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]
|
The ’45
Christopher Duffy
Weidenfeld & Nicholson 2003
Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart
Frank McLynn
Routlledge 1988
Prince Charles Edward Stuart’s campaign to regain the British throne for his father is the most romantic episode in British history, retold many times. Landing in Moidart on the Scottish mainland with seven companions, and then persuading a number of clan chiefs to support him, he conducted a brilliant campaign that took him to 120 miles of London. Because of the passivity of the English Jacobites and the failure of any French help to arrive, the clan chiefs refused to proceed further and the army retreated back to Scotland and ultimate defeat. The five-month hunt for Charles through the Scottish Highlands and Islands until he escaped at last to France provides a coda just as romantic and more material to make him into a legend, which even turned the head of Frederick the Great.
Duffy’s massive 639 page account is primarily a military history, giving much information on the forces of the two sides, Stuart and Hanoverian, their movements, tactics and morale, but strangely lacking serious discussion of strategy. The political background, national and international is likewise missing; in 1743 Britain had got involved in the war of the Austrian Succession (1740-48), and was at war with France. It may be that the author is overconscious of going over well-trodden ground, but it seems perverse to opt out of giving an account, or even a summary of an account, of the council of war at Derby that decided that the Jacobite army should retreat, and though he dissents from that decision himself: “It is not the purpose of the present work to recapitulate the details of the sessions, which are recounted at length in every serious biography of the Prince and study of the ’45 (p. 301)”.
McLynn’s biography makes it clear that the Highland chiefs, whose clans had been the spearhead of the invasion simply refused to continue. They had been disappointed by the lack of French intervention, promised by Charles, together with the passivity of the English Jacobites. Duffy makes much of the fact that the scale may have been turned by the false information that the Duke of Cumberland’s army was about to block any possible retreat provided by the Hanoverian agent, Dudley Bradstreet, masquerading as Oliver Williams, an English, or more likely, a Welsh Jacobite volunteer. Bradstreet must have had nerves of steel, for he stayed with the Prince on the retreat, and was not slow to take the credit for it. Duffy does not say when he deserted – for that one would presumably have to read Bradstreet’s own account (1750; edited and republished, 1929). Needless to say, it is far from being accepted by everybody as gospel.
There is no doubt that until Derby, the rebels had won every move, mainly because of their greater mobility and their seizing of the initiative. Even the weather, usually bad, favoured them, despite or even because by the time the crisis came they were conducting a winter campaign, for which they were better suited than their opponents, not only because of the greater hardiness of the Highlanders, who made up their shock troops, but because of their logistics. They advanced from town to town in an orderly manner, usually collecting money already accumulated there for tax payments and sometimes clothing and equipment. What they did not get, especially after they had crossed the border, were many recruits. The impression given is that most of the population, both in England and Scotland, had decided to sit things out and see what happened. → Continue reading: The Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 – a romantic non-event?
Hopefully my title has alerted readers to what “George IV” I am thinking of.
George IV has got a bad press. He is thought of as a fat, drunken fool. Who was so deluded that he thought he fought at the battle of Waterloo.
His father (George III) has had his reputation defended by it being pointed out that his metal problems had a physical cause (a blood disorder made worse by arsenic poisoning from the power in his wigs and the very medical treatments he was given). Whilst in control of his body and mind, it is now accepted, that George III was a hard working and learned man who was deeply concerned by cases of individual injustice – for example a poor clock maker might be cheated of the longitude prize by all the politicians and administrators, but when George III got to hear of the case he would not rest till justice had been done.
On the other hand George IV is seen as a man whose problems were self inflected. A man unwilling to resist temptation – whether it was for women, food or booze. A man disloyal to his father (for example keen to be Regent years before his father had his final breakdown and even willing to have his father locked up for life), of hopelessly unsound political judgement (for example his connection with Charles James Fox, a politician who supported the French Revolution and never showed the understanding of either security or finance needed to be fit for high office).
And whereas George III was learned (with a great library of well used books, knowledgeable on all the main subjects of his day), George IV is presented as shallow minded and lazy – whose knowledge of even those subjects that interested him (such as architecture) was superficial.
The last point first:
George IV may indeed have had less knowledge of art and architecture than George III had. And George IV’s favoured architect (John Nash) may indeed have big gaps in his education.
However, have a look at Windsor Castle, or the Brighton Pavilion, or the area of Regents Park in London. Neither George VI nor John Nash may have had the book learning of George III – but they did not do so bad a job.
On women, food and booze: George IV had the faults that many European aristocrats (and other rich people) had in this period. That George III did not have these faults is to his credit – but it should not be used as a stick to bash his son over the head with.
Also on booze, water was unsafe to drink in the late 18th and early 19th centuries (although not as unsafe as it would be when cholera stuck Britian in the 1830’s) so becoming what we see as a drunk was quite common – even the great Pitt the Younger (the supposedly straight laced rival of the degenerate Charles James Fox) died of booze.
A man may say some very stupid things when he is drunk – even waxing on about the fighting at Waterloo – but then again people interested in military history (or military affairs in general) often see themselves at certain battles and talk in this way.
I would not like to be thought mad because I have talked of battles (as if I had been there) that occurred hundreds of miles from me, or indeed centuries ago – we armchair generals may be bores, but we are not mad. → Continue reading: In defence of George IV: King of the United Kingdom
Is the Pope still Catholic?
How long Economics in One Lesson has been available to read free, online, I have no idea, but since she only just heard about this, I feel entitled to say with similar lack of shame (unless of course a fellow Samizdatista has already flagged this up and I missed it) that her posting was how I finally found out about this myself.
It has been a while since I read this book. The bit I recall with the greatest vividness concerned the broken window fallacy. This fallacy says, fallaciously, that broken windows are good for the economy because they are good for the window-mending business. What the broken window fallacy neglects to mention is that broken windows are bad for all the businesses that the window mending money might have gone to instead, but now cannot.
The most extreme statement of this fallacy is the claim that the ultimate window breaker, war, is good for the economy, because that way lots of work is “created” in all the industries that subsequently set to work to repair the destruction. When Keynesian economics was in its pomp, you did hear people actually saying this. Maybe, if those are the kind of circles you still move in, you still do.
Yet war is creative, in a back-handed way, and provided that you lose. It destroys wealth, but it can also destroy certain impediments to future wealth creation. Mancur Olsen, in his book (alas not available on line so far as I know) The Rise and Decline of Nations (lots of five stars out of five reviews here), says that, yes of course, losing a war does destroy wealth, but that it also destroys what he calls “distributional coalitions”. In plainer language, losing a war breaks up politically well-connected rackets, like state-enforced cartels and trade-unions. Thus the post-WW2 economic miracles of Germany and Japan.
This is what you would call a high risk strategy for achieving economic dynamism. I mean, just for starters, be careful who you lose your war to. Pick the wrong country to surrender to and you are liable to end up with an even huger, politically even better connected racket, in the form of your rapacious conquerors. In other words, broken windows followed by more broken windows, and nobody ever mending them.
The UK Labour Party, having set in train the laws making possible the recent postal voting scandal in Birmingham, are no doubt hoping voters forget all about it in a day or so. Former Home Secretary David Blunkett, however, has done his bit to keep the light shining on the issue with a typically idiotic proposal: solve the fraud problem with ID cards.
So, let’s get this right. The government, having created a system ripe for fraud and abuse, has one of its former members suggest that it be dealt with creating a system ripe for fraud and abuse.
The Tories should give up now. They cannot compete with genius like this.
(Side observation: this whole affair underscores why some libertarians don’t believe that democracy is a particularly reliable firewall against the corruption of power).
The British Army is making a new regiment operational with a dedicated anti-terrorist mission in mind, called the Special Reconnaissance Regiment. Much of the manpower will come from 2 Para bn and 14 Intelligence coy:
CGS statement 1st April
The SRR will draw personnel from existing capabilities and recruit new volunteers, both male and female, from serving members of the Armed Forces where necessary. Officers are keen to recruit those of Middle Eastern or Mediterranean appearance, as well as Muslims and members of ethnic minorities. Priority at recruitment must be given to those able to infiltrate or blend in with Islamic terror groups, rather than to their fitness or fighting capabilities.
There has been chatter about the unit from irrepressible insiders since the middle of last year (the name Reconnaissance and Surveillance Regiment was mooted) but the firm news is hitting the mainstream media now that the unit is going operational.
The badge seems to me to be referencing the Artists’ Rifles insignia, which seems appropriate give the Artists’ Rifles special forces lineage.
How do scientists work? Do they spend a lot of their time holed up in big buildings with lots of fancy equipment, work in large teams or mostly alone, with rumpled air and just a blackboard and lump of chalk trying to figure out the laws of physics? What sort of social lives do they lead and how do they handle the political, business and personal demands that come their way? How do they deal with hostility from jealous colleagues, skeptical review boards and college principals worried about expanding their budgets?
If you ever wanted to know some of the answers to these questions as well as have a rattling good yarn told, then this book, an old classic by Gregory Benford, fits the bill. I have been engrossed in it for the last few days and I won’t spoil for any would-be readers by giving the ending or basic plot away. Let’s just say that this book actually gave me the feeling of actually working and living in a science lab, of hanging around scientists in the early 60s and later, in a sort of crumbling, environmentally troubled 1990s. Strongly recommended.
Much has been said about the Labour Party’s election catchphrase “Britain forward not back”. It has been claimed that the phrase was stolen from The Simpsons. As The Times pointed out in February:
[In an episode of The Simpsons] Clinton appears during a presidential debate. “My fellow Americans,” he proclaims. “We must move forward, not backward, upward not forward, and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom.”
Last night Labour said it had not deliberately appropriated the slogan from The Simpsons, but MPs said it was another example of a Milburn faux pas.
At the time of the controversy, I watched Milburn on the TV saying that it wasn’t stolen from The Simpsons. I do believe he was right. It actually came from the Tories. When Michael Howard was elected leader, BBC News wrote:
He urged his colleagues “to look forward, not back” and to recognise that Britain had changed since the Tories first came to power in 1979.
My good friends who run the Big Blog Company do not like to use Samizdata to promote the Big Blog Company as much as they might, because this is not cool. It is not good blogging practice. But I am only doing this incidentally when I link to the latest posting on their blog. My main purpose is to promote myself, which I suppose is not all that cool either, but there you go.
Said I, here:
A new market is chaotic, and (and this is the point) ignorant. People do not, e.g., know how to spot cowboy operators, or bad products made in all sincerity but badly. Ignorance and foolishness abound, and so to start with, down goes the graph of achievement. . . .
And, back from her tBBC promotional trip to LA, Jackie D said, this very morning, this:
Unfortunately, I wasn’t making it up when I recounted to her how one PR flack we met in LA boasted of how his firm lies to big corporations and promises them good coverage on their “big traffic,” fake blog. The blog itself has been set up by the PR company for the express purpose of scamming companies into paying out substantial amounts of cash for positive postings on it. Looking at the blog, it seems to be authored by an anonymous nobody . . . who just so happens to pepper his commentary with glowing mentions of the PR company’s clients, and negative remarks about their competition.
That is a classic description of how a genuinely new market (as opposed to a made-to-sound-like-a-market governmental rearrangement of a non-market) starts out by working – i.e. not working.
Stay with it guys. In the long run, you will get rich. If you can still be there when the long run starts to run. Eventually all those corporations will start to really understand blogging, and to want help to do the real thing.
To continue my own quote:
. . . But then, if this really is a true market, things bottom out and start to improve and in the longer run the result is a market that is orders of magnitude better . . .
Or, to put it another way:
This sounds like it could have an affect on the forthcoming election, not just on the numbers of votes that go this way or that, but on what gets said during the campaign. It makes our Labour government look bad.
The judge in a vote-rigging trial says the postal voting system is “wide open to fraud” and has strongly attacked the government’s attitude to the problem.
Richard Mawrey QC was speaking as he ruled there had been “widespread fraud” in six Birmingham council seats won last year by Labour.
He accused the government of being not only complacent, but “in denial”, about the failings of the system.
The lawyer representing the accused in this case has just been on Newsnight, and he came as close as you can (with the look on his face rather than with his mere words) to saying that his clients are a pack of liars. That was a fun moment. This is a ticklish matter for the media, because the people doing these frauds are … er … ethnic.
Now Sion Simon, a local MP right next to where this happened, and something of a Labour attack dog in the Norman Tebbit mould, is saying that there is no systemic problem. Paxman is being quite rough on him. Simon Hughes for the Lib Dems, and a Conservative whose name I did not catch, are saying that there is a systemic problem. And of course, although this row has been simmering for some time, there is now no time to do anything to the system except urge vote counters and returning officers to be extra-vigilant.
Just how bad this will be for the government, I do not know. Maybe in a couple of days it will all be forgotten by almost everybody. But however this particular story plays out in the next few days, I get the feeling that, in Britain now, a political corner has been turned, some time during the last few months.
Whether the electorate as a whole has any plans to vote differently remains to be seen. Many of my friends, such as regular Samizdata commenter Paul Coulam to name but one, have said to me that Blair is about to be re-re-elected with a similar majority to last time around, just as Thatcher was. Coulam certainly said this to me a few weeks back. But governments take a long time to unravel, and what does seem to have happened is that the metropolitan media of Britain have got bored with Labour. They are now more bored with Labour than they are disgusted and embarrassed by the Conservatives, which was not true a year ago. Michael Howard may disgust many Samizdata readers by being just another opportunist political hack, but he is nevertheless, I would say, a much more impressive and consequential figure than his two predecessors at the head of the Conservative Party.
Now, Paxman is talking about what life is like in North Korea. Apparently people who have tried to escape from that hell hole, to heaven, otherwise known as China, are being executed in public, with everyone else in the town rounded up and forced to watch. Someone even managed to film one of these horror shows, and the BBC showed it. “Worst human rights record of any country in the world.” Count your blessings time.
Interesting story here that a firm which is said to be behind a lot of the spam messages hitting our mailboxes could go bust. Perhaps, just perhaps a corner might be turned in the current battle against spammers. I used to think that one man’s junk mail message was another’s piece of legitimate advertising, but the relentless offensive and downright moronic crud I have to sweep from my computer each day has made me change my mind. The effectiveness of the Internet as a business and social tool has been seriously blunted by this phenomenon.
I still don’t really know whether spam can be best dealt with legally, economically or through some other means. What I do know is that I won’t be shedding any tears at the demise of one of the most prolific producers of this stuff in the world.
Dale Amon is too busy to blog about this himself, but emails the rest of us with news about this, from Novosti:
Russia still leads the way in space exploration. Russia’s Clipper reusable spacecraft will be unveiled during the 2005 MAKS aerospace show in Zhukovsky near Moscow. This spacecraft, which is developed by the Energia corporation, will seat six people. The Clipper, which can fly to the moon, can also be used for reaching the Red Planet. This was disclosed to Izvestia by Anatoly Perminov, general director of Russia’s Federal Space Agency.
Quite where the Energia corporation now sits in the public-private spectrum, I do not know. I suspect that both state money (bad) and the desire for commercial gain (good) are involved here, a lot. But most of all, I suspect that the plain old-fashioned desire to (best of all) fearlessly and braving all dangers get out there and to courageously explore new frontiers and to ruthlessly (and whatever is the Russia equivalent) split infinitives, etc., is what is really going on.
Good for them. The Russians have not had much to cheer about lately. This kind of thing may be expensive, and “irrelevant”, no answer to poverty, blah blah, but it will surely make at least some of them a bit happier.
It makes me think of that moment in 10 Things I Hate About You, one of the recent-ish Hollywood products that I did like a lot despite these Hollywood moans, when, after a surprisingly successful date with the object of his affections, that young guy who was also in Third Rock from the Sun, thinks about it all, and then grins hugely and smacks his steering wheel with both hands and shouts: “And I’m back in the game!”
|
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.
|
Recent Comments