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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Well, I guess one has to admire the guts of these fellows:
A group of 100 shopkeepers in Palermo, the nerve centre of the Sicilian Mafia, have staged an unprecedented rebellion against the Cosa Nostra by refusing to pay protection money. Until now, almost every business in the Sicilian capital has quietly paid off the Mafia or faced retribution. But since Bernardo Provenzano, the 73-year-old “boss of all the bosses”, was arrested two weeks ago after decades in hiding, the island’s anti-Mafia movement has gathered momentum.
This may end badly, I fear.
I know how many readers and Samizdatistas enjoyed the glorious “Sod off, Swampy!” story from last year. Like the incorrigible news truffle pig he is, Tim Blair found that particular happy tale. This time Tim has prime beef on the menu. Here’s a taste:
Protester Angie Stephenson says it was terrifying.
“The workers, they were standing around cheering and whooping and yelling and making lewd comments so we had to call the police and tell them to get out here straight away,”
A great example of workers’ enterprise in the face of protesting menaces attempting to hinder a perfectly legal activity. I think I will pop down to the shops and buy some expensive fillet steak for dinner to further enjoy the labour of underappreciated abbattoir workers like those mentioned above.
Not only is Jacques Chirac, no matter what he thinks and says, NOT funding a French ‘Google killer,’ he “doesn’t even know what a mouse is”. And that comes directly from a guy who is a partner in the French non-‘Google killer’. Search expert John Battelle interviewed the guy, Francois Bourdoncle, and writes:
So what is [Chirac] funding? Well, according to Bourdoncle, there will be no single Quaero site. Instead, Quaero is a program, a long term effort to spur various European competitors toward creating better search related technologies. Participants will share R&D, for example, as well as become each other’s customers. In other words, this is a government funded attempt at pulling together a keiretsu of sorts.
Not exactly a European Google killer, I commented. Nope, Bourdoncle responded, and attempting to do that would be a pretty stupid move. I couldn’t agree more. Sounds to me, I thought to myself, that Quaero is simply a way for huge companies like Thompson to insure a steady flow of dollars from its government, and if using the Big Google Is Going to Kill European Culture meme helps along the way, so be it. Before I could even mention that idea, Bourdoncle addressed it head on, saying he was sure folks might see it that way, and he was not one to say if it was true or not. “I’m not really sure what (Thompson’s) strategy is,” he said. “They don’t tell me that.” Sounds like the keiretsu is shaping up nicely, no?
The ASI hosted a gathering of bloggers and curious old media types in Westminster last night. Times journo Danny Finkelstein and well known blog commentator Tim Worstall. As with all the ASI events I have attended, I rather enjoyed myself and there was a large posse of OG bloggers to swap scandal with.
Read more about it from Jax here.
In his classic demolition of Big Government, Parliament of Whores, P.J. O’Rourke explains that one of the keys to explaining how govermment can spread its tentacles and prove so hard to roll back is that its very size makes it hard for anyone, even a smart reformer, to understand. The bafflement that one experiences when looking at the extent of the state is part of why it stays big, he argues.
I was reminded of this by the sheer contrast with what used to be the case. As William Hague points out in his excellent biography of 18th Century UK statesman Pitt the Younger (now out in paperback), Pitt had hardly any resources at all in his brief spell as Chancellor of the Exchequer. There were no civil servants or secretaries, no armies of bureaucrats. Nothing. Nada. Zip. And when Pitt entered 10 Downing Street, the actual size of the state engine at his command was just as meagre, even though this was a government that was to wage war against Bonaparte, deal with the growth of an empire in India and the effects of the Industrial Revolution.
Ponder on that, Gordon Brown.
Rumours are afoot that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are going to be in Hollywood’s attempt to bring Atlas Shrugged to the big screen. They might make an interesting pair to play John Galt and Dagny Taggart.
Mike Masnick, posting on Techdirt, notes an unfortunate development in U.S. politics: the adoption of network neutrality as a partisan issue. At which point the discussion starts to sound eerily familiar:
The only reasons the telcos are in the position to violate network neutrality are because they’ve pretty much been granted subsidies and monopoly rights of way – and part of that bargain was that to increase competition, there needed to be open and fair access. To suddenly claim that we need a hands off approach is ignoring the fact that there’s never been a hands off approach and the companies involved were granted special rights.
This neutrality dilemma reminds me a lot of similar discussions of free markets. The difference is that it is a less mature discussion – for now. We have been talking about markets for a long time now, and we no longer frame the debate in terms of whether a market is simply free or un-free, as all markets exist in a relative state of freedom at all times.
The debate on neutrality, being younger, so it still sounds, like a bunch of people agitating for or against a perect state of being known as ‘neutrality’. But like freedom, neutrality an ethos, not a state of being. As Masnick implies, there may be such a thing as objective reality (I like to think so), but there is no such thing as objective neutrality.
Life is far more fun when you have a really good book on the go, and the only thing wrong with mine just now is that it weighs too much to be lugged about comfortably on my pedestrian journeyings around London. It is The Lives & Times of the Great Composers by Michael Steen. For me, this book is perfect. I know what most of the music that the great composers composed sounds like. But I am enjoying hugely learning more about the circumstances in which this wonderful music was composed and first listened to.
After an Italian prelude, the first big name composer Steen deals with is Handel, the German who ended up living in London for most of his life.
Handel’s London was an exciting place (p. 39 of my unwieldy paperback):
The year before Handel arrived, Sir Christopher Wren’s St Paul’s Cathedral had been completed at a cost of £1,167,474 paid for largely by the import duty on coal. Sir Isaac Newton, the great scientist was still at work. London, with its sounds of wheels rumbling on cobbles and cries from the street vendors, was well into a century of commercial and cultural prosperity: the country’s population grew by 71 per cent over the century; its merchant fleet more than doubled in tonnage between 1702 and 1776.
London, in other words, then as now, was making lots of progress. Perhaps because music itself can be such an otherworldy thing, even when composed by such a worldly figure as the energetically entrepreneurial Handel, Steen chooses in this book to emphasise the material aspect of things when describing the world in which this music was created.
The kind of people who enjoy the fruits of material progress, but who enjoy them more than they think about how they were first devised and are now cultivated, often dismiss progress as a small thing, perhaps because they dislike the kind of people who are needed to make it, and the methods they must be allowed to use. (Basically: commerce. And insofar as “public spending” is involved, someone has to make that money first before it can be spent.) Such people should ponder pieces of writing such as what Michael Steen says next about Handel’s London:
Behind its superficial prosperity and elegance, London was overcrowded, squalid and full of beggars. People had fleas, lice and few teeth. Most people defecated in nooks and crannies, or used public lavatories built over rivers such as the Fleet. For the more refined, with a small fee, the ‘human lavatory’ would provide a pail and extend its large cape as a screen. Lavatory paper did not exist, the alternatives ranged from a sponge on a stick in a container of salt water, to stones, shells and bunches of herbs.
Delightful.
But the most chilling observation Steen makes about the trials and tribulations of material life in the early eighteenth century – instead of the early twenty-first, say – is this, a couple of paragraphs later:
The political outlook was uncertain.
So? When was it not? But now, hear the reason:
Queen Anne, who was in her late 40s, had borne seventeen children; mostly still-born, none had survived.
Let an anti-progress person of now read that, and then try telling us that material progress of is no great importance, or of no “spiritual” significance, that it is merely a matter of brute, animal comfort. The Queen of England, no less – who presumably enjoyed, if that is the word, the very best medical attention then available – scored zero out of seventeen in the deadly game of childbirth and child-rearing; which meant that there was no obvious royal heir, which meant that the political outlook was uncertain. Poor, poor woman.
Later (p. 54), Michael Steen throws light on another kind of material progress, of a sort that is far more widely and deliberately scorned than progress in things like plumbing or medicine (which is often merely forgotten about), namely cosmetics. Steen has this to tell us about the way that the sort of women Handel often had dealings with – such as the highly paid and outrageously indulged and pampered opera singers whom he supplied tunes for, the crazy rock stars of their day – tried to beautify themselves:
Their faces were painted with compounds of white lead, rice and flour, with washes of quicksilver boiled in water with bismuth.
Suddenly, the progress made in female adornment, which has put incomparably more convenient and healthy – to say nothing of far more visually appealing – methods of adornment into the hands of any modern woman with a few quid to spare who wants them, appears almost as impressive as progress in plumbing, medicine, nutrition, travel, civil engineering, electronic entertainment, or even the wondrous progress that was about to be made in the two centuries after Handel, in music.
Harry Hutton, the funniest man in the blogosphere, has auteured a short film.
Having previously written a post on Alfred the Great (who I still think was the greatest Englishman who ever lived) and his family, I think it would be nice to present a pro-Viking post (or at least pro-Norse: not quite the same thing).
To go a Viking is to ‘raid’ in the language of old Norse and most Norse people were not raiders – they were farmers, craftsmen and traders (although someone might be any of these three things and still be a raider at some time in their life) like most non-Norse people in the period (from the late 8th to the early 12th centuries).
Raiding is not a libertarian activity (robbery, slave taking, rape and murder are violations of the non-aggression principle) and (as stated above) non-raiding occupations were much the same among Norse folk as among non Norse folk. So why do many libertarians (and non-libertarians) have a soft spot for the ‘Vikings’ (if we must call the Norse Vikings)?
Well a case can be made for the Norse as the freedom loving folk of pro-Viking popular legend.
It starts with Charlemagne (768-814). Charles the Great King of the Franks and later first Holy Roman Emperor. Charlemagne’s grandfather was the great general Charles Martel who defeated the Arab invasion of France, and his father was Pepin who deposed King Childeric and made himself King of the Franks (rather than just the “Vicar of the Palace” and real power behind the throne that Charles Martel had been). Charlemagne had some trouble imposing his rule (over other claimants to the throne) and had to beg the aid of Tassilo the ruler of Bavaria.
However, the internal politics of the Franks would not be a great concern if it were not for the policies of Charlemagne. Most rulers of this period raided (the later Vikings were not breaking totally new ground here) – loot was a good way of winning the loyalty of the hard men one need to be able to count on to preserve one’s rule. But Charlemagne raided more than any other ruler of his time.
Sometimes Charlemagne waged war with an ideological justification, for example the long wars against the Saxons in order to impose Christianity (more on this later). Other times it was to eliminate a potential rival (such as when Charlemagne betrayed Tassilo by the conquest of Christian Bavaria) and sometimes it was just in search of loot and ‘glory’ (such as the long distance raiding against the Avars). Charlemagne’s wars against the Saxons and his pressure on the Frisians (part of centuries of pressure on these folk of what is now the coast of north west Germany and north east Holland) and Denmark caused considerable interest in the Northern world.
Serfdom (the semi-slavery of the peasants – and idea that went back, in various forms, to the late Roman Empire) was never successfully imposed on the Frisians or the Saxons, but the spreading of religion by the sword was not Charlemagne’s only intent – the spreading of the Frankish social system (a military elite, loyal to a great warlord, living off the forced labour of others) was certainly part of the story. And in order to imposer this vast numbers of people were killed in Charlemagne’s campaign of terror.
It is hard to be sure (and it is contested) but some claim that there were great councils of the North – and that the ‘Viking Age’ (at least at first) was a response to the activities of Charlemagne. Certainly (even if we keep to the idea of the Vikings as independent raiders) the pressure on the Frisians meant that their sea power could no longer control the North Sea – leaving the area free for others.
Charlemagne also favoured the power of the Church – not just the worship of the Christian God. This meant the rise of what came to be called tithes and other forms of church taxes. But even after the Norse became Christians they tended to resist such taxes. For example in Iceland they were not imposed till the 1080’s and in Norway to the early 1100’s.
Serfdom as also strongly resisted by the Norse. In won out in Denmark – but never in Sweden or Norway (even after these areas became nation states). The case of Norway is interesting. As late as the early 1100’s there were still four different peasant assemblies that elected Kings (who did not have to be the same person) – such ideas were outside the mainstream of European thought (as expressed by Charlemagne and those who came after him). Slavery did exist in the Norse world – but it tended to decline. For example, in Iceland it died out completely in the 11th century. And (of course) Charlemagne was just a greater slave trader than the Vikings ever were.
Lastly there is the matter of price control. There were (broadly speaking) two views of the concept of the ‘just price’ in legal-theological thinking of the time. There was the view that the just price was a price that was freely decided between buyer and seller (this view is reflected in the laws of Bavaria in the 8th century) and there was the view that the ‘just price’ was the price established by custom or law.
Charlemagne favoured the latter view – and his officials (and those of later Kings) tried to impose detailed price controls (and other regulations). The Church was never united behind Charlemagne and his officials – but Charlemagne had saved the Pope from the power of the Lombards and the Pope did declare him Holy Roman Emperor, so the view of the dream of extensive state power (itself a dream of re-establishing the controls of the late Roman Empire) was a respectable one within the Church – and cast a long shadow over the Middle Ages and beyond.
The Norse however rejected the very notion of Imperial power in such matter (indeed in all matters). So perhaps people are not totally foolish to remember some aspects of the ‘Vikings’ with certain warmth.
Just as I suppprt the right to publish drawing that annoy the hell out of some Muslims, I also support the right to publish drawings which annoy the hell out of some Christians.
If some find provocative images of Jesus offensive, they should feel free to express their outrage… but should not feel free to express their outrage to their legislators, because the implication is clear that they want them to use the violence of law to prevent themselves from being offended… to which I can only say, they have no such right.
The frankly shocking discovery that this blog is being used as an educational aid for A-Level politics students is proof, if proof were ever needed, that state education is failing our children.
– Guido Fawkes yesterday (knowing that no-one will agree)
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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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