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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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.
Mark Steyn comments here on the absurdity of trying to legislate to make our charming youth appear less menacing by stopping them from wearing hooded tracksuit tops of the sort familiar in any major city. As he goes on to write, the attempt by the government to try and regulate this sort of thing suggests the government has a terrible naivety about the ability of the State to improve things like manners and standards of conduct by brute force of law:
But respect is a two-way street, and two-way streets are increasingly rare in British town centres. The idea that the national government can legislate respect is a large part of the reason why there isn’t any. Almost every act of the social democratic state says: don’t worry, you’re not responsible, leave it to us, we know best. The social democratic state is, in that sense, profoundly anti-social and ultimately anti-democratic.
As Steyn points out, the habit of wearing hoods, large baseball caps and the like is in part a rebellion against the gazillions of CCTV cameras which now festoon so many of our town centres, shopping malls, public buildings and even, so the government hopes, our countryside. The law of Unintended Consequences, as Steyn says, applies. If you treat the populace like kids being minded by nannies in a creche, some of them will try and hide from nanny the best way they can. Of course, there is no reason why owners of private premises cannot enforce dress codes, as happens in pubs which ban people from wearing soccer shirts etc. However fair or unfair, owners should be allowed to insist on the dress code and behaviour they deem fit.
Perhaps this government might try to treat us like reasonably intelligent adults. You never know, the habit might catch on.
The recent television programme which has made the most difference to Britain has, I would say, been Jamie Oliver‘s show about school food. I did not see the show myself, but my sister, who used to be a General Practitioner, did see it, and was hugely impressed by it. She has not been the only one, to put it mildly. Never in the field of human cookery will so much be eaten, so differently, by so many, at the behest of just one celebrity chef.
My sister was especially impressed by the bit of his show where Jamie persuaded just one family to change the diet, for just one week, of their extremely troublesome and badly behaved children. The behaviour of the children was utterly transformed! They became nice, companionable people. Even more striking was that, as a treat for having eaten their meat and two veg (or whatever it was) and for behaving so well, the children were given another junk food meal, and they immediately reverted to being their old monstrous selves.
I have two comments to make about this story, beyond observing that it has had an electrifying effect upon Britain’s educrats, and school food providers.
First, it is quite wrong to blame the free market for this sorry episode. In a real free market, schools would fall over themselves to offer good meals rather than bad ones. Insofar as there is something resembling a private sector in British education, it does supply quite nutritious food. (I went to a succession of private sector schools, and the food was pretty good, in the adult sense of being nutritionally good.) When British state schools were instructed, by Margaret Thatcher, to farm out school catering to the lowest bidders, that was an exercise in state diktat, not of the freedom of a free market. In real free markets you are not compelled to buy the cheapest version of what you want. No, you buy what you truly want, and if you choose to buy something good but more expensive, fine. That is your choice.
But when the same old single customer (the government) decides that its purchases shall be obtained from slightly different suppliers, that does not make a free market. One single word, ‘privatisation’, was invented to blur this distinction, the idea being that moves in a free market direction had to be made one small step at a time, and once you have lots of separate school food suppliers, that might make it easier to move towards having lots of genuinely independent schools. And that may even be true. But the distinction thus blurred should nevertheless be insisted upon.
Second, since this is not actually a free market versus state diktat issue, but merely a good food versus bad food issue, then, if like me you agree with my sister that the kind of food Jamie Oliver has been recommending would be an improvement over junk food, then you will welcome the influence he is now having. I agree that a free market in education, as in everything, would be better. But given that education is largely nationalised, it is good, other things being equal, that the inmates of this system should be well fed rather than badly fed.
At last, that bastion of idiotarianism the BBC is going to go off the air for a while, God willing! That these grasping tax funded parasites are going to strike during major televised sporting events is splendid news so maybe now more folks might be a bit less willing to shell out £125 (about $240) per year in order to support an institution filled with moral relativists, collectivists, reflexive anti-Americans and pro-Islamofascists.
Whilst Britain remains fixated on the aftermath of Tony Blair’s unprecedented third term victory against their intellectually bankrupt and dependably inept opponents, it would behove people in Britain to pay a bit more attention to the electoral earthquake which shook Ulster which has resulted in David Trimble’s relatively moderate Ulster Unionist Party has almost completely collapsing in favour of Ian Paisley Democratic Unionist Party.
Now that the only two significant political players locally are the two extremist parties from either side of the sectarian divide, things look like they are about to get dramatically more… interesting. The message from the Northern Ireland’s protestant majority seems pretty damn clear to me but is anyone actually listening? I have a feeling I am going to be spending a lot more time keeping tabs on what get said on Slugger O’Toole, that most indispensable source of insights for all things Northern Irish, to see how things develop.
This is interesting. It is Maurice Saatchi, in the Telegraph, ruminating upon the Conservative electoral defeat:
It will come as a surprise to my Conservative colleagues, as they absorb the lessons of last week’s defeat, to learn that the Tory Party lost the 2005 election in 1790. That was the year Edmund Burke first advised Conservatives to concentrate on: What is not What should be.
With that single fatal distinction, pragmatism became the hallmark of Conservatism. Absence of idealism became its invisible badge of honour. And aimlessness became the pinnacle of its morality. There would never be a romantic bone in a Conservative body – or so Burke hoped.
Two hundred years later, Conservatism has fallen into an electoral slump, because it remains captive to his bleak instruction. At the 2005 election, the authentic voice of 18th-century Tory pragmatism spoke through the medium of the Conservative spokesman who said: “If you want philosophy, read Descartes.” He meant that the function of the Conservative Party is to make the trains run on time. That may be so, or at least partly right. But the lesson of the campaign we have just fought is that the mere promise of efficiency is not enough to persuade people that you would be an efficient Government. Mere anger at the problems of the world we live in is not enough to convince the voters that the Conservative Party is fit to solve them.
Read the whole thing. And while you are about it, read this Paul Marks paper to see what a misreading of Burke much of the above is. The usual Conservative practice where Edmund Burke is concerned is to misread him to be an unthinking, anti-principled pragmatist, and agree with that misreading. Saatchi misreads in the usual manner, but at least disagrees with the misreading. With the flair of the advertising man that he is, he signals his argument for principle by being a Conservative and opposing Burke. Good grief!! Would Burke himself have been pleased or infuriated? A bit of both, probably.
But never mind about such scholarly digressions. The point about this piece is not just what is being said but who is saying it. → Continue reading: Dumping pragmatism on pragmatic grounds
Andrew Sullivan has an absolutely barnstormer of a piece here about the British elections. It is often highly refreshing to read a perspective on the poll by a Brit living thousands of miles away after having spent the past two decades earning a living outside the UK. His analysis of what is wrong with the Tories, his brilliant skewering of our media, and his rendering of the LibDems and Labour, is spot on.
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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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