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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“Obama went on to tell Romney: “You seem to want to import the foreign policies of the 1980s, just like the social policies of the 1950s and the economic policies of the 1920s.” So he’s Reagan, Eisenhower and Coolidge all rolled into one? Sounds way too good to be true, but one can only hope.”
James Taranto.
I suppose a person could argue that the 1920s were flawed in America because the boom of that era ultimately led to the Wall Street Crash of 1929, but can, say, Harding and Coolidge get the blame for the scale of the downturn in the 1930s? And a lot of good things were created and invented in the 1920s in the US. The major turd in the punchbowl was Prohibition and the associated surge in organised crime. As for the 1950s, yes, Eisenhower was no radical, but as a recent biography sets out, he was a wise leader in many ways, and the process of dismantling the Jim Crow regime in the South was under way before JFK got in. As for Ronald Reagan, well, to even hint that Romney could be a new Gipper, and take the US back to the vibrant 80s when the Soviets were on the run counts as a massive own goal for Obama. Just think what Romney must have thought: “God, this preening jerk actually tried to imply that I might try and have a re-run of the 1980s! I have got the White House in the bag.”
Finally, the 1950s in the US gave us lots of Hitchcock movies, Elvis, Chuck Berry, Grace Kelly, M. Monroe, lots of good novels, interesting aircraft and space-craft, and er, some of these beauties.
As we head in to the final days of the US elections, an issue that has been aired has been the size of the US navy. The number of ships that the US navy has will, according to Mitt Romney, decline from its current number of below 300 towards the lower 200s if projected cuts are put in place. Some conservative parts of the blogsphere, such as Pajamas Media, are giving Mr Obama a hard time for his comments, and maybe his arrogance is annoying, but is he necessarily wrong? Does the US actually need more than 300 vessels to do its job? And if so, what sort of vessels? If you have, say, a carrier, it needs a large fleet of support vessels and frigates, not to mention other kinds of support, to operate effectively rather than be a burden.
As I noted some time ago, the world of military hardware is being dramatically changed by developments in science and technology, as recounted in this astonishing book, Wired for War. Romney and his advisors should not just blindly go along with the “we need a vast navy to do our job” mindset. The US is broke; frankly, if Republicans want to be taken seriously on the case for cutting spending, they need to recognise that the sheer scale of the US military at present is financially unsustainable and needs to be focused more on domestic defence, and defence of certain key trade routes of importance to the US (which is where a navy comes in) against the likes of pirates.
I know it is going to get me unpopular around here, but not everything that Obama says or does is necessarily wrong, or even done for malevolent reasons (cue reaction from Paul Marks!). And even so, there is a need for small-government conservatives and genuine liberals to think about the fundamentals of what a defence policy should look like, and what can be afforded. This article at Reason magazine by Nick Gillespie is a good starting point, in my view, as this Reason magazine piece also.
Talking of the US navy, let’s not forget that this is the 200th anniversary year of the War of 1812, in which the sailors of the US gave the Brits quite a licking.
“You don’t have to support the campaign to reform Section 5. But one day, your teasing dig in a colleague’s leaving card will be taken the wrong way; or your mobile phone comment will be misheard by passers-by in a crowded street; and then they will come for you.”
– Victoria Coren, over at the Guardian. Her article refers to comments made about the American actress, Lucy Liu. (Time for a gratuitous link to the lovely lass, Ed).
“Many explanations have been offered to make sense of the here-today-gone-tomorrow nature of medical wisdom — what we are advised with confidence one year is reversed the next — but the simplest one is that it is the natural rhythm of science. An observation leads to a hypothesis. The hypothesis (last year’s advice) is tested, and it fails this year’s test, which is always the most likely outcome in any scientific endeavor. There are, after all, an infinite number of wrong hypotheses for every right one, and so the odds are always against any particular hypothesis being true, no matter how obvious or vitally important it might seem.”
Gary Taubes. I was going to use this for the Samizdata quote of the day but the SQOTD slot has been taken but this is too good not to put up. Taubes – as discussed recently by Natalie Solent here – is one of those people uprooting some conventional wisdom about diet and health. Here is Taubes’ website.
This is probably very unscientific of me, but my approach to a lot of these views on health and fitness is to take a slightly Aristotelian “middle way” approach: moderation in all things, decent exercise, balanced diet, and plenty of sleep. (As my wife reminds me, this also means I watch my intake of red wine, which I have over-indulged in over the past).
I suffer from gout, a nasty sounding term which is also bloody unpleasant. One of the contributory factors, from what I read, is sugar. So I am on a very low sugar diet, drinking lots more water and exercising a lot in the gym, with a blend of weights and interval training. It seems to be doing the trick for my general health and physique and the gout is at bay, although I get the occasional twinge. One of my colleagues at work runs triathlons and suffers from gout, so it is not necessarily caused by drinking port all day.
The US business and health guru, Timothy Ferris, has some interesting things to say about gout and how to defeat it.
“Unlike Mitt, I loathe Sesame Street. It bears primary responsibility for what the Canadian blogger Binky calls the de-monsterization of childhood – the idea that there are no evil monsters out there at the edges of the map, just shaggy creatures who look a little funny and can sometimes be a bit grouchy about it because people prejudge them until they learn to celebrate diversity and help Cranky the Friendly Monster go recycling. That is not unrelated to the infantilization of our society. Marinate three generations of Americans in that pabulum, and it’s no surprise you wind up with unprotected diplomats dragged to their deaths from their “safe house” in Benghazi. Or as J. Scott Gration, the president’s Special Envoy to Sudan, said in 2009, in the most explicit Sesamization of American foreign policy: “We’ve got to think about giving out cookies. Kids, countries – they react to gold stars, smiley faces, handshakes.” The butchers of Darfur aren’t blood-drenched machete-wielding genocidal killers but just Cookie Monsters whom we haven’t given enough cookies. I’m not saying there’s a direct line between Bert & Ernie and Barack & Hillary … well, actually, I am.”
– Mark Steyn
Funny how these trends in kid-friendly TV animals go. Back when I was a nipper, we had Basil Brush, Top Cat, the cast of the Magic Roundabout, the Muppets, and the timeless Tom and Jerry cartoons. A later generation had Roland Rat.
Aficionados like to point out that Basil Brush was modelled on the late, great Terry Thomas. Definitely a Tory.
“Ryanair has been forced to apologise to Italians after a crew member on a flight to the southern city of Bari reportedly described it as the “the city of the mafia and St Nicholas” in an on-board announcement.”
Via Tim Worstall.
I am off to San Francisco for a week’s business and some sightseeing next week. I am flying via Virgin, and the last time I did, the announcement about the destination was not quite so, er, interesting.
Here are some interesting thoughts via Prof. Stephen Hicks about the death of one of the Mongols and what it meant for Europe back in the time of the invasions.
” Half of the libertarians seem to have gone entirely off the rails… a very vocal half. Fiddle around reading “libertarian” websites and you’ll find all sorts of bizarre things: neo-Confederate denunciations of Lincoln, 9-11 Trutherism, anti-vaccine nonsense, climate change denialism, idiosyncratic “theories” of mental illness, apologia for Putin, arguments for the moral equivalence of Nazi Germany-United States-Israel, and (especially) rabid, blind rage against anyone who dares offer a counterargument. A sensible person, wondering what libertarianism is all about and trying to find whether it offers anything of value, would be so put off by this stuff that they’d forswear libertarianism as a kind of madness. (This isn’t hypothetical — decent people occasionally ask me how I can be associated with such craziness.) So right when the world most needs ’em, libertarians are going bonkers.”
Charles Steele, at his Unforseen Contingencies blog.
Hmmmm. I agree with much of this although it is worth repeating that being a skeptic about the claims made for catastrophic man-made global warming is not the same as being some sort of incorrigible “denier”.
I would also add something else. Libertarianism is no different from any other secular or for that matter, religious creed in having its fair share of nutters, heretics or those who say or do things that are just plain embarrassing. But even nutters can say or do things that open up debates that more “reasonable” people shy away from. Consider just how shockingly radical Mrs Thatcher’s brand of conservatism was made to appear 30 years ago, for example.
Long ago, I learned to stop worrying about this so long as the core message of respect for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness came shining through and so long as the majority of people who held such views seemed to be, and were, decent people. The problems start when that does not happen.
“Lots of hard problems have proven to be tractable. The planetary genome and proteome have been mapped so exhaustively that the biosciences are now focusing on the challenge of the phenome – plotting the phase-space defined by the intersection of genes and biochemical structures, understanding how extended phenotypic traits are generated and contribute to evolutionary fitness. The biosphere has become surreal: Small dragons have been sighted nesting in the Scottish highlands, and in the American Midwest, raccoons have been caught programming microwave ovens.”
Page 170 of Accelerando, by Charles Stross. (First published in 2005. )
Whatever you think of Stross’s non-fiction views, such as on libertarianism, his fiction often includes hilarious passages such as this.
“Hobsbawm’s implacable refusal to recant his views when faced with their grotesque consequences tells us something about the belligerent mindset of the wider British Left. But the eminence that he and his fellow travellers have enjoyed also speaks to the bovine complacency with which, since Mrs Thatcher, the Conservatives have allowed such dubious figures licence to dominate the soft culture of the BBC and our universities.”
– Michael Burleigh
I tend not to bother much these days with the dead-tree press but occasionally I’ll pick up a paper on my journeys on London’s Underground to one meeting or whatever. Yesterday, Anthony Hilton, writing in his regular column in the Evening Standard, absolutely crushed the argument, as floated by the mis-named Liberal Democrats and its leader, Nick Clegg, that what Britain needs is a “wealth tax”, given the existence of current state grabs of our wealth upon death:
“What no one seems to have grasped, however, is that if a further wealth tax were imposed to be paid by people when they were still living, it would reduce the yield on inheritance tax. A wealth tax on the living would not raise additional revenue so much as bring part of the payment forward which would ultimately have come out of the person’s estate anyway on their death. This is most obvious in considering some of the schemes mooted to pay a mansion tax. It is understood that the nearest most people come to wealth is to own a house that has gone up in value over the years. Many of the people living in expensive homes are old and not particularly well-off in terms of income. The house is probably the only thing of real value they have. It means they do not have the ready cash to pay the tax.”
Absolutely. Hilton continues:
“This cash-flow problem could be overcome, it is suggested by wealth-tax supporters, by telling them to borrow against the value of their property through an equity release scheme. They would of course have to pay interest on the money thus borrowed, or have it added to their debt. Alternatively, it may be permissible for them to defer payment and allow the outstanding tax to roll up into a lump sum. This would then be collected on death when the house could be sold. Obviously, both solutions are possible. But both would directly reduce the value of the deceased’s estate, and would therefore result in a pro rata reduction in the amount of estate duty.”
And he plunges a stake into the heart:
“So we have a proposal that would deliver no increase in the overall tax take but would create even more impoverished pensioners, who would be most likely to get their revenge at the ballot box. It might not go down that well with younger voters either once they saw a wealth tax — or the fear of a wealth tax — take away any chance that their parents might help them with a deposit for a house.”
Of course, it is entirely possible that Clegg and his allies are only giving the impression of wanting to enact such a tax in exchange for agreeing to more, supposed spending cuts, and in reality, they realise how pointless and self-destructive such taxes could be. But it is also a sign of how far away we are from any coherent notions of tax in the first place. Consider: the current government recently sought to attract foreign investors to the UK by offering accelerated visas for those investing serious amounts in the UK; it has, it says, sought to clarify rules about domicile and residence. Last year, finance minister George Osborne vowed to cut the top rate of income tax to a still-high 45 per cent. Imposing a wealth tax would blow such limited moves towards commonsense out of the water.
“Yes, in fact the freedom to examine and criticize people and beliefs is a positive good, and how else will we ever be able to separate good ideas from bad ones? There is no other way other than freedom of discussion. And one can’t specify in advance which ideas or criticisms are and aren’t permitted — that would assume we already knew and agreed on Truth.”
Charles Steele, a US blogger writing about some wretch by the name of Eric Posner, a tenured law professor who believes the US 1st Amendment is so just 18th Century, daaaahling.
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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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