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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Sheila Lawlor, director of the think tank Politeia, is concerned that the status of teachers is low and that too few people apply to become teachers. She regrets that in Britain it is rather easy to get a place in a teaching course whereas elsewhere in Europe the entry qualifications are strict. In an article for the Times entitled Get higher grades from teachers first, she writes:
Would raising entry standards at least to those of comparable European countries help to improve matters? Or would, as one union threatened some time ago, a GCSE Grade B in maths mean that applications to the profession collapse? Probably more terrifying for the Government than bad teachers is the prospect of no teachers. Yet far from threatening the supply of teachers, higher and tougher entry standards bring greater competition for places. In France five candidates compete for each job. Here the highest entry levels set for medical school go along with the most sought after university places.
This is an interesting argument. Well, not exactly argument, since having raised the question of whether making it harder to become a teacher might not reduce the supply of teachers as common sense and two and a half centuries of observed economics might lead one to expect, she simply asserts that the converse is true: “Higher and tougher entry standards bring greater competition for places.”
I think the bit that is meant to be the argument is the next sentence, saying that in France – where, as the article has said earlier, the status of teachers is high, and the qualifications required to become a teacher are also high, there are many people who want to be teachers.
Back in 1974 the physicist Richard Feynman gave a lecture in which he described the beliefs of certain primitive tribes:
In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas–he’s the controller–and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land.
See, the tribe of the French get the cargo. Let us do as the French do and surely the cargo will flow to us!
Ms Lawlor, like the cargo cultists, is persuaded that by imitating some of the forms (runways, men with headphones, high entry qualifications for teaching) associated with a desired state of affairs (free goodies from the gods, high status of teachers) one can cause that state of affairs to come about.
To be fair to Ms Lawlor, economists do speak of certain goods for which demand, contrary to the usual way of things, goes up as the price goes up. I think they are either called Veblen goods or Giffen goods but trying to nail down which might apply here is giffen me a headache. I will concede that just possibly increasing the entry qualifications for teaching might conjure down a little status from the sky. Perhaps one or two easily-led souls might be induced to apply for a teaching course as a result. But compared to the numbers put off from doing so by the frequent unpleasantness and occasional danger involved in teaching in a British state school, this is very minor magic indeed.
Sorry. No airplanes land.
What does one call a state partially ruled by a club for police chiefs and ‘law enforcement’ bureaucrats who do not wish to obey the law?
In a perhaps understandably nasty tirade about Harriet Harman, Rod Liddle, the Spectator’s resident yob, we get this paragraph:
“The reason we should have disquiet about Harriet is because she is either thick or criminally disingenuous. My guess is thick. Being a bit thick should not disqualify someone from leading their party, I suppose, as both Iain Duncan Smith and Lord Salisbury would concur.”
Well it may be true that Ms Harman is as dumb as a stump, a moron of heroic proportions, completely out of her depth, etc. But Lord Salisbury? The gentleman, who was prime minister for long periods at the end of the 19th Century when the British Empire was at its greatest extent, was hardly thick. Wrong, maybe, but thick, no. His shrewd handling of foreign affairs for certain periods, for example, puts him considerably ahead of most contemporary politicians. And he was quite libertarian in many ways, a skeptic about the efficacy of government power to improve human lives. A sign of wisdom, I’d say.
In making such an assertion about Lord Salisbury’s alleged thickness, Mr Liddle comes across as a bit of a thickie himself. And in wondering out loud about the sexual desirability, or lack, of these various New Labour women, he also undermines what might have been a good essay on the awfulness of their ideas by being so incredibly crass. But maybe I am just old fashioned or something. “That is the trouble with you, Johnathan, you’re not “edgy” enough.”
“As for politicians’ personal conduct, I doubt it is much worse, relative to other professions, than it has always been, and it is not — or should not be — the main cause for concern. Personally, I would much rather MPs had numerous extramarital affairs, their hands in the till, or lucrative second jobs exploiting inside knowledge, than that they cavalierly abolish yet another civil liberty that took hundreds of years to establish. As far as I am concerned, politicians are welcome to be not only greedy, but also dull, unapproachable, ugly, pompous, clubby, elitist or socially inept, just as long as they do not consider it their job to reform society by making up a few more laws and rushing them through parliament as quickly as possible. Sadly, the people who agree with me appear to be a very small minority.”
Fabian Tassano. His blog is required reading, in my view.
Sir Bobby Robson, former manager of Newcastle Utd, England and a brace of successful European clubs (such as PSV Eindhoven, Barcelona), has died after a brave fight against cancer. But the club that in many ways will feel the pain of his loss the most is Ipswich Town FC, the club I have supported since I was a young boy
He took this relatively unfashionable club on the UK’s east coast to the heights of success in the FA Cup and in European competition, coming also very close to winning the old domestic First Division. His teams were glorious to watch. He conducted himself with grace, good humour – apart from the occasional tiff with the media – and had an infectious love of the sport that inspired football fans and players from all clubs. RIP.
Surely the Second Coming is at hand!
The way to absolute power is to dress up empty cruelty as public virtue, and have the organs of propaganda promulgate it for ‘carers’ to inflict on children. Finally they have an excuse to take Teddy Bears from toddlers.
The alternative news-agency SchNEWS, frequently offers inchoherent and borderline-mad stories, but it does carry some interesting stuff from time to time, including this well-composed and entirely plausible account* of how even hippy festivals are now closely regulated by the authorities:
In spite of these setbacks, [the Big Green Gathering (BGG)] managed to scrape themselves back off the floor with shareholder cash and some potentially dubious corporate involvement. Every effort had been made by the gathering’s organisers to accommodate the increasingly niggling demands of police and licensing authorities. The procedure lasted over six months – just check out www.mendip.gov.uk/CommitteeMeeting.asp?id=SX9452-A782D404 for the minutes of meetings held between organisers and the authorities. Demands included a steel fence, watchtowers and perimeter patrols, having the horsedrawn field inside a ‘secure compound’ and wristbands for twelve undercover police. At a multi-agency meeting on Thursday, police took those wristbands in order to maintain the pretence that the festival stood a chance of going ahead. A catalogue of other obstacles were also continually placed in the organiser’s path.
All of the businesses associated with the BGG came under scrutiny, licensing authorities contacted South West ambulances, the Fire Brigade and the fencing contractors and asked them to get payment up front from the BGG. Needless to say this caused huge problems.
For their own good, of course. One cannot just have hippies hiring fields from farmers in order to have a place to enjoy themselves as they see fit. Someone might not get hurt. And that would open the floodgates to anarchy in the UK. Or Wessex, at least.
hat-tip: Dr Geraint Bevan
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* Though they do get the date of the vile Licensing Act 2003 wrong
Iain Dale, the UK politics blogger, has interesting things to say about how Sir Trevor Phillips, head of the Equalities & Human Rights Commission, has come under attack from the far left over his not being sufficiently on-message with their agendas. Well, as Mr Dale eventually states, it is probably about time that this quango – quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisation – was scrapped. Far from soothing racial or other tensions, it seems at times to require their continuation to justify its existence. As any student of Parkinson’s Law will tell you, such a bureaucracy will endlessly look for new things to do, new causes to embrace, or new dragons to be slain. Sir Trevor is, by the standards of such organisations, relatively sane, which no doubt is one of the reasons why the hard left hates him. If he had sense, Sir Trevor should commend the government, any government, to heed Mr Dale’s advice. This organisation needs to join a long list of quangos for annihilation.
The decision by the UK government a few months ago to use anti-terrorism powers over the case of Icelandic banks in trouble has caused deep resentment in Iceland. As this article suggests, such a tactic is hardly a way for Britain – now in deep debt – to make friends with foreign investors. Of course, Mr Brown may have made the calculation that he will be out of power in a few months so why care? But even so, the use of such powers represented a new low for UK diplomatic relations. It also proves the age-old truth that if governments acquire new powers, they will use them in ways far beyond their original scope.
In Britain, you probably are.
Both the Shetland Islands Council (101) and Corby Borough Council (90) – among the smallest local authorities in the UK – have more CCTV cameras than the San Francisco Police Department (71)
– BBC Report Pretty pictures here.
That’s nothing, it seems. We learn today that a single school in Stockwell, south London, has 96.
Dominic Lawson tears into the moral cant and dubious economics of those who want to festoon the UK with windmills as a solution to so-called man-made global warming. As he says, other countries, such as Germany, have spent large sums on such alternative technologies but have not, yet, been able to retire conventional power stations at all.
I am quite a fan of tidal power, as alternatives go (although I think that no serious energy policy that sidelines nuclear power is worth considering as a practical one). Unlike the wind, which is dependent on weather, tides are as regular as the orbit of the Moon. Reversible turbines could be powered by the regular, big currents that sweep to and fro in the coastal waters of countries such as the UK, France, Germany and Spain. And unlike windmills, they would not, hopefully, create a bloody great eyesore or hazard, either.
Apparently it is news that the UK is still in recession, or as the headline says Economic recovery in UK ‘on hold’.
On hold? The government is debasing people’s saving as quickly as possible and stripping money out of productive sectors and pumping it into unproductive sectors, and generally trying their damnedest to drive businesses and wealth creators out for years now… and the fact this is tearing a huge hole is surprising to who exactly?
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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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