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]
|
And that’s only trivially because Patrick deals with other countries besides the UK. The deeper reason why all should periodically attend to UK Transport is that what it says about transport often applies with equal force to the rest of the universe. Consider the following, from a posting yesterday about airline seats.
I think there are archive problems over at UKT, because I couldn’t make the first of those two links work. Here’s the stuff I mean:
It may be that left to its own devices the market will solve the problem. But, of course, these days markets are not left to their own devices. Right now, at an airline near you the following conversation could be taking place:
“Why don’t we increase seat sizes?”
“Because, the government is thinking of introducing some new regulations.”
“How does that affect us?”
“Because, if we go ahead and change all our seats we could find they’re too small and have to replace them again.”
“Oh. And if they’re too big?”
“Then with the new regulations, everyone will assume that the problem has been solved and we’ll lose any competitive advantage we might have had.”
“So, we’re better off waiting for the government?”
“Precisely”
So, the change will be late, you won’t have a choice and the state will take the credit.
Now I think that’s about a great deal more than just airline seats, don’t you?
The quotes below come from a new blog called This Blog has no Title just Words and a Loon. I’m indirectly responsible for this. After posting my personal attack on Patrick Crozier the other day I rang him up to tell him not to take it personally, and it emerged that he had all sorts of other non-transport thoughts he wanted to blog and talked about starting Words and a Loon, although not by that name. For whatever difference it may have made I said go ahead, because I admire Patrick as a writer and will go there regularly. Patrick explained the thinking behind W&L in another non-transport posting on UK Transport. Then he started W&L, and it already has several bits including “The newspaper is dead”. At first I thought of just cutting and pasting the concluding paragraph, which has stuff like:
Newspapers exist (I presume) because it is not actually possible for one person to write the article, print it and distribute it to the millions of possible customers. There has to be some kind of division of labour. But the internet changes that.
But we’ve most of us had thoughts like that. I reckon these earlier ones are more illuminating.
I have no principled objection to paying for content. What I would object to is having to subscribe to masses of different publications. It might work for some of the bigger publications but if it comes to a choice of fumbling for my credit card for that one article in Peruvian Railways Monthly then it’s a non-starter.
What I would like to be able to do is to make ONE payment of, say, £20 a month and then be able to access everything.
Like all good libertarians, Patrick invents new businesses by just thinking aloud. He describes what they might look like, anyway. I don’t think he’s a loon.
Samizdata readers distressed that there has been no mention here for two whole days of the World Cup can slake their soccer thirst over at UK Transport. Or should that be UKTran Sport? Some while ago, Patrick Crozier explained that since he finds the World Cup more interesting than transport, he was going to talk about the World Cup more and transport less. I just went looking for the relevant posting, but couldn’t find it in his voluminous archives (although I did chance upon an interesting posting with guest emails galore about compulsory purchase orders/eminent domain of May 7 2002 that I missed the first time around). Anyway, Patrick is taking his own threat seriously and has done several World Cup postings without even the pretence of transport relevance, culminating in a long report this morning of the televising on BBC1 last night of the 1970 Brazil/England game.
Samizdata is intended to be somewhat self-indulgent. We’re supposed to be talking about whatever takes our fancy. And we’ve at least made some effort to relate the World Cup to the libertarian agenda, for example by wondering what is the relationship between the apparent collectivism of a pub crowd watching the World Cup to the individualism we’re supposed to believe in? Football, soccer I should say, has also proved to be a fun way to get to know some of our American readers better.
But I think that Patrick is taking the joke a step too far. There’s plenty he could say about the World Cup that is transport related. What are the problems of shifting crowds around which are huge but which will only be there for a few weeks? What is transport like generally in the places where the World Cup is taking place? Where, because of transport considerations, does it make sense to put football stadiums in the first place? What sort of buses do the various teams like to use? Are their any ex-bus-drivers or ex-train-drivers or qualified pilots in any of the teams? But Patrick isn’t handling the World Cup like that. He’s just plain writing about it. To hell with transport. If I was a journalist looking in at UK Transport for a possible transport story, I might be seriously irritated, and that might very well my story.
As soon as I started writing for this blog, I got the impression that in some form, blogging is going to affect my journalistic working life and not just my private, ideological, libertarian part. A good article in Tech Central Station by Dominic Busulto makes for an excellent overview of the phenomenon and how writing about business and analyzing companies will change as a result.
Certainly, in my brief experience, the arrival of the weblog has already started to affect how I work. When I get in to work in the morning I usually scan my firm’s website (www.reuters.co.uk) before looking at various websites pitched at the financial world to see what other news organisations have been reporting on. But I also click on to certain blogs for current affairs and related financial news. Very often I find that a blog, like that of prolific Glenn Reynolds will have unearthed an important news story or theme which would have been missed by the mainstream media. And this surely beats the hell out of trawling through acres of newsprint, although I do have an incurable need to read the printed sports section of the Daily Telegraph.
Very soon, I think, blogging will be the accepted form of business analysis by economists and journalists in the City and Wall Street when it comes to checking out company results, mulling over future trends, or trying to figure out what investors think. Analysts, who have been chastened by the collapse of U.S. energy giant Enron and concerns about the financial results of leading companies, will increasingly not be able to get away with issuing grand press releases giving their views, but instead have to see their ideas challenged, chewed over and discussed through the vibrant medium of the blog. The same goes for news columnists who like to make guesses about the future.
Journalists are going to have to become blog-savvy. I guess this puts yours truly in a nice position. Still, I haven’t yet figured how we get to be millionaires out of this. Let’s just say I am working on the notion.
It may seem odd to find an answer to this question in a book published in 1889, but if one can ignore merely local labels of party, Trevelyan expressed well the way in which consensus can be overturned by the cumulative effect of many small efforts at persuasion.
“But the outward aspect of the situation was very far from answering to the reality. While the leaders of the popular party had been spending themselves in efforts that seemed each more abortive than the last, –dividing only to be enormously outvoted, and vindicating with calmness and moderation the first principles of constitutional government only to be stigmatised as the apostles of anarchy, [Here my analogy temporarily loses it as some of our more enthusiastic brothers leap to their feet and cry, “Way to go, baby! Down with government! Anarchy forever!”]–a mighty change was surely but impeceptibly effecting itself in the collective mind of their fellow countrymen.
“For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in the main.”
– Sir George Otto Trevelyan, Bart, The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay.
Brendan O’Neill asks, “Why is blogging a right-wing thing?” and adds various unflattering remarks about us, our guns and our mid-life crises. As I said to him in a private e-mail, I would dearly love to rend his gobberwarts.* But there’s a problem. I agree with him. He says:
“I have always suspected that the right-wing blogging phenomenon is a result of the right’s increasing isolation from the mainstream – from mainstream politics, mainstream journalism and mainstream debates. Over the past 10 to 15 years, traditional right-wing views have become ever-more unpopular, as Third Way and consensus politics have take centre stage. The Reaganites and Thatcherites who were in the ascendant in the 1980s have found themselves out on a limb in an age where we’re all supposed to be caring, sharing, non-argumentative, environmentally-aware centre-lefties. ”
You can’t say truer than that. It’s like being a sheepdog on a sensitivity training course these days. Pah. But after this strong start the limitations of Mr O’Neill’s mindset soon become clear:
“And rather than build an effective and coherent opposition to the new political orthodoxies, some on the right seem happy to retreat into the ‘Blogosphere’, from where they can throw insults at their enemies without having to challenge them fundamentally.”
Huh? Just what sort of fundamental challenge do you think I was putting up before the blog? Cleaning the toilet in a right-wing way? Non-multicultural clearing up after breakfast? The point about blogging is that it costs next to nothing, anyone from housewives to executives can do it, and you don’t need to go through an editor. Mr O’Neill’s disdain for such low-intensity warfare comes through in his repeated use of the word “challenge”:
“…the very nature of the Blogosphere … means it is best suited to poking fun or poking holes in the mainstream media, rather than actually challenging it at a serious level.”
Er, yes. Such a relief. As I write this post now I know that it is well short of the serious and weighty response that I could be composing were I Gladstone reborn. How nice that I’m not, and it’s just a blog post that I can get done before nipping round the shop for some more milk. For all his romantic attachment to the spirit of 1798, Sir Brendan the Serious has all the attitudes of a nobleman demanding that these oiks put down the longbows and fight properly (with the very important caveat that first they have to buy the horse and the armour i.e. get a journalism degree and a proper job.)
“…it’s safe to say that The Guardian – now the most mainstream, pro-government paper in Britain – won’t be quaking in its boots.”
No, but it’s turning red and shuffling about. Did I ever tell you the story of Matthew Engel’s column that was laughed right out of the Guardian archives?
“…it means that many on the right will end up simply talking to themselves, rather than building a real opposition to the Blairs, Clintons and Schroeders of this world. That is one of the reasons I have a lot of time for Iain Murray. Iain and I disagree on many things, but his Conservative Revival weblog was a good stab are thinking about actual alternatives to New Labour and how such alternatives could be reconstituted as an opposition.”
He means proper politics again. Join a party. Become activists or local councillors or journalists. Get a proper job. (Not that I have the slightest objection to Iain Murray (May his sword arm be ever strong!) or anyone else doing these things. But it all boils down to play nicely! To which I say, “Shan’t!”
“In short, I think blogging is a right-wing thing as a result of the right’s increasing isolation – and as a result of right-wingers’ fancy for short, sharp, pithy attacks on an enemy that, in fact, they don’t feel like they can take on.”
Classic guerilla tactics. And a classic guerilla error is to be tempted before you are ready into full scale battles that you are certain to lose.
Whoah, brakes on. Perhaps I’m in danger of letting my military metaphor push me into conclusions I don’t really believe. Although I do think the right wing three quarters of the blogosphere does indeed do much of its work by pinpricks, it may have its greatest effects through conventional means. As Brian Micklethwait says, ‘Blogging is going to impact seriously on all this, by identifying non-left and libertarian journalistic talent, giving it a start, training it, and then feeding it into the mainstream media.’ So come on Brendan, gis a job.
*As Terry Pratchett fans will know, not as much fun as it sounds.
(Given that Brendan O’Neill threw down two gauntlets in my direction, by sending me duplicate e-mails, one addressed to me alone and one as a member of this mighty Libetarian organ, I feel that I am entitled to scurry out of his way and squeak from the sidelines in duplicate as well. So an almost identical post to this one also appears in my blog.)
I am at long last able to post my stories directly so if I have any readers out there who still remember my name… expect to hear from me on a much more regular basis in the coming weeks.
Since the end of February when we “upgraded” to BloggerPro I’ve had to send my raw html text to Chief Editor Perry de Havilland for insertion. I understand Perry loves matching html tag pairs with a passion only outdone by his love of reading the London telephone directory in braille. The sales blurbs claimed lack of support for Linux was a “temporary” matter. Unfortunately, I do not have a great deal of time for anything beyond my consulting work and some activities with the National Space Society, so the extra burden was just enough to make me think twice when an article started buzzing about my head…enough trouble that I tended to swat the idea away rather than do anything about it.
Then preparations for the ISDC (International Space Development Conference) hotted up as April slipped into May. I am the Chair of the National Space Society committee that oversees the local Conference committee so this kept me rather busy. More so as I was dumb enough to also volunteer to run a track of programming on Novel Propulsion Systems on top of assisting with liaison between NSS and the Moon Society (Artemis Project) on the lunar programming track…
Speaking of the Lunar Track… No Glenn, I didn’t see the anti-capitalist, anti-settlement, anti-commercial space, anti-space resources, anti-property rights, anti… [you get the picture] guy who decided he’d like to speak at our conference. I was running my own track next door at the time with speakers talking about fun things like Launch Loops, Gas Guns, Electrodynamic Tethers and the like, so I didn’t have a chance. However I can confirm there were no bloodstains left over in the Lunar Track room by Banquet time, so our lads and lasses were polite enough to let the fellow get out of our midst alive. Darn.
I really must give the fellow (Richard Steiner) credit for courage. Walking into a room full of space activists who would shave their grannies into hamburger for a chance to get off the planet and suggesting the entire Moon be made off limits to settlement is not something to be attempted by the faint of heart. It also won’t happen and we wouldn’t obey it even if it did happen.
Besides… on the surface of the moon environuts are easily dealt with. If one should chain their self to a rock (no trees!)… No prob.
We’ll just sit back in the cab of our lunar rover and take bets on when their Oxygen runs out.
Yet again our crappy pox ridden ‘tech-support-vanishes-at-Five-O’clock-on-the-dot’ domain host is down… so if you want to send us e-mail, send it using [removed] rather than the usual ‘libertarian-samizdata.net’ addresses. Grrrrrrrrrrr.
In the not so distant future, Libertarian Samizdata will be moving both to a different domain host and probably off blogspot in order to make everything more reliable.
 Both Blogger.com and Soho-uk.com are living on borrowed time Update : Problem fixed… normal e-mail addresses working again.
Blogger N.Z. Bear has a cool feature on his blog “The Truth Laid Bear,” in which he attempts to quantify the flow of blog-to-blog links within the blogosphere. He identifies the blogs that are most often referenced by other blogs, and he also identifies the blogs that most frequently link to other blogs.
You can probably guess who is #1 on both lists. Where does Samizdata rank? We are tied for 18th place on the list of blogs most cited by other bloggers. However, we are way, way down there in terms of linking to other blogs, tied for 96th place. So, here is a link to HappyFunPundit, which is on a roll with its last two entries. HFP’s “music industry suckage report” is one of those pieces where you realize that someone else has just articulated what you thought all along but couldn’t quite express yourself. And while the Kevin Richardson vs. George Voinovich flap is funny enough as a straight news story, HappyFunPundit’s take is even funnier. Well done, Dan and Steve.
I just noticed that UK Transport now has a hit counter, and I pushed the little cross, expecting just a number. But as most readers of this probably know far better than I, what you actually get is a whole new page of numbers. And the news is that the UKT cup is either almost completely empty, or else starting to get definitely, detectably damp at the bottom, depending on how you look at it. VISITS: Total: 869, Average Per Day: 29, Average Visit Length: 1.10, Last Hour: 5, Today: 24, This Week: 240.
You can see how a regular journalist, looking at numbers like those, would say, forget about that. I, and I hope Patrick, with our backgrounds in unofficial paper pamphlets stuffed into envelopes and the like, are more easily impressed. I definitely am. Compare Total with This Week, or Average with Today (that was at 11.30 am today), and maybe you’d agree. Patrick seems to be excited, because (as Natalie Solent also noted) he was up at 6.43 am this morning. This is about when I go to bed.
There’s a mass of recent UKT stuff to look at, and Patrick does write beautifully, with a decent sprinkling of human being outbursts and idioms to enliven what from other keyboards would be uninterrupted number and date crunching. What I like about Patrick is: he’s honest. You always feel that he’s saying it like he’s seeing it. If he’s confused, he says so. If he deviates in his head from the libertarian orthodoxy (e.g. on Compulsory Purchase Orders being necessary to build railways) he deviates right there on UKT. Which means that when he does express a strong judgement that counts for something.
Nevertheless, of all the recent stuff on UKT, the thing that most impressed me was an email from Tim Hall, whoever he is. It’s full of insider knowledge about the sad fate of brand-new but never used railway carriages, or something, and what it means is that UKT looks like continuing its slow but steady rise to significance. Patrick doesn’t have to write the entire thing himself. He may not know as much about roads and planes and ships as he does about trains, but there are surely others out there ready to fill in, as soon as they hear of UKT’s existence. In a year or two, he could have himself an entire ideologically simpatico circus of regulars. Patrick is a one-step-at-a-time sort of person, and he’ll probably say something like: you’re very kind Brian, let’s hope you’re not too kind, wait and see, etc, etc. Which is all part of why I’m starting to get seriously optimistic about UK Transport.
For sex (bikini reference!), violence (attack by dog! blood!) and much, much more, go to Bitter Girl!
One of the many joys of the Samizdata is that it is a truly marvelous tool for weedling all manner of Libertarians out of their various hidey holes. So it is with nothing but pleasure that I accept the gentle rebukes of Paul Marks from whom I have not heard since sometime before the last Ice Age.
For the benefit of Paul (and others) let me make it clear that I accept that President Bush is not beyond criticism and I will leave it at that for the moment.
And, like Paul, I welcome the likes of Messrs Prodi and Petain speaking their minds. It means that blind people can hate them as well.
|
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.
|
