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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There is a long and detailed report in the London Times today about the scale of gangland and police violence in Brazil’s Sao Paulo. If ever there was an account ramming home the distance between the image of Brazil as a fun-loving, sun-soaked nation and a country of enormous social and economic problems, this surely is it.
Brazil is one of those country’s that I would love to visit some day (I am a bit of a nut about Brazilian music). But stuff like this does not exactly get me rushing to get on the aircraft.
A movie based around the death of Princess Diana and focussing on how Queen Elizabeth II dealt with the whole sorry business is not something that yours truly would expect to see, to be honest. However, having read so many rave reviews about Helen Mirren’s performance as the British monarch, I gave in and went to see it tonight. Definitely worth a look, is my verdict. Mirren is brilliant, uncannily believable. (Better get that Oscar speech ready, Helen). This film is surprising in a number of ways. The Queen comes across as a sympathetic character, bound up in a sense of duty that puts her at odds with the manic celebrity culture that developed around Diana. You sense, as the film goes on, that the qualities that have stood this lady in good stead for most of her life will ultimately prove more valuable than the meritricious arts of media manipulation and spin that have become associated with the court of Tony Blair.
Oddly, I will admit that the portrayal of Tony Blair surprised me by showing that this man, whom most Samizdata writers will regard with fair levels of loathing, comes across fairly well: someone who realised that the Queen was being bullied by an almost-deranged media and part of the British public. The guy playing spin-doctor-in-chief, Alastair Campbell, was also very good, showing that Campbell was, and is, one of the most malevolent persons to have held power in British life for many years, admittedly quite a feat.
I have fairly mixed views about monarchy. I suppose, given my brand of post-Enlightenment liberalism, that I should take a dim view of this institution and its representation of hereditary power, but one has to recognise that if we are to have a head of state at all, then there are distinct advantages if that head is a person who is not elected and hence a necessarily controversial figure but someone who gets the job through the lottery of birth and is restricted by checks and balances of a constitution. (There is a case for arguing why we need a head of state at all. The Swiss seem to have a sort of revolving mayoral system, which works fine). This film may not persuade people on either sides of the argument on the case for or against constitutional monarchy, but it is a thought-provoking film and also has the merit of being relatively short.
Interesting article here on what might be in store for Cuba as and when Fidel Castro finally dies. My hope, probably naive, is that that country finally gets a break and enjoys the fruits of free enterprise. One thing that makes me annoyed is whenever I hear of affluent Western travellers go on about how they dream of going to Cuba before it “gets spoiled by U.S.-led development”. Yes, I am sure all those crumbling houses in Hanava, all those ancient 1950s cars and cute old guys with no teeth look so, you know, authentic in contrast to the frightfully ghastly prosperity of Miami or for that matter, Hong Kong.
Like a good friend of mine, I am only going to Cuba when or if it becomes a shameless hotbet of capitalist vigour and not one minute before.
I’ve been lucky enough to win an Oscar, write a bestseller… my other dream would be to have a painting in the Louvre. The only way that’s going to happen is if I paint a dirty one on the wall of the gentlemen’s lavatory.
– David Niven, actor, writer and soldier.
The senior Russian central bank official who was shot dead this week was a prominent campaigner against money-laundering. No matter what one thinks of some of the more oppressive laws against money transfers – as a libertarian, I find a lot of such laws counter-productive and intrusive of privacy – there is no doubt that Russia has a terrible reputation for financial skulduggery. By going against financial hoodlums, it sadly appears this guy signed his death warrant.
Funnily enough, this story does not appear to have caused much of a stir outside the business sections and some of the foreign bits of the press. I find that a bit odd, if not chilling. A senior central bank official gets murdered. Imagine the reaction if a top official working for the Bank of England or the Fed got killed.
Russia has a long, long way to go before it becomes a place in which civilised people will want to do business.
This by George Reisman, economist and free marketeer:
The New York Times reports that the European Commission has “ordered Microsoft to disclose secret code in Windows XP needed by rivals to allow them to write programs that work properly with Windows. And it required the company to introduce a second version of Windows XP with its audio and video player removed.”
The European Commission is also reported to be drafting a ruling that will require the world tennis champion Roger Federer to share the secrets of his play with rivals, to enable them, for example, to better integrate their returns with his serves.
In still another development, the European Commission is reported to be contemplating barring the sale of automobiles and other motor vehicles equipped with radios, CD players, or video players. The ruling is held to be necessary to preserve the separate markets of the suppliers of these devices and not allow them to be monopolized by automakers.
Here is more about anti-trust pursuit of Microsoft by the European Union, in a slightly less irreverent vein.
Okay, it is very late on Thursday evening and I thought I would pose this question to our commenters for a bit of a Friday quiz before I go to bed:
What is the worst film you have ever seen?
(This thought was inspired by seeing a short trailer for a movie starring Jennifer Lopez).
What the hell is one supposed to make of this?
The point at which Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez decided that London should serve as a model for services and governance in Caracas was not immediately apparent. He came in May, visited City Hall amid much controversy and fanfare, and was soon gone.
But the result of his visit is likely to be an extraordinary deal struck with London Mayor Ken Livingstone that would see Caracas benefit from the capital’s expertise in policing, tourism, transport, housing and waste disposal.
London, meanwhile, would gain the most obvious asset the Venezuelans have to give: cheap oil. Possibly more than a million barrels of the stuff.
South American diesel would be supplied by Venezuela – the world’s fifth-largest oil exporter – as fuel for some of the capital’s 8,000 buses, particularly those services most utilized by the poor.
This is gesture politics at its most contemptible. It is particularly bad given that the poor of London are, by any meaningful yardstick, considerably better off than their counterparts in the South American nation. The idea that Venezuela, a nation led by a thug who’s democratic credentials could be best described as flaky, is some sort of benefactor to the oppressed masses of London, is an utter joke. It is also particularly ironic that as part of this “deal”, London will “help” Venezuela’s tourist industry. No doubt Venezuelans cannot wait to discover the joys of the British welcoming service ethic.
We tend to dismiss the antics of Ken Livingstone as political theatre. If he wants to stand on platforms with Irish Republican murderers, we giggle. If he provides platforms for gay-hating Islamic preachers, we are all supposed to roll our eyes in amusement. Good ol’ Ken, what a laugh.
Incidentally, I wonder what the British government thinks about this?
Canada has much stricter gun laws than in the United States, and so, one would assume, is a far safer place if one believes in the idea that the way to make society safer is to reduce access to items that can be used to kill. Well, generalisations are of course always dangerous, but I am not quite sure how this horrific story from Canada quite fits inside the gun-control argument. On the BBC television news this evening, the news announcer explicitly referred to the contrast between laws in Canada and the United States and expressed great puzzlement over the Canadian shootings.
UPDATE: here is another account of the story, with an update on the number of injured.
“It had always bothered him to see waste; to see Gas Giant atmospheres not mined for their wealth in hydrogen; to see energy from stars spill into the void, without a Dyson Sphere to catch and use it; to see iron and copper and silicates scattered in a hundred million pebbles and asteroids, instead of a smelter or nanoassembly vat.”
– The Golden Age, by John C. Wright, page 261.
The Times newspaper, owned by Rupert Murdoch, has yet to really come out strongly in favour of Tory leader David Cameron, preferring to stick, for the time being, with the Labour Party, or at least maintain a sort of studied neutrality. If you can recall that far back, Blair famously courted Murdoch’s media empire ahead of the 1997 election, convincing Murdoch that a Labour administration would not repeat the mistakes of the past. It worked, and the Times gave Blair and his court a remarkably easy ride for the first few years of Blair’s time in office.
Even so, with Labour in deep trouble, Blair and finance minister Gordon Brown at each others’ throats, the position of the Tories appears to be more promising than for a long time. You might think that Cameron, even though he has shown himself to be trend-follower since becoming leader, might take the odd risk by not trying to creep up to fashionable chattering-class opinion on such issues as Iraq, the Israeli-Hizbollah conflict and the ongoing campaign to crush Islamic fanaticism. Instead, as the Times notes today, what we get is a mixture of truths, half-truths and vacuous sound-bytes on foreign affairs.
Apologists for Cameron – some of whom pop up on the comment threads here – like to use the following, rather damning argument. It goes like this: the public will never vote for a small-government, strongly pro-capitalist, pro-America, pro-liberty Tory Party. The English middle class floating voters, so the argument goes, are not exactly the most intelligent demographic on the surface of the Earth, and are convinced that any tax cuts must come at the expense of the poor, the health service and education. Capitalism is cruel and rather naughty. Saving the planet and forcing people to give up their cars is a Jolly Good Idea (for other people). So Cameron, realising that this is what people think, has to appeal to this mindset. Once he is in power, suddenly, he can give up the “hug-a-mugger” rhetoric, tell the Greenies to go hang, slash taxes and regulations, restore in full the English Common Law, stop nagging us about eating chocolate oranges, etc.
Like many cynics, they are wrong. I would have thought that Cameron, if he has any sense at all, would realise by now that unless he lays down a few markers about what he would actually do in power, then he will face a situation where, once elected, it would be hard to push through a radically pro-market agenda particularly if the Tories get a narrow majority. “Where’s the mandate?”, people would cry. And their cries would have some merit. When Margaret Thatcher won power, the Tory manifesto of 1979 was famously thin. There was little mention of the kind of privatisation and large cuts to tax rates that were to follow. But even so, during the 1975-79 run-up to the elections, Mrs Thatcher, along with colleagues like Sir Keith Joseph, did voice a coherent, and sustained attack on things like Keynesian demand management, out-of-control trade unions, nationalised industries, regulations on business and controls on trade. In short, Mrs Thatcher made it pretty clear what sort of administration hers would be like. She gave herself a bit of room to say to the doubters during the hard years after 1979: “This is my platform and the public voted for it”.
Cameron, if he wants to con his way into power, is, I supposed, welcome to try. Britain’s political history is full of adventurers like Disraeli or chancers like Lloyd George. But when I hear libertarian-leaning Tory voters trying to convince me that Cameron is embarking on the mother-of-all deceptions, it sounds suspiciously close to whistling in the dark to sustain the spirits. I am not convinced.
This book states what the revisionists have questioned: the fall of the Roman Empire sucked and the Dark Ages really were dark and a regression for civilisation. Looks like a must-read for fans of ancient history.
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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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