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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The Daily Telegraph reckons that global warming might advance the chances of England, or at least select bits of it, one day rivalling the wine producing prowess of France. Maybe. It has been rather hard to become convinced of the global warming thesis in what has been, by any standards, an exceptionally wet month of May. There is no doubt that a run of hot summers has got people thinking about the implications for agriculture. In my native Suffolk, there are a few quite famous wine producing farms, such as this one. The wine tends to be a bit too sharp for my taste, rather like the stuff produced in the Rhine area. (My favourite wine from the north European area is the very distinctive white wine from Alsace). Personally, I think the best booze in East Anglia is the cider, although it is very strong.
England produced quite a lot of wine in centuries past, when average temperatures were quite possibly hotter than now. The Romans produced a fair amount of the stuff (and no doubt their passion for baths and washing was partly driven by the desire to sweat away the subsequent hangovers). So maybe England could become a great wine producer again. Even so, it will have to go some way before it can rival the Lafites, Latours of Montrachets of France. Anyway, it is my 40th birthday today, so I may just have to find an excuse to do some tasting.
Blogger and friend Andrew Ian Dodge, at one of his many venues, Tech Central Station, offers this poser on the recent, ahem, bracing winners of the Eurovision song contest:
Does Lordi’s win reflect the rot in Europe, a final admission of rock’s power on the continent? Or is it merely an unintentional blip that Eurovision’s chiefs will seek to keep from ever recurring? Will heavy-metal find its way into Finland’s EU presidency? Is it just a silly music contest won by a bunch of rubber clad nut-cases? Oh no dear reader. It is far more than that.
Hey, heavy metal music is not exactly everyone’s cup of tea, although I often find that the most unusual sorts of people (mostly men, but some women too), will confess to a passion for the odd heavy metal track, played as loud as possible. I have had some of the funniest and most enjoyable nights out at gigs where such nutters play. Most of these people don’t take themselves remotely seriously. The very fact that their music offends “right thinking” people of the crusty left and the crunchy right only adds to the appeal. Rush, the Canadian rock band, were inspired by Ayn Rand. The Iron Maiden front man, Bruce Dickinson, is a qualified and working commercial airline pilot. Heavy rockers often seem to have an equal passion for gadgets and cars. I once visited a Royal Navy warship at London’s Docklands and went into the navigation/weaponry control room, and in the background, ACDC was playing (Very ideologically sound, if you ask me).
Meanwhile, on the subject of music competitions and the usual feelgood sense of life they tend to give out, this comment by Timothy Sandefur on the recently completed American Idol is rather nice:
Moreover, American Idol is a rebuke to those silly “crunchy conservatives” who insist that modern technology and mass production denigrates community, and so forth – in T.S. Eliot’s idiotic words, “The remarkable thing about television is that it permits several million people to laugh at the same joke and still feel lonely.” But that’s not true! The community has all joined in on this wholesome, fun, harmless moment to celebrate opportunity, singing, and lightheartedness. What could be more American than that? Lightheartedness is, I think, a profound and incredibly rare value, and one which our country has figured out how to mass produce. That may be among its greatest accomplishments ever.
Some recent court rulings show that marriage is turning into a nice little earner for certain spouses, as Tim Worstall discusses on his blog. He pinpoints a key problem in English law that it is not possible to have pre-nuptial agreements recognised as valid, although pre-nups might influence a ruling (he goes on to discuss how things are a bit different in Scotland). It seems pretty basic to me: the State has no business legislating at all on marriage. The way in which persons choose to form long-term contracts with another is for the parties concerned and no-one else, period.
If a rich entrepreneur, or musician like Paul McCartney, say, wants to shield himself or herself from being taken to the cleaners by a wife or husband, then it should be within their rights to do so. Of course, it may not be terribly ‘romantic’ to have pre-nups, but let’s face it, if rich people fear they will lose a huge chunk of their money to a cynical spouse on the make, it will raise calls for no-fault divorce to be abolished. It could prolong the divorce process at the expense of children’s happiness, foster further cynicism about the institution of marriage, and erode respect for an important part of civil society.
In the interests of the institution of marriage, then, I call on politicians to let consenting adults get on with whatever arrangements they please. It really is that simple. (Which is probably why it won’t happen anytime soon).
By the way, I will be getting married to a lovely woman in just over a week’s time in Malta. Just thought I would mention that.
The question I ask in the headline may not have an affirmative answer but the world’s stock markets have a decidedly shaky look at the moment. The British bluechip index is now at the level where it was at the start of the year, erasing all its gains. Some emerging market bourses have fared even worse. What is going on?
Inflation – which some economists had claimed was ‘dead’ – is possibly back, created as a result of the vast amounts of monetary liquidity sloshing around the global economy at the moment. For a while, red-hot growth in China, India and continued robustness to the U.S. economy may have bred a dangerous amount of complacency. We have a new head of the powerful U.S. Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke. Bernanke is clearly keen to establish his own policymaking persona after the long stretch of the Alan Greenspan years. There is a sense that interest rates could be headed up further. Gold prices have been above $700 an ounce, rising rapidly to a degree that has got some old-fashioned ‘gold bugs’ like me decidedly nervous.
So should we fear a recession is on the way? Not necessarily. The enormous motor power of the U.S. economy repeatedly counters the doomsayers. But there are clear risks. China’s state-dominated banking sector is stuffed with bad loans and investment is often wildly misallocated. The price of oil is acting like a tax on growth, although in time it may weaken if new energy supplies come on stream to slake demand (assuming governments allow it).
The economic sea may be choppy for a while yet. However, to counter some of the gloom read this sharp piece at the Mises Institute.
Among the main reasons for opposing a compulsory state ID card is the risk, all too real in a country like Britain with shoddy state-run IT, of being wrongfully identified. For example, imagine the danger of being wrongfully described as a criminal, and having that error imprinted in a database.
The risk is all too real.
Some wonderful photos and informative writeup here about the lost, and now found, treasures of Alexandria, which at one point ranked as one of the wonders of the world, boasting the world’s tallest lighthouse.
The photographs are outstanding. Enjoy. (Thanks to Stephen Hicks for the link. Stephen has written a fine book debunking that steaming pile of intellectual hocus known as post-modernism, incidentally.)
As I write this, it is raining in a slight but persistent drizzle outside my Pimlico flat, central London. It has been a mixed bag on the weather front recently: some spells of great warm weather but a fair amount of rain. The cricket match at Lords was briefly interrupted by it. One can bet that the Wimbledon tennis tournament later in the summer will undergo the familiar ritual of thrilling matches being interrupted by rain (although I hear there are plans afoot to put a giant cover over the Centre Court stadium in due course).
Despite all this, we are told that Britain faces an unprecedented drought. All manner of water restrictions are threatened, although thankfully, given the less-than-wonderful personal habits of Londoners (any Tube user will know what I mean) it is still allowed for us to take a morning shower. In short, shortages. This appears insane in a country famed or infamous for its damp summers. It is an island in which few places are more than 100 miles from the sea. In a wider context, most of the Earth’s surface is covered in the stuff. What’s the problem?
The ‘shortages’ we have now have a number of causes, from what I can glean. There has been a substantial population rise in the southeast of England. Greater affluence means more dishwashers, bigger washing machines. Increasingly, many people will often have more than one bathroom in a house. Other, wetter, parts of the UK like the famously wet area to the west of the Pennines have not seen the same sort of population growth. There is plenty of water in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. → Continue reading: Water and some basic economics
Ronald Bailey does not pull his punches when dealing with opponents of biotechnology:
Bioconservative intellectuals are fully cognizant of the tendency for our species to be suspicious of the new and the strange, and they clearly want to harness that suspicion as a strategy to restrain biotechnological progress. To that end they advocate adopting the so-called precautionary principle… it would mean that new biotechnological techniques such as stem cells, cloning, and sex selection should be presumed innocent, and those who propose a new intervention must bear the burden of showing that its promise outweighs its peril.
The problem is that humanity is terrible at anticipating benefits. Consider the optical laser. When the optical laser was invented in 1960, it was dismissed as “an invention for looking for a job”. No one could imagine what possible use this interesting phenomenon might be. Of course, now it is integral to the operation of hundreds of everyday products: it runs our printers and optical telephone networks, corrects myopia, removes tattoos, plays our CDs, opens clogged arteries, helps level our crop fields, etc. It is ubiquitous.
(pages 242-3)
His praise for the idea of material progress reminds of me what Brian Mickelthwait wrote a few weeks back on this blog.
I also liked this passage, where he refers to the unashamed opponent of material progress, Bill McKibben and others:
Respecting the sanctity of life doesn’t require that we take whatever random horrors nature dishes out. Safe genetic engineering, when it becomes possible, strongly affirms the intrinsic value of human life by producing healthier, stronger, smarter people more equipped to enjoy their lifes and to thrive during them.
(page 178)
Bailey’s book is strongly recommended and I pretty much agree with all of it. A point of his that I would emphasise is that of course, people are entitled to say that if they don’t want biotech or whatever, then they should not be made to pay for it. If biocons want to stop tax-funding of stem cell research, then as a libertarian, I entirely defend their right to refuse such funding but of course my view changes if such folk try to actually prevent private funding of such ventures.
Another argument that Bailey confronts head-on is the idea that by penetrating the mysteries of the physical world, we somehow lose our reverence or respect for life. That always struck me as a dumb argument. My amazement at the wonders of space is hardly dented by the insights of a Newton or the glorious photos taken by space probes. Quite the opposite. And whatever some genetic determinists (some of whom are sadly racists) may say, I don’t believe that the argument for free will and Man’s capacity for making meaningful choices in life is reduced one iota by our understanding of genetics. The more we know, the more power that gives us to shape our futures. I think it was a chap called Francis Bacon who said something to the effect that nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.
Bailey is one of the better writers for Reason magazine. I definitely can recommend this book for those looking at controversies in this area, such as this subject.
The Onion just keeps on getting better.
You know, being a test pilot isn’t always the healthiest business in the world.
Alan B. Shepard, aviator and astronaut. I also rather like his terse message to Mission Control at the time of his flight in 1961: “Why don’t you fix your little problems and light this candle”.
I am sure he would be thrilled at the private sector space ventures that Dale has been tirelessly writing about lately.
Flicking through the Reason blog, Hit & Run, I came across the link to the recent appearance by Reason’s editor, Nick Gillespie, on the O’Reilly Factor. Gillespie argues that it is silly to pass a law stating that folk should sing the national anthem of the United States in English. I agree (it is not exactly a Top Government Priority), although I would have thought that immigrants, if their intentions are to make a long-term home in their adopted country, should value it enough to try and speak the local language. Language is a part of assimilation. If I went to live in France, I would expect to learn the language, even if I spoke in an atrocious accent. But passing laws to force language is silly.
That said, I do not think Gillespie helped his case by what I thought was a singularly boorish performance on the show. Not a great advert for libertarianism. Virginia Postrel would have never acted like that, and she is much better looking.
There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served.
– Jane Jacobs.
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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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