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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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
The latest posting of my Internet acquaintance Adam Tinworth (we first linked because he is professionally interested in new architecture and I am an amateur fan of it) consists of just two paragraphs, and yet is full of insight into the way we live now. Either paragraph would have served well as a Samizdata quote of the day.
I could not decide which to pick, and in any case did not want to neglect the other, so here are both:
WiFi in airport departure lines is the mark of civilised countries. Free WiFi is the mark of truly civilised countries. Based on my experiences in Edinburgh and Washington, the UK is civilised and the USA is truly civilised.
In other news, I was reminded again today of the fact that pretty much the first thing people do when going for a meeting with someone new is Google them. If you Google me, you get this site. More and more people I’m meeting through magazine work have read this site before I meet them. I’d better be on my best behaviour, hadn’t I?
There is indeed, I think, something very Jane Austenish about blogging. Simply from the point of view of good manners it seems to bring the best out of a lot of people, and to moderate their snarkier tendencies, in just the kind of way that Tinworth has registered.
It is understandable that the Mainstream Media have focussed, when discussing blogging, on the impact of blogging on the Mainstream Media. Is blogging another way, and a better way, and a more cost effective way, and a less politically choosy way, to do what they already pride themselves on doing, namely to rake muck and to make powerful people wish that the ground would open up and swallow them?
This is a very good question, but it misses the degree to which blogging may also serve to make regular people just plain nicer and more polite to one another.
The Taliban is history and Al Qaeda is a mere shadow of its former self, so the question is why are US (and UK) forces still in effective control of Afghanistan? The latest example of appalling behaviour by US interrogators (who appear to have tortured a taxi cab driver to death at Bagram for being in the wrong place at the wrong time) is starting to turn local opinion against the over-mightly US presence. Not only do the people responsible need to be suitably called to account a good way up the chain of command, clearly there are some serious institutional problems in sections of the US military that need to be stamped on pretty harshly.
Given Afghanistan’s history, the fact locals have reacted so well to the US presence for this long is remarkable (and of course understandable considering we enabled the ‘Northern Alliance’ to destroy the Taliban), but staying for much longer is counter-productive. There is no need to kill every single Taliban/Al Qaeda supporter in Afghanistan (or Pakistan come to that) as the infrastructure that supported the September 11th attacks has been well and truly smashed.
Also, the preposterous attempts to curb narcotics production is both utterly doomed to fail and hugely counter productive in that messing with people’s lucrative livelihoods is just about the surest way to guarantee armed opposition to the allied presence in that part of the world. Sure, in an ideal world we would have no heroin and no armed factions willing to tolerate/support Islamic terrorists but in the real world it is likely to be a choice between one or the other. So please, enough with the preposterous obsession with narcotics! If the US and UK states cannot stop tonnes of the stuff coming into their own countries every year, what chance do you think they have of doing so in far off Afghanistan? The effort will of course fail dismally just as it has failed in Columbia but with the extra added ‘goodness’ of encouraging resistance to the pro-Western regime on Kabul. Sheesh.
By all means leave a couple thousand ‘liaison’/training teams behind to bolster the Karzai regime but unlike the clearly unfinished business in Iraq, it is time to declare victory and get the hell out.
Job done. Let’s go home.
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?
The Bush administration wants to get rid of the filibuster in the US Senate when voting on nominations to the US Supreme Court. Now the prospect of replacing left wing activist judges with right wing slightly less activist judges seems like a minor move in the right direction, however… I am uneasy because although this (none too civil liberties inclined) government adjusts the underpinning rules to impose its will now, the shoe could so easily be on the other foot in a few years, with President Hilary getting to ram through some ghastly left wing jackanapes using the very mechanisms Bush looks likely to put in place next week.
And anyway, anything which buggers up the process of laws getting made (which filibusters certainly do) tends to appeal to me instinctively. But is the filibuster a good thing when it comes to the calculus of whether or not the US system is conducive to producing liberty? Is that peculiar institution a good way of curbing legislative excess or is it just a way of locking in bad stuff already on the books and making the system un-reformable?
The steady advances in cloning technology holds a great deal of hope the future of the species and the news from Korea and Britain has been pretty damn encouraging over the last few years. It now looks like we could be on the brink of being able to mass produce stem cells and that, boys and girls, could be the gateway to a new era of medical possibilities.
I quote at a bit of length because only when you quote at a bit of length do you get the real flavour of stories like this one:
A new anti-yob task force is to be set up to tackle the culture of disrespect and unruly behaviour in schools, ministers have said.
Otherwise known as a committee. This announcement will only add to the culture of disrespect. Disrespect of ministers.
The group, made up of teachers and heads who are experts in school discipline, will advise the Government on how to improve standards of behaviour.
One key part of their work will be to make sure parents take responsibility for the way their children behave, the Department for Education and Skills said.
But “taking responsibility” will not quite do it, will it? This would only work if parents actually changed the way their children behaved. This is a euphemism that communicates the underlying lack of confidence here. These people already know that none of this is going to work. If they thought that parents really could, and really would, make their children behave better, then this is what they would have said. → Continue reading: How to abolish bad behaviour in schools
I share the general enthusiasm for the so-called London Eye (I prefer to think of it as The Wheel), and so I hope that this little spat fizzles out quickly:
The London Eye could close down after being served an eviction notice after a £1m rent demand – an increase of more than 1500%.
Its landlords, the South Bank Centre (SBC), said they are not getting enough rent from the land that holds part of the wheel’s supporting structure.
If the rent is not paid they say the Eye will have to be removed in a month.
None of the parties wished to comment but said negotiations are taking place in the hope of reaching a settlement.
According to a document seen by Kate Hoey, MP for Vauxhall, SBC sent out the eviction notice after issuing a demand for the increased rent.
She told BBC London on Thursday: “I find it quite outrageous that the South Bank Centre has now turned around and is trying to be like a greedy developer.
“It will not go down very well with people in my area and Londoners and the country as a whole.”
Oh well, there you go, that’s politics for you. And it must be politics because an MP is involved, and the South Bank Centre is being accused by that MP of trying to be like a greedy developer, which would never have been said if it was a real developer.
I have no idea of the details of the agreement between whoever now runs the Wheel and the South Bank, but personally I think that the Wheel is by far the most beautiful object on the South Bank, and that anything calling itself the South Bank Centre ought to be thoroughly ashamed of itself for even pretending to threaten to get rid of it. Presumably it is strapped for cash, for some reason associated with all the other abominable structures on its patch.
Come to think of it, it occurs to me that there is a big plan in motion to try to rescue the now grotesque acoustics of the Royal Festival Hall. As this Guardian piece says:
They’re awful. Simon Rattle once said that playing there “saps the will to live”. Even the RFH’s resident orchestras, who have historically been defensive about their home, now openly admit it “leaves a lot to be desired” (that’s David Whelton, who runs the Philharmonia).
I once heard Rattle conduct Mahler’s mighty Resurrection Symphony in the RFH. It sounded like a very bad recording.
Anyway, has this wild attempt to gouge more money out of the Wheel got anything to do with this RFH plan? The attempt to turn the RFH into a proper concert hall will apparently be costing quite a lot.
The Royal Festival Hall (RFH) in London will close after its last performance on 26 June to undergo a GBP71m, 18-month refurbishment. The work is part of a wider GBP91m development of the South Bank Centre on the River Thames.
GBP71m? GB91m? Yes. I do believe there might be a connection there.
People in France, that paragon of European economic sophistication, are being told that if they reject the European Constitution, they will suffer economic catastrophe.
But what might happen? Perhaps French unemployment might reach, say, 10%? Oh right…
Rob Fisher blogs about Monday’s USA Today front page a story about a new X-Ray machine for use in airports that can see through clothing. The machine apparently generates images that, “paint a revealing picture of a person’s nude body”.
He points out that the article does not even touch on the need for such machines.
Are not current metal detectors adequate for preventing people from getting on an aeroplane with firearms?
If an airline says it wants me to walk through this machine as a condition of getting on one of their planes, that is one thing: it’s a private company deciding that this is a necessary measure to protect its customers or keep down its insurance costs. It’s their aircraft, they can quite rightly refuse to allow on anyone they feel like for whatever reason.
But if the government mandates the use of these machines, then that’s the government forcing airlines and airports into doing something they and their passengers likely don’t want to do. It’s governments yet again abusing their power to achieve nothing of value to anyone except politicians who want to look like they’re doing something useful.
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.
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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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