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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By every standard that can be measured, participation and interest in electoral politics in this country is in precipitous decline. With every year that passes the figures for voter turnout, party membership and financial donations drop a few more points down the graph.
The process is slow but apparently inexorable and (for obvious reasons) it is sending an adenalin-rush of panic coursing through the veins of the political classes:
Democracy needs strong political parties. And for them to be representative and effective, they need to be properly funded. In the past 50 years, parties have seen their income and membership decline dramatically while expectations of what they should do have increased.
Says Leader of the Commons and Secretary of State for Wales, Peter Hain, who appears to be far less concerned with political bankruptcy than with the very real threat of financial bankruptcy:
In return for public funding, parties should be obliged to direct a certain amount of their work to community organisation and to educational material for voters. We might, for example, borrow the idea from Germany of creating party-linked, publicly funded foundations which could take on this education and policy formation work.
This relates to the third principle: extending public funding will create a more bottom-up style of politics, with political parties better embedded in local communities, for example by financing youth organisers in major towns or population centres, so reaching young people disturbingly turned off politics.
Public funds could be earmarked for salaries to employ general party organisers at national, regional and local level, as happens in Sweden, Germany and other European countries. Public funds could also pay for training and political education schemes and international contacts between parties.
So Mr. Hain is proposing that the funding that he and his colleagues have signally failed to amass through voluntary donation should now be taken by force. In return for this ‘generosity’, civil society will be merged with ‘the party’ to become a single living, breathing, sweating, symbiotic creature of state.
More public funding could help all parties extend their work beyond the world of political activists, creating a politics that serves the people and not just politicians.
Some people will believe that. But then some people will believe anything.
The raison d’etre for being a politician, or to use that wonderfully explicit Americanism, a ‘lawmaker’, is to pass laws. This is a topic I have often pondered before. Without that ability, a politician’s power of patronage completely disappears and with it, the funds given by people who want laws enacted that tilts the table in favour their personal or factional interests. To be a politician is to see the world as something to be legislated.
Thus when I hear that there is another push in the US to pass laws that will ‘control the availability of pornography to minors’, I feel the urge to nod sagely and marvel at yet another example of the triumph of image over substance. Now I know you expect the usual rant from me regarding how such legislation is a violation of both freedom of expression and freedom of association, but as any regular reader of Samizdata.net already knows my views on that, let me just point out that what really interests me is that ‘lawmakers’ are so happy to pass laws that have no chance whatsoever of making the slightest difference to the perceived problem at hand. This is nothing new of course, but it is sometimes worth reminding oneself why this happens so often.
The public appearance of a politico ‘doing something’ is far more valuable to that politico than actually addressing the problems they are called on to fix. Thus the actual efficacy of a measure, or even the prospect of the law passing, is often largely incidental to the decision to try and enact a law. Thus if the ACLU, EFF, FOREST or whoever get a bill strangled at birth, the politico can shake his head sadly at his enraged backers and say “Hey, I tried, but those slimy [civil rights/capitalist/pinko/faggot] S.O.Bs got in the way”.
And thus a sublimely fungible business like Internet pornography, much of which already runs off servers in Romania, Bangladesh and Brazil (places not known for giving a flying whatever what laws get enacted in the USA), is going to be effectively regulated by some American law how exactly?
Do the majority of legislators actually care? Probably not, other that a small semi-demented cadre of folks from the less well travelled American hinterlands who probably cannot conceive that the world is filled with people who regard the antics of American Lawmakers with mild bemusement or utter indifference.
George Monbiot is as mad as hell and he’s not going to take it anymore. Narcolepsy-inducing speeches, plaintive whining and bogus statistics are no longer enough to bring about revolution. And George should know because he has tried all three.
The time for mere words has passed and the time for action has begun:
The formula for making things happen is simple and has never changed. If you wish to alter a policy or depose a prime minister between elections, you must take to the streets.
I think George is making yet another big mistake if he thinks that sleeping in shop doorways and begging strangers for money is going to change the world. But who am I to argue?
“It’s not the age, it’s the mileage.”
Like so many other bloggers have done, I could not resist generating a map of the places I have visited (though I feel India and Bahrain are a cheat because it was only changing airplanes)…
PS:
Ah yes, St. Valentine’s Day.  The shop windows are filled with endless tacky heart-shaped corporate eye-catchers and the air is filled with cupid’s arrows… and other rather faster moving objects.
Have fun.
No… not some tedious article about race…
Perhaps the reason I find snow in London so fascinating is that it is both uncommon, little more than a dusting and very picturesque. I do not recall finding it so interesting when I lived in the United States, but that might have been because when it snowed, verily the skies opened and it tended to be a significant inconvenience! That said, New Jersey copes better with 3 feet of snow that London does with 3 inches 
Last Saturday I decided to treat a friend of mine to a dinner at a restaurant, the Painted Heron, that received one of the most glowing reviews I have ever come across. It appeared in the last week’s Sunday paper magazine (no link, alas) and it certainly inspired me despite the fact I am not too keen on Indian food.
The dinner was an extraordinary experience. Despite our high expectations induced by Matthew Norman’s raving review, we were not disappointed. Everything – the decor, food and service – was excellent and the price commensurate with the quality we enjoyed. For our London-based readers I recommend to make a trip to 112 Cheyne Walk, SW10 and sample the gastrogasm-inducing fare we enjoyed.
I also applaud Matthew Norman whose restaurant review in the Sunday Telegraph Magazine is one of the sections of the paper I read regularly. His razor sharp witt is refreshing as he uses it to punture many a pompous restaurant’s pretentions. However, his vitriolic sarcasm had a day off when he wrote a review for the Painted Heron – one of the reasons I wanted to see this culinary marvel. And as it was substantiated, I am ready to trust his opinions in the future. He is by no means the only one to give high marks to the place. Although I cannot link to his review, I found another reviewer making pretty much the same points:
The food is bloody marvellous. Every single dish made me stamp my feet and howl at the moon.
The tandoori baby chicken came. And I came over all funny. This was a good strong bird not much bigger than a greedy quail, served whole, orange from the oven and trickling juices and runnels of bright yoghurt, served on onion kulcha bread.
I picked it up and tore in. Sweet Jesus. And then I was sorry again because the chicken in your local curry house is not fit to cluck orisons over the carcass of this princely bird-child.
Quite.
Still reeling from the culinary delights of the night before, I opened this week’s Sunday Telegraph and right in the news section I find out how Matthew Norman’s review of another restaurant has earned him a letter from the owner threatening to sue.
It was, both parties will submit, not quite a glowing review. Indeed, phrases such as “the eighth circle of hell”, “among the very worst restaurants in Christendom” and “meals of crescendoing monstrosity” may have conveyed the impression that Matthew Norman, the prize-winning restaurant critic of The Sunday Telegraph Magazine, was not entirely enamoured with the food on offer at Shepherds in Westminster, central London.
Last week, alas, things moved from the kitchen towards the courtroom. Richard Shepherd, the owner of Shepherds, whose restaurant has long been a favourite of politicians, is threatening to sue The Sunday Telegraph for libel because he was so hurt by the review.
Unless Mr Shepherd received damages paid to the charity of his choice, and the opportunity to write a letter defending his restaurant, he would have no choice but to sue.
It is not just a matter of free speech and the right to express one’s opinions, especially when one is getting paid for doing so, but the manner in which Mr Shepherd’s reacted to Mr Norman’s sharp and let’s face it, witty criticism.
Where do you start with somewhere like Shepherds? You don’t. If you have any sense you finish with it.
There is so much about Shepherds that is wrong that it would, in a more elegant age, merit a pamphlet rather than a review.
This is a man who likes his food and dislikes the kind of pretentious ‘concept’ restaurants that has sprouted all over London in the last decade or so. Apparently, many customers have written letters to the Telegraph expressing support to the restaurant with colourful insults directed at Mr Norman. One has to remember though that Shepherd’s is frequented by politicians whose palates are not necessarily amongst the most discriminating, what with having to kiss arses all day long…
Mr Shepherd’s response, or more accurately his lawyers’ response, is a seriously po-faced letter that completely misses the point of Mr Norman’s job and talent. It is almost distressing to see the kind of corporate bullying normally reserved for customers directed at a restaurant reviewer. There was at least one dissenter, John Blundell of the Institute of Economic Affairs, who wrote:
Thank you a million times for your brilliant review of Shepherds. I stopped eating there four years ago when we had to send back three of our four main courses.
Mr Norman himself appeared unrepentant, although he did admit that he had one regret.
The lawyers’ letter was far more amusing than my review. That’s the sad thing.
Somehow I doubt it…
George Monbiot aka Moonbat has joined the great and the good in the 2004 edition of Who’s Who, described as environmentalist and writer.
Oh dear.
(in today’s Telegraph’s print edition)
An American scientist, William von Hippel has an explanation for racism. Well, a theory of why elderly people are more likely to be prejudiced than young people. And if his research is right, it’s not just because they grew up in a different era, because Blair’s Britain is a sink pit of immigrant crime, or because old people are brave enough to fly in the face of political correctness. Mary Wakefield explains in today’s Telegraph that a bit of their brain is missing:
According to von Hippel and other psychologists working in the same field, whatever age we are, our immediate thoughts are formed by cultural stereotypes. This means we instinctively think inappropriate and unfriendly things about each other.
…
For a highly social species, the ability to keep these thoughts to oneself is crucial, so we have developed a special part of our brains – a mesh of connections between the prefrontal lobes and the limbic system – to inhibit and temper them.
…
Where von Hippel’s research is new is in suggesting that older people’s brains often suffer the same sort of damage. They become prejudiced because they lack the power to inhibit the stereotypes that form our instinctive thoughts.
The gap in their brain releases stereotypes and they naturally infer that they are doing it on purpose.
I have no idea whether the theory will hold up to further scientific scrutiny. I also do not like the implication that older people’s opinions and behaviour are somehow not results of their rational discourse but determined by a neurological phenomenon. Nevetheless it is an interesting article that caught my attention and so it appears here without any firm conclusions from me as to its goodness or badness. If true, it has highlighted the importance of stereotyping and unexamined prejudices. Get your opinions in order before you are disconnected from them and begin to embarass your offspring. 
Of course, this means that there could be a psychological metacontext.
Clearly an off day here at Samizdata. So maybe today is the day for a question which I found via b3ta.com. This is a question that has always troubled me, ever since I first encountered the problem.
Warning. If you do not like questions about toilets, and in particular about how disgusting they can be when they are being really, really disgusting, then stop reading now. I mean it. This is not a nice posting. This is a crappy posting. But the way I see it, after the previous posting, I have nothing left to lose, dignity-wise.
Okay, here it is:
German toilets are quite extraordinary. Other European toilets – well, the ones that aren’t merely holes in the floor – work much like their North American cousins. They are shaped a little differently, but the basic principle is the same: the excrement either lands directly in the water or it slides down a steep slope into the water, before being flushed away. Simple, effective and clean. See?
There then follows a picture of a North American cousin type toilet. But now, and this is your last chance to stop reading this if your disgustingness threshold is low, comes this basic and most troubling fact:
Not so the German toilet.
Last chance. Okay, you asked for it.
The excrement lands on a bone-dry horizontal shelf, mere inches beneath one’s posterior. Repeated flushings are required to slide the ordure off the shelf into a small water-filled hole, from which it hopefully disappears. See?
And then there’s a picture of that, in section, as we ex-architecture students say.
And the rest of the piece can be boiled down to a one word summary: Why? What on earth, on the sun, and on all the other planets in circulation around the sun, is the point of this arrangement? Why do they do this???
The Samizdata commentariat has a growing reputation in the blogosphere for its combination of intellectual scrupulousness, technical savvy, and for its general ability to see the larger picture, to sense what are the important things in life and what are not. So people, let’s get this thing understood, and if necessary dealt with. Either we establish once and for all that there is a good reason for this apparently senseless, not to say plague inviting arrangement, and that it really does have a good reason, and then tell the world about it, or we establish that there is no good reason for this arrangement and we set in motion the (if the latter is the case) long over-due process of putting a stop to it.
The internet is a powerful thing, with a global reach. Time to use the its powers for good once again.
Sorry, Natalie, but I am in a profound depression triggered by the US Supreme Court’s decision to jettison the First Amendment (which protects, or used to, freedom of speech and of the press). After I am suitably medicated (less than half a bottle of Laphroiag to go), I will have some thoughts on one of the fundamental flaws in the whole campaign finance debacle.
Right then. Desperate times, desperate measures. It’ll just have to be the kittens.
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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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