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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Some time ago I wrote a piece here about whether Mark Steyn had exaggerated the threat of a fast-growing Muslim population in Europe (I argued that demographic prediction is a notoriously inexact science); I argued, and still do, that it is a bit odd for a conservative skeptic on doomongering scares like global warming to be so keen on pushing a doomongering prediction of his own. But I also maintain that while Steyn may be guilty at most of extreme pessimism, he’s no racist. Islam is a body of ideas (including some very bad ones); it makes universal claims about the place of men and women in the world that are designed to apply to the entire universe. If humans had terraformed Mars, you’d be certain that radical islamists would be keen to convert the people who lived there. But this has nothing whatsoever to do with race.
So to accuse him of racism on the basis of a quote not by Steyn but by someone else is pretty stupid. And to then not issue a short, honest apology but then to more or less recycle the racism charge in a long, meandering post, is even worse. And that is what the blogger, Jim Henley, has done. I used to read his blog quite a bit; I disagree partly with his strict non-interventionist foreign policy although I think his argument that “Hayek does not stop at the water’s edge”, suggesting that intervenionism is as dumb in foreign policy as it is with domestic affairs, is generally wise. But in this latest case, Jim has made a royal ass of himself over this issue and continues to dig a hole in the ground for himself. A shame, because there is a reasonable case to be made criticising Steyn, but this is not the way to do it.
I occasionally take a look the Observer newspaper to see if that sister publication to the Guardian has improved; sometimes it has good things in it – I like its sports coverage – but its write-ups on business issues never change from a sort of anti-globalista, Keynesian mish-mash. An article in this Sunday’s paper about the supposed crisis of shortages of drinking water is no exception:
The midday sun beats down on a phalanx of riot police facing thousands of jeering demonstrators, angry at proposals to put up their water bills by more than a third. Moments later a uniformed officer astride a horse shouts an order and the police charge down the street to embark on a club-wielding melee that leaves dozens of bloodied protesters with broken limbs.
A film clip from the latest offering from Hollywood? Unfortunately not. It’s a description of a real-life event in Cochabamba, Bolivia’s third largest city, where a subsidiary of Bechtel, the US engineering giant, took over the municipal water utility and increased bills to a level that the poorest could not afford.
Yup, those evil foreigners, and worse, Americans!
Welcome to a new world, where war and civil strife loom in the wake of chronic water shortages caused by rising population, drought (exacerbated by global warming) and increased demand from the newly affluent middle classes in the emerging economies of Asia and Latin America.
If water is so scarce (it is not, two-thirds of the globe is covered with the wet stuff) then those evil capitalists would surely be investing like hell to create more of it, by irrigation, building reservoirs, desalination plants, etc. If demand from all those “affluent middle classes is rising” for the good things of life, that seems like a great market to tap (‘scuse the pun). Greater revenues for the water companies, particularly if they are allowed to compete for business rather than protected as monopolies, will surely drive increased investment in water, no? But as far as the author of this article is concerned, the very idea of allowing foreign, private companies to operate such utilities is beyond the pale.
The question for countries as far apart as China and Argentina is whether to unleash market forces by allowing access to private European and American multinationals that have the technological know-how to help bring water to the masses – but at a price that many may be unable, or unwilling, to pay.
If the problem is that people cannot afford to pay supposedly higher water bills, then the problem is lack of income; protecting state-run utilities and resisting the investments of mulitnationals is daft; surely, if the underlying problem is poverty, then the solution is more trade, more capital flows, more investment, right?
As Cochabamba illustrates, water is an explosive issue in developing countries, where people have traditionally received supplies for free from local wells and rivers. But in the past 15 years rapid industrialisation, especially in places such as China, has led to widespread pollution and degradation of the local environment.
“For free”. Well, someone had to dig that well. Someone had to lift the water out of it, transport it, purify it, etc. When people say that water should be “free”, they pay no heed to the expenditure of effort in getting water and conveying it to where people want it the most. Multinationals are rather good at figuring out how to do this.
Max Lawson, senior policy adviser for Oxfam, says: ‘We are sceptical that private-sector involvement is the solution for very poor countries. In fact, there is an argument that much greater public sector involvement and cash is needed to channel supplies to where they are most needed.’
Another pretty good reason for not giving a penny to Oxfam, in my opinion.
Some earlier reflections on water.
“The loss of a leg may generally be regarded as a more real calamity than the loss of a mistress.”
– Adam Smith.
I think I agree, although I guess it depends on the mistress.
I want one.
The website is great fun for over-grown teenagers like me.
Bryan Appleyard has some interesting things to say about science fiction (hat-tip, Glenn). As a commenter said in the Times’ letters section though, Bryan focuses a little too much on the dystopian side of SF, on science-out-of-control. There are some nice touches though: he is right to examine how SF has affected the course of science, as well as the other way round.
The problem with a newspaper article like this, unfortunately, is that you can only really skim the surface of the subject. SF is pretty vast – hey, like the universe itself! There are bound to be vast tracts of land that get overlooked. Appleyard does not mention the more positive, life-affirming side of hard science fiction in the works of people like John Varley or Vernor Vinge, for instance (two of the best writers of the lot, in my opinion). And he barely mentions Arthur C. Clarke, Neal Stephenson, Ken MacLeod and R.A. Heinlein. Mention of the latter, of course, brings us onto the fact that SF has often been quite daringly political; it has used imagined futures to play around with cultural, social and ideal political scenarios (regular readers of this blog will know what I mean, such as The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, or Stephenson’s Snow Crash, etc).
But, to be fair to Appleyard, he takes SF seriously. As he points out, there seems to be more interest in fantasy instead: the enormous popularity of Lord of the Rings, Terry Pratchett, being just two examples. Maybe I am missing something, but I have never been interested in that side of the genre. My wife keeps badgering me to read Pratchett. Another sub-genre is what one might call “techno-military” SF; Heinlein wrote some of this in things like Starship Troopers; a good current example are the writings of John Scalzi.
Here’s a pretty good dictionary of science fiction.
The Spectator magazine is allergic to the city of Liverpool. Now, having never been there, despite some distant family connections to its 19th Century history (one of my ancestors helped to erect the magnificent St George’s Hall), I cannot comment on whether Liverpool is the sort of place that the Germans should have obligingly finished off in 1939-45 or a place full of cheeky, merry Scousers all singing Beatles tunes and watching Everton and the Reds. Sorry, no idea. But there is something – even to my non-PC eyes – rather grating about how the likes of Rod Liddle, the Speccie’s House Yob, never fails to lob a literary hand grenade at the city. Here it is again:
So the mop-headed ingenue teacher Gillian Gibbons has been released from her torment in Sudan without being horsewhipped or banged up for too long. The Scousers – Ms Gibbons is from Liverpool, naturellement – had insufficient time to organise a candlelit vigil for her or a minute’s silence at Anfield, but they did manage to festoon lots of railings with yellow ribbons and bouquets from the local garage.
Ah, those sentimental scousers. They are such thickies, aren’t they?
Meanwhile, that strange Frank Spencer manqué Gibbons returns safely to Blighty all jolly with stories about how the Sudanese prison authorities gave her lots of apples, what lovely people they all are, and she doesn’t regret a thing, etc. Fine, love — however, on that latter point, we do, so you can pick up the travel bill for the Muslim peers who supposedly sprang you from chokey, you deluded, asinine fool.
She may not be the brightest light in the harbour, but I would love to see Rod Liddle put in an Islamic slammer for two weeks. The benefits would be salutary.
My own rather uncharitable view is that she was released from prison far too soon; having told us all that Islam was a gentle and peaceable religion, she should have been allowed proper time inside to reflect upon this interesting perspective. And without apples. The whole affair also made me worry about my children’s education; teachers interviewed on TV seem to get more stupid, further down the league tables of sentience, with every year that passes. And now we have Gillian Gibbons. Please God, they can’t all be that thick, can they?
Quite possibly, Rodney, she is as dumb as a stump. Naivete might be the worst thing she can be accused of (I must agree to sharing his nagging worries about the sort of folk who are schoolteachers these days). But this sort of gratuitous name-calling against a person imprisoned and threatened with flogging for something so batshit insane is beyond the pale. But hey, let us not turn up the chance to take the piss out of those sentimental scousers.
His article does move on to better ground here, however, where I think Liddle has a decent point:
But – whisper it quietly – some considerable good may have come of the whole shebang. The most unequivocal and persistent protests about Ms Gibbons’ arrest, back home, came from Britain’s self-appointed guardians of Allah, the Muslim groups. Including the Muslim Council of Britain. Note the word ‘unequivocal’. They protested loud and strong and without those previously ubiquitous caveats always beginning with the conjunction ‘but …’. As in ‘We condemn this outrage entirely, but you have to understand that…’ This time there were no buts, just condemnation. And it was truly heartening to see a niqab-clad British woman protesting outside the Sudanese embassy holding aloft a placard bearing the photograph of a teddy bear, under which was written, with wit and acuity, ‘Not in my name’.
Quite possibly true. It may be the case that the sheer, oh-my-god-how-mad-can-they-be craziness of the teddy bear-as M. has made even the more ardent Muslims wonder whether certain regimes are taking their professed religious beliefs a step too far. He may be right.
Surfing around the net, I came across this now-oldish story about Charles Koch, the billionaire, who is an avid collector of fine wines. He may – I have to be careful here – have been scammed by a seller of fake wine. Instead of buying what he thought was red stuff once owned by Thomas Jefferson, the wine may be er, a bit younger. Oh dear. Given the enormous – and to my mind barking mad – sums of cash that people spend on wine, this is almost inevitable. The same thing can happen with antiques. There have been infamous forgers of paintings. The movie re-make of the Thomas Crown Affair, which I thought was an excellent film, is about art forgery (amongst other things). But I had not come across the idea of someone faking wine itself.
The investment market in wine is now a big business; this seems almost immoral, but then I tell myself, as a student of Adam Smith, Ludwig von Mises and Milton Friedman, that if investors want to punt on the future price of Margaux, Talbot or Mouton-Rothschild, then go ahead. There is even a London-based electronic exchange (Liv-ex) for trading in wines, most of which are French. Trading in New World wines is also large but not done out of a central exchange yet. I am not quite sure the God Bacchus would approve of this: the idea of wine, even if you lay it down for years, is eventually to get out the corkscrew and drink it. But the forgery story is a great one: there has to be a movie in this somewhere.
One of my great regrets is that I never saw a Lightning take off.
– By regular Samizdata commenter Nick M. I hate to rub it in, Nick, but I did, as a young kid at RAF Mildenhall, Suffolk, on a day out with my old man (RAF navigator in the 1950s). A totally awesome sight and noise: my ears are still probably ringing with the impact.
Here’s a picture of one of these bad-ass beauties.
With all the combination of self-inflicted disasters hitting the British government – lost data, Northern Rock, dodgy donations, ranks of senior military officers stating the bleedin’ obvious about lack of funding – it has been an extraordinary time for the Conservatives. Dead in the water, so we were told by the commentariat, back in September, David Cameron suddenly discovered the wonders of tax cuts – inheritance taxes, to be exact – and the momentum of politics suddenly shifted. There is still a huge way to go as the next general election is some way off, however, and in this environment, the spotlight will shine a lot more brightly on Cameron now that his prospects of getting into 10 Downing Street have increased. This is as it should be.
And one or two people have already concluded that Cameron is a bit of thug under that Etonian gloss. I have noticed the same thing. Thuggery has its limited uses, of course; if it means Cameron has the killer instinct in standing up to the government, excellent. If it brings closer the time when the current government, with its dotty plans for ID cards, etc, get removed, that is good. But there is a nagging worry that I have; with politicians who lack a clear set of principles to distinguish them from their opponents, it creates a vacuum.
I think that Cameron, in general, is not very different from the man he shouts at across the Dispatch Box of the House of Commons, apart from his rather different social origins, speech inflexions and choice of friends. Into that space that might have once be filled by large political differences enters personal animosity. True, in the 1980s, when politics was in some ways far more ideologically charged than it is now, Margaret Thatcher could be pretty savage to poor old Labour leader Michael Foot (personally a most charming man, apparently) and she treated Neil Kinnock (remember him?) as a joke.
But in some respects, as politics crams in to the supposed ‘centre ground’ and ideas matter less, the hunt for power becomes even more vicious. I am not entirely sure this is smart for Cameron to play the schoolyard bully. We Brits are a funny lot. People might, just might, start to feel sorry for Brown (please stay with me on this one). They might think, “Kerist, we all have bad weeks in the office”. I know I do. So that fatal fair-mindedness of the British may assert itself. Which would be a shame, since Brown, wrecker of pensions and much else, deserves to be kicked out.
The next election is in two years’ time. To adjust a famous quote from the late Harold Wilson, that is a bloody long time in politics.
Where do they find these people?:
Today it seems politically unpalatable, but soon the state will have to turn to rationing to halt hyper-frantic consumerism
It is unpalatable because it is f******g stupid, Maddie. And how do you tell the difference, pray, between “hyper-frantic consumerism” and say, the mature, intelligent, oh-so virtuous form of consumer activity that you might favour? No answer to that, of course. We are just supposed to accept the wisdom of rationing by our betters instead of the supposed wild anarchy of the marketplace.
Well, it is Monday, start of the week and all that and a dotty Guardian columnist has got me all fired up. It is almost better than going to the gym.
Update: I urge readers, if they have the stomach for it, to actually read the CiF comment thread. Quite encouragingly, some people get just how authortarian Bunting and her mindset actually is. It is, at last, starting to dawn on the smarter parts of the left (sometimes I think this is a rather select demographic) that the whole Green agenda is poison to genuine, progressive politics. Once, socialists were supposed to be rather keen on consumption, I thought; okay, they were totally wrong about the process of getting more stuff to consume, but consumption was part of the idea. M. Bunting is, of course, precisely the kind of reactionary-in-drag worrywart that Brendan O’Neill complained about the other day.
Update 2: this comment at CiF is worth reproducing in full:
What utter nonsense. I was a child during WW2 and rationing, along with being bombed and losing fathers to the carnage, was suffering and sacrifice, sometimes resulting in lifelong problems due to inadequate nutrition. You know nothing about what we and our parents endured during the war and have no right to compare it to reducing consumption, apparently because dinner party liberals will make us do it. Rationing will not be introduced and it is incredible that a sane person could imagine it will be.
Well said. My only nagging worry is that rationing might be introduced. Never underestimate the sheer fanaticism of the eco-authortarians.
I am feeling rather groggy after a wonderful party yesterday – I also watched the excellent Barbarians-South Africa match in a pub – but this item on a website called Sharp as a Marble is an instant hangover cure. Good heavens – the stuff you can find on the web.
Thanks to Instapundit, I came across this staggering collection of photo images of vandalised speed cameras – called “Gatsos” – on the sides of British roads.
The website I have linked to gives the impression that it is generally rather in favour of this practice, on the grounds that many such cameras are difficult to spot and hence set up as a sneaky way to catch out motorists to make money from fines, rather than actually trying to slow down speeds to cut the risk of accidents. A recent book by Christopher Booker and Richard North contends that the obsession with reducing speed limits on Britain’s roads has not reduced the amount of accidents, although it has made the driving process even more tedious than it can be already.
Frankly, I am not able to judge whether North and Booker’s analysis is correct, although they present a formidable number of facts to demonstrate their argument. Rather, what the extraordinary collection of images of vandalised speed cameras demonstrates is how far Britain has retreated from quiet deference to the rule of law. I think that society needs to have laws and certain laws need to be enforced and respected. It is a perversion of the argument for freedom to state that it implies a lack of respect for the law. Not so. But what is also clear is that in a society burdened with a rising weight of regulatory, nannying regulations, that a degree of blowback, if I can use the term, will occur. Which is a pity. Motorists who hammer along roads in streets near schools and houses are a menace.
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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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