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]
|
They’ve been getting plenty of mad props from all over the ‘sphere, and rightly so: no one bashes the UN better than Diplomad. Every self-absorbed, self-interested, counterproductive flaw you ever imagined the UN had, has been on display in response to the tsunami, and Diplomad has the goods.
This Embassy has been running 24/7 since the December 26 earthquake and tsunami. Along with my colleagues, I’ve spent the past several days dealing non-stop with various aspects of the relief effort in this tsunami-affected country. That work, unfortunately, has brought ever-increasing contact with the growing UN presence in this capital; in fact, we’ve found that to avoid running into the UN, we must go out to where the quake and tsunami actually hit. As we come up on two weeks since the disaster struck, the UN is still not to be seen where it counts — except when holding well-staged press events. Ah, yes, but the luxury hotels are full of UN assessment teams and visiting big shots from New York, Geneva, and Vienna. The city sees a steady procession of UN Mercedes sedans and top-of-the-line SUV’s — a fully decked out Toyota Landcruiser is the UN vehicle of choice; it doesn’t seem that concerns about “global warming” and preserving your tax dollars run too deep among the UNocrats.
We can never get too much UN-bashing here at the Rancho Dean. Add ’em to your blogroll, sez R. C.
At Joanne Jacobs I learned about another of these teacher/pupil ruckuses where the teacher would appear to have behaved very stupidly.
17 year old Ahmad Al-Qloushi disagreed with his teacher, Professor Jospeh Woolcock, about America being great. Ahmad Al-Qloushi thinks it is. His teacher, Professor Joseph Woolcock, on the other hand, said to Ahmad Al-Qloushi that he needed therapy for expressing such an obviously bonkers opinion. The story is already bubbling away on the internet and will surely spread. Al-Qloushi has put his version of the story out there, and however much the Professor may curse, he cannot now reverse this. The Professor has filed a grievance, whatever exactly that means, against Al-Qloushi, for putting his, the Professor’s, name out there, but out there it is and out there it will now remain.
Whenever I hear about disagreements like this, I always think to myself: well, maybe the guy is a bit crazy. Maybe, in this case, the essay was a bit bonkers. And maybe Al-Qloushi had said and done other crazy things which he is forgetting about, and this essay was just the final straw in a hayrick of craziness that we are not hearing about. So, I am especially interested that in addition to reading Al’Qloushi’s complaint, we can also read the offending essay. → Continue reading: The lefty Professor versus the Arab college Republican president
Seamus Heffernan takes Richard Gere to task.
It has become the unfortunate reality of all things political: celebrities love to chip in with their insights and opinions on the Big Events of our time. Following Yasser Arafat’s death, this weekend the Palestinians are holding elections. As a result, they have been treated to this television ad in an attempt to rouse them into voting, which starts with:
Hi, I’m Richard Gere and I’m speaking for the entire world.
Excuse me?
We’re with you during this election time. It’s really important. Get out and vote.
Wait – the entire world?
What is about being left-leaning and famous that makes most people so grossly overestimate not only their intelligence, but also their relevance? Does Gere really think that there are hordes of Palestinian girls out there getting all weepy over An Officer and a Gentleman?
Indeed, most Palestinians greeted the ad with a shrug.
But many voters, already struggling with the labyrinthine politics of the West Bank and Gaza, say they have never heard of the actor.
“I don’t even know who the candidates are other than Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas), let alone this Gere,” Gaza soap factory worker Manar an-Najar told Reuters.
It is too bad that Manar is not more familiar with the Gere canon. Surely he and his fellow Palestinians would just love to take political advice from an actor perhaps most famous for his role as a degenerate, imperialistic tool of American capitalism who falls in love with a prostitute. Or perhaps he would be more interested in hearing the views of Gere’s co-stars in the ad, one of whom has gone on record as saying:
[T]he Jews are destined to be persecuted, humiliated and tortured forever, and it is a Muslim duty to see to it that they reap their due. No petty arguments must be allowed to divide us. Where Hitler failed, we must succeed.
Nice work, Rich – the Dalai Lama would be proud.
(Hat tip to Little Green Footballs.)
In these State of the State speeches, other governors often begin by listing their accomplishments of the past year. Well, I will do the same.
The year before I took office as governor, California had 300 days of sunshine. Last year, under my administration, we had 312 days of sunshine. That’s what true leadership is all about.
Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, showing some political leadership in his “State of the State” address.
I have been a blogger for almost three years on my own blog and for about 18 months here at Samizdata. The nicest thing that has happened due to this is that it has allowed me to become connected and to meet a great many people I would not have met otherwise. Not the least of these are of course Perry, Brian, Adriana, Gabriel, David and the rest of the Samizdata team.
And of course links and comments come unexpectedly, from people with in widely dispersed places and from widely dispersed cultures with who one none the less discovers one has a fair bit in common. (When I write a travel article, it is always nice to be commented on and linked to by people native to the place I was writing about. And this often happens.
But being linked to is fun. Take for instance something that happened this evening. Looking at the refers to my personal blog, I discovered that I was listed in a page of links to expatriate blogs, that is blogs written by people living in places other than their native countries. This is fine and indeed good. I am certainly an expatriate. And expatriate blogs do have certain things in common. If you live in a country other than your own you do find that you look at things in a slightly different way than do natives, and you do have this in common with other expatriates, even expatriates from wildly different places and who are living in wildly different places.
And unsurprisingly the compiler of this list is an expatriate blogger himself. Like me, this blogger lives in London. However, whereas I am Australian, he is apparently German. (Actually, I have no idea whether it is a “he” or a “she”, but I kind of think the mindset is a male one. And of course he could be Austrian or Swiss). As he is writing in a language I do not understand, I cannot read the blog. But from the pictures, it is none the less obvious to me that the author of this blog is my kind of guy. And possibly also Brian’s kind of guy. And perhaps Jackie’s kind of guy.
Tony Blair is only one of many who has expressed amazement at the scale of the response by individuals to the Tsumani disaster.
Just why this particular disaster has, as they say, caught the imagination of the public is a complicated matter. It was photogenic, for one thing. More to the point, it was and is still being actually photographed. Lots of flattened towns and recycled amateur videos of the waves themselves crashing in on everything. That helped and still helps a lot. Like Dale Amon, I think that the media have made a huge difference. Indeed, I would say that this is the kind of situation when we see these people at their considerable best. And I like also to think that the Blogosphere in particular and the ‘new media’ in general were also helpful in communicating the story, as I have already written here. It must have further helped that many of those blogging or new-media-ing were able to do so in English, the lingua franca of the Aid-giving world.
The presence of tourists who are (or were) Just Like Us surely added to the sense of involvement many of us felt, and although people understandably derided headlines like this, the fact that celebrities had their holidays all disrupted brought it all that bit nearer home to us, surely. Call me shallow and Dianaficated – and knowing our commentariat I am sure several will – but this catastrophe only really impinged upon my feelings, as opposed to my numbed and astonished brain, when I learned that Lord Attenborough had lost his fourteen year old grand-daughter. Lord Attenborough is famous for his stellar film career, and also for his habit of crying on British TV for the most trifling of reasons. There will be fewer jokes about his crying now. His loss surely affected other feelings besides mine.
So, explaining this tidal wave, if you will pardon the metaphor, of freely donated money, as well as political money in response to the public mood, involves many different variables. But I would like to add a few more thoughts to the mix.
This catastrophe is, it seems to me, an exception to a rule which is now widely accepted among the donation-giving (as opposed to donation soliciting) classes. This rule is: that most of what passes for Foreign Aid these days is pointless, or worse. Personally I believe this, and I now believe that a lot of other people believe it too, and have believed it for some time. → Continue reading: Where did all this Tsunami money come from?
Just imagine a country with a low crime rate yet loads of people own guns and finding a fully automatic rifle in someone’s house is not at all unusual. Imagine that this country does not even have a single unifying language, has a weak central government and strong regional government, yet is politically stable. It has few natural resources compared to many other parts of Europe yet has low unemployment, a diverse economy and one of the highest per capita incomes in the world (about the same as the USA). Of course like everywhere it has its problems and it is not a paradise on earth, but it is a pretty nice place to be and an even nicer place to do business. It is also a place that has been praised on this blog before.
Yes, I just got back from Switzerland.
With all the understandable attention being focused on the dreadful situation in the lands skirting the Indian Ocean, there is always a danger that disasters of a different, more Man-made kind, get overlooked. Well this week the German statistics office reported a dreadful set of unemployment figures, showing the number of jobless in Europe’s biggest economy to be at the highest level for seven years
A Bloomberg report on the story contains the following passage:
New measures cutting benefits for the long-term unemployed took effect on Jan. 1. Those without a job, including people previously registered as social-welfare recipients rather than as jobless, will also face increased pressure to accept job offers or risk losing benefits. The changes will add an as yet undetermined number of people to the January jobless total.
But it is clear that the German authorities are still tinkering with the issue. That 10.8 percent of the working age population of such an important country should be out of a job is a disgrace. What I find odd though is how little outraged commentary in the economics part of the press there is about this. It is almost as if the European chattering classes have come regard this problem in Germany, and also France, with an air of sullen resignation. Of course, dealing with it will involve lots of vulgar, Reaganite actions such as deregulation, tax cuts to spur business formation and the like, which of course goes against the grain of Germany’s ‘managed’ form of business so beloved of leftist commentators like Britain’s own Will Hutton.
Germany needs to get its act together. Some 15 years since reunification with the eastern part of the country, Germany has failed to live up its early promise. With so many young people, including those from immigrant backgrounds, on the dole, no wonder commentators wonder about the social fabric of that country. They should.
Entrepreneurship does not seem to get a very fair run on our main terrestrial television channels, as far as I can tell. The BBC is a particular offender. So credit is due to the BBC for a programme that shows how contestants with business ideas compete for money and interest from a panel of venture capitalists.
I watched the programme on Tuesday evening, and after my initial reservations about the format I became pretty engrossed. At the end, the final contestant, who eventually negotiated a deal where the others had failed, came across as such a smart fellow that I would have invested my own meagre funds in his idea.
The impression I got was that the producers asked the panel of VCs to play the role of flint-faced, capitalist bastard. They certainly succeeded. I disliked all of them intensely. No doubt that was the goal of the producers, but despite all that, I could not fail to be impressed by the enthusiasm of the wanna-be entrepreneurs.
The BBC may not fully realise it, but it is spreading the entrepreneurial meme.
Here is another health scare to add to the pile. It seems that Pakistani cricketer Abdul Razzaq has been overdosing on … spinach:
Abdul Razzaq’s mysterious illness, that he suffered during the Melbourne Test, may be related to his curious addiction to spinach. Razzaq suffered a bout of vomiting, dizziness and breathing difficulties on the third morning of the Boxing Day Test and though he batted in the second innings, he hadn’t recovered fully in time for the final game at Sydney.
Razzaq had experienced dizziness and nausea during Pakistan’s tour of New Zealand, in early 2004, and he was put on a diet of spinach by a medical guru in Pakistan. “Somebody told him to have spinach all the time,” Zakir Khan, the Pakistan board’s operation manager, told The Melbourne Age. “So he loves spinach and wherever he goes he says spinach should be part of the diet, in Pakistan particularly. The other team-mates tease him and call him Popeye the Sailor Man.”
It is with such stories at this that I am now consoling myself for this fiasco.
Maybe I am making too much of this, but see what you think.
This is the blurb, from a leaflet that fell out of the latest edition of the Radio Times (so no link), for a movie that has just come out on DVD about the musician Ray Charles:
MUSICAL BIOGRAPHICAL DRAMA The early life of celebrated musician Ray Charles, from 1930-1966. Charles loses his sight at the age of seven – two years after his brother’s tragic drowning. Encouraged by his mother, he forges a successful career as a pianist and singer, fusing together gospel, R’n’B and soul. But despite overcoming his early setbacks, Charles becomes dogged by drug problems and the complications arising from his numerous affairs.
The bit I object to is where it says that Ray Charles was “dogged by drug problems”. I do not know the exact circumstance in which Ray Charles turned to drugs and do not know to what degree he is to be blamed for his drug problems, but one thing is surely true, namely that these problems were set in motion by things which he himself did, and by choices which he himself made. Yet the blurb writer (who I do think is blameworthy) makes these “problems” read like entirely separate creatures who sneaked up behind Ray Charles and mugged him, without him doing anything to provoke them at all. To use the phrase “dogged by drug problems” to describe Charles’ drug misfortunes is to imply that these misfortunes were not in any way self-inflicted. It is to switch from the active to the passive, from responsibility for action, to excuse. At least those “complications” that arose from his affairs are described as arising from his affairs, rather than just from thin air. And of course Ray Charles gets all the credit that he surely deserves for forging (in a good way) his career, for fusing this music with that (ditto), and for overcoming early (and horrendous) setbacks. So why the “dogged by drug problems” stuff? Why not “problems caused by his drug-taking”?
You hear this kind of language – the passive evasive tense, and the relabeling of forces actually set in motion by the victim of them, into external life forces with minds of their own – a lot. (I recall this man referring to such language a lot – link anyone?) And this matters, because if individuals are not going to be described as at all to blame for what are actually their – at least partly – self-inflicted misfortunes, it is all too likely that someone else – someone who at worst only contributed somewhat to these problems – will be held entirely responsible for them. Which is unjust.
When things are said badly, they are liable to be done badly.
Surely nobody would be so callous as to use the Asian tsunami disaster as an excuse to try to extract money out of people by force, would they? That would be so cruel and contemptible and venal and heartless.
And true:
This last week has seen a rare and stirring demonstration of people power. Maybe we ought to turn to the big companies and say: you can no longer have it both ways. Either you give as generously as we do – or we will take it off you in tax. Either way, it’s time to start paying.
Mr. Freedland proves he is no slouch when it comes to leveraging an opportunity. He has now positioned himself perfectly to blame any post-tsunami suffering on a failure to turn the taxation screws with sufficient gusto.
Cunning to be sure but he might at least have waited a discrete period before making his move.
|
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