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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My title of this posting is taken from that fine film, “The Right Stuff”, based on the book of the same title by Tom Wolfe. The character who uttered those lines in the movie was Werner von Braun. The reference is to the fact that at the end of the Second World War, a group of German scientists working on the V2 and other rocket systems were captured by the Allies and ended up working on the US space programme, while another lot of Germans ended up working for the Soviet Union.
Via the Andy Ross blog, here’s a review of a new book on von Braun.
Of course, no reference to von Braun would be complete without the following song from Tom Lehrer.
Samizdata has now been going for more than half a decade, and since what I am about to say has been becoming ever more true throughout that time, I may have said what follows before. So if you have already read, marked, learned and inwardly digested all of this, apologies, and on to the next posting.
I want to make a point about the nature of voting in British general elections. It now looks as if there is going to be a Labour melt-down, in the next one of these. A whole generation of Labour MPs seem about to lose their jobs, and whole new swarm of now diligently obscure Tories seem about to step forward to take their places. Setting aside what one feels about these two groups of people, why the completeness of the switch? Why these huge lurches, from massive Thatcher majorities, to massive Blair majorities, and soon – it now appears – to massive Cameron majorities? Even if the next general election does not yield the anti-Labour landslide that everyone is starting now to anticipate, we all know that it could. In the years when I first noticed party politics in Britain, parliamentary majorities were never this big, or they never seemed so. Parties lost elections, but they weren’t crushed, the way they get crushed now. Now, we live in an age of electoral landslides. Why? What has changed?
It may simply be that I have changed. Maybe landslides always happened from time to time, but I only started noticing rather recently. That could be it. Also, in a similar comment debate about this sort of stuff, here or somewhere, I seem to recall being accused of describing London rather than England or Britain when I talked this way. But I do think that there is something else going on here other than me just being me, living where I do. I think that the electorate has also changed. This posting makes an essentially rather simple point, but be warned now, it does it at somewhat tedious length. If you push that “Read more” button, you may rather quickly want to read less. → Continue reading: The age of political landslides
The new-look Harry’s Place carries this zinger of an article debunking a piece of revisionist tripe from the former editor of the New Statesman. The idea, essentially, is that Britain should have stayed out of WW2 so that the poor, put-upon Mr Hitler could then have shipped those pesky Jews off to some island in the Indian Ocean.
Unbelievable.
Tyler Cowen, the US economics writer, ponders – in the course of responding to a column by the US leftist economist Paul Krugman – whether modern industrial development would have reached its current pitch had it been forced to deal with today’s levels of regulation. On the face of it, had the Industrial Revolution, starting in the 18th Century, had to deal with 21st century levels of state bureaucracy, health and safety rules, and the rest, we’d still be using horses and carts and there’d be no blogging. Or would there? The trouble with these kinds of assertions is that there is no counterfactual universe against which to check it. The best we can reasonably do is to look at those societies that have imposed heavy restrictions on entrepreneurship and technology, and those that have not done so, and see if there are any consistent patterns to give us an idea. I suppose one good example is what happened in China about 600 years ago, when the rulers of that nation decided they’d had enough of all that exploration business and turned inwards. Another might be the extraordinary rise of Hong Kong in the 1940s under the benign laissez faire policy of UK colonial administrator, Sir John Cowperthwaite.
The other point that Cowen and Krugman deals with is the idea that the pace of development in the field of energy and industry has slowed down. Well, up to a point. When the late Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001 was made in to a film by Stanley Kubrick, people who watched in the 1960s were led to think that travel from Earth would soon be a relatively normal event. We have not got there yet. Maybe the problem is that there are sometimes periods of history of enormous change compressed into short periods, followed by longer stretches of time when not a lot appears to happen, but actually the incremental changes are quite big. We just need to get used to this rather than become unduly depressed that we are in a holding pattern rather than moving forward.
Note: I appreciate that not everyone accepts that the Industrial Revolution “started” in the 18th Century, but from my own readings, that century is when the critical mass of scientific, technological and economic forces came together, starting in the UK. For a marvellous account of the men who helped shape that revolution, I recommend this by Jenny Uglow.
On the pace of scientific advance in the West, and how it has arguably slowed since about 1950, this Charles Murray book of a few years back is a good read and is absolutely packed with statistics. I am not a professional statistics man so I am not sure I can comment all that intelligently on the rigour of his methods, but they look pretty robust.
The more I think about it, the more I realise that the establishment of a formal, state-run empire was a mistake, both from the point of view of the conquered peoples and from that of Britain. The first phase of British expansion – our informal mercantile dominion – was much the more successful. It is at least arguable that the nationalisation of the East India Company marked the moment when things started to go badly wrong.
– Daniel Hannan
I seldom recommend TV to anyone. But I caught this last night – or it caught me – and I think many readers, able through the wonders of the internet to see the whole thing lawfully, will be interested to do so.
It is the sort of serious programming that the BBC used to be famous for: a depiction and explanation using clips of films and still photographs taken by diplomats and other visitors, of the strange anachronistic religious-feudal state that existed in Tibet in the late 30s and the 40s, and how it came to be annexed by the People’s Republic of China.
No-one seeing this will find it easy to make sense of the Chinese official claim that Tibet has ‘been part of China for 800 years’. Welsh readers will note that Wales has been administratively part of England for 800 years, in a much clearer sense, but that does not mean they have to like it or feel English. Bordelais readers (who are old enough) will recall that they certainly were under the English crown 800 years ago, but that does not mean they still are. History is not monotonic. And neither Aberystwyth nor Aquitaine, language apart, has for centuries had institutions wholly alien to an Englishman; whereas Tibet was clearly fascinatingly weird to everyone else only 60 years ago.
I brought prejudices acquired during the Cold War to the struggle between civilisation and Islam, but tried – and try still – to be careful to see the differences as well as the similarities between the two struggles.
In this spirit, I at first thought that whereas Soviet communism was ideologically breakable, Islam is not breakable. More than a billion souls believe in it, and however true it might be that it is evil and repulsive nonsense, saying this would accomplish very little. It would merely poke the hornet’s nest with a stick. But slowly, I have been coming round to thinking almost the complete opposite. Not only does denouncing Islam as evil nonsense establish the mere right, of us civilisationers, to denounce Islam – along with our right to say anything else we might want to say – true or false, nice or nasty, sensible or daft. Such talk also, I am starting to believe, strikes a dagger into the heart of the enemy camp, by spreading doubt in it about basic beliefs and hence sewing discord and confusion. I used to think that Islamists were indifferent to such ideological attacks. Now, I am starting to believe that they fear them very much. Hence all the murder threats. They sense that this is one of their weakest and potentially biggest fronts in the struggle. The biggest front of all, in fact.
And even if only a few “apostates” materialise, they are of huge significance, for they bring with them deep knowledge of the enemy we face and how we can see the enemy off.
Another advantage of ideological attacks on Islam is that arguments about – and in favour of – “apostasy” unite civilisation, and divide its enemies. We civilisationers argue fiercely with one another about how to oppose Islam, but almost all of us believe that if you want to criticise a religion non-violently you should be allowed to, and that if you want to abandon a religion you should be able to do that without getting extremely violent grief, or even the threat of it, from those who still do believe in it. Talking like this or doing this may be rather daft, and very unwise, and get you shunned by polite society (i.e. scared society), but … yes, it should be allowed. I am content to regard all who say that they disagree with the claims in this paragraph as the enemies of civilisation that they are, not just from the point of view of the mere truth, but on tactical grounds. Put such cretinous pro-Islamist fellow-travellers on the defensive also, I say.
And now I read this article (linked to about a week ago by Instapundit) in which it is claimed that the trickle of converts from Islam that was all I had so far noticed is actually whole lot more than that. It tells of a spectacular growth in the number of converts from Islam. Conversions have been happening in a steady flow for decades, but recently they have become a torrent, world-wide. Mostly these people are converting to Christianity, but sometimes just to not-Islam. Bossiness and terrorism and constant fighting is, it seems, not just repulsive. It actually repels. People are leaving the religion of war and joining the religion of, approximately speaking, peace – or joining no religion at all. Islam is only still growing numerically because it is growing so quickly by purely biological means. As far as the flow of converts is concerned it is now in headlong retreat.
So, is this true? Is this allegedly huge exflux really happening? I have heard nothing about it before, but that could merely mean that I am ignorant. Or is the exflux just wishful thinking on the part of Christians, talking nonsense to keep their spirits up?
What Sport Tells Us About Life: Bradman’s Average, Zidane’s Kiss and Other Sporting Lessons
Ed Smith
Penguin books, 2008, 190 pp., £14.99
I rarely buy new books in hardback at full price, because I rarely want any particular book. Usually I am just looking for something that is interesting, and prefer to soften the financial blows by taking my chances in the remainder and charity shops. But something about Ed Smith’s little book appealed to me, despite its combination of brevity and a high price-tag. Partly it was that the first three people quoted on the cover saying how good it was were Mike Atherton, Christopher Martin-Jenkins and Michael Brearley, all of them big names if you are an England cricket fan like me, and all people whose opinions I greatly respect. Ed Smith himself is also a name, if you follow England cricket, because he is one of those many unfortunates who played a handful of test matches (his were in 2006 against South Africa), but who was then, somewhat unluckily, discarded. He now captains Middlesex. On the other hand, maybe he won’t prove to be so unfortunate in the longer run, because England batting places are now up for grabs again, following several batting debacles in recent months, and Ed Smith, who read history at Peterhouse, Cambridge, is just the kind of thoughtful, intelligent type – like the aforementioned Michaels, Atherton and Brearley – whom selectors like to have trained-up and ready to take over as England captain, should they be caught short for one. There are a few broad hints in his book to suggest that Ed Smith has not given up on such hopes himself. He certainly still hopes to play for England again. Meanwhile, I was not disappointed by this book, nor did I feel that the fifteen pounds I spent on it was wasted or bestowed upon an unworthy cause. There are basically two big reasons why I liked it.
The first reason is simply that Ed Smith writes not just about sport, but, as his title suggests, about the psychology, sociology and history of sport, and about psychology, sociology and history in general, merely illustrated by sport, in the sort of relaxedly middlebrow way that I particularly enjoy. Recently I have been doing some teaching, having always wanted to, and there is a lot of the teacher in Smith and in his family. You can entirely see why he is now a county captain. → Continue reading: Sports lessons
I like this:
For, the truth is that a dogmatic respect for certain fundamental rights is what enables us to be easygoing about most other things.
“Us” being us libertarians. This is in connection with some row at Harvard about reserving the gym for women, for a bit, or something. Being, like Ravikiran Rao, a libertarian, I can be easygoing about the details, although a link from Rao would have been good.
To me, it seems like a good idea to make reasonable accommodations for people’s religious or other beliefs, where possible. Whether we should in any particular case depends on so many factors, so many costs, so many benefits and the conflicting interests of so many constituencies that it would be highly presumptuous of me to make blanket statements one way or the other. But what I can state is that letting property owners make the decision devolves the decision making to those who are closest to the decision and who have the most stake in the costs and benefits of that decision.
Or, you could turn this into a legal question involving esoteric principles. Well, good luck. When you are trying to make a law for this, you are moving the decision-making up to the top. Your quest for foolish consistency will inevitably lead to foolish decisions, because no law will provide for every nuance that would be involved in individual cases. There is still time. Come to Libertarianism my children!
Heh. Read the whole thing (which is not a lot longer) here. And while you’re there, wander around the rest of the blog, which is one of my favourites, aside from its regrettable habit of not supplying links, to such things as stories about Harvard gyms being reserved for women.
I particularly enjoyed an earlier posting that Ravikiran Rao wrote, some time last year I think, which I cannot now find (so no link to that from me – sorry), in which he blamed nuclear weapons for the miseries of the world. The argument went approximately like this. People are happy when progressing, and one of the easiest ways of making progress is to make the kind of progress involved in clearing up after a major war, by rebuilding buildings, baby booming, and so on and so forth. But, nuclear weapons have done away with major wars, progress has therefore become a lot more awkward, and people are consequently more miserable. I suspect that there may be quite a bit of truth to this surmise, but true or not, I enjoy the way that Rao’s argument arrives at a deeply respectable modern orthodoxy (nuclear weapons: bad!) via heresy (nuclear weapons have unleashed a serious modicum of world peace).
That last heresy is one that I agree with. I accept the orthodoxy about the niceness of world peace, and say: well done nuclear weapons. Seriously, I think that nuclear weapons have changed the world from a place in which major powers prepared for world war at all costs, to a place in which major powers avoid world wars at all cost.
History is the oppression of the weak by the strong.
“It is one of the oddities of the consumer-electronics industry that the snazziest products often have their origins in the world’s oldest profession., The porn industry’s embrace of the videocassette helped guarantee the technology’s commercial success. Today, it is doing the same for the DVD and the Internet.”
– John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, A Future Perfect.
(John is related to Samizdata contributor Brian Micklethwait, for those who are curious).
The perception of Islamic science, perhaps properly called natural philosophy, has been shaped by Bernard Lewis and his strong programme of senescence instead of renaissance. The development of scientific knowledge follows a pre-ordained path to scientific revolution and those cultures that failed to ignite need to be explained. Is not exceptionalism the oddity? A review in the Times Literary Supplement adds to our understanding:
After all, the scientific and industrial revolutions did not occur anywhere in the world except in Europe, and therefore one needs to explain the peculiarity of European history, rather than adduce some kind of Islamic brake or blinker.
→ Continue reading: Islam’s long siesta
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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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