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“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). February 27th, 2008 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
 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:
January 28th, 2008 | 39 comments - (Comments are closed)
It is not widely known even in Australia that in 1808 the NSW Corps of the British Army deposed the Governor of New South Wales, William Bligh, in a coup. This is known as the ‘Rum Rebellion’, but it was not really about rum. Reading about it on Wikipedia, it is clear that Governor Bligh, a Captain in the Royal Navy, who had already endured the Mutiny on the Bounty, was not fit to govern a colony like New South Wales was at the start of the 19th Century. For there were already free settlers in New South Wales at that time, and they wanted their rights and liberties as British subjects respected. Chief among them was John Macarthur. Michael Duffy writes about the rebellion and Macarthur’s role in it here. As for myself, since it is also Australia Day today, I am going to do the patriotic thing and toast my nation onwards- with good old Australian Rum. January 26th, 2008 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
Former governor Mitt Romney won the Michigan Primary, and it seems he did it the old fashioned political way, not by showing any leadership or vision, but rather by showering other people’s money at the voters. This earned him the scorn of David Brooks in, of all places, the New York Times. The money quote was pure snark.
Who should be more ashamed of themselves- Mitt Romney for pandering or Michigan primary voters for swallowing this claptrap? January 16th, 2008 | 45 comments - (Comments are closed)
I was talking to a friend this evening who noted that a bank had sent him a letter promoting a loan; confounding the pessimists who think that the days of easy credit are completely dead. He observed that the letter contained the phrase “The mill that produced this paper supports sustainable forestation”. It is hard to believe that the bank really cared that much about the source of their paper, but banks, being creatures of the market, are sensitive to their customers, and make efforts to please them. The small but noisy minority of ‘environmentally friendly’ customers that would have approved of the bank’s effort to be eco-friendly would be appeased, and the rest of the client base would care not a jot. But we are seeing more and more of these nods to the environment being enforced with the power of national governments. It is rather like what happened to ancient Rome in the Fourth Century. The first Christian Emperor, Constantine the Great, lifted restrictions on Christianity in 312, and Christianity backed by the power of the state made slow but steady gains at the expense of the old pagan faiths before the Vestal Virgins were disbanded by Imperial order in 394. I am not sure what will really qualify as comparable milestones in the rise of environmentalism as the official faith of the West, but for those of us of a skeptical nature, I think it does rather have a feel of being like a Pagan in 4th Century Rome. January 12th, 2008 | 32 comments - (Comments are closed)
An extraordinary interlude – an aberration, you might say – in the history of music is now drawing to a close. The musical opportunities created by modern electronics, in the form of electronic recording, radio, and then later of actual electronically powered musical instruments, were responded to by the music profession in two profoundly contrasted ways. The “classical” fraternity concentrated first on popularising – and then on recording in opulently perfect sound – their resplendent back catalogue. “Pop” music has been just as profoundly shaped by electronics. Indeed, it is the creation of electronics. The most fundamental effect of electronics on “pop” music has been that popular music (by which I mean the old folk traditions) has no longer been obliged to rely either on musical literacy skills, or, for those in whom such skills were lacking, memory. “Folk” music always teetered on the edge of oblivion, relying as much of it did on the human brain as its hard disc, so to speak. And folk musicians were forced to concentrate on remembering the old songs, having little brain space to create new ones (folk music before recording was rather like literature before printing. Written manuscripts were about as perishable as the people who created them, for they lasted about as long). Recording, for folk/pop musicians changed everything. No longer did the lowest class of musician depend upon their own memories to keep their previous creations and inherited repertoire alive. They could compose at their instruments, and record it, confident that it would then survive, and they were thus liberated to get on with creating the next would-be hit. And pop musicians were as uninhibited in their use of new, electronic instruments as the classical fraternity were mostly stand-off-ish about them (I know: Boulez, Stockhausen etc. They’re worth a mention). This is a complicated story. Technology takes time to develop and get cheap, and it’s still hurtling along of course. Electronic recording (and CDs) took nearly a century to get good enough to do justice to Beethoven, Bruckner, Mahler and Wagner. At it took a similar time to get cheap enough for working class teenagers to play with it in bedrooms and garages. The classical recording enterprise is now basically concluded. Oh, there are still occasional gems to be found in among the dross at the battle of the barrel. But, the great works are now recorded, and re-recording them again and again cannot count for as much now as making similar recordings did fifty years ago when classical fans were still hungry to hear their core repertoire. “Classical” musicians must now look to create new repertoire of a sort that can earn them a living, the inverted commas there being because a lot of them won’t really be “classical” musicians anymore and are becoming a lot more like pop musicians, from whom they have much to learn. The music profession will once more be a single (if huge and sprawling) entity, full of varieties of taste and of technique, but without that cavernous gulf that divided it during the twentieth century (in this respect it resembled and resembles politics. Discuss). I could go on, and on the night I will, but I’ll end by briefly discussing my qualifications to do this talk. Well, first of all, I am a music fan, possessing an small-to-average sized pop CD collection and a gargantuan classical CD collection, having been a classical collector and listener all my now long life. I was a teenager during the sixties musical revolution. I have also been studying the history of the means of communication and information storage for as long as I can remember. I am no great shakes as a musician, although I did play the flute in my school orchestra, and I had a fabulous treble voice as a boy, which I used to sing in choirs of various kinds, at home around the piano and at school. But in the end, I’ll just have to hope that my audience finds my talk illuminating and enjoyable. For the truth is that they know most of the facts pretty much as well as I do. The question is, will I make more sense of those facts for my listeners? I’ll try. December 29th, 2007 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
I found this article by Edward L. Glaeser, about the city of Buffalo, very interesting. Both Buffalo’s rise and its current eclipse were caused by transport, first in the form of the Erie Canal, and then in the form of trains and lorries which made the canal less significant. Also important, at first, was proximity to Niagara Falls and its abundant energy supply. Later, when more efficient means of transmitting energy were developed, that proximity also counted for less. More recently, of course, the Federal Government has only made things worse by throwing billions into the bottomless pit of successive ‘urban renewal’ projects, like superfluous housing schemes to add to the already abundant housing stock, or a superfluous train system to add to the already abundant road system. Instead of trying to help the place, says Glaeser, the Feds should be helping the people, to have good lives. In Buffalo or wherever else they end up living. Buffalo, he says, should “shrink to greatness”. I think it would be even better if the Feds didn’t try to help at all, and just knocked it off the income tax, but then I would, wouldn’t I? All of which is very interesting, but I found this bit of Glaesar’s article especially intriguing:
I should guess that this consideration may have something to do with the relative stagnation of the north of England compared to the south of England in recent decades. But because the difference is less marked, this would presumably be harder to prove. Whether that particular effect is real or not, a lot now would seem to hinge on whether the weather is going to get warmer, as the current orthodoxy among the politicians and their preferred scientists says it will, or colder, as some heretics now prophecy. December 9th, 2007 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Times yesterday reported on how well the Bible is now doing in China, both for Chinese readers and as yet another manufactured-in-China export:
Does this mean that China will behave more nicely in the future than it is behaving now? An American commenter on the above piece reminds us that Christianity and niceness do not always go hand in hand:
And its spelling has not been improving lately, either.
Charming. Speaking as one of the “athiest” and “blastphemus” ones, I do nevertheless concede that Christian congregations scattered around the landscape can do dramatically good things economically. Small groups of mostly decent people, constantly urged to refrain from frivolous consumer spending and to treat each other with kindly and thoughtful reciprocity, can become hugely productive. This in its turn causes others to join in, perhaps for rather less spiritual reasons than those which animated the prime movers, but in ways which also end up improving the newcomers morally, to the general betterment of economic life, among much else. So this process will surely strengthen the Chinese economy, provided only that it is allowed to take root. But what will then be done with China’s economic strength? Unlike Islam (which positively encourages it), Christianity offers little justification for war making. But by contributing mightily, in the indirect and rather surprising ways described above, to the making of the means to fight wars, it nevertheless does encourage warfare, indirectly. Christian powers have fought wars because they did become, almost in spite of themselves, Christian powers. They fought, in other words, and fight still, because they can. If a somewhat Christianised China veers away from the warlike pattern set by the West, it will be because the weaponry of all-out war has recently become so much more destructive than was the case when the Christians were fighting most of their wars, rather than because Christianity has become any more persuasive at making people nicer to foreigners of whom they know little. December 9th, 2007 | 31 comments - (Comments are closed)
For most of my life I have been fascinated by two-man teams. Much is written in the management books about the decision making and leadership skills of individuals. Much is made of teams, of about six to a dozen or so people (a dozen being reckoned by most to be about the upper limit before factionalism sets in), and about the skill of building effective teams. But less, it seems to me, is made of the partnership of two, despite the fact that everywhere you look in the world of human accomplishment, you see two-man teams, often famously named: Rolls Royce, Gilbert and Sullivan, Laurel and Hardy, Powell and Pressberger, Pratt and Whitney, Rogers and Hammerstein, Flanders and Swan… trust me, the game of naming two man teams goes on for as long as you have time to devote to it. I could have machine-gunned this posting with links, but Google is Google – another now famously accomplished two-man team runs that, I believe – and I could not be bothered. Partly this is because this is, be warned now, a rather long posting, and doing proper links would have taken me the whole day. Even when a single creative genius seems to stand in isolated splendour, more often than not it turns out that there was or is a backroom toiler seeing to the money, minding the shop, cleaning up the mess, lining up the required resources, publishing and/or editing what the Great Man has merely written, quietly eliminating the blunders of, or, not infrequently, actually doing the work only fantasised and announced by, the Great Man. Time and again, the famous period of apparently individual creativity coincides precisely with the time when that anonymous partner was also but less obtrusively beavering away, contributing crucially to the outcome, and often crucially saying boo to the goose when the goose laid a duff egg. If deprived, for some reason, of his back-up man, the Lone Genius falls silent, or mysteriously fails at everything else he attempts. Think Elizabeth the First and … damn, I can not remember his name, but he was crucial, and Elizabeth was never the same after he had died. Cecil, that was him. That literature and showbiz are so full of two-man teams is evidence of the enormous emotional importance that we all attach to these partnerships. Every TV detective, for instance, seems to have his Dr Watson figure, less inspired, but perhaps emotionally more adult, who buys the pint afterwards, soothes the frazzled nerves of the great detective, and who generally carries the can and tidies up after. For every Holmes there is a Watson, for every Morse, a Lewis. And for every Regan, a Carter. Major kudos to the late John Thaw for having participated in – having lead, actually – two very different but equally famous two-man teams of British TV coppers. → Continue reading: On two-man teams (and on the current travails of Mr Brown) November 30th, 2007 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
I went to watch Elizabeth – the Golden Age – as I had mentioned a few weeks back and I was pretty impressed, despite a few jarring notes (Francis Drake barely gets a mention in the defeat of the Spanish Armada, rather like overlooking Nelson at Trafalgar). But the film was overall good entertainment, if not dead-accurate scholarship. One thing stuck in my mind on the way home: the man who played Philip II of Spain was very convincing in the role of a religious maniac, a man swinging between rhapsodies of hatred for Elizabeth and tearful despair. I thought to myself: “This guy looks like a stunt double for the current leader of Iran”. I mean, he really does. Creepy. November 12th, 2007 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
Patrick Crozier and I have taken to meeting up on Monday evenings to have recorded conversations. How long we’ll do this is anyone’s bet, and how many people listen to these conversations apart from us I have no idea… though perhaps Patrick knows? But a good time is had by us, and the mere possibility that others may be listening tightens up our conversation and makes it a lot more satisfying than if we merely chatted in complete privacy. This coming Monday, we will be talking about World War I: how it was fought, and why it was fought. This has long been an interest of Patrick’s, particularly the how bit. He thinks, or so I expect him to be saying, that Britain’s military commanders have been criticised too much. As for me, it is my (unclear) understanding that for all its exaggerations, the Blackadder version of WW1 is basically correct. The end did not justify the means. The prize was not worth the price. Germany was temporarily subdued, but at a cost in blood and subsequent political mayhem that was out of all proportion to any good that was achieved. But is that true? In particular (Patrick and me both being Brits) what might been the outcome of this war if it had still proceeded, but if Britain had sat it out, either by not forming a special relationship between Britain and France, or by not sticking to that deal in August 1914? What if Britain had left Germany to do its worst? Presumably the argument of Britain’s WW1 warriors was that sooner or later there would have been some kind of military reckoning between Germany and Britain, involving interests that all Brits (including me) would have regarded as vital, and that the longer such a confrontation was delayed the worse it would be for Britain. But is that right? Comments about all these and related questions would be greatly appreciated. Last week, Patrick and I talked about Northern Ireland, and the comments on this Samizdata posting proved very useful in suggesting various reasons why peace has broken out there, if peace it proves to be. Maybe something similar may happen again. November 5th, 2007 | 77 comments - (Comments are closed)
I love this mighty beast, linked to by David Thompson in his latest batch of ephemera links (which he does every Friday and which I highly recommend):  This rusting hulk is (was) one of the world’s biggest digging machines. It now resides in an open air museum, where the captions and propaganda messages are all about the ecological folly of big digging machines. But for me, this is a glorious monument to man’s continuing and growing ability to impress his imprint upon nature. And thereby, incidentally, to create all manner of interesting new habitats for other forms of nature beside man, once man has finished with using them for his original purpose. Last night I happened to watch a TV show about some defunct clay-excavation-for-brick-making site, somewhere in the Midlands I think, which has now become one of Britain’s most satisfactory habitats for various particularly interesting sorts of newt. In general, I think the way that the First Industrial Revolution churned up the landscape and thereby made it more varied and interesting, is an under-talked-about topic. The Norfolk Broads, no less, which I have fond memories of sailing on as a boy, began as peat mining:
So, good for Dr Joyce Lambert, good for the Romans, good for exploitation, and good for rising sea levels. The Romans would have loved that giant digger, even as they would have been amazed and discomforted that it was made by their arch-enemies, the Germans. In further interesting environment-related speculations Bishop Hill reckons we may be due for a cold winter, on account of the sun taking a bit of a rest just now. Interesting. We shall see. October 29th, 2007 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
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