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Tom Morris has taken matters into his hands and is asking British Library about its patron privacy policy… The conclusions are not favourable.
My opinion on this is pretty simple: it’s evil and needs rethinking. Patron privacy is one of the biggest issues for me. This won’t affect my use of the library (but I will not be requesting certain books from the BL – rather, I’ll be buying anything controversial or reading it at another library), though I will be making my opinion clear to them in the form of a formal letter. I will also try and get hold of this records management policy. Ideally, they should hold borrowing records only as long as is required for the books to be retrieved from the store, then delete them after the books are returned to the counter. Or, perhaps, a system where patrons can submit a form either online or in person asking that their records be wiped clean. Again, like all privacy concerns, this is simply about ensuring that what should remain private does remain private.
I am sure that the ‘if-you-have-nothing-to-hide-you have-nothing-to-be-afraid-of’ bridage would completely miss the point on this one too…
This BBC report about the anxieties and arkwardnesses now being suffered by the EU’s leaders in the wake of their repudiation by the voters of France and Holland makes fun reading for all those of us who fail to see the point of the EU. What is it for? What good and worthwhile thing can the EU do that could not be done just as easily by the separate nations and governments of Europe with a fraction of the fuss or expense or grief? Why must the nations of EUrope homogenise themselves into one nation? For what? Against whom? The EU’s leaders have never explained in a manner that makes simultaneous sense to all of EUrope’s people.
Instead, they have tended to fall back on the argument that the EU is inevitable. Yes but is it desirable? That does not matter, because desirable or not, it is happening. It is reality. It is the future. Arguing that it should not be reailty or the future is to indulge in fantasy.
If the EU had a desirable and agreed purpose of the sort that the people of the EU might actually be able to get enthusiastic about – some purpose, I mean, other than that of giving the EU elite a superpower to be the bosses of – that would have made quite a difference in recent weeks. In crisis, all fundamentally effective institutions go to their core purpose. But the EU has no core purpose that its leaders are willing to allude to. All that the EU has is its precious momentum, its inevitability, and if it suddenly looks like it does not have momentum or inevitabitlity, then, in the word’s of Germany’s Vice President, a certain Guenter Verheugen, “the ground is shaking beneath our feet”.
Shake baby shake, I say.
The EUro-momentum will no doubt soon be re-established, and this little democratically induced tremor may soon be forgotten. But while it lasts, I am enjoying it. I can even tell myself that it might be remembered for a while.
As a general rule, whenever you hear or read that teaching unions are ‘angry’ then you can pretty much bet all your wordly worth that something good and positive is happening in the education sector.
I have yet to encounter an exception to this rule:
Teachers’ unions reacted angrily today after the Government vowed to press ahead with plans for 200 privately-sponsored city academies.
This hardly means that the (long overdue) commodification of education is upon us but then these public sector mafiosi possess bloodhound levels of sensitivty that enable them to pick up on even the faintest whiff of threat to their vested interests.
I wholly expect that even if these academies do start sprouting up around the country, the curriculum will still be politically-mandated and the sponsors will (in common with everyone else in the productive, non-looting sector) have to navigate their way through a miasmic swamp of diktats, edicts and regulations on their way to getting something resembling decent results.
But, for all that, they do seem to me to represent the first few, tottering, tentative, baby steps towards the long-term goal of levering the state out of the education business. Good.
As I remarked in my previous post, Sir Bob Geldof is an annoying gentleman but capable of moments of lucidity. (I was a bit rude about him in my previous post. Sorry Bob). As an act of charity to the fellow, here is a quotation he might like to ponder:
“I see in the free trade principle that which will act on the moral world as the principle of gravitation in the universe- drawing men together, thrusting aside the antagonisms of race, and creeds and language, and uniting us in the bonds of eternal peace… I believe the effect will be to change the face of the world, so as to introduce a system of government entirely distinct from that which now prevails. I believe the desire and the motive for large and mighty empires and gigantic armies and great navies… will die away… when man becomes one family, and freely exchanges the fruits of his labor with his brother Man.”
Those words were uttered by Richard Cobden about 150 years ago, a man who saw a congruence between the ideals of personal liberty, concern for the welfare of one’s fellows, and the free market order. For him, like his great Victorian contemporaries like Sir Robert Peel, free trade was a progressive cause to be championed in the interests of the little guy, and not the cause of big powerful interests. It is a message that urgently needs to be understood by those who, no doubt from fine motives in a few cases, rail against global capitalism.
If the case for the free market is to be more widely advanced, we have to appeal to the sense of idealism and concern for the downtrodden that animated our ancestors and could still appeal to the decent folk on the left. It is worth a try, anyway.
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I realise that to do business in China means having to deal with the realities of the Chinese state, but when Microsoft becomes yet another direct collaborator with Chinese repression by adjusting its blog tools to help block online speech using words such as “democracy,” “freedom,” or “human rights,” then clearly Microsoft has become a party to the trampling of human rights in China and is not just a bystander.
Next time you hear of all the philanthropic work done by MS and Bill Gates, just keep in mind that there is a very nasty flip side to the Giant from Redmond. It would appear that even Gates has a price at which his principles are clearly ‘negotiable’.
Update:: There is some question of whether or not this is actually true according to a commenter who has set up a Chinese MSN Space blog. I will try to contact Voice of America and see what they have to say.
I have been tipped off by Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber that he is taking issue with this post of mine. His post has the title you see above and can be found here. He writes:
The title, btw, is not meant to be a personal dig but rather a play on the title of Jerry Cohen’s book (see the post). Still, I think there’s a real question for you guys: granted, you think it would be wrong for the state to force you to do good, so why don’t you do it anyway, unforced?
I anticipate a range of answers to that one, including that the good I’m thinking of either (a) isn’t really good at all or (b) wouldn’t be achieved by the means I’m suggesting. But I’m saving responses for a later post.
Bertram says that I was not entitled to assume that the protestors are strict egalitarians or that they necessarily believe that the Third World is poor because they are rich and that money transfer is the way to correct that situation. He continues, “They may, of course, believe the true claims that some Third-World poverty is attributable to the action of wealthy nations and that money transfer can be part of a solution to that problem.”
I cannot resist saying that I am at least as entitled to my assumption that protestors at a protest agree with the rhetoric of the protest leaders as he is entitled to his assumption that libertarians do not do good unforced.
In his next paragraph he very neatly cites protectionist regimes such as the Common Agricultural Policy as an example of the action of wealthy nations that he correctly states I believe causes poverty. A little too neatly: if the protestors’ foremost demand was the abolition of the CAP then I might head up to Edinburgh myself, but it is not. Where they do make that demand at all, it comes way down the list after a lot of actively harmful demands such as that Third World governments make their own people pay more than we do for food and fridges. (Or “Third World countries have the right to protect their farmers and infant industries” as they quaintly put it.)
→ Continue reading: “If you’re a libertarian, how come you’re so mean?”
There have been some interesting discussions across the blogosphere about the role of arms in resisting tyranny, many sparked off by what is going on in Zimbabwe. But whilst I am very much in favour of civilian ownership of firearms that are suitable for all manner of uses, I think many ‘on my side of the aisle’ overstate the direct benefits of not allowing the state to have a monopoly on the means of violence. Certainly I do not buy the argument that arming the Tiananmen Square protesters would have prevented the massacre that occurred.
However what arming the population does is not prevent tyranny (at least not on its own), but rather it raises the marginal cost of tyranny. The in your face reality of most tyrannies around the world is that it is not enforced on a daily basis by armies with tanks and helicopters (against which a few AK-47’s will do little) but rather by a couple swaggering officious policemen with little handguns pushing their way into people’s houses. Now those folks are the ones a few privately held weapons can truly work wonders with when it comes to the bottom line reality of force, not because privately held weapons will actually be used to kill or intimidate directly but simply because those policemen know that whilst they have the authority of the state behind them, right there and then in that house, there are very real limits to just how far they can push things, which is exactly how it should be.
Sure, they can come back with 50 soldiers in armoured personnel carriers if needed, but if that is what they have to do every time they want to intimidate someone, well, that is a much bigger investment of time and effort. Do not underestimate the value of increasing the marginal cost of tyranny. For example widespread gun ownership in Zimbabwe probably would have a major impact at mitigating the shambolic Zimbabwean governments ability to carry out much of what it does even if it does not directly lead the Mugabe’s well deserved downfall.
Guns in private hands work, but it is just one piece of a much larger question and I suspect claiming they are a panacea for the ills of bad governance is not doing the pro-liberty side any service at all.
Sir Bob “Make Poverty History” Geldof is getting the vapours over the fact that tickets for his various supposed poverty-relief events have been put up for sale on that symbol of dark, rampant capitalism, eBay. In particular, he seems all upset that a big corporation like eBay should make any money from such a highminded event.
Horsefeathers, is all I can say. eBay, in my view, contributes vastly more to the sum total of human happiness and welfare than that preening stage army of hasbeens, wannabees and well-intentioned nitwits that have clustered around Sir Bob. As has already been recounted in detail here, Sir Bob Geldof is a man of infuriating contradictions, able to talk with piercing clarity and lack of cant about the corruption of African governments and yet also willing and able to spout the cheap pieties that seem to accompany many a post-colonial guiltfest such as Live8.
If Africa’s economy were run with the same brio, dash and entrepreneurial brilliance of eBay, Sir Bob and his ilk would have to spend a little more time on what they supposedly do best.
UPDATE: thinking this through in the light of watching Geldof on the television, I can certainly applaud his desire to steer as much revenue to the poor of the world as possible but there seems no awareness on the part of the Live 8 crowd that what Africa needs is precisely the sort of business acumen of which eBay is a modern example.
UPDATE 1: eBay has blocked sales of such tickets on its pages, according to the BBC.
Moeletsi Mbeki, the brother of South Africa’s President, says that the private sector is key to modern economic development in Africa. But, he says, African leaders and Western donors are holding it back. On the website of his organization, the South African Institute of International Affairs, he argues that:
foreign donors could play a more constructive role than they are doing at present through their current efforts to sustain the political elites and African states with budgetary support and the like.
Instead of giving more money to African governments, Mbeki says donors should providing the expertise to help establish independent financial institutions like credit unions and savings banks and help shield them from political elites.
Moreover, African governments need less power and the private sector more:
Africa’s private sector is predominantly made up of peasants and secondly, of subsidiaries of foreign-owned multinational corporations. Neither of these two groups have the complete freedom to operate in the market place because they are both politically dominated by others – non-producers who control the state. Herein lay the weakness of the private sector in Africa that explains its inability to become the engine of economic development. Africa’s private sector lacks political power and is therefore not free to operate to maximize its objectives. Above all, it is not free to decide what happens to its savings.
→ Continue reading: President Mbeki’s brother: only the private sector will make Africa rich
As several people have predicted would be the case, many of the EU’s ‘great and good’ are just continuing with the Great European Integration project as if the French and Dutch NO votes never happened. But it does seem that the shock to the system those votes administered to the torpid media has indeed woken up a few people. It seems that the insects have not noticed that someone has picked up the rock they were under.
With almost Marxist historiography, Eurocrats dismiss the French and Dutch results as the product of “false consciousness”. The peoples of those two countries plainly misunderstood the issue. They were really voting against Turkey, or against Raffarin, or against Anglo-Saxon liberalism – against anything, in short, except the proposition actually on the ballot paper.
[…]
During the recent referendums Yes campaigners argued that a No vote would be a rejection, not simply of the constitution, but of the entire European project. Let them now stand by their own logic.
With luck the Euroclass will continue to seriously underestimate the problem and thereby create enough real hostility that the whole European edifice will just start lurching from one political crisis to another until various bits start falling off… preferably UK shaped bits.
The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language
Melvyn Bragg
Sceptre 2004
A History of the English Language
Albert C. Baugh and Thomas Cable
Routledge & Kegan Paul 1951, revised 1978.
It is probable that those who have watched Melvyn Bragg on television and have heard him on radio on the subject reviewed here, will find the printed word, in short, his book, by far the superior medium to communicate it. It would be tedious to enumerate the advantages of the printed word, but the lack of sound is its great drawback, for of course language is oral, not visual – yet the only evidence of its past and development is visual, not oral. In his fluent, informative and thoughtful account of our language, Bragg tends get excitable: English faces “challenges” and, at a critical stage even “kept its nerve”, though whether its speakers were aware of these anthropomorphic postures is doubtful. Readers might do well to keep by them the more sober narrative of Baugh and Cable.
Although he gives a mention to the Indo-European stock from which almost all European languages differentiated, Bragg very sensibly begins in the fifth century when a variety of invaders from the mainland of Europe started to land in what is now England, speaking a distinctly different language from those who were already there. This language was a Germanic one, existing in a number of dialects. Some dialects were brought across, others left behind. The resulting mixture evolved into Anglo-Saxon, though it seems its closest living relative is present-day precarious Frisian.
The Anglo-Saxon speakers moved west, gradually conquering the resistance of the Celtic-speaking inhabitants and replacing their language with their own. One must be careful to distinguish this process from one of replacement of the inhabitants themselves, for studies of the DNA of today’s population indicate that this was far from being the case. However, the Celtic language itself survived only in Wales and Cornwall, though refugees transferred it to Brittany in France, while a related Celtic language continued unaffected in Ireland, and what was probably another one, spoken by the Picts in Scotland. → Continue reading: Bragging about English
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