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]
|
Whatever happened to getting your head down and doing the damn job? Whatever happened to going bowling in your own time? You want to take some of the crew from work? Well, that’s nice, too. And if a more fruitful professional relationship between a close-knit group of employees is the result, well isn’t that peachy? But really, if we are all big about this, shouldn’t we be able to interact productively without the panacea of fake camaraderie or a day throwing up in a corporate box at the races? Some of the 7/7 bombers went white-water rafting before the event, you know; and what great team players they turned out to be.
– Martin Samuel. I have never suffered a “team building” trip away from the office, thank god (my boss has better things to do).
I was trying to think of something profound to say but in the end, what the heck………
The campaign to become Mayor of London must be taking its toll. Boris Johnson writes today that the interests of the US and the rest of the world would be best served if Hillary Clinton reaches the White House. His reasoning is thin at best. Perhaps the real problem is that America, even though it is such a vast nation, has only been able to produce Presidential candidates of such dreadful quality as this lot (I am afraid that applies partly even to Ron Paul, for whom I have a lot of sympathy).
At the recent Libertarian Alliance conference in London, one of my favourite speakers, Leon Louw, mocked the idea that water on earth is scarce. Two-thirds of the Earth’s surface is covered with the wet stuff, in fact. What people mean when they say that water is scarce is not that there is a lack of H20, rather, there is a lack of drinkable, clean water. But the idea that water is scarce is, in and of itself, bonkers. As Leon said, if an alien from outer space talked to some ecological doomsters and heard their moans about water shortages, he would probably fly off in search of more intelligent life elsewhere.
Heaven knows what an intelligent alien would make of George Monbiot.
You know the feeling. A market rises like a rocket; there is lots of gushing news items about how market X or Y is the hottest thing since the iPod; but there is a lot of muttering about the inevitable fall, the decline, or even the monster crackup. Well, it has sort of happened with the US credit market this year and the collapse of sub-prime mortgages (in plain English, the business of lending money to people who are often bad repayers).
I have this sort of queasy feeling now about China. Do not get me wrong: I am delighted that China is a poster child for how things improve if you ditch certain aspects of collectivism, but it is still a long, long way from what a free society could or should be. And some of the economic data that comes out of that vast country gives economists cause for concern.
If this film, a sequel, is half as good as Elizabeth, then it will be one to wait for. Blanchett was simply outstanding in the first movie.
I was interested in the comment by the actor, Clive Owen, who said he was not bitter at being passed over for the role of 007. I am not sure I entirely believe him – but then there was a lot of spying going on in Elizabethan England, so instead of holding a Walther PPK, he gets to use a rapier sword instead. Arguably, M16 and its cousins can trace some of their origins back to that period.
And let’s face it, Cate Blanchett is certainly easy on the eye.
I drive around London at weekends occasionally – I have a car but do not bother to use it to get work (I can reach my office in Westminster on foot, thanks to living nearby Pimlico). But when I do get behind the wheel, the congestion is terrible, not just at the usual peak times. Getting out of London often takes longer than on the open road. For example, whenever I go to visit my parents in Suffolk, at least half of the journey time is taken up by driving from Pimlico through the eastern reaches of London before actually hitting Essex on the A12. Pretty much the same dire situation applies if you head north, south or west.
Has the congestion charge, introduced by London Mayor Ken Livingstone, made much difference? I doubt it; it always looked like a revenue-raiser to me, whatever the spin. While in theory I have no ideological problems with the charge – if the roads are genuinely privately owned, that is – in the current context the charge seems like a bit of a con to me. Or at least it is unless we can get rid of the curse of the Bus Lane. But then the charge does not apply at weekends, so my view might be affected if I had to drive during weekdays. On those rare times when I have done so, I thought the traffic was pretty heavy.
This guy agrees with me. But what to do about it? Well, cutting down the number of buses – heavily subsidised – might be a start since they hog up so much space; some road widening might be workable in places but given London’s densely-packed streets and historic buildings, maybe not easily doable.
Maybe I should face the facts: if I want to drive without raised blood pressure, live in Nevada.
Lincoln Allison, a contributor to the excellent Social Affairs Unit blog has this rather amusing, if at times harsh, list of various people he thinks are not quite the greats they are cracked up to be. Revealing the conservative tilt of that blog, his candidates are:
Princess Diana, Che Guevara, Salman Rushdie, John Lennon, George Best and John Osborne.
Maybe I am getting soft and liberal (in the US sense) in my early middle age, but with the exception of Guevara, I rather like most of the above, or at least I do not get as exercised as some right-of-centre folk do. Diana? Well, she was annoying, or at least the hysteria over her death was, but I was saddened by her death, sorry for her sons and relations and would rather she was still with us.
Lennon? A bit of a nob as a person, maybe, but a brilliant musician – Revolver is one of my favourite albums.
Osborne – no real opinion, although I loved his personification of evil in Get Carter.
Then there is Rushdie: I just cannot agree with Allison; for all that I cannot be bothered to tackle his fiction, I admire his unbending stance on Islamic fanaticism and his no-compromise approach to free speech.
And then there is dear, dead George Best (I met him a few times). Allison makes the rather unusual approach of not actually attacking George Best’s drinking or womanising but attacks his skill as a footballer, claiming that Northern Irish players like Danny Blanchflower were greater as they achieved success with “lesser” teams (I am sure Spurs fans will be galled to hear that their lot was a lesser team in the 1960s than Manchester United. Spurs in fact won a sackload of trophies in that decade). He also says Best could not cope with Italian-style defenders. Well, he did not play against Italy much so how do we know and Best made mincemeat of the likes of top European sides Benfica and Real Madrid. His demolition of the former team at their home ground in 1966 – the year I was born – remains one of the highlights of 20th century football.
Regular readers will know that I have a sort of allergy to the Sunday Times columnist, AA Gill. In the glossy magazine section, Gill spreads his wisdom about the utter pointlessness of space exploration and settlement. Bravo AA! No doubt some commissioning editor thought that what with all this renewed interest in space flight, the Google project, Richard Branson’s support for the Rutan project, etc, that it was time to do what Gill knows how to do best, arguably, the only thing he knows how to do – take the piss. Here is a paragraph (no web link available):
The one lasting aesthetically beautiful thing that did comes from the whole guzzling, ugly space business was that photograph of the blue planet; astonishing and moving and vulnerable, our great group photo. And ironically, that image did more than anything to galvanise the nascent ecology movement.
There is a nugget of wisdom here, but he grossly exaggerates. The back-to-nature-can-we-just-turn-off-the-whole-industrial-thingy?” movement arguably started as far back as the bucolic sentimentality of Rousseau and the Lake poets and their horror at the Industrial Revolution; I’d argue that books, however flawed and tendentious, as Carson’s Silent Spring did a lot to encourage the Green movement. Pictures of the Earth taken from space are indeed fantastic, but I doubt it got a lot of would-be Greens going; what those photos demonstrated was the brilliance of the space project, the daring, the sheer bloody-minded persistence required to get up there in the first place.
Gill lists, with his usual sneer, all the various inventions that are sometimes linked to the space race, like teflon coatings or GPS navigation equipment, the latter being ridiculous, he reckons, in that it allows us to reach Leeds without using a toll road. Such wit, such intelligence! (Has Gill ever met a person in the military, or a sailor or mountaineer for whom GPS has proved a lifesaver? Probably not). But one might as well sneer at say, the discovery of tobacco, the potato or other plants as a result of earlier “pointless” explorations. Earlier explorations drove the development of accurate clocks, which in turn improved standards of engineering; they encouraged development of storage of food, improved medical treatments to avoid problems like scurvy, and so on. No doubt some equivalent of AA Gill in the 18th Century would have mocked such things then (I am sure these people existed; they are of an ineradicable human type, alas).
Yet amidst all the smart-alecisms of Gill, he misses the really big criticism that one should make of the space race: it was almost entirely funded and directed by government. As a result of the gigantic sums raised in tax to spend on spaceflight, other, less spectacular but in the long run arguably more useful private ventures were squeezed out. If such private ventures could get going, it is hard to see how AA Gill or others could object to people risking their own money on such things although as his article implies, I reckon Gill would be quite keen to ban such “pointless” things if he thinks it somehow diverts precious resources from preserving the status quo on earth.
Here is a blast of fresh air on the subject, meanwhile.
I’ll be poised to grab a cinema seat for this one when it comes out.
I liked this film, 3:10 to Yuma. The death of the Western is one of those occasional refrains, but this is fine piece of film-making. There were one or two clichés in it (those evil rotten railroad barons) but those clichés had some basis in fact.
The picture of the old West was almost completely bleak, but it made for great drama, and a terrific set of gunfights. For a rather contrarian view of the West, this book is worth a look.
His supreme blogness, Glenn Reynolds, likes to put up posts about disaster preparedness and pretty much anything that encourages people to figure out for themselves how to deal with emergencies, protect themselves from danger and protect their loved ones or indeed strangers out of simple human generosity. Being a broadly libertarian character, Reynolds defends the use of firearms in self defence but there is much more to it than that, including knowing about first aid, dealing with sudden loss of electric power, drinking water, and so on (I would be interested to know how many commenters here have studied first aid or rescuing people in difficult situations, like from drowning).
Glenn has a round-up of links here which is pretty good. I could not help notice the contrast between Reynolds’ very American can-do attitude with the sort of pathetic, rule-obsessed attitude demonstrated by so-called police officers who failed to act, at least with great urgency, to prevent the drowning of a young lad.
When I hear people talk about the erosion of civil society under the impact of officialdom, it is tragedies like this recent story that demonstrate what I mean.
|
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.
|
