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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Via the Global Growth blog comes news of the recently (June of this year) launched Private Sector Development blog.
Says the Global Growth blog:
Its great to see that market approaches to development thinking are gaining traction, yet more evidence that a new paradigm is forming.
Indeed.
Although, I have already spotted one error in this new blog. In his June 29th posting, Pablo Halkyard says that Bill Nighy played the Chancellor of the Exchequer in The Girl in the Café (my opinion of The Girl in the Café is to be found here). No. Nighy played a mere civil servant. The Chancellor was played by the appropriately Scottish Ken Stott.
This is a small error. That the private sector is the way to go for enriching countries that are now poor is a great truth.
The Architect and His Wife: A Life of Edwin Lutyens
Jane Ridley
Chatto & Windus, 2002
The great grand-daughter of the architect (“Ned” to all) and his wife (Lady Emily Lutyens, nee Lytton) has set herself the quadrangular task of describing the lives of both of them, together with his architecture and her theosophy. Their interests, to which both were strongly bound, conflicted and in others, and probably at other times, would have ensured their separation. But as his letters (The Letters of Edwin Lutyens to his Wife Lady Emily, edited by Clayre Percy and Jane Ridley) can attest, much more strongly than this book does, they retained a deep affection for each other, certainly amounting to love initially and at the end of their lives together. “In the last years of his life,” wrote Lady Emily, in her autobiography Candles in the Sun, “I like to think that we were closer to each other than we had ever been before.” And, penitently, after re-reading their letters two months after his death, she found hers and herself “a revelation of such an odious person, and Father so endlessly sweet and patient.” His letters (a superb collection, and a joy to read) certainly bear this out: as far as I know, hers have not been published – perhaps as she would have wished.
Unfortunately their incompatibilities were enormous. Just for a start, neither seemed to have any idea how to make love. Perhaps if Emily had been seduced by Wilfred Scawen Blunt, “a corridor-creeper” as someone characterised him (and got away with it; and, in the circumstances it did seem an amazingly close-run thing – see A Blessed Girl by Lady Emily herself) he might have taught her how to initiate the obviously clumsy virgin Ned. As it was, after the birth of Mary, the youngest child, she refused (by letter) to have any further sexual relations with him. Fortunately, perhaps, they did not live together very much; at first his work took him to sites and clients, South Africa and India, later her theosophy to camps, congresses, India (he had to warn her that if she came when he was there, he’d have to throw up his work) and Australia. The children suffered terribly – or do I exaggerate? → Continue reading: An odd (but loving) couple
“I do not really think the House of Commons is ‘My Cup of Tea’, I am too much of an individualist, and also, too self-centred and set in my ways. Enough if I remain a mute, just adequate back-bencher, but frankly most of the problems that so excite ‘the Hon. Members’ leave me quite cold and indifferent.”
– Sir Henry “Chips” Channon in his diary entry for December 5th 1935.
Clive Davis, writing for TCS last week, has some sad news for his American friends:
Mrs. Miniver is dead. The funeral was held some time ago, and there were not many mourners in attendance.
Mrs. Miniver being a character in a Hollywood film that represented all that was best about war-time Britain and Middle England. Looking beyond the pageantry of the Anglosphere, a different picture emerges:
Immediately after 9/11, much was made of such ceremonial gestures as the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the Changing of the Guard. Dig a little deeper, though, and there’s no mistaking the hostility to American values among large sections of the British population. Conservative commentators in the US have got plenty of mileage out of jibes at French anti-Americanism; the unpleasant truth is that Britain is home to a similar phenomenon.
Why the hostility? When did this happen and why? My experience supports Clive’s view to some extent. Although I tend to move in circles where America may be criticised for some things but respected for many of its qualities, I am often taken aback by latent anti-Americanism when talking to people outside those circles. The most annoying thing about such attitude is that it is emotive, not based on anything other than some misplaced zen-like view of the world. Well, you know, there should be some counter-balance to the US power… . As Clive quite rightly notes it is a potent mix of ignorance and arrogance that feeds the Middle England’s political cosmology. (Or shall I say astrology…)
Perhaps as a consequence of all those hours spent sighing over Hugh Grant, Americans tend to assume that British are much more worldly and sophisticated than they really are. The truth is, when it comes to knowledge of American history and institutions, the Brits are woefully uninformed. What they are familiar with is American popular culture, which is – as I don’t need to remind you – a different thing all together. The result of that false sense of familiarity is a toxic combination of ignorance and arrogance. Besides, the British middle classes (like many of their counterparts in the US) do not necessarily see American popular culture as an unmitigated force for good. As the cultural critic Martha Bayles observes in an essay on public diplomacy in the latest edition of the Wilson Quarterly: “Popular culture is no longer ‘America’s secret weapon.’ On the contrary, it is a tsunami by which others feel engulfed. ”
Indeed, the thing that seems to gall the British chattering classes and, at the same time, helps them maintain their sense of superiority is the impression that Americans are, oh so, stupid. I find myself replying with increasing frequency that in a country where people are free to be as triumpantly stupid, it also means that they are free to be triumphantly creative and innovative.
Update: Clive posted comments emailed by readers of the TCS article on his blog.
I am watching that supreme embodiment of the Anglosphere culture at the moment – cricket, surely the finest game invented by Man. England are building on their first-innings batting performance against a rather shaky-looking Australia, although the Aussies have a chance to draw the match I think thanks to a superb batting effort by Shane Warne. Warne is normally and rightly famed for his leg spin, able to make the ball move in a bewitching fashion.
The Ashes series, as the England vs Australia Test matches are known, are currently shown on the Channel 4 terrestrial tv channel. The channel has made a huge success of its cricket coverage, I think. Its commenators are excellent, intelligent and don’t interrupt the flow of play. Even the adverts shown during a brief pause in play don’t irritate me like I thought they would. Simon Hughes, a true cricket geek, does a fine job of explaining key terms and tactics to novices. Cricket is a complex game and yet the presenters seem to make it accessible without dumbing it down.
Four of us Samizdata scribblers are split down the middle on this Ashes series, I guess. Two Aussies – Scott Wickstein and Michael Jennings – pitted against Brian Micklethwait and yours truly.
Update, despite the so-far snarky remarks in the comments sections, my joy continues to rise thanks to today’s batting performance. Summary of the game here.
You really need to click on this picture.
“No part of my job involves stopping people from fornicating”
– Elena Procopiu
For the first decade and a half of my life I remember thinking that if your schooldays are the happiest days of your life, then I was going to have a wretched life. Things were not much better at my first university (Cambridge – nothing but the best for me), where I failed to work nearly hard enough, at architecture, and from which I retreated ignominiously.
It was only when I switched to another less grand university (Essex) that the connection between educational institutions and being happy started to make sense to me. I learned a lot about politics, but I did it mostly by watching, listening, and reading. I did not participate in politics, if only because what I was being urged to participate in was, I increasingly realised, mindless sub-Marxist twattery. No, what got me going was the university drama club, rather grandly known as the Theatre Arts Society, TAS (pronounced TASS) for short. We were the TAS Clique, and we loved it. It turns out that TAS is still going, and is still called that!
Although I acted, my particular speciality to start with was ticket selling, which was how I first got seriously stuck into using the then-as-now ever-changing technology of communication to get maximum impact for your message with the minimum of cost. (I first started to learn, you might say, how to do Libertarian Alliance publications.) I can still remember the thrill of my first, first night, full house. From that moment on, and for the first time in my life, I was somebody.
As for my acting career, a friend said to me after my last bit of acting at Essex: “You know Brian I’ve seen you in lots of things, but I never knew you could act.” That was after I had played one of the junior Mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, during the performances of which I finally learned what decent acting felt like. Ah, happy days.
And happy days that soon ended. Having decided not to become a real actor, I dabbled briefly in the idea of doing amateur acting as a hobby, and signed up to be in a production of Noel Cowards’s Private Lives for the local drama club near where my family home was. But the magic had gone, and I gave up drama and switched to political stirring and scribbling, which I have been doing ever since. As the decades passed I occasionally pondered if I might even get back into drama, in some capacity or other, but the opportunity never arose. Shame, but there you go. You get old. You stop doing things.
But then, a few weeks ago, suddenly, everything changed. → Continue reading: A drama dream comes true
A minority of musicians not only dislike the capitalist world, but they believe they can eschew it. Some of them have set up the sort of micro-firms that capitalism makes so easy to do. So they have spurned being sub-contractors or suppliers to large firms, and have become entrepreneurs instead – and think of it as rebellion.
– Richard D. North in Rich is Beautiful
James Waterton of the Daily Constitutional sees the need for more hardcore activists to spread the word for classical liberal values… and he also sees the need for more people to read his excellent articles. We agree with him on both counts
I was having a chat today with two friends about the nature of a market society. Both guys are intelligent, open minded and lacking ideological zeal. After talking about this and that, the discussion turned into me defending the free market of commerce and culture. Neither of them are heavily interested in politics, however they both articulated their positions with cognisance and we had a good discussion.
Because of the above discussion and the assumptions my friends held of the free market, I came to realise that – as enthusiasts of the free market – we do very little to actively promote the cause and its benefits. We hope our continually improving lives do the talking for us. Trouble is, these benefits can be twisted by people who do not agree with us. We are getting rich, says Green Left, at the expense of those in the third world and/or in our underclass. This is rubbish, of course, but it is an easily grasped concept, no matter how misguided. A group like Resistance goes out to a lot of schools to talk to students about the beauty of socialism. It is rich pickings for them there, because the simplistic truths of socialism appeal to minds that are neither sullied with the realities of human nature nor self-supporting adults. It is not hard to make a teenager feel bad about our society. Ask them if they lead a comfortable life. Show them a few pictures of starving African children. Let them join the dots. Child’s play. → Continue reading: We need a classical liberal ‘Resistance’ movement
Those of us who believe in an open immigration system acknowledge that this should not mean we let in those who support terrorism. So hurrah say I to this news:
“The Home Secretary has issued an order revoking Omar Bakri Mohamed’s indefinite leave to remain and to exclude him from the UK on the grounds that his presence is not conducive to the public good,” a Home Office spokesman said.
The wording “not conducive to the public good” comes from the Immigration Act 1971. The government says it needs new powers to deal with terrorism. The funny thing is that I cannot remember anyone talking about being able to exclude preachers of hate if they are “not conducive to the public good” before this last week. Could it be that the government does not actually know what powers it has?
Earlier this week there was an interesting moment in my personal history as a libertarian-activitist-stroke-blogger. I had a phone call from someone at The Times. “Millen” was the name, I think. He was asking me to contribute four hundred “headbanging” – his word – words on how the government is using the War on Terror to trash civil libertiess. I am not sure enough of the details of this story, and suspect that if I was, I might actually favour some of these alleged trashings, so I recommended that he give Perry de Havilland a ring, and Perry was happy to oblige.
For me what was interesting was that in his phone call to me the Times man used the word “Samizdata” – and what is more he was very nice about it – rather than the words “Libertarian Alliance”.
I switched to being a blogger, for Samizdata and elsewhere, from being a Libertarian Alliance person about three years ago. But because my home number used to be the contact number for the Libertarian Alliance, and because with my Libertarian Alliance Editorial Director hat on I used to do lots of little broadcasting performances and am still in their address books as that, I still from time to time get rung by media people who have me fixed in their databases as Libertarian Alliance, asking me to be on something or other. Never, until now, have they rung me up and talked instead about Samizdata. → Continue reading: Samizdata finally gets a mention
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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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