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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This guy does not like the Joseph Heller book, Catch 22, one little bit, and gives a decent takedown of the book:
This is by intention a humorous book, a work of social satire. But it consists of basically the same joke over and over again: military people are evil and stupid. They are also stupid and evil. (Did I mention that they are evil? Also stupid?) I found this pretty clever and amusing for about the first twenty pages. But by that time I still had about 450 pages more to go, and the rest of it wasn’t any fun at all.
Absolutely. The problem with such books is that they were written to appeal to folk who no doubt thought that military people were and are inherently ridiculous. In that sense, Heller succeeded: I can think of dozens of lefty acquaintances of mine who have Catch 22 on their bookshelves but they would not be seen dead reading Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, or for that matter, the Sharpe novels of Richard Cornwell.
But as Lester Hunt, the reviewer, goes on to argue, if Heller really wanted to show some guts as a novelist, he should have attacked the whole idea of WW2 rather than target the lunacies of military bureaucracy (admittedly a fair target). But then, he would have to argue that it would have been better to let a certain A. Hitler and Co. tyrannise Europe and Asia, with all that would flow from that. Tricky, no?
Perhaps more generously, Heller and other writers of a similar ilk – Kurt Vonnegut springs to mind – might have had enough of reading about the feats of “The Greatest Generation” and rebelled. Perhaps some of this was necessary and right; Heller’s book and others of its type hit a receptive audience. Published in 1961, Catch 22 was bound to gain a more avid following from readers increasingly disenchanted with the Vietnam campaign. Heller caught the mood of the times well.
But it is an over-rated book in my opinion, and it is occasionally reassuring to realise that one is not alone in holding that sort of view.
I have travelled to a lot of cities in the world in my relatively short life (Paris, San Francisco, New York, Cologne, Geneva, Milan, Edinburgh, Barcelona, Vienna……) and there are quite a few more that I want to knock off the list before I step off this mortal coil. Well, this week, I did just that and spent a wonderful day ambling around the old southern French town of Montpellier. The city is a university town with a strong commercial base, oodles of history and some of the swankiest French urban architecture outside of Paris. Access to the city from Britain is easy: a one-and-a-half-hour flight from Gatwick.
I know that there is a lot to gripe about with France: the taxes, red tape and as we know, considerable problems with a large and angry underclass, made worse by a lack of assimilation of its Islamic population. However, from my point of view, if newly-elected Nicolas Sarkozy manages to cut taxes somewhat and reverse some of the daftest labour market restrictions, then any advantage to living in Britain rather than France will look increasingly slender. (I see no sign that Britain’s petty brand of health and safety puritanism has completely taken hold). I am not the first person to make that observation, of course.
Mind you, the beer is alarmingly expensive, but you can buy wine for a Euro a litre – and it tastes good. Emigration never felt so compelling.
“One can resist the invasion of an army but one cannot resist the invasion of ideas.”
Victor Hugo.
I have no idea what it tastes like, but what a name. I am in the village where they make the stuff.
“It is not the State that creates a healthy society. When the State grows too powerful people feel they count for less and less. The State drains society, not only of its wealth but also of initiative, of energy, the will to improve and innovate as well as to preserve what is best. Our aim is to let people feel that they count for more and more.”
– Margaret Thatcher, 10 October, 1980. Taken from the rather good tome, Great British Speeches, a collection compiled by Simon Heffer. Perhaps out of an impish desire to annoy, the book contains Blair’s ghastly and embarrassing ‘forces of conservatism’ speech, perhaps the ugliest statement of political authoritarianism in recent British political history.
When Perry referred to the recent comments of US Presidential hopeful Barak Obama, we had another example in the ensuing comment thread of how people lazily refer to the idea that healthcare should be ‘free’. Of course, unless Obama is a total idiot – and I doubt that – he realises that health care, like roads, clean water, defence or food is not free in any sense at all that matters in a world of scarce resources that have alternate uses (such scarcity and the fact they have alternate uses is a classic element of what economics is). Healthcare is not free – it must be paid for, paid out of the time and trouble of other people. The problem, however, is that a lot of people, not just socialists, think that some things in life ‘ought’ to be free although one often finds they are at a loss to say why. Indeed, if you challenge a person by asking, “Why should health, clean water or defence be free”? they will either change the subject, or go bright red with anger, or fail to understand the question at all.
To attack the idea that certain services and resources should be ‘free’ is not, alas, all that easy in today’s politically dumb climate. However, I think I have a partial solution in how to frame the point. If you ever encounter a person who says that healthcare should be free at the point of use, and it should be a ‘right’, then point out that this means that someone else has a corresponding duty to be a doctor, a nurse, a hospital orderly or an administrator. Unless people can be forced to perform these roles, then all talk of health as something that ought to be free is meaningless. Of course, at this point the socialist will blather on about incentives and so on, but what if no one wants to be a doctor or a nurse, regardless of pay? Does this mean that anyone who shows an inclination to like medicine should, at an early age, be conscripted into a hospital like a draft for the Army?
I ask these rhetorical questions because I think that when we try to frame our arguments, it is sometimes easy to lose sight of the fact that actual flesh and blood human beings are involved in talk about “the right to free health care”. Most people these days oppose the idea of military conscription so it ought to be possible to make the case against medical conscription. If we can point out that medical conscription would be a bad thing, then it would be a step in nailing the nonsense that healthcare is a ‘right’.
Here is a book I highly recommend about the whole noxious doctrine of ‘welfare rights’ and how they erode respect for the original, far more coherent rights doctrine of classical liberalism.
This startling story from France even made yours truly, who has become a jaundiced observer of French political life, sit up and take notice. Apparently, a bunch of people styling themselves as protectors of the Gallic wine industry have issued an ultimatum to new French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, that unless those evil cheap imports from countries such as Australia (the horreur!), New Zealand (Rainbow Warrior, anyone?), South Africa (enough said), America (the Great Satan) and other places are stopped, then supermarkets, offices and other places will be dynamited.
Suppose that people in such venues get killed. I think that such a terrible outcome might begin to get across to the politically and economically uncommitted the true nature of the thuggery that sometimes accompanies protectionism and any form of coercive interference with voluntary economic exchange. Ultimately, such folk believe that you, the consumer, or worker, or entrepreneur, are beholden to buy, produce or sell not on the basis of freely consenting exchanges with your fellows, but on account of some state of affairs that the protectionists deem right and proper. In this case, the wine industry of France, or at least the mass-produced bit of it, is under threat from the cheaper stuff from other parts of the world. (I think it is safe to assume that the producers of Latour or Lafite are unlikely to be worried). I am actually off to Southwestern France in early June for two weeks’ much-needed holiday and the Languedoc region is one of the places where these thugs hail from, apparently. I tend to notice that whenever I visit France, which is quite often, it is hard to see non-French wine in the shops. So if these thugs are getting upset at the arrival of a relatively small amount of foreign imports, they would go totally batshit if they saw the mixed wine-racks in Sainsbury’s or Tesco’s in a standard English town.
Sarkozy’s time in office is unlikely to be a quiet one.
Libby Purves, the Times columnist, has a nice appreciation of the Cutty Sark, which was partly destroyed by fire yesterday. The burning of the Cutty Sark clipper ship appears, judging by some reports, to have been started deliberately. I have long since given up trying to fathom what goes through the minds – for want of a better word – of the pondlife who get a buzz out of torching old monuments like this 19th century vessel. An active hatred or pranksterish contempt for the past soon spills over into a defilement of the present and eventually, lack of interest in the future (very Burkean, ed).
Some time ago, I reflected on how the clipper ships like the Cutty Sark were a demonstration of how globalised the 19th Century was in terms of trade. Anyway, let’s hope the vessel can be restored. It is certainly one of the finest sights in Greenwhich, in the eastern part of London and a major tourist attraction.
Writers who hate a lot are often more compelling to read than pleasant, nice folk. We want some, if not all, of our newspaper columns to have a fair measure of sulphur, a bit of bile and a pinch of basic malice. Rod Liddle of The Spectator comes to mind. Christopher Hitchens, when he is on form and slaying some religious nonsense or attacking George Gallway, fairly curls the edges of a newspaper. But the supreme purveyor of sustained, gratuitous nastiness is AA Gill. He sometimes hits the target with great accuracy, but there is this level of personal animus that he directs to certain targets that makes me wonder what exactly is eating this man, or whether he is ever so slightly off his trolley (“Nurse!”). Many of his targets seem to come from the same background, in terms of income, culture and education, as himself. There seems to a lot of score-settling between that small, suffocating clique of London media types going on, if you read between the lines of Gill’s writings, which must leave a lot of ordinary folk bemused.
Consider this paragraph about a recent TV documentary by Ian Hislop. Hislop profiled the founder of the Boy Scouts, Robert Baden-Powell, who founded the movement 100 years ago. Hislop was rather kind to the man, and although he mentioned the imperialistic overtones of the Edwardian times in which B-P operated, generally urged us to admire the old fella. For Gill, who clearly loathes so much about England and its history, Hislop’s sin is unforgivable:
Hislop is good at documentary TV. He has a bright, hobbity enthusiasm and is smarter than he looks, which, frankly, isn’t much of a stretch. He comes from a great tradition of English pamphleteers and iconoclasts who are very eccentric and partial about the bits of the Establishment they want to put on the tumbril and those they want to preserve in aspic. Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys was, predictably, a good thing, though very few of today’s scouts were allowed to sully the halcyon, Hentyesque nostalgia for a simpler, stiffer, perter time.
He has half a decent point, of course. Hislop is editor of Private Eye, which unfailingly hammers away at all manner of targets, not all of them deserved. On the Have I Got News for You satire programme, Hislop and his opposite number, Paul Merton, send up the news stories of the week through a generally left-liberal lens (a lens that I suspect is shared more or less by AA Gill). But occasionally Hislop goes “off the reservation” and says nice things about people, which must clearly upset Gill. Hislop once, memorably attacked the European Union on the show, to the horror of his fellow panelists. Hislop is also a devout Anglican Christian and clearly has a lot of affection for many of the traditions of this country. He comes from the sort of upper-middle class background that formed much of the backbone of institutions like the old Indian Civil Service. Gill’s insult about his intelligence is a cheap shot and damaged what could have been an actually quite decent argument (Hislop may be selective in his choice of victims and heroes.) But Gill’s vileness gets the better of him and masks the point. A shame. If you read the link to the article and read his first point about another, awful TV programme, you can see why Gill remains the master of sustained and justified invective. But he needs to cut out the personal and thank his lucky stars that the practice of duelling is now outlawed.
It looks like another candidate for my Amazon wish list. A thumping great book showing stunning photographs of the red planet, as taken by the recent US rover machines. The link here is to the Chicagoboyz blog site, which has a good review of it. There is also also a film about the exploration. Great stuff.
Some of the more innovative and exciting buildings these days are linked to the world of sport. This may not be surprising given the vast sums of money – alas, sometimes taxpayers’ money – that swirls around sport these days. Take this picture of the Barcelona FC stadium, for example. Ever since the Roman days, in fact, sports stadia have been among the most impressive buildings in human civilisation (the arena at Arles, in the South of France, has a spooky, imposing quality of its own, for example).
But of course today, if you are a sport-loving Englishman like yours truly, today matters because the FA Cup Final is being held at its traditional home, Wembley (for non-Brits, this is in west London). The new stadium looks pretty damned impressive. The project to build it has not gone at all smoothly (a sign of the possible difficulties we might expect from the London Olympics). But the wait is worth it. It is magnificent.
One of my happiest days as a youngster was in 1978, when my local team, Ipswich Town, beat Arsenal 1-0 to win the FA Cup (the Blues won the European UEFA Cup three years later. Ah, those were the days). Even watching the game on the television, you were struck by the atmosphere. In 2000, when Ipswich were promoted in a playoff, I went with friends to the stadium in the last fully competitive game to be held before the old stadium was pulled down.
Update: a pity the match between Manchester United and Chelsea did not live up to the billing. Chelsea won. Well done to them (I think one or two Samizdata contributors will be rather chuffed about that).
A lot of people are getting hot under the collar, and with some reason, about the decision by David Cameron to pour scorn on grammar schools. Grammars, since the 1944 Education Act, have selected pupils by a rigorous examination at the age of 11 – hence it is known as the Eleven-Plus exam, and an often make-or-break test in a person’s life. In the late 60s, the-then Labour government began a move to scrap grammars and replace them with so-called comprehensive schools, adopting a fiercely egalitarian policy. The collapse of grammars accelerated, ironically, when Margaret Thatcher was an education minister in the government led by Edward Heath. There are now only a few grammars left.
Cameron dislikes grammars, he claims, because they do nothing to advance the interests of bright, working class kids. He may have half a point in that for many people, the 11-plus can be an arbitrary point to decide a pupil’s future. Unfortunately for Cameron, however, his stated hostility to grammars only reinforces the image of him being an upper class toff who is determined to kick the ladder of upward mobility away from the unwashed proles underneath (his recent daft idea of hammering cheap flights with tax conveyed much the same patronising, bugger-the-plebs message).
But the Tories, in wrestling with education policy, are missing the point, as they often do. The fundamental problem is that education between the age of 5 to 18 is compulsory, a fact that ignores the fact that many youngsters are bored by school much earlier and should be allowed to work and if need be, pick up their education at a later date (it amazes me that some people find this idea so incredible). The Tories are also ignoring the need to focus on choice. Rather than schools selecting pupils, by exam or some other criteria, we need a genuine and broad market for education, in which parents and their children choose the school instead. I have my reservations about vouchers – they can give the state a potential lever over private schools – but a radical boost to parental/pupil choice of school is a reform that urgently needs to be put in place.
David Cameron: what is the point of this man?
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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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