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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Recently the IEA sent me a flier about this book in praise of globalisation, and I went round there and bought a copy from them (at an enticingly reduced price – thank you Adam). That second link is to an IEA review of the book. So far I have only read the Introduction, so I cannot offer you a review of my own, but already I am impressed.
I found especially interesting what the book’s author Martin Wolf had to say about the World Bank, and about its boss at the time that he worked for it, Robert McNamara.
For some reason I have never really paid proper attention to the World Bank. I knew that I was vaguely against it. I suspected it of doing too many of the things that the globalisers who are the target of Wolf’s book still complain about it not doing. But I had never really got to grips with the story. So this bit of Wolf’s Introduction really struck home to me:
By the late 1970s, I had concluded that, for all the good intentions and abilities of its staff, the Bank was a fatally flawed institution. The most important source of its failures was its commitment to lending, almost regardless of what was happening in the country it was lending to. This was an inevitable flaw since the institution could hardly admit that what it could offer – money – would often make little difference. But this flaw was magnified by the personality of Robert McNamara, former US Defence Secretary, who was a dominating president from 1967 to 1981. McNamara was a man of ferocious will, personal commitment to alleviating poverty and frighteningly little common sense. By instinct, he was a planner and quantifier. Supported by his chief economic adviser, the late Hollis Chenery, he put into effect a Stalinist vision of development: faster growth would follow a rise in investment and an increase in availability of foreign exchange; both would require additional resources from outside; and much of these needed resources would come from the Bank. Under his management, the Bank and Bank lending grew enormously. But every division also found itself under great pressure to lend money, virtually regardless of the quality of the projects on offer or of the development programmes of the countries. This undermined the professional integrity of the staff and encouraged borrowers to pile up debt, no matter what the likely returns. This could not last – and did not do so…
Wolf’s next paragraph starts predictably:
By that time I had had enough…
But then Wolf goes into a bit of detail, on the subject of India. → Continue reading: Martin Wolf on the World Bank
Every great movement must experience three stages: ridicule, discussion, adoption.
– John Stuart Mill
As mentioned before on Samizdata.net, a television advertisement for featuring a woman firing a gun has been banned by regulators after it prompted complaints from viewers. The advert for the Freelander Sport was accused of glorifying guns and encouraging dangerous driving. Ofcom, the regulator for the UK communications industries, ruled that it had breached guidelines on harm and offence and must not be shown again.
Given regular coverage of high-profile shooting incidents and public concern about the wider social impact of the so-called gun culture, the glamorisation and normalisation of guns, even indirectly, is simply offensive to many people.
What on earth do they mean by gun culture in Britain? It must be the fact that criminals have them, because a law-abiding citizen can not get hold of one. Oh, no, guns are bad, bad, bad. The fact that a gun would enable a father to defend himself and his sons against a drug gang thugs terrorising his neighbourhood is obviously missing the point.
A public-spirited man who was beaten up in front of his young sons when he confronted drug dealers outside his home committed suicide because he felt powerless to protect them.
We must ensure that those who want to protect themselves and their families understand that guns would only increase the level of mindless violence in Britain and, more importantly, make the self-righteous Guardianistas and assorted champagne socialists look even worse. There is no room for gun culture in the multi-cultural Britain.
Interestingly, David Davis, the shadow home secretary notes:
Large amounts of crime go unreported and many people accept yob culture as a fact of life.
We shall also fight the ‘yob culture’ with luncheon vouchers, wagging our fingers at hyper-active young men beating up whomever stands up to them and banning them from town centres for unruly behaviour. That should show them.
Now pass me that baby…
I did a few postings on my Education Blog at the beginning of this month, but these aside I’ve taken the whole of the month off from blogging. And now, my Internet Connection willing, I am back.
It was not so much that I was fed up with blogging, more that there were other things that needed doing, seriously, with the kind of concentrated attention that daily blogging was making impossible.
My home needed new shelves for books and for classical CDs, and it needed old shelves, laden with Libertarian Alliance pamphlets that nobody now needs, to be emptied and taken down. Mounds of papers needed to be sorted and classified, and space had to be created for them then to be stored in such a way that they didn’t just get muddled together again. Two notorious no-go areas (the big cupboard and the space under the desk in my bedroom) were … gone into, and cleansed.
I did do one radio spot about … oh, something or other, and at the end of the month I hosted my usual Last Friday meeting (thank you Paul Marks – excellent talk and an excellent evening). Oh yes, and I did a talk about Classical Music for Tim Evans’s Putney Debate on the Second Friday. But basically I took a holiday from pontification more profound than I can ever remember having enjoyed since I got started as a politificator at the beginning of the nineteen eighties. I did carpentry, sorted through papers, and in between times I socialised with friends (including some of my fellow Samizdatistas), undistracted by the self-imposed duty to tell the world what it should be thinking, or even to think about it.
It was a blessed relief suddenly to find myself in a world where the only problems that mattered were my own, and my own to grapple with and to solve. Yes, I have had Internet Connection problems, but I can deal with them, provided only that I get seriously stuck into them. And yes, carpentry can be exhausting. As was taking out about three dozen black plastic bags of rubbish, with about another two dozen still to go. But what a joy to be obsessing only about things that I could personally do something about.
My kind of politics is very anti-political, as is a lot of the politics here. But it is still politics. And there is a world of difference between sneering and jeering at the buffoons who rule the world, or who think they do, or who pretend that they do, and truly not giving these people the time of day, for day, after day, after day. It really was very refreshing, and not, I believe, an experience I will soon forget.
I even stopped reading Samizdata.
Now that I have resumed reading it, I am glad to see that I was not essential to its continuing success. (I would not want to be writing for a group blog that depended on me.) I did read a book or two during August, and I did inevitably do the odd spot of abstract thinking, about this and that. So I return to blogging action with a mind that is not completely blank. Meanwhile, my deepest thanks to the Samizdata editorial team for not nagging me, and for letting me rest in peace.
It would be fair to say Conrad Black’s spectacular and much publicised difficulties are being presented by him as a struggle between a capitalist libertarian (yay!) versus evil regulatory statists (boo!)…
The name-calling between the parties has been ugly, however, with Lord Black filing a libel suit in Canada against Mr Breeden and other Hollinger International directors, accusing them of waging a “campaign of defamation”. He was being persecuted by “truly evil people”, among them “Breeden and his fascists”, who represent “a menace to capitalism as any sane and civilised person would define it”, he complained in court documents.
But is that indeed the case? I am in no position to judge the truth or otherwise of the specific allegations but it seems to me what is at issue here is did Black (et al) fail in their fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders for whom they were actually working? Moreover, did were those shareholders actively defrauded by Black and his colleagues?
Again, I have no idea but I would be very leery of assuming this matter has any first order ideological dimensions at all.
There were two articles on the Rittenhouse Review which rather interested me:
Firstly the blog’s author, James Capozzola, displays what I can only describe as a very healthy disdain for democracy (which I certainly share) by applauding the fact that people in Pennsylvania will not be allowed to vote for Ralph Nader for President of the USA. I have commented on this subject before on Samizdata.net.
Now if only Kerry and Bush could also be disqualified…
Secondly, there is an article which mentions that the 427th Transportation Company (based in Pennsylvania, hence being of particular interest to Philadelphia based Rittenhouse Review) was deployed to Iraq with insufficient body armour and GPS sets. He approvingly notes that after he reported on this, one of his readers privately purchased a GPS set and intends to mail it out to Iraq for the unit to use. I too heartily approve of this and would love to see a significant proportion of the military’s funding gradually replaced with voluntary subscriptions, something I would happily contribute to myself. However I must take issue with the phrase:
Imagine it: The U.S. military, notably reservists, relying on family, friends, neighbors, and perfect strangers to fill gaping holes in the Pentagon supply chain.
I would prefer to think of it as ‘members of society with a vested interest in survival and an affinity for the people defending them’, rather than the more pejorative ‘perfect strangers’, filling the spaces left in the Pentagon’s supply chain which are theirs to rightly fill.
Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of jackals by jackasses.
– H. L. Mencken
On the very first occasion that I saw the advert on my TV, I knew, I just knew that is was going to set the fur flying. I was right.
Scenario: a man picks up his car keys and leaves the house to get into his brand, spanking, new Land Rover Freelander Sport motor vehicle. A woman (presumably his wife) spots him leaving. She rushes up to the bedroom, opens the dresser drawer and pulls out a starting pistol. She rushes downstairs again and runs outside just as her husband is getting into the car. She points the gun up to the sky and fires a single shot, thus giving him signal to get started.
Pretty innocuous stuff. But still far too traumatic and disturbing for some people:
A television advert for Land Rover featuring a woman firing a gun has been banned by watchdogs for glamourising gun culture….
The agency behind the advert said it was intended to promote the message “that the Freelander Sport triggered sporting behaviour”.
But 348 viewers complained to media regulator Ofcom, meaning that the advert is in the top 10 of the most complained about commercials.
Most viewers were concerned that the commercial glamourised or normalised gun culture despite the fact handguns are illegal in Britain. Many also pointed out that the gun was stored irresponsibly.
Yes, you are reading that right. People might be encouraged to store the guns which they do not possess irresponsibly. Priceless!
The right to keep and bear arms is not a debate in this country. Nor is it an issue or an idea or an argument. It has all been subsumed into a deep national psychosis for which I see no prospect of any cure.
What would make you think we are trying to provoke?
Perhaps it is merely a case of grabbing whoever is conveniently to hand. Or perhaps not:
A group calling itself The Islamic Army in Iraq says it is holding the two men – Christian Chesnot of Radio France Internationale and Georges Malbrunot of Paris daily newspaper Le Figaro….
Arab TV station al-Jazeera showed a video on Monday in which both men, speaking in English, called for the law banning headscarves to be overturned – and for French people to demonstrate for its repeal.
A group calling itself The Islamic Army in Iraq says it is holding the two men – Christian Chesnot of Radio France Internationale and Georges Malbrunot of Paris daily newspaper Le Figaro.
Arab TV station al-Jazeera showed a video on Monday in which both men, speaking in English, called for the law banning headscarves to be overturned – and for French people to demonstrate for its repeal.
Of course, the only way to prevent this kind of thing happening again is for the French to change their misguided and interventionist domestic policies.
[P.S. Why were they speaking in English, I wonder?]
War is an ugly thing but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feelings which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.
– John Stuart Mill
If pigs could vote, the man with the slop bucket would be elected swineherd every time, no matter how much slaughtering he did on the side.
– Orson Scott Card
In the most recent edition of the Sunday Times1, there was an interesting article by Ferdinand Mount called Uppers and Downers which had the tagline:
Ferdinand Mount believes a ‘classless’ delusion grips Britain. Not only is the class divide wider than ever, but in a compelling new book he explores how the rich are treating the poor with an unprecedented contempt
I must confess that this intro led me to read this article with a predisposition for contempt for that premise myself. And indeed, I found much of what Mount had to say about class attitudes in Britain debatable to put it mildly. However the central thesis, something not hinted at in the introduction, was indeed compelling: that many social problems today in the UK are a direct consequence of the destruction of working class culture, and this was caused by, as Mount puts it:
Worse than all of this is the fact that in the past I have worked for a Conservative government, and not just any government but the administration led by Margaret Thatcher, which its passionate opponents still believe did more to deepen class divisions than any other government since the war. I was, for a time, the head of her policy unit. How can someone like me pretend to know what life was and is like for the worst-off of my fellow countrymen?
My answer is that it is People Like Us who are largely responsible for the present state of the lower classes in Britain. It is our misunderstandings, meddlings and manipulations that have transformed a British working class that was the envy and amazement of foreign observers in the 19th century into a so-called underclass that is often the subject of baffled despair today, both at home and abroad. We did the damage, or most of it. It is the least we can do to try to understand what we have done and help to undo it where we can.
For me this is truly the key but it is not a consequence of the ‘Conservative’ or ‘Labour’ varient of intrusive regulatory statism (for in 2004, who really thinks there is a huge material difference between them?) but of regulatory interventionist statism in all its progressive democratic forms. I shall certainly read Mount’s new book Mind the Gap, though if the pre-release blurb is true that the book asks…
[T]he author pursues an oft-times illusive answer to the fundamental question: How can oppressive inequality in Britain be wiped out once and for all?
…which begs the question does ‘oppressive inequality’ (a) actually exist in Britain, and (b) it is anyone’s business to ‘wipe it out’. If that is in fact what the book is about then I expect I shall be putting a pretty nasty book review up here on Samizdata.net in the not too distant future.
For me the core issue here however is that as Mount indicates, it was indeed the political class, people like him, who bear the responsibility for destroying a significant section of civil society and replacing it with a state-centred dependency and entitlement culture of de-socialised barbarians.
Thus the question that really needs answering it not how do ‘we’ solve this problem but rather how to dis-aggrandise the entire class of people from left to right who caused the problem in the first place. I cannot tell without first reading Ferdinand Mount’s book but perhaps he has realised that there is indeed what Sean Gabb calls an ‘enemy class’… and much to his chagrin, the term ‘People Like Us’ indicates Mount has realised that he is a member of it.
1 Due to the benighted archiving policy of The Times making articles unreadable to viewers overseas, we do not generally link to Times articles
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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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