interested in silly lawsuits should keep an eye on Overlawyered, an invaluable blog.
A couple of weeks ago I linked to a story about how the UK drugmaker Shire was planning to relocate offshore to avoid paying UK tax. The FT reports today that a large number of blue-chip firms are looking at following suit.
The problem, however, is that even if the UK government cuts corporate taxes to entice firms not to leave, a high-spending administration like this one is likely to recoup any loss of revenue by hiking taxes elsewhere. If it does, that will only encourage more people to leave.
Andrew Sullivan, who seems to have bought into the Obama campaign wholesale despite Obama’s Big Government views – hardly what Sullivan claims to support – makes this pretty sweeping assertion against those who are unimpressed by Mr Obama and his interesting choice of friends and associates.
It’s extremely depressing that the first major national black politician who takes on the victimology of Sharpton and Jackson is greeted by the right with the kind of cynicism you see at Malkin or the Corner or Reynolds. It reveals, I think, the deeper truth: the Republican right only wants a black Republican to do this.
Well, I guess in the case of Malkin or National Review’s roster of writers at its Corner blog, they are, you know, Republican supporters. They are more interested in the views of the candidate across a whole range of issues – Iraq, spending, the size of the government, security policy, immigration, trade – than whether he or she is going to somehow change the “victimology” that Andrew Sullivan writes about. It is a bit like Sullivan moaning that Roman Catholics are only in favour of black priests who are Catholics rather than Protestants. Well, duh. As for Glenn Reynolds, he once supported the presidential run of Al Gore, if my memory serves, so he is hardly a blind follower of the GOP.
Sullivan’s critique of other bloggers would carry more weight if he could accept that US voters face essentially three big government candidates, albeit with subtle differences. I am surprised that Sullivan has not made more of why this is, and what to do about it.
Swiss banks have not had a good time of it lately, which does rather dent their image of being sober-suited outfits able to protect your millions. UBS, the Zurich-based banking and wealth management group, has booked a total of $37 billion in losses connected to the credit crunch. Wow. Even other banking groups in the Alpine state, like Clariden Leu, Julius Baer and Credit Suisse, have suffered – though not remotely as badly as UBS, which possibly may break up or get taken over.
So I was a bit bemused to read that Credit Suisse has hired former US Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta as an adviser. Has no-one told Credit Suisse that this fellow used to be known unflatteringly as “Underperformin’ Norman” when he was in charge of sorting out airport security and other areas?
I do not much care for Simon Heffer, the columnist who writes regularly for The Daily Telegraph. Even if I agree with him on certain issues, he has a way of making his points in a state of such constant anger that I find him rather wearying to read, rather like Paul Johnson in the Daily Mail – though Paul Johnson is to my mind much better when writing his history books, which I regard as superb. Mr Heffer also has a bit of a chip on his shoulder, if my judgement of this column, attacking Boris Johnson, is correct. Mr Heffer went to a grammar school in Essex, one of the best in the country, in fact. Boris Johnson went to Eton. For some people of a certain cast of mind, that is damning enough. But Heffer goes on to write a remarkably personal attack on BJ for his frivolity, lack of management skills, exploitation of old friends and colleagues, and so on. Blimey. I wonder what personal animus might bubble beneath the surface. It is not as if Johnson’s shortcomings were heavily classified secrets.
I sympathise with Heffer to an extent: if the Tories are going to challenge for the mayorality, is Boris really the best on offer? Maybe the harsh truth is that he is. For all that the mayor has a large budget and can make quite a difference to life in The Smoke, the job still has a slightly circus-act feel about it.
But as I have said before, I have reservations about why London needs to have a mayor in the first place. I am still undecided whom I will vote for on 1 May.
John Derbyshire, who writes for National Review, the conservative publication, is not a man I always agree with. On the issue of creationism, however, he is wonderfully scornful of some of its advocates. In commenting on the movie, Expelled, put together by Ben Stein, he has this to say:
Our scientific theories are the crowning adornments of our civilization, towering monuments of intellectual effort, built from untold millions of hours of observation, measurement, classification, discussion, and deliberation. This is quite apart from their wonderful utility – from the light, heat, and mobility they give us, the drugs and the gadgets and the media. (A “thank you” wouldn’t go amiss.) Simply as intellectual constructs, our well-established scientific theories are awe-inspiring.
And now here is Ben Stein, sneering and scoffing at Darwin, a man who spent decades observing and pondering the natural world – that world Stein glimpses through the window of his automobile now and then, when he’s not chattering into his cell phone. Stein claims to be doing it in the name of an alternative theory of the origin of species: Yet no such alternative theory has ever been presented, nor is one presented in the movie, nor even hinted at. There is only a gaggle of fools and fraudsters, gaping and pointing like Apaches on seeing their first locomotive: “Look! It moves! There must be a ghost inside making it move!”
Update: Ben Stein has lost it totally.
I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution, or that have failed in their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden. I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is ‘needed’ before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. And if I should later be attacked for neglecting my constituents’ ‘interests’, I shall reply that I was informed their main interest is liberty and that in that cause I am doing the very best I can.
– Barry Goldwater, US politician. As cited by David Mayer, over at his excellent blog.
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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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