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.
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When people in public offices start bleating about a conspiracy of private firms to screw the public, it is usually a sign that said public official is trying to spread a profound misunderstanding of market forces, or is an idiot, or is trying to name a scapegoat to shore up public support. In the case of President George W. Bush – not exactly the brightest light in the harbour – it may be just be a combination of all three.
Anyway, veteran libertarian scholar and free marketeer Tibor Machan is having none of it.
Oil prices are high – though in inflation adjusted terms, not as high as in some periods. The reasons for this have nothing to do with the nefarious activities of Big Oil. It is caused by rising demand from the expanding Chinese and Indian economies; a lack of supply caused by low investment during the 80s and 90s when crude prices fell to below $10 per barrel at one stage; a lack of refining capacity for the same reason; regulations designed to cut pollution, which raise production costs, the interruptions to supplies from the Middle East because of the conflict there, and finally, an element of speculation from hedge funds and the like.
Adam Smith famously warned of the dangers of firms forming cartels to prop up the price of a particular good or service, although in practice such cartels tend not to last very long unless they can enlist support from governments in some ways to prevent new companies from entering a market. If Exxon, say, tried to do a deal with Shell to rig the price of gasoline at X dollars a gallon (not litres, dammit) then sooner or later another firm would see a market opportunity to undercut that price, and in an age when motorists can check prices on the internet, it is hard to see how this process could be stopped without State intervention.
Conspiracy theories are great fun, and I hate to be a party-pooper, but in 99 times out of 100, they are bunk.
The constant temptation for writers here at Samizdata is to focus only on politics, and as a direct consequence to get depressed. Politics is always depressing. Depressing is what politicians do. They say they are going to encourage this or that, but these thises and thats generally involve extorting yet more tax to pay for such encouragement, which depresses taxpayers yet more, and the encouragement as often as not turns out to be the opposite, while nevertheless scaring away any non-governmental encouragers who might really have helped, which is especially depressing for everyone who got their hopes up.
So, I will now write about opera on DVD, which is not nearly such a depressing subject as politics, and especially not right now. True, opera is often paid for by governments – which goes a long way to explaining why most new operas now are such junk. And true, the stories told in operas are often themselves very depressing, involving, as they often do, politicians, as well as other sorts of bad people doing bad things. But, despite all that, the presentation on DVD of the operas that date from the time when opera was show business and when people ran opera houses for fun and profit, rather than out of a sense of cultural duty, is now getting seriously into its stride.
DVD has always seemed to me the obvious way to enjoy opera. The thing itself, in an actual opera house with actual live singers and players, is for me just too expensive and too chancey. For instance, a few years ago I attended an English National Opera production of Madame Butterfly. It was advertised as being sung in English, but it turned out to be that particular sort of unintelligible English that only opera singers sing. Waar-blaar-traar-hyaar etc. I couldn’t make out one single damn word of it. Since I was paying for someone else to be there too, that was a big slice out of a hundred quid in exchange for a few tunes that I already knew and already had on CD in several versions, all of them better.
And as for when they are singing in another language, well, where’s the fun in that if you don’t understand it? To enjoy that, you have to do a ton of homework, and for me that drains all the fun out of it. No, the answer had to be DVD, with subtitles (which I believe you can often summon up even if they are singing in operenglish). And the good news, for me, is that opera DVDs are finally coming within my price range.
I don’t buy opera DVDs new, any more often than I buy full price regular classical CDs new. I buy them new, that is to say, only very occasionally. Fifteen quid for one disc? No thank you. And operas on DVD still tend to cost nearer thirty quid than fifteen, if you buy them new. But, and this is the really good news, opera DVDs have finally started to show up in decent numbers in the second hand classical CD shops and market stalls that I regularly visit. So, for instance, I recently got the entire Levine/New York Met set of Wagner’s Ring Cycle for thirty quid, and, during the same trip, Beethoven’s Fidelio and Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier for a tenner each. Some operas are going now for even less. That, for me, is value. These prices mean that now, I can finally allow myself to enjoy opera, because if I become addicted to it, as I never have allowed myself to so far, the habit will not ruin me and mean that I have to die under Charing Cross Bridge in a cardboard box, instead of indoors and comfortable.
Have I disliked opera because I really did dislike it? – mostly because of the wobbly, incomprehensible way they so often sing it. Or did I dislike it in mere self-defence against being economically ruined by it? Hard to say. But, a few nights ago, listening to the closing scene of Der Rosenkavalier, I could feel myself getting seriously hooked.
Der Rosenkavalier contains many ridiculous things. The leading man is sung by a soprano, which takes some getting used to, however well she sings. And teenager Sophie, whom the leading man (well, more like a boy) eventually becomes engaged to in that melodious last scene, is, in this production, rather obviously nearer to forty than twenty, albeit a very nice looking forty-year-old. Above all, these people are all old-time Viennese, which means that not only does the villain have a thoroughly warped view of the world, but so, frankly, albeit to a lesser degree of course, do the good guys. I.e. the good girls.
But no matter. Richard Strauss’s taste in operatic singing is pretty much the same as mine. He adored the light soprano voice – as opposed to the heavy, wobbly, knock-a-giant-down-at-fifty-paces Wagner-type soprano voice – to the point where ever since, people have tended to call such sopranos “Straussian”. (Gundula Janowitz and Lucia Popp are two of my favourites, both of whom were sublimely wonderful performers of Strauss’s sublimely wonderful Four Last Songs, which I have adored for decades.) Der Rosenkavalier, like most operas, has its longueurs, when they do that annoying form of operatic talking which is half talking and half orchestrally accompanied singing, which is similar to what actors used to do, without music. But every so often, and the final scene of Rosenkavalier is definitely one such time, they get some actual tunes to sing, and as Sophie and the Boy/Girl Soprano sang away ecstatically, I could feel myself surrendering.
Good. For me, classical music is something to enjoy first, rather than to “understand”. But, there is no doubt that if you do want to deepen your understanding of this music, you have to at least be acquainted with opera. Mozart’s piano concertos, for instance, are intensely “operatic”, and a thorough study of the way they echo tunes in his operas will give you an order of magnitude greater feeling for what they are all about.
I already have a number of operatic DVDs, quite aside from the ones I have recently acquired, for the operatic DVD bargain is not an entirely new phenomenon. But, for all the considerations alluded to above, I have tended to keep them on the shelf, unsurrendered to. Now, I look at my little DVD opera collection with new eyes, knowing that I will soon be listening to it with new ears and watching it with those same new eyes, enthralled.
Charles Clarke appears before an Eminent Jurists Panel, spruced up and professional, to defend the undermining of due process and roll his eyes backward, because they just do not get it. Terrorists, they kill people, we need security.
“I defend it categorically,” Clarke told the Eminent Jurists Panel at a hearing in central London. The orders give some capacity for the state against people we don’t feel able to pursue through the courts in a normal prosecution.”
Clarke today rejected those arguments in his testimony, suggesting the panel may have failed to grasp the gravity of the terror threat.
“I don’t think you understand,” Clarke said. “Do we just somehow pretend it’s not there?”
That was the response of the Home Office to foreign prisoners who were designated for deportation after completing their sentences. They just slipped away… into the community.
Matters were made worse by Clarke’s admission late Tuesday that he did not know where most of the offenders, who include three murderers and nine rapists, were.
Among the offenders, five had been convicted of committing sex offences on children, seven had served time for other sex offences, 57 for violent offences and two for manslaughter.
There were also 41 burglars and 20 drug importers among those released back into the community without considering their removal from Britain.
Our Home Secretary has taken personal responsibility for this slight hiccup.
Clarke, who has accepted personal responsibility for the ‘shocking and systematic failure’ of his ministry and the immigration agencies in dealing with the cases, said Tuesday evening: “I certainly don’t think I have a duty to the public to go – I have a duty to sort this out.”
All the foreign prisoners released will be served with a ‘super-ASBO’ (Anti-Social Behaviour Order) trademarked TB, and supervised by the Probation Service.
Australian government efforts to foist an ID card on its subjects have not really worked out, but the statist desire to identify and regulate its subjects are as perennial as weeds, and the latest gambit looks likely to get the go-ahead, with the cabinet to discuss a photo-ID ‘government services card’. This half-way house measure could be announced in next month’s budget, despite costs that look likely to be north of $A 1 billion.
As well as a photograph, the card will carry a computer chip with all of the subject’s details on it.
John Mearsheimer is a Professor at the University of Chicago who has attracted a great deal of attention in the blogosphere recently for a paper he co-authored about the role of the Israeli lobby and its influence on the policy of the United States towards the middle-east region. I think it fair to say that, at the very least, the paper was not his finest hour.
But it attracted me towards some of his other work, and the estimable Winterspeak, posting at Jane Galt’s blog, recently went to a speech where he outlined some of his views on his theory of international relations. Winterspeak was not entirely convinced.
Of course, political science is even more of a ‘black art’ then economic science. A scientific theory in the natural world can be demonstrated or refuted by scientific verification. In the social ‘sciences’ such verification is much harder. Therefore, making predictions about the future is hard. But one I still a worthwhile exercise. Readers can judge for themselves.
One of the aspects of Professor Mearsheimer’s work that has drawn particular attention is his view that the internal composition of states does not matter, democracy or dictatorship, theocracy or monarchy, they will have the same foreign policy goals. Given that in the United States, democracy is seen as a sacred cow, this is bound to be a provocative stance.
In considering this point of view, it may be helpful to make a distinction between ‘strategic’ foreign policy thinking, and ‘tactical’ foreign policy thinking, just as a chess-player does. Strategic is ‘this is what we want’ and tactical is ‘this is how we are going to get it’. If you view Professor Mearsheimer’s work in that light, I understand why he thinks that way. Take, for example, his recent debate with Zbigniew Brzezinski on the future of China’s policy. It seems to me that the internal composition of China’s government will not make a great deal of difference towards China’s desire to regain Taiwan.
It does of course make a great deal of difference about how they go about getting it, though. I am not very knowledgeable about China or its people, so I am not at all sure about how a future Chinese democracy would go about trying to reclaim Taiwan from the mainland. It may be thought that a democratic Chinese government would be sensible enough to eschew war, but given what the Chinese people seem to think about their neighbours, and watching other Asian democracies in action, gives me reason to doubt the good sense of a Chinese democracy.
It does seem to me that the tactics a state employs though are extremely important, and have massive and wide-ranging implications. Therefore, if one may be critical of Professor Mearsheimer’s theory, it is that he under-rates the importance of tactical moves in foreign policy goal setting. The classic example of this would be the transformation of Prussia into Imperial Germany in the late 19th century, and its effects on France and Russia. A more contemporary one, and more pointed given his latest academic effort, is that vital one of United States support for Israel. This policy is effected precisely because the United States is a democracy and, like it or not, the American public opinion is far more favourable towards Israel. This expression of American opinion thus translates into a massively different policy position towards the Middle East then would be the case if United States foreign policy was principally conducted with the interest of the government only in mind, as would be the case if the United States was a dictatorship.
And that support has a huge bearing on the foreign policy strategies of Arab states. So in the long run, democracy matters.
That does not mean that a democracy is likely to pursue more sensible or rational foreign policies. Democracy is no guarantee of good government. It simply means that governments in democracies have different political considerations to bear in mind when they make diplomatic decisions. I would welcome readers views on this matter.
Charles Clarke, the current boot boy in the Blunkett-Howard tradition, is upset that the government’s abridgement of fundamental rights is being called for what it is. It is at least a good sign they feel the need to be a bit defensive as previously they scarely seem to try and diguise their contempt for notions of privacy or personal civil liberty.
Although the Tories (or at least David Davies) have said in the recent past that they would scrap the whole monstrous ID card plan, I wonder if that will remain their view if they actually end up in power with this scheme already in place. I have my doubts that any party which so recently has Michael ‘a touch of the night’ Howard as its leader really has any honest commitment to civil liberties.
In an odd sort of way, contemporary soft leftists are both obsessed with politics and unpolitical at the same time. That is, their political involvement seems as much about showing what kinds of people they are (caring, concerned etc) as making a difference. The plausibility of a political strategy is less important than being involved.
– Andrew Norton, Research Fellow at the excellent Centre for Independent Studies, editor of Policy magazine and resident at Catallaxy
Mr Clarke pointed to recent articles in the Guardian, Observer and the Independent newspapers which made “incorrect, tendentious and over-simplified” statements about Labour’s record on civil liberties.
– BBC Online
The pieces I’ve seen there were actually considerably more accurate than his rebuttals, and relied not at all on the circularity and misleading literalism that is the foundation of any Home Office statement. But maybe he’s worried about anyone else getting into the business of tendentiousness and over-simplification in relation to civil liberties. That’s his (and Mr Blair’s) job.
This is the kind of stuff one can find probing around ‘social networks’ in companies. Makes my job worthwhile and goes some way to restore my faith in the individual within a large corporation. I came across this video recently, an employee of a company I consult for is into online video and is a dedicated supporter of Revver, an online video marketplace.
I guess I could have found him though his blog but the blogosphere is too large these days. So, ladies and gentlemen, I give you… an interview with the founder and employees of CubeBreak.
Quicktime required to play the video.
Nation-states consider the most unlikely trophies to be the heartblood of their culture. Here is the latest example of idiots wasting time and taxpayers money:
The Japanese could hardly have dreamed up a more horrifying way of thoroughly annoying the Koreans.
“We will never consider suspending our efforts for international certification of Korean names for 18 undersea features in the East Sea,” said Song Min Soon, national security adviser to Roh. “The naming issue cannot be linked to Japan’s waterway survey scheme.”
Song got down to basics.
“We don’t need a complicated argument,” he said. “Simply speaking, we’ll never permit Japan’s maritime survey out of our steadfast determination to protect our territorial islets and waters.”
Protect those territorial inlets and underwater features now!
The other day I received a letter which contained this message: “Darling, I adore you and I cannot live without you so if you don’t marry me I’ll kill myself”. I was rather disturbed by this and even more so when I saw that the letter was addressed to “occupant”.
The inimitable Tom Lehrer, composer of ‘Poisoning Pigeons in the Park’ and other gems.
It seems that the great audio-tape recorder maker has been at it again, casting aspersions and making threats from his luxurious cave in the better parts of the Pakistani badlands.
Apparently Sudan is preying on the old boy’s mind. One would have thought that anyone that the ghastly regime there wanted to kill would be dead by now, but just in case the UN make sure of it by sending a force to help out, Osama is going to rally the faithful against them.
I call on Mujahedin and their supporters, especially in Sudan and the Arab peninsula, to prepare for long war again the crusader plunderers in Western Sudan
Hmm. Geography was never my strongest suit, but I must confess I was bemused to see ‘plunder’ and ‘Western Sudan’ together in the same sentence. Osama, as an old Sudan hand, should be aware of this. Perhaps he’s losing his grip?
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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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