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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Paul Staines points up another consequence of pursuit of democracy as an end in and of itself in the Middle East
The latest Al Qaeda action in Turkey is their logical response to the US pushing democracy into the Muslim world. Could it be that Al Qaeda is trying to push democracy out of its only Muslim stronghold? So much for the fly-paper theory (which smacked of an ex post facto rationalisation) that Iraq would draw in the world’s assorted Muslim terrorists into a military battleground of the Pentagon’s choosing.
It may be that in the future Istanbul will suffer more than New York and London. Ironic given that Turkey rejected intervening wholeheartedly in Iraq. Attacking Anglosphere interests in Turkey and other Muslim countries in the Western orbit seems to be the best response of the terrorists. Bombing HSBC and the British consulate in Istanbul is a lot easier than bombing Britain’s biggest bank in London.
My impression of Turkey from my last visit (pre 9/11) is that its elites have firmly decided their future lies with the western democracies, but a vocal minority side with the mullahs. I had lunch with an urbane sophisticated somewhat worldly banker, I challenged him about the recent arrest of opposition politicians, piously telling him that Turkey would never enter the EU if it did not respect political and human rights. Without hesitation he simply said:
Tell me, would you like to see 20 Islamic fundamentalist members of the European parliament?
I did not respond, it is an interesting point, democracy will certainly produce uncomfortable outcomes in Iraq as well.
Paul Staines
There was a semi-interesting semi-comical article yesterday in the Guardian on the subject of happiness.
Propose a movement whose aim is to bottle happiness so it can be dispensed to one and all, saving humanity from a future of chronic misery, and you might expect at least a few people to roll their eyes. But, starting tomorrow, Britain’s most prestigious scientific institution, the Royal Society, will host a meeting for some of the world’s top psychologists who have done just that. Over two days, they will discuss “the science of wellbeing”. Their aim is to find out why it is that some people’s lives go so right. What is it that makes them happy and fulfilled, while others seem doomed to founder in misery, dissatisfaction and dejection?
Psychologists have immersed themselves in the study of misery, but have studied happiness a lot less. That was the message of a speech by Martin Seligman to the American Psychological Association in 1998, which set this happiness research bandwagon rolling. Simply: What makes people happy? Quick: find some happy people. Study them. How do they do it?
Optimism is one of the answers, and optimism, says Nick Baylis of Cambridge University, one of the organisers of this Royal Society meeting, can be learned. You can focus deliberately on the positive. Bad stuff? Put it out of your mind. Make a list of all your reasons to be cheerful!
So, the academic psychologists are finally admitting that all those tacky American pop psychology books about how to get ahead selling life insurance, with their positive mental attitudes and winning friends by influencing people (by, e.g. smiling, and listening to them and being cheerful), have been right for about the last hundred years and the academic psychologists wrong. The way to avoid misery is not to wallow in it, but to put it behind you. Surprise surprise.
Okay, but why do I write about this here? What has this to do with the Samizdata meta-context? My title will have already told you. → Continue reading: The happiness argument for capitalism and the misery argument against the state
Despite Michael Howard’s reported U-turn, peers have once again thrown out Big Blunkett’s discredited Criminal “Justice” Bill. They were particularly concerned by Blunkett’s plans to restrict the right to trial by jury, to allow people to be tried twice for the same crime and to allow evidence of “bad character” (i.e. gossip) to be used in trials.
Today is the last day of the parliamentary session, so if the Lords continue to stand up for civil liberties the whole Bill could be lost. The only way for it now to pass would appear to be significant concessions by the Government, a move that would further undermine Blunkett’s position.
Cross-posted from The Chestnut Tree Cafe
Scaled Composites completed the fifth test flight of SpaceShipOne on November 14th at the Mojave Civilian Test Flight Facility.
Objectives: The fifth glide flight of SpaceShipOne. New pilot checkout flight. Stability and control testing with the new extended horizontal tails. Tests included stall performance at aft limit CG and evaluation of the increased pitch and roll control authority. Other objectives included additional testing of the motor controller (MCS) and handling qualities in feathered flight.
Results: Launch conditions were 47,300 feet and 115 knots. Satisfactory stability and control at aft limit CG. A notable improvement in control power, particularly in roll. Handling qualities into and out of feather remained excellent with good nose pointing ability. Adjusted landing pattern altitudes resulted in a touchdown at the targeted runway aim-point.
There is as yet no indication when they will be ready for the first in-flight engine ignition test. It is conceivable this might be carried out next month on the date of the First Flight anniversary. As for the first suborbital flight, I certainly expect to see it before next summer. I do not know the status of their launch license filing beyond the gossip of last summer when they most likely decided to start the process, and that is likely a limiting factor on the launch date.
Okay, I have fifteen minutes left today, November 19th, to tell you what Dave Barry told his readers a blog-age ago (yesterday): today is World Toilet Day.
Says who? The World Toilet Organization,that’s who. So now you know what WTO really stands for.
Here is the World Toilet Day Press Release, which lists ten things everyone can do. My favourite is number 7:
Treat the public toilet you are in, as if its in your own home.
Their punctuation. In my case that would mean cleaning it only rarely, but putting up lots of bookshelves.
Some ‘amazing’ news from Russia – President Vladimir Putin has met with the country’s richest business people and warned them that unless they share their wealth they risk losing it. He told them they must use their wealth to help reduce poverty, saying there is a line between wealth and political power. Seems like an offer they can’t refuse…
Sounds familiar? You bet. Putin used to be the head of KGB and I expect no less of him. His career since the fall of communism did nothing more than reinforce his old communist opinions and prejudices. It is possible that his ‘talking to’ to the 800 businesses could be, just could be, a very clever PR ruse to appeal to the Russian people who have to struggle to make the ends meet in a whole new and ‘free’ post-communist fashion whilst the nouveau rich flaunt their wealth. But I do not really think so. It is worse than that, he actually believes it. The few politicians from the former communist bloc who are perceived as ‘englightened’ by the West are more often then not paleo-communists whose rhetoric has turned communitarian, or outright anti-capitalist. This is what Putin told a packed Hall of Columns in the House of Unions that included at least five billionaires:
[Businesses] must aim their efforts at developing a system of new social guarantees for the population in line with the new demands of the time. [We must join] forces to make the lives of people economically sound so that they have plenty to live on.
Bye-bye the lip-service to individual property rights whilst economic future of Russia circles round the drain as her dozen billionaires and several thousand millionaires have begun the process of moving their money off shore. God speed, ‘comrades’.
I am sure that these ‘gentlemen’ are no lambs. In fact, I am certain that their money does not come from honest business. Most likely they grew obscenely rich on rigged privatisations – they happened to be at the right place, right time, with nastier thugs at their command. From what I have seen so far it seems to me that Mikhail Khodorkovsky might not of the same ilk but I do not know enough about him to stand by that conclusion.
Nevertheless, the way to tame the ‘oligarchs’, as they are affectionately known in Russia, is not making them hand-over their money. Just make them subject to the same laws as everyone else (I hope it is obvious that Yukos is not Russia’s Enron). That would, however, require strong institutions such as courts and legislature upholding laws in general and contracts between individuals in particular. This is profoundly lacking in Russia and elsewhere in Eastern Europe.
The Russian state machine is toxic. It may have divested itself of the evil ideology, but it continues to trample over the individual. Rights and justice are considered Western luxuries or, better yet, a clever propaganda by the Western politicians to mask the strings pulled by the military-industrial complexes. Tinfoil hat material? I do not think so – not enough tinfoil in Russia for the lot of them.
A famous Texan is over here in town. So, given the rude noises coming out of the bottom-feeders of the ‘peace’ movement, with their oh-so original cracks about the ‘cowboy Bush’, here’s a quotation to ponder taken from Ian Fleming’s first, and arguably best, James Bond adventure, Casino Royale:
Bond reflected that Americans were fine people, and that most of them seemed to come from Texas.
No rudeness implied, by the way, to citizens of any state outside the Lone Star State, just in case folk get upset!
Back to Brussels for the first time since 1990 (and the first time since 1988 for more than 24 hours).
The racism is worse than I expected, especially on the part of Flemish speakers against French speakers (not just Walloons). The little things like shop opening hours, the lack of intelligence of policemen, the incompetence or unhelpfulness of bus drivers, trigger my French prejudices about Belgium being a sort of Franco-Dutch nation of retards. Partly it’s the accent and the slow-paced speech. A Belgian professor of mathematics with an IQ of 180 describing integrated calculus would sound like a dimwit to a French person.
It is all the more strange for the attractiveness of the central districts of the town. Belgium is an ancient centre of capitalism: at one time Antwerp was the world’s largest trading centre and either Ghent or Brussels (I forget which) is supposed to have the oldest stock exchange in the world. There is architectural evidence of this: the older houses of Brussels are very individually designed, there was clearly a lot of wealth around in the 17th century, and there are more statues per square mile than any other city I can think of (and most of them look pretty good).
White beggars in Belgium speak at least three languages: French, Flemish and English, they often also speak at least a smattering of a couple of either Dutch, German, Turkish or Arabic. The non-white beggars didn’t speak to me (is this an indication that whites don’t give them money willingly?). As usual in Europe, the East Europeans doing the low-status jobs are ridiculously overqualified: engineering school graduates working as garbage collectors or cleaners, bar staff with medical qualifications.
In one respect Brussels is far superior to Paris: there are street kiosks in the town centre where one can buy snails, as well as the gauffre (waffle) and crèpe sellers that have been exported to other cities. One nastier thing is that in France I can go to a hotel, pay cash, give a false name and show no ID, whereas Belgium seems to have the old surveillance society trick of requiring all visitors to register their ID (this used to include staying at private addresses, but I don’t know if that still formally applies). Another bad thing is the police sirens are the same as in London: the stupid loud whooping noises designed for a grid road city that are confusing in cramped city streets. Parisian sirens are less noisy, don’t pump the adrenalin of police drivers as much (I would love to know if there are fewer fatal road accidents caused by Paris police responding to emergency calls than London), and you can tell where they’re coming from.
I made a walk-in visit to an Emergency Room to arrange for a prescription and found a compromise between the British National Health Service (queue, grubby surroundings) and France (helpful, competent and much, much, much faster, but one pays). The price of the medication was cheaper than in the UK. I shall make enquiries about gun laws and taxes. The disturbing evidence so far is the number of notices about taxes. It is easier to find information about registering for taxes than finding a decent street map of Brussels.
George Monbiot has had a revelation… a few decades later than it should have been, but hey, better late than never. Having had the rare pleasure of meeting George Monbiot in the flesh, I was somewhat incredulous to read of his sudden insight that the only plausible way to end capitalism is with totalitarianism rather than caring sharing ‘democracy’:
Whenever anyone in Paris announced that capitalism in all its forms should be overthrown, everyone cheered. But is this really what we want? And, if so, with what do we hope to replace it? And could that other system be established without violent repression? In Paris, some of us tried to tackle this question in a session called “life after capitalism”. By the end of it, I was as unconvinced by my own answers as I was by everyone else’s. While I was speaking, the words died in my mouth, as it struck me with horrible clarity that as long as incentives to cheat exist (and they always will) none of our alternatives could be applied universally without totalitarianism.
Of course the choking weed of ‘democratic’ regulatory statism will continue to bugger up that great impersonal global capitalist wealth generation machine for quite a while yet. However in the long run Monbiot is quite right that the only way to actually kill off that protean virus-like thing called capitalism is to kill 20 or 30 million people in the developed world… and that ain’t gonna happen. Nevertheless, do not expect Monbiot to abandon his attempt to replace as many several social interactions as possible with collective political interactions any time soon (euphemistically called ‘making the world more democratic’). In many ways, his sudden realisation that he cannot wish capitalism out of existence by calling for a show of hands will make him more keen on gaming the system to achieve his ends, much the same way Ralph Nader holds himself up to be a ‘consumer advocate’ (and what could be more ‘capitalist’ that a ‘consumer’, right?) and speaking outside the tradition left wing meta-context.
Well, as Samizdata’s token Australian, I guess it is my job to do a little bit of cheering from the point of view of England’s opponents in the final of the Rugby World Cup on Saturday. Like Brian, I have also been writing about the tournament on ubersportingpundit, but if he is going to bring it here and the commenters are all then going to complain about Australians I might as well use my God like Samizdatista powers too.
For in the other semi-final on the weekend, Australia versus New Zealand, the Australian side that have looked second rate all year suddenly came good, and played superbly to beat New Zealand. Sydney is getting excited. The final is Australia v England, a great grudge match.
Which leaves me with two things to discuss. The grudge, and the match. First, the match. → Continue reading: Australia in the Rugby World Cup Final – and New Zealand hung out to dry
I think you will find this DOD transcript a fascinating entree into the current situation in Iraq. Major General Charles H. Swannack, Jr., the Commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, is high enough to have a fairly global view but not too high. He’s still close to the combat and day to day reality.
It is well worth a read.
David Frum has a strong editorial in today’s Telegraph writing about the anti-Bush demonstration in Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London last night.
The war on terror has glaringly exposed the moral contradictions of contemporary political radicalism: a politics that champions the rights of women and minorities, but only when those rights are threatened by white Europeans; a politics that celebrates creative non-violence at home but condones deadly extremism abroad; and, perhaps above all, a politics that traces its origins to the Enlightenment – and today raises its voice to protect militantly unenlightened terrorists from the justice dispensed by their victims.
He talks about how obtruse the ‘protesters’ were about answering his questions or generally engaging with him, warning each other about how he is bound to misquote them or quote them out of context. This is what he has to say to that:
I agree that context is everything, and the context of this week’s events is that many thousands of British people intend to converge on central London to protest against the overthrow of one of the most cruel and murderous dictators of the 20th century – and to wave placards calling the American president who ordered the dictator’s overthrow “the world’s number one terrorist”.
It’s a deeply shameful context, and though I would not quite endorse the verdict of the taxi driver with the poppy stuck in his dashboard who dropped me off at the demos (“Not many of them traitors out tonight, I see”), he at least saw something that they, with all their apparently abundant education could not: that the two leaders they most scorn are the latest in the long line of Anglo-American statesmen whose willingness to use force to defeat evil secured them their right to make bloody fools of themselves in Lincoln’s Inn Fields and through the streets of London to Grosvenor Square.
Although there is no love lost for Bush on this blog and we do endorse the taxi driver’s verdict, the article contains sentiments that we hope are shared by more people in Britain than the current coverage seems to suggest.
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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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