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 Turner Prize competition has become a byword for everything that is, in the opinion of some, trashy, superficial, capricious, and utterly vacuous in today’s art world. Amazingly, it is considered a news event that an artist working in the representational tradition has actually been shortlisted to win the prize named after one of the greatest, if not the greatest, painter that Britain has ever produced.
In the meantime, for those that wonder about what has gone wrong in the art world, may I recommend this fine book about art and the theories thereon by the late Ayn Rand. I highly recommend it even to those who are not Rand fans like yours truly.
Of course, I would love it if this man won the Turner Prize, but I guess he probably does not care a hoot anyway.
Yes, three days later than last year but that comes as no surprise, right?
We have already had people from the commission this morning talking about how they ‘interpret’ the French vote. What don’t they understand? No is no.
If the government in this country or the commission try to breathe life into this corpse, then we in Britain we must have a say to deliver the final blow.
– Liam Fox, Tory Shadow Foreign Secretary
… or at any rate prolonged the misery.
I have been reading The Motivated Mind by Dr Raj Persaud, British TV’s most familiar psychiatric face. This book is, for me, rather less than the sum of its parts. There is a structure to it, in the form of the assertion that human motivation is often very complicated, and more complicated than many psychologists have said. But mostly it is a mixture of more or less informed pop psychology about how to get on with your career, love life, etc., and references to interesting learned articles. It reads more like a bundle of articles than a real book, and personally I would have preferred it as a blog, but that may just be me. So I have not been reading this book solidly. Rather, I have been dipping.
And near the end (p. 396 of my paperback edition) I did come across this amusing titbit:
For many years the most popular method of suicide in Great Britain was asphyxiation – sticking one’s head in the oven and turning on the gas. After the discovery of natural gas deposits in the North Sea in the fifties and sixties, most English homes converted from coke gas, whose high carbon monoxide content made it highly lethal, to less toxic natural gas. From 1963 to 1978 the number of English suicides by gas dropped from 2,368 to eleven and the country’s overall suicide rate decreased by one-third. Despite England’s varying unemployment rate and social stresses since then, it has remained at this lower level.
Maybe you knew that, but I did not, and I find it most intriguing.
The moral? Plenty of them, I suppose, but one would be the extraordinary mismatch that constantly occurs in life between trivial causes and portentous consequences. Economic analysis that it would be more dignified to apply only to such insignificances as chocolate bar purchases – in the form of transaction costs – turns out to illuminate self-administered death also.
For me, if suicide ever beckons, it will either itself be painless, or my continuing existence will itself have become so painful that one more spasm of further pain will make no difference. So it does actually make sense to me that if you remove what must at least seem like a reasonably painless means of exiting from life, many who would have slipped out by this door, instead remain living until death, by natural causes, reaches out to them.
A very small silver lining to the very large dark cloud that overshadows these violent times is that the war on drugs – that is to say the “war” on a particular form of unhealthy behaviour – no longer gets the prestige it once did. I think someone is feeling left out.
Police have claimed new successes in the war on drugs in central Scotland.
Officers have swooped on nearly 20 homes in the Falkirk, Stirling and Clackmannanshire areas in the past week as part of Operation Overlord.
They called it Operation Overlord?
This kind of thing used to enrage me. Then it got to the stage where it embarrassed me. Then it began to perplex me. But now, I am almost entirely resigned.
Go on, do your very worst. Bring it on:
A&E doctors are calling for a ban on long pointed kitchen knives to reduce deaths from stabbing.
A team from West Middlesex University Hospital said violent crime is on the increase – and kitchen knives are used in as many as half of all stabbings.
The researchers said there was no reason for long pointed knives to be publicly available at all.
Next: Doctors call for ban on opposable thumbs.
I reckon it was a plot to make us all buy two copies of the Evening Standard.
First it was:
The French are making an audacious bid to take the London Eye to Paris.
And then later in the day it was:
The London Eye was saved today after an intervention by Ken Livingstone.
In my posting about this ruckus last week, I said that this attempt to gouge a hugely increased rent out of the Wheel might be linked to the plans now in hand to redevelop the South Bank in general, and in particular to rescue the acoustics of the Royal Festival Hall. Since posting that speculation, I have actually visited the South Bank, and can confirm that building work has already begun.
What I omitted to mention was the Olympic effect. The Wheel is obviously a key part of the attempt to get the 2012 Olympics for London.
Evidently the (for now) South Bank Centre (a government funded quango) boss Lord Hollick reckoned that the Olympic effect would work in his favour, and he still might be proved right. But this is politics he is playing, not business, and it seems more likely that he will come out of this very badly. And the South Bank Centre, instead of getting a substantial fraction of the original absurd rent demand, may end up actually losing money. Hollick, by precipitating this row, has already hurt London’s Olympic bid, and Ken Livingstone surely spoke for many, high and low, when he called him a prat. And being called a prat is the least of Hollick’s problems. The trouble with playing the game of Olympic blackmail is that you are liable then to be savaged by extremely savage people, in the form of our particular feral (when angry) current batch of rulers. Hollick is going to need all the friends he can muster in the days to come.
I do not know how seriously to take the alleged French plan to ship the Wheel over to Paris and make it the cherry in the cake of the Paris bid. I love the Wheel, and never for a minute did I fear that this French plan, even assuming it was serious and not just cooked up by some friend of Ken Livingstone, or of the Evening Standard, would be allowed to come to fruition. So I laughed out loud when I first saw the headline.
I also had another laugh this evening when I looked at this website plugging the South Bank Centre, and saw this:
Situated on the South Bank of the River Thames next to the popular London Eye, the South Bank Centre is at the heart of an arts quarter stretching from the National Film Theatre to Tate Modern and Shakespeare’s Globe.
If London loses the Olympic bid, as most of us here at Samizdata.net pray that it does, then everything will turn out splendidly. Lots of entertainment, and no actual Olympics to spoil the fun.
On the other hand, if London does get landed with the Olympics, stand by for blackmail like you’ve never seen before, from whoever decides to give it a go.
And since we are on the subject of ‘Star Wars’ this evening, it appears that Our Glorious Leader has finally been seduced by the ‘Dork Side’:
They are the must-have fashion accessory for the socially aware – and now Tony Blair has got in on the craze.
Whether worn to highlight racism, cancer research or poverty, coloured bands are a familiar sight on the wrists of footballers and pop stars.
Now the prime minister has been photographed wearing a white Make Poverty History wristband during a trip to a hospital in Edgware, north London.
Perhaps he wants to be in a filmy-wilmy with Gwynnie and Braddie?
[Furthermore, for a polished and forensic debunking of this cloth-headed, celebrity-driven codswallop, I recommend Stephen Pollard]
It is arguable that, despite the radical changes that have transformed the British economy over the last three decades, the political economy underlying the welfare state remains intact. This compact, forged following the swing to the left in 1945, was based upon a universal benefits system, that all members of the national community would benefit from. The postwar Labour government wished to extend the perceived benefits of wartime mobilisation and national solidarity, transforming the People’s War into the People’s Peace. Such was their success that the underlying principles of the welfare state and the National Health Service, ‘from the cradle to the grave’ and free healthcare for all, became defining qualities of the British national identity.
Despite the dismantling of the nationalised industries, the third pillar of the welfare state, and the contraction of the benefits system by linking pensions to prices and the use of mens testing, the underlying principles were maintained. Indeed, they were strengthened by the development of the welfare state into a subsidised service for the professional middle classes, with free health and cheap university education. What the Labour government giveth, the Labour government can taketh away. → Continue reading: Alternative methods of squeezing pips
Delightful vignette from the always fascinating Theodore Dalrymple:
The fact is that people who commit fraud, at least on a large scale, have lively, intelligent minds. I usually end up admiring them, despite myself. My last encounter was with a man who defrauded the government of $38,000,000 of value added tax. I am afraid that I laughed. After all, he had merely united customers with cheap goods. Unfortunately for him, he had been lifted from his tropical paradise hideaway by helicopter and then extradited. By the time I met him, though, his sentence was almost over. He had discovered Wittgenstein in prison.
“Did you have to pay the money back?” I asked.
“No,” he replied, “though I would have had a shorter sentence if I had.”
He had calculated that an extra two years as a guest of Her Majesty was worth it. I shook his hand, as a man who was unafraid: I could do no other.
This is merely the appetizer, though, for a delightful tale of literary “fraud.” Tantalizing you with an excerpt might spoil the fun, so I will simply urge you to, as the man says, read the whole thing.
Christopher Hitchens has to be one of the premier knife artists currently working in the English language. Can’t say I’m that big a fan of his post-mortem assaults on Catholic luminaries, but when he lights up a political celebrity, well, its all good.
Indeed, he was a type well known in the Labour movement. Prolier than thou, and ostentatiously radical, but a bit too fond of the cigars and limos and always looking a bit odd in a suit that was slightly too expensive. By turns aggressive and unctuous, either at your feet or at your throat; a bit of a backslapper, nothing’s too good for the working class: what the English call a “wide boy.”
TO THIS DAY, George Galloway defiantly insists, as he did before the senators, that he has “never seen a barrel of oil, owned one, bought one, sold one, and neither has anybody on my behalf.” As a Clintonian defense this has its admirable points: I myself have never seen a kilowatt, but I know that a barrel is also a unit and not an entity. For the rest, his defense would be more impressive if it answered any charge that has actually been made. Galloway is not supposed by anyone to have been an oil trader. He is asked, simply, to say what he knows about his chief fundraiser, nominee, and crony. And when asked this, he flatly declines to answer. We are therefore invited by him to assume that, having earlier acquired a justified reputation for loose bookkeeping in respect of “charities,” he switched sides in Iraq, attached himself to a regime known for giving and receiving bribes, appointed a notorious middleman as his envoy, kept company with the corrupt inner circle of the Baath party, helped organize a vigorous campaign to retain that party in power, and was not a penny piece the better off for it. I think I believe this as readily as any other reasonable and objective person would. If you wish to pursue the matter with Galloway himself, you will have to find the unlisted number for his villa in Portugal.
Hitch gets in a few licks on our own torpid Senate as well, and is pleased to report being characterized by George Galloway as a “drink-sodden ex-Trotskyist popinjay”. Worth the read.
We certainly have our fair share of odious idiots, craven lickspittles, and oleaginous opportunists here in the States, but is there, anywhere in the Anglosphere, a worse human being than George Galloway?
Britons, even those uninterested in sport, would have to have been ignoring the news for the past few weeks not have seen reports about the audacious purchase of English football team Manchester United by American tycoon Malcolm Glazer. His bid, which looks likely to succeed and will take the club off the stock exchange, has enraged fans, concerned that a man with no knowledge of football or the club’s history will wreck the club.
I hope the fans’ worst fears do not come to pass. The deal is, however, troubling. Glazer has taken on a vast amount of debt to finance the deal, presumably calculating that he can earn enough profits to service his debt to make the deal – known in the jargon as a leveraged buyout – viable. With concerns rising that the economy could slow down and dent the firm’s profitability, such a deal could easily end badly for the club. A number of teams, most notably Leeds United, have fallen on hard times, nearly going under due to mountains of debt.
As a gung-ho defender of free enterprise, I can hardly claim that Glazer was not entitled to bid for this team under the rules of the stock market. He has taken his gamble and who knows, it may pay off, although the financial details don’t appear very reassuring. I have noticed more than just a whiff of unpleasant anti-Americanism in some of the reporting on this deal in some quarters of the media.
I follow another team – Ipswich Town FC – but have always had a bit of a soft spot for the team that has given us the likes of Duncan Edwards, George Best and Bryan Robson. I hope that this rather oddball entrepreneur from Florida understands what he is doing and does not wreck one of the most famous, if the most famous, sporting institutions in the world.
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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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