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 England cricket team is doing really rather well just now. They are not the best. Australia are the best. But England are well on the way to establishing themselves as the best of the rest. Yesterday they completed a fine victory against South Africa, in the first of the series of five test matches they are playing down there, having earlier in the year, in England, beaten New Zealand in 3 games out of 3 and the West Indies in 4 games out of 4. Before that they toured the West Indies and beat them 3 games out of 4, with the last game drawn. In other words, England have won 8 out of their last 8 test matches (more than any England side has ever won consecutively before), and it would have 12 out of 12 had it not been for that final game draw in the West Indies. Recent England recruit Andrew Strauss, who batted superbly, both in the game against South Africa that finished yesterday morning and throughout last summer, has now played in just 8 test matches and has been on the winning side every time. This is amazing.
All of which means that, what with England doing so well, now was a very good time for the England cricket authorities to be renegotiating the TV rights to cricket matches, and here is what they have done:
Live coverage of England’s home Test matches will no longer be available on terrestrial TV from 2006 onwards.
The England and Wales Cricket Board has awarded an exclusive four-year contract to BSkyB, which will run until 2009.
In other words, I and millions of other BBC License Fee payers will not be able to watch test cricket live on the telly without paying extra. → Continue reading: Who owns English cricket?
The Washington Times has a blog called simply Politics Blog that fulfils the bare basics for blog-hood: Reverse chronological order and permalinks to individual articles. It is even written in a suitably bloggy informal style and takes an irreverent look at issues from an unabashedly partisan perspective.
And yet Politics Blog is not really a good blog for quite technical reasons.
Firstly it does not provide readers with useful sidebar links. Secondly and more crucially, it seems to studiously avoid external links in the blog articles themselves. This is a major failing as the whole point of journalistic blogging is to establish ‘accessible credibility’ and the way you do that is by linking to external sources relating to the things you write about.
For example, in this article called Race Hypocrisy by John McCaslon, an organisation called Project 21 is mentioned as well as the fact that left-wing cartoonist Gary Trudeau referred to Condaleeza Rice as ‘Brown Sugar’. And yet Mr. McCaslon just seems to assume people will take his word that what he says about Project 21 and Gary Trudeau is correct because he does not add links to either Project 21 or the offending cartoon by Gary Trudeau.
There! See how easy that was? If you link to the things you discuss, people actually have some basis for judging the merits of your words and in the on-line commentaries of tomorrow, to write a critical article without external links as citations will start alarm bells ringing as to the soundness of your views. It it not enough to have a blog, you need to know how to blog.
Michael Bloomberg, founder and owner of the unlisted financial media firm bearing his name, is planning to sell up and transfer much of his assets to a charitable foundation on similar lines to that of Microsoft’s Bill Gates. As Mayor of New York, Bloomberg has not really been able to give much day-to-day attention to his media empire, preferring to spend his time on matters such as banning smoking in bars.
I do not like much of what I hear about Bloomberg the politician, but I do greatly respect Bloomberg the businessman. The single-minded determination he has shown to challenge, and in some cases beat, rivals such as AP Dow Jones and Reuters has been impressive. In the space of little more than 15 years, Bloomberg has broken the near-duopoly on wholesale financial news and data once held by Reuters, the listed British firm which is more than 150 years old, though still bigger in terms of overall coverage of news.
If Ayn Rand were still alive, I would wager a small bet that she would think of the fellow as a likely business hero. It is going to be interesting to see what happens to this segment of the news business over the next few months and years.
I am given to understand that the art of being a successful confidence trickster lies in the ability to identify what their victims really, really want and then plausibly appearing to offer it to them.
This con artist knew exactly what his ‘mark’ wanted and he offered it up to them on a plate:
The BBC was forced to apologise yesterday for a story claiming that tens of thousands of victims of the Bhopal gas disaster and their families would receive compensation from a $12 billion fund.
A man purporting to speak for the Dow Chemical company told the BBC that its Union Carbide subsidiary, which owned the chemical plant when the gas leak killed 3,500 people immediately and later up to 15,000, would be liquidated and the proceeds used for compensation….
The programme was aired twice on BBC World and followed up on Radio 4 and BBC News 24 causing Dow Chemical’s shares to fall 3.4 per cent in Frankfurt before it was discovered that the whole thing was a hoax.
When the victims of con men recount their tales of woe, it nearly always results in the same charge: ‘How could you have fallen for that’? The answer is always the same: the victim believed what they were told because they wanted to believe it.
On the face of it, a claim that a major global concern was going to fall on its collective sword is wholly implausible. At the very least it is the kind of claim that begs for verification; verification that could easily have been sought by means a quick and expedient telephone call to the company’s headquarters and which would have resulted in dismissal.
But that telephone call was never made because the apparent admission of guilt by Dow Chemicals had set BBC hearts-a-flutter. In their minds, Dow Chemicals is guilty, regardless of any facts to do with the Bhopal disaster. Dow is guilty of profiteering, of raping the planet, of making evil chemicals, of being a multinational corporation, of being big. All of a sudden they get an iron-clad confession from the Beast itself: an unimpeachable confirmation and reinforcement of everything that BBC journos believe as Gospel.
They sought no corroboration for the claim because they wanted it to be true. They needed it to be true and, like lovesick adolescent girls who swoon for the duplicitous declarations of love from disingenuous paramours, they gladly opened their legs.
This grubby little incident is a snapshot of everything that is wrong with the Fourth Estate and the BBC bit of it in particular. It is not they are negligent or dishonest but neither are they objective and therein lies the problem.
Like many libertarians I often attack the BBC. I doubt that it is actually more statist in the opinions it supports than ITV and C4, or, perhaps, than ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN in the United States – but with the licence fee (the tax on television owners that goes to the BBC) it hurts more to experience the endless blather about Welfare State spending being the ultimate good and the solution to every problem being another government regulation.
However, the BBC does sometimes get things right. Yesterday, when reporting yet another Chinese coal mine accident, the BBC reporter said “and this makes 7,000 deaths over the last year in the state owned Chinese coal mining industry” and pointed out that there were claims that the Chinese government had cut corners on safety in order to boost production (shades of Stalin’s “war on the limiters”).
In reporting the large numbers of deaths (i.e. that the accident was not an isolated incident) and that the industry was state owned (i.e. that the deaths were not caused by wicked businessmen), the BBC showed a depth of reporting and a fairness that should be praised.
Tonight at midnight I am to be on the Richard Bacon debate show on Radio 5 Live, arguing about censorship. My job, and that of my pro-censorship opponent, will be to poke a stick into the wasps nest that is the Radio 5 phoning-in community, thereby ‘involving’ lots of people. They hope. If no one calls, we will no doubt talk amongst ourselves, although if I know these people they will have done some preliminary poking already, and lined up some callers of appropriate extremity and craziness, for if we two official debaters let the side down by talking too sensibly.
Libertarianism, civil liberties, etc., is strictly stuff that they squeeze in when nothing real is happening (i.e. football). However, I take such chances when they are offered, and if they make it worth my while. They have promised me £80, which for me is not bad for an hour’s intermittent chit-chatting. Wish me luck.
I keep trying to get these radio shows to introduce me as a Samizdata blogger, instead of just as “from the Libertarian Alliance“, but they still do not understand about this, or perhaps fear that their listeners will not understand. I suppose the problem with writing for the internet is that, you know, anyone can do this and it is very easy so therefore it is of no importance. I mean, what on earth could ‘blogging’ possibly have to do with a debate about the official control of and suppression of information?
Glenn Reynolds has a good article in the Guardian about the election and expresses some interesting ideas about its lessons for the media.
Thanks to the internet, cable news channels and talk radio, media bias is easier to spot and easier for people to bypass. This not only changes views, but prevents the formation of a phoney consensus – what experts call “preference falsification” – resulting from widespread, and unified, media bias.
Those of you across the Atlantic may wish to take a lesson from this. As the BBC’s atrocious handling of the Gilligan affair – and, indeed, its war coverage generally – illustrates, media bias is hardly limited to the United States.
But what is with that photo? I would not have recognised that as Glenn but for the context in which it was displayed.
The European Court has dispelled any residual doubt that it is little more than a politically motivated tool of the European Commission and continues its slow but steady construction of the means to make investigative journalism impossible in Brussels by ruling that Belgian police could seize Hans-Martin Tillack‘s computers and records to identify his sources regarding reports on EU corruption.
The Euro-court has made little attempt to hide that is has colluded with EU political interests in a judgement that cuts to the heart of journalists ability to report on wrong doing and corruption by politicians.
Euro-judges accepted commission claims that it played no role in the arrest of Mr Tillack, even though leaked anti-fraud office documents show it orchestrated the raid from the beginning.
Whistleblowing will not be tolerated. The superstate is not your friend.
Here is an interesting effect of the Internet, I think you will agree.
The Telegraph declines to run this article, and Mark Steyn declines to change it until they would.
So, he just sticks it up at his website anyway. (Without the Internet, might he have been more pliable? Without the threat of the Internet, would Mark Steyn be such a good writer?)
Quote:
Paul Bigley can be forgiven his clumsiness: he’s a freelancer winging it. But the feelers put out by the Foreign Office to Ken Bigley’s captors are more disturbing: by definition, they confer respectability on the head-hackers and increase the likelihood that Britons and other infidels will be seized and decapitated in the future. The United Kingdom, like the government of the Philippines when it allegedly paid a ransom for the release of its Iraqi hostages, is thus assisting in the mainstreaming of jihad.
By contrast with the Fleet Street-Scouser-Whitehall fiasco of the last three weeks, consider Fabrizio Quattrocchi, murdered in Iraq on April 14th. In the moment before his death, he yanked off his hood and cried defiantly, “I will show you how an Italian dies!” He ruined the movie for his killers. As a snuff video and recruitment tool, it was all but useless, so much so that the Arabic TV stations declined to show it.
If the FCO wants to issue advice in this area, that’s the way to go: If you’re kidnapped, accept you’re unlikely to survive, say “I’ll show you how an Englishman dies”, and wreck the video. If they want you to confess you’re a spy, make a little mischief: there are jihadi from Britain, Italy, France, Canada and other western nations all over Iraq – so say yes, you’re an MI6 agent, and so are those Muslims from Tipton and Luton who recently joined the al-Qaeda cells in Samarra and Ramadi. As Churchill recommended in a less timorous Britain: You can always take one with you. If Mr Blair and other government officials were to make that plain, it would be, to use Mr Bigley’s word, “enough”. A war cannot be subordinate to the fate of any individual caught up in it.
That last sentence would make a fine Samizdata quote of the day, and I nearly posted it that way instead.
Commenters will no doubt have all kinds of things to say about Scousers, Italians, the FCO, Mr Blair, etc. But what interests me about this little circumstance is that it is yet one more straw in the wind, gently falling onto the back of the camel that is the Mainstream Media.
It just cannot be such fun being an MSM editor these days. You spike an article. But it gets ‘published’ anyway, with your spike marks on it as a badge of pride.
The Guardian, biased but, so far as I can tell after one skim-through, accurate:
For supporters of John Kerry, who have seen allegations about the Democratic candidate’s military record sap his campaign, it must have seemed like a case of just deserts.
The president, George Bush, was last week looking vulnerable on the same grounds after CBS’s flagship current affairs show, 60 Minutes, broadcast a report claiming he had been suspended from pilot duties for failing to meet the required standards. It was also claimed that a commanding officer had been put under pressure to ‘sugar coat’ Mr Bush’s performance reviews.
But while CBS stands by its story, allegations have now surfaced that 60 Minutes based a large part of the report on forged documents.
Now as in last Friday. Surfaced as in we have now heard about it other than just via the blogosphere, who have been all over this for some time. But, better late than never. Much better.
Later on in the same report:
60 Minutes does not have a reputation for irresponsible journalism – it was the show that first broadcast the now notorious photographs of prisoner abuse at the Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq – and it takes the reliability of its stories seriously.
The CBS news president, Andrew Heyward, told the Baltimore Sun he had confidence in the story and it was appropriately vetted, but conceded it was a “political hot potato”.
Indeed. CBS throws more chips on the table with every passing hour.
My one objection to this Guardian report (apart from the fact that I knew it all already) is that it refers to things like “a report on the Free Republic weblog“, while linking only to the Free Republic weblog in general, rather than actually linking to the particular post it refers to. But such links – there are others to the top of other weblogs (Little Green Footballs, Power Line) – are, again, far better than no links at all.
If you do want links, you can of course track all of this on Instapundit. Scroll down and, you know, find the postings for yourself. Unless you think that everything of importance has all been said here. Oh all right then, here is a good Insta-posting to start, with lots of links, to other actual postings.
Changing the subject completely, I have just been reading a very fine description in this book (Maritime Supremacy and the Opening of the West Mind by Peter Padfield) about the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Light, better armed, much more agile little English ships sporting cruelly with the stately galleons of Philip II of Spain, occasionally capturing one, and changing the course of history. An excerpt (about the country that gained most from the Armada’s defeat, Holland) from the book can be found here. Sorry. Flying off at a total red herring tangent. Must stop doing that.
Here, at last, is the truth that the US Government tried to suppress.
They did not want the world to know but, thanks to the painstaking forensic skill and integrity of the Fourth Estate, the skeleton is finally out of the closet!
“We stand by the authenticity of this document” – CBS
“…..the smoking gun” – Reuters
“…incontrovertible proof” – Guardian
“…a major setback for the Bush Whitehouse” – BBC
“What else are they trying to cover up?” – New York Times
Case closed.
One of my favourite scenes from the funniest ever Carry On film, Carry On Up The Khyber, comes right at the end when the villanous Khazi of Khalabar (Kenneth Williams) discourteously attacks the Residence while Sir Sidney Ruff-Diamond (Sid James, of course) and his good lady wife (Joan Sims) are having a formal dinner.
In a gloriously demented show of stiff-upper-lippery the assembled diners refuse to admit that anything is happening. The musicians play on even while the ceiling falls in and the walls crumble. Change our ways because some dashed foreigners are set to slaughter us? By Gad, Sir, next you’ll be asking us to pass the port to the right!
Robert Fisk and the other staff of the Independent probably do not often think of themselves as Sons of the Empire. But I was rather struck by the headline an unknown sub-editor gave Fisk’s front-page Independent article yesterday. The article commemorated the third anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001 – when the crumbling walls and the slaughter were, alas, real rather than part of a movie. The headline said: “We should not have allowed 19 murderers to change our world.”*
* = full story archives here.
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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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