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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Jack Straw, it is amazing to relate, has been touted as a potential Prime Minister. Who knows, if the implosion of the Brown government gets worse, he might still be in the running for the top job. So it might be useful to realise that among his gifts is one for sublime comedy:
The constitutional expert Vernon Bogdanor has commented that when the history of this era is written, the last 10 years will be seen as heralding a “quiet revolution” in the way in which the UK is governed. He is correct.
Quiet or not, there have been major changes. In case our Jack needs a bit of assistance, here are some of them:
- Emasculation of the House of Lords
- Erosion of the right to trial by jury
- Removal of the double-jeopardy protection in court trials
- Extension of blasphemy laws
- Law enabling the creation of a centralised state database and ID card system
- The passing of more than 3,000 criminal offences
- Anti-social behaviour orders – many of which can be imposed without full due process of law
- Civil Contingencies Act, giving sweeping powers in the case of “national emergencies”
- Erosion of right to hold public demonstrations
- Erosion of rights of private property owners to use their premises as they seek fit: bans on smoking in pubs and restaurants, for example
- European Arrest Warrant
Okay, I think you get the general idea. And on the other side of the balance sheet, what can Straw suggest? He talks about the Freedom of Information Act and EU “human rights” legislation. The former is an improvement but hardly compensates for the list above; the latter is a mish-mash: some of the “rights”, as my sneer-quotes imply, are not rights in the classical liberal sense as acting as brakes on coercion, but rather entitlements, or claims, and which interfere with things like freedom of contract, etc.
The general thrust of policy over the past few years has been towards more regulation of personal behaviour in the fields of health, the environment, family upbringing, smoking and diet. About the only emphatic move in a libertarian direction is on the area of booze: 24-hour drinking; yet the government cannot get itself in a consistent frame of mind when it comes to drugs – and alcohol is a serious health hazard when consumed to excess – so we continue with a largely unwinnable war on drugs, which by the way operates to the detriment of our campaign to undermine the likes of the Taliban, etc, and the poppygrowing druglords of Asia, etc. On sex, yes, the government has lowered the age of gay sexual consent to 16 and permitted gay civil partnerships, but a properly liberal approach would be to get the state out of the business or regulating marriage completely.
Generally, an appalling record. The challenge for the Tories, if they have any gumption, is to reverse it, lock stock and barrel (oh, did I mention that the right to self defence is pretty much dead as well?).
Christopher Hitchens reckons the CIA should be scrapped for its many recent screwups, including the latest fiasco over the NIE report about Iran. I agree, although the question is largely academic: governments are not known for scrapping institutions that go awry. But the NIE fiasco – which actually might endanger our security since Iran is still trying to produce enriched uranium – does add to the impression that security services are in danger of becoming the problem, not the solution. And the recent issue surrounding alleged destruction of taped evidence of torture does not exactly square with an institution operating under the rule of law, as Andrew Sullivan has put it recently, although Sully has not drawn the logical inference that the CIA should be closed down.
Here is the crunch paragraph from the Hitchens piece. Read it all:
And now we have further confirmation of the astonishing culture of lawlessness and insubordination that continues to prevail at the highest levels in Langley. At a time when Congress and the courts are conducting important hearings on the critical question of extreme interrogation, and at a time when accusations of outright torture are helping to besmirch and discredit the United States all around the world, a senior official of the CIA takes the unilateral decision to destroy the crucial evidence. This deserves to be described as what it is: mutiny and treason. Despite a string of exposures going back all the way to the Church Commission, the CIA cannot rid itself of the impression that it has the right to subvert the democratic process both abroad and at home. Its criminality and arrogance could perhaps have been partially excused if it had ever got anything right, but, from predicting the indefinite survival of the Soviet Union to denying that Saddam Hussein was going to invade Kuwait, our spymasters have a Clouseau-like record, one that they have earned yet again with their exculpation of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It was after the grotesque estimate of continued Soviet health and prosperity that the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan argued that the CIA should be abolished. It is high time for his proposal to be revived. The system is worse than useless—it’s a positive menace. We need to shut the whole thing down and start again.
Question: should the same logic apply to MI-6?
The screenwriter, Tad Safran (whoever he is), has penned a rather coarse and unpleasant item about the physical pros and cons of British vs American women. It says something about the state of the Times (of London) that they would print this sort of thing at all. There may be some limited truth in his observation that women (or for that matter, men), spend different amounts of time on personal grooming and appearance. But in my experience of travelling to the States, I have seen enough examples, from both sexes, of scruffiness/smartness to reckon that his generalisations are BS.
This is a rather more uplifting study on the wonderful womenfolk of these Anglosphere nations.
Note: in my original item I said Safran was an actor, not a screenwriter. Mea culpa.
From our special correspondent:
“Party boss Ed “bulging eyes” Balls told a respectful yet cheerful gathering of tractor workers in Omsk that the 10-year plan to increase tractor production by 1000% between now and 2018 was achievable. “Men,” he said, his voice quavering slightly as the chill Siberian wind blasted through, “we can and will produce more tractors, of higher quality, over the next 10 years. Britain needs tractors. Tractors need Britain. It is true that despite our heroic efforts, and the massive, Soviet resources spent by Comrade Gordon, that tractor production continues to lag. But let us not be downhearted. We know that tractor production in the past has been held up by the capitalist sympathisers, wreckers and revisionists working for the late traitor, A. Blair. We can and will do better over the next 10 years.”
At least, that is what I thought he said. Maybe it was education instead…….
For some sanity on how to get the state out of education, check out this website.
Update: related thoughts on home schooling and education by David Friedman (son of the great Milton).
Another update: Fabian Tassano has been a tireless campaigner against the odious idea of keeping people in school until the age of 18. His new book is also very good.
This remark was made by some individual called jsbachUSA at the Guardian’s Comment is Free site:
But if the Arabs choose to attack Israel with conventional weapons and Israel loses, so be it. As the cliche goes those that live by force die by force. Even if Israel ceases to exist, as long as it doesn’t nuke the world in a spasm of anger in the process, Jews will still be welcome and prosper in many part of the world, just like they did for thousands of years. The end of the Israel mistake will not be a bad thing.
“Just like they did for thousands of years”.
Priceless.
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.
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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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