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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This minute is my contribution but I should re-emphasise that I remain unconvinced by the overall policy. I believe the proposed plan is flawed, and that no tinkering with particular issues will be able to resolve what is a fundamental political matter. We remain as far apart as ever on the acceptability of charging. How will we get people to accept a fee when asylum seekers get the card free? What about the practicality of ensuring every citizen provides a biometric sample while no effective procedures are in place for those who refuse? The potential for a large-scale debacle which harms the Government is great, and any further decisions on the next steps must be made collectively. I will continue to urge strongly that this issue be shelved.
–Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, asking David Blunkett some very good questions in a leaked Cabinet document, as revealed in the Sunday Times.
Great piece by Mark Steyn about the Arnie Californian triumph, making entirely justified fun of the Euro-sneerers.
California’s problem was that it was beginning to take on the characteristics of an EU state, not just in its fiscal incoherence but in its assumption that politics was a private dialogue between a lifelong political class and a like-minded media. It would be too much to expect Le Monde and the BBC to stop being condescending about American electorates. But they might draw a lesson and cease being such snots about their own.
Steyn also makes the point that Arnie won not just with his classically American Immigrant biography, but with his better policies. He says he’ll cut taxes and get the Californian economy moving again. It was policy what did it. This is what the EUro-media don’t get or refuse to get. And they wouldn’t, would they?
Is Arnie telling the truth? In my opinion the best summary of his victory came from an anonymous Californian voter interviewed on Brit TV during the last few days. I have no idea when this was, or for what programme, or what the guy does for a living. But I do remember what he said. He said: “I rolled the dice. Gray Davis was the devil I know, and I know he’s running the state diabolically. Arnie says he’ll do better. I hope he’s telling the truth. My reason for being optimistic is that so far he’s done a damn good job of running his own life with fiscal effectiveness. Maybe he’ll do the same for California. I sure hope so.” Those were not the exact words, but that was the substance of it. It was impeccably logical, utterly clear-eyed. GD was a guarantee of ghastliness. Arnie has been competent being Arnie. Maybe – no certainty was expressed here, only the rational hope – maybe he’ll be competent enough to do what he promises for California. It was a democratic rerun of the Parable of the Talents, in other words. “Thou hast been faithful in a small thing, viz: being Arnold Schwarzenegger, so now we’ll make Master of a Great Thing, viz: Governor of California. And as for you, you idiot, you lose everything.”
If Arnie messes up, as Steyn makes clear, prattling away in a funny voice about how he made good as a funny voiced immigrant won’t save him from public obloquy.
Maybe we at Samizdata.net go on about this Arnie election too much here, when we ought to be telling all you Americans things you don’t know, British things.
Maybe my next posting will be about that Conservative plan to have a locally elected “Sheriff”, instead of every police force everywhere no matter how insignificant being controlled by London, and of how disdainful everyone has been about that. “I mean, my dear, who knows what ghastly people will be chosen?” I say “everyone” will be disdainful. Maybe the voters will quite like it. Although electing a Sheriff is another thing Americans know more about than we do, of course.
I know that we’re not supposed to be this gung-ho about democracy here. But if the choice is between US-democracy and EU-plutocracy – US-democracy being the system that allows body-builders etc. to become plutocrats as well and sort things out if the regular plutocrats do nothing except steal and swank around and mess things up like they do in EUrope – then I say US-democracy is often better.
Big Mother
Here’s another of those Has This Person Been Reading White Rose? pieces, this time by Jemima Lewis in today’s Telegraph:
Some pestilential scientist has invented a device that allows parents to trace their child’s location via his mobile telephone. This is the latest in a rash of new gadgets designed to make sure children never get a moment’s privacy. There is the tracker watch, which uses Global Positioning System satellites to pinpoint a child’s whereabouts (and which, once affixed around the poor blighter’s wrist, cannot be removed without alerting the police). There are similar devices that can be sewn into the child’s clothing or school bag, or – creepiest of all – surgically implanted under the skin. And last month we saw the unveiling of a gadget which, when installed in the family car, reports back to parents where, and how, their child is driving.
It seems extraordinary that, at a time when children’s rights are more loudly invoked than ever before, there is not an uproar over this invasion of their civil liberties. There is no statistical justification for it: children in Britain are no more likely to be abducted by a stranger now than in 1975. It can serve only to foster parental paranoia and make children feel more hounded than ever.
Who would want to be young in the reign of Big Mother?
Often one says at this point: read it all. But that’s all of it. It’s just a diary bit in a longer piece which is about lots of other things as well. So, no need.
British smokers are refusing to lie down and die of nagging. The European Union directive requiring that cigarette packets be used as a means of harassing smokers with loud offensive messages like SMOKING KILLS!, YOU WILL DIE! NOW! and the more succinct and efficient FUCK OFF!!! Is soon to be superseded with graphic pictures of diseased organs which will by law have to cover at least 150% of the surface area of the packaging.
Yet good old British creative thinking is successfully combating this ludicrous and patronising nonsense. People have noticed that cigarettes can actually be removed from their packaging and placed in other receptacles, perfectly legally- and that it is still within the law to cover one’s cigarette box with a piece of brightly-coloured fabric! And a whole new market in old-fashioned silver cigarette boxes, and new-style box-covers, has opened up and is blossoming in the UK. What a good idea, and recyclable hence money-saving too, so surely an improvement even on those clever ironic stickers for covering up the offensive messages which were featured in a blog here some time ago. Go capitalism!
It almost makes me want to take up smoking again, just for the pretty cases. If only the things didn’t give one cancer.
(Cue Samizdata blog predicting inevitable future EU plans forcing smokers to hold unmodified and unadorned officially-approved packets up for inspection by the police on demand…)
The Reconquest of Spain
D. W. Lomax
Longman, first published 1978
It is surprising to read (p. 179), “There seems to be no serious book in any language devoted to the history of the whole Reconquest,” (at least when the book was published in 1978) despite the fact that it would seem to be the underlying theme of the history of the Middle Ages in the Peninsula, with the nice firm dates of 711-1492. The author commends O’Callaghan’s A History of Medieval Spain.
Like everywhere else, from Persia to the Atlantic, Islam rolled unstoppably over the whole of Spain, except its tiny northern edge, probably leaving that out in favour of richer pickings in southern France. Even here, in Asturias, only active resistance to the Arabs ensured the survival of the tiny state and an early civil war amongst the Moslems led to the withdrawal of disaffected Berbers from northern territory which was then occupied by Christians.
The author claims, with some evidence, that quite early the ideal of Reconquest was the ambition of the Christian kings and people. However, the initial Ummayad emirate, subsequently caliphate, flourished until the end of, and particularly during, the tenth century, though the last caliphs were puppets. It is probably this period of the Muslim occupation that has been idealised as a time of toleration by Muslims of Christians and Jews, though these were definitely second-class citizens and persecution of them not unknown.
The break-up of the caliphate enabled the Christians to advance again, with some assistance from France; also the crusading ideal, though mainly focussed on Jerusalem, was some help, sometimes by crusaders en passant. The capitulation of Toledo, even though it remained something of an outpost, signalled this. However, about 1085, some of the Muslims, in desperation invited in from North Africa the Almoravids, a puritanical sect (often hated by the more liberal decadent Spanish Muslims) who, in the great battle of Sagrajas (1086) halted the reconquest. The Cid (1043-99) is of this period. Much of the time he as often served Muslim kings as Christian, but after capturing Valencia, “was the only Christian leader to defeat the Almoravids in battle in the eleventh century”. (p. 74)
By this time the Christian states were Portugal, Leon-Castille (gradually united), Aragon and Navarre, sometimes allied, but more often not and generally with no scruples about fighting each other with Muslim allies. However, Aragon was pushing down the Ebro valley, taking Saragossa in 1118, though the Almoravids fought back successfully to prevent it reaching Valencia, which had been evacuated after the death of the Cid.
Like the Caliphate before them, the Almoravids disintegrated and were largely replaced, from 1157, by another sect from Africa, the Almohads, who soundly defeated the Castilians at Alarcos in 1195. This defeat seems to have first cowed then roused the Christians (particularly the Pope); finally Christians from all the Spanish kingdoms, and some from France, united in a campaign which won the decisive victory of Las Navas de Tolosa (1212). In the forty years after the battle the Almohad empire broke into pieces which were annexed by” Castile and Aragon. Vital cities – such as Cordova (1236) and Seville (1248) – passed permanently into Christian hands so that “by 1252 the whole of the Peninsula was nominally under Christian suzerainty” (p. 129), though this, of course, did not mean the end of Muslim kingdoms.
The pace of reconquest slowed down, initially as a result of another transfusion from Africa, the Marinids, who, however, could only defend the Muslim rump. In 1340, at Tarifa, their sultan was decisively defeated and no successor state in Africa invaded Spain again. Muslim Spain survived as Granada for another 150 years, the Christians occupying much of the time fighting and rebelling against each other. One is forced to add: when they should have been completing the Conquest. The process, when it happened, certainly united Spain. In the end, “Fernando and Isabel could cure one crisis in 1481 simply by setting the war-machine to work once more to conquer Granada.” (p. 178)
The author, at his Conclusion makes the persuasive claim that “Only Spain [and also, I suppose to a lesser extent Portugal, which he does not mention] was able to conquer, administer, Christianize and europeanize the populous areas of the New World precisely because during the previous seven centuries her society had been constructed for the purpose of conquering, administering, Christianizing and europeanizing the inhabitants of al-Andalus.” (p. 178) As so often in books published from the 1970s on, the maps leave much to be desired; certainly places are mentioned in the text which are not to be found on them.
Two days after I had finished this book I listened to a discussion on “Cordovan Spain” under Melvyn Bragg’s chairmanship on Radio 4. The three other participants were Tim Winter, a Muslim convert, of the Faculty of Divinity, Cambridge University, Mary Nickman, a Jewess (carefully correcting herself from AD to Common Era) and an executive director of the Maimonides Foundation, and Martin Palmer, whose voice was not to me sufficiently distinguishable from the first, an Anglican lay preacher and theologian, and author of A Sacred History of Britain. Although the consensus was largely positive about the Ummayad regime, and their tone “multicultural” in the modern sense, the first two did seem to agree that the three religions, while coexisting, did not indulge in dialogue, let alone interpenetrate. This confirms an episode mentioned in the book, that even when promised immunity in a bilateral debate, a Christian was executed “when he expressed his real opinion of Mohammed”. (p. 23) Nor was the Koran translated into Latin “until the twelfth or thirteenth century”, someone said in the discussion. Needless to say, the rosy view of Muslim Spain did not take into account that the Muslim conquest fatally disrupted Mediterranean civilization, the burden of Pirenne’s Mohammed and Charlemagne. To pick up the shards and pass a few of them on does not strike me as a very large recompense.
The Observer reports that it is now “highly unlikely” that Big Blunkett’s plan to introduce compulsory National Identity Cards for innocent British citizens will be included in the next Queen’s speech.
Apparently the decision follows new evidence that ID Cards would be “close to useless” in fighting terrorism – something those of us opposed to the idea have been saying for ages.
Another problem is the “foundation documents” required to gain an ID card. If ID Cards are issued on the basis of (for example) birth certificates and birth certificates are easily forged then ID Cards are worthless.
If this report is accurate then it is good news for UK civil liberties. However it doesn’t mean the threat is over, we need to remain vigilant. There is every likelihood that Big Blunkett will try to resurrect his pet project.
Cross posted from The Chestnut Tree Cafe
Today I received an email from the LSE (that’s London School of Economics) Hayek Society. I’ve been in occasional touch with this operation over the years, and have attended a few of their events, which have always been lively and well organised. It would appear that, this academic year, under the leadership of Nick Spurrell (whom I met again a few weeks ago at the office of the International Policy Network office where he was helping out over the Summer, alongside samizdatista Alex Singleton), the Hayek Society is keeping all this going in fine style.
They have elected a new Committee. Here it is:
President: Nick Spurrell; Vice-President: Lauri Tahtinen; Treasurer: Sarah Meacham; Secretary: Natalia Mamaeva; Financial Officers: Vicky Yuen, Peter Bellini; Events Officer: Szymon Ordys, Louis Haynes, Oliver Dully; Editor-in-Chief: Erica Yu; Co-editors: Michael Chen, Harry Cherniak; PR Director: Daniel Freedman.
Now apart from Nick, I don’t know who these people are whose names I’ve just put up here in lights. But I like it that many of these names are female (Sarah, Natalia, Vicky, Erica), and that many are non-British (Tahtinen, Mamaeva, Yuen, Ordys, Yu). All the non-Brits could just be Americans, but I’m pretty sure that there are more places of birth involved that that. These people are bound to attract lots more people, of lots of types, from lots of faraway places. I mean, if each of them invites four friends … In a university, a mere two or three people can make a huge difference. The Hayek Society already has a definite thirteen, and the year has only just started. Extraordinary.
The Hayek Society has for years now been dosing the LSE with the message of limited government liberalism – liberalism, that is, when it really was liberalism and before the socialists of the sort who infested the LSE during an earlier era got hold of the word liberalism and turned it on its head. And through the LSE, the Hayek Society will dose lots of other places besides in the years to come. Get them when they’re young …
The LSE is an important place and always has been. For good or ill, what they think today, the world thinks tomorrow. And this time around it’s for good.
There have been a great many animated films produced in the last 15 years. Many have been ordinary, but a surpringly large number have been good to wonderful. This article is an overview of these movies.
In the world of animation, once in a while see an animator or an animation studio going through a wonderful creative period. Over the last fifteen years, we have had three or four such hot patches. They do, I think, all owe a lot to the resurgence in animation that occurred due to the first of these, at Disney.
Until the late 1980s, Disney’s animation division had appeared to be in terminal decline. However, this somehow changed: Disney went through a stunning (but relatively brief) period of drawn animated musicals at the end of the 1980s and start of the 1990s, thanks to the wonderful musical work of Howard Ashman and Alan Menkin. In retrospect I think there were two great movies that came out of this, The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast, but these changed animation forever. The two Disney movies that followed these (and which were as anticipated as they were because of them) were more financially successful, but I don’t think they were quite as good. Aladdin was an Ashman/Menkin movie, but the influence of Robin Williams made it a little uneven, in my opinion. And, very sadly, Howard Ashman was dying when he wrote the music, and it is not as finished and polished as on the earlier movies. The Disney movie that followed that was The Lion King, which had its music written by Elton John and Tim Rice, and although I think this movie is nicely made, it lacks the style of the earlier ones. After that, Disney’s drawn animation went into a steep decline, from which it has not recovered. (Just out of interest – the music and choreography of the first song – Going Through the Motions – of the musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is deliberately intended to look like a number from an Ashman/Menkin musical).
Financially, these four movies were extraordinarily successful. Prior to these movies, animation was considered to be something of a niche business, but these movies changed that idea utterly. They grossed far more than anyone had believed possible. Still, though, the audience was mainly children, and this fact made them some of the most financially successful films ever made. This was because they were made after VHS video recorders were ubiquitous. VHS video was a rental business, as people generally only wanted to watch movies once. However, the exception to this was films aimed at children. Children would (and will) watch the same movies over and over, and therefore parents would actually buy VHS tapes for their children. At the time, the prices of such tapes were high, and stunning numbers of the tapes of these four animated movies were sold. (Low quality direct to video sequels were made of these films as well, and these raked in even more). The films had not cost all that much to make (animation was not an art held in high regard just prior to The Little Mermaid) and the levels of profitability were just amazing. (The profit on The Lion King is in the billions of dollars, on an investment of maybe $50 million). Even better, children’s films are hugely valuable things in studio archives, as a new generation of children comes along every few years. (The Ashman/Merkin films also were helped by the fact that they coincided with the arrival of the baby boom echo generation of children. Hollywood was too dumb to be actually aware of this, and didn’t actually figure it out until after the release of the horror film Scream in 1996, but that is a different story, although one well worth telling some other time).
Disney’s competitors saw all this, and felt that they wanted a part of this profit. → Continue reading: Waiting for Miyazaki, or Thoughts on the state of animated movies.
Nowadays we need to celebrate every victory, however small.
Management at the Trelleborg chemical company in Leicester have agreed to stop tagging their employees.
Under the recently imposed scheme workers had to request and wear a red tag whenever they took a break. Not surprisingly they complained that this was demeaning. Following ACAS intervention the company agreed to scrap the system.
The fact that such a repulsive scheme has been scrapped is encouraging. The fact that the company thought they could get away with it in the first place is worrying.
BBC report here
The Age of Reagan: I 1964 –1980
Steven F. Hayward
Prima Lifestyles, 2001
This is a very long book (718 pages + another 100 pages of notes etc.) and it is somewhat daunting to realise that in due course a second volume will come to complete the story. It might be as well to say that this is emphatically not a biography, not even a political biography; the title and the sub-title The Fall of the Old Liberal Order make this clear. It is more a history of the times, from the anti-Goldwater landslide of 1964 to the Reagan landslide of 1980. The cumulative impression of the book itself is its richness and how its detail ministers to its analysis.
And it is a sorry, not to say a frightening tale, telling as it does of the collapse of American self-confidence and the rise of the counter-culture of self-hatred amongst its elite. The narrative is admittedly partisan, but at the very least a case that needs to be put. As for the Presidents of the period, Hayward’s judgements are that Johnson was irresolute, reacting to events minimally, Nixon misguided, obsessive and unfortunate, Ford a mere stopgap and Carter simply disastrous. All of them seemed to have underestimated Soviet malevolence and overestimated Soviet stability; for the latter the intelligence services seem to have been especially at fault.
For anyone who has been misled into thinking that Reagan was an intellectual nullity, here is ample evidence that he was an independent and original thinker, often insisting on keeping to his own line or script in face of criticism from his advisers and speechwriters. Many of his statements, which at the time seemed naive, questionable, wrongheaded or too extreme now seem merely farsighted. He was also optimistic about America and had no time for any rationale for its decline, such as Kissinger, student of the rise and fall of European states, believed in, or at least feared. Nor was he put off by the “complexity” arguments of those who despised him for his simple attitude to problems and their solutions. Some of his difficulties with his own advisers and supporters lay in persuading them that this attitude could be made plausible to the public as electorate.
As much as the first two thirds of the book, however, has little mention of Reagan, for it is a history of how the US got into the messes that Reagan, it is fair to say, rescued it from. By far the biggest mess, which he was too late to do anything about, was, of course, the Vietnam War and it is quite plain that the left-leaning media and intellectuals, combined with political ineffectiveness and downright ignorance, contributed overwhelmingly to its being lost. To illustrate US political masochism: the two “war pictures” that had the greatest negative impact on home support – execution of the Vietcong prisoner and the napalmed little girl – won Pulitzer Prizes for the photographers.
It is not exactly necessary to be reminded, but it is necessary to bear in mind that it was under two Democrat Presidents, Kennedy and Johnson, that the US entered and enmeshed itself in the Vietnam “quagmire” (though this is not a term I recall being used by the author). The muddled, incremental escalation of the conflict by Johnson is described in Ch 4. It was also a Democrat Congress, not the President, the hapless Ford, that abandoned the South Vietnamese, even refusing to supply them arms.
Even more so was Cambodia betrayed, and the dignified reproaches of their leaders, as they refused the offer of evacuation by the American ambassador, to face certain death, make sad reading (p. 408). It is a terrible comment on what the consensus was that Reagan’s characterisation of the US effort in Vietnam as a “noble cause” was regarded as eccentric and chauvinist, just as later was “evil empire” (but for the latter’s vindication see The Week, 15/2/02, p. 13).
All through the account is woven the political manoeverings of various, almost forgotten presidential hopefuls and their minions. The ups and downs of Reagan’s two bids for the Republican nomination and the campaign that won him the Presidency, are given in great detail. On the other hand, his two terms as Governor of California are more lightly sketched in (or are perhaps less memorable). A fine book, which should be better known.
Could there be such a thing a ‘Legal Laffer Curve’? What I mean is, a point where there are so many laws that the State cannot possibly enforce them and their agents start to wilt under the pressure of trying to do so. From then on the whole thing starts to go downhill and the lawlessness begins to grow uncontrollably.
Has that point been reached?
A chief Constable admitted yesterday that his officers are being forced to ignore thousands of burglaries, thefts and car crimes because they are swamped by increasing drug and gun violence.
The public’s perception that the police were not interested in low-level and non-violent crime was underlined when Steve Green, Chief Constable of Nottinghamshire police, said there was not enough money or officers available to investigate all crime.
The emergence of Britain’s drug and gun culture had impacted on his force to such an extent that “something had to give”.
A very telling admission from a man who is clearly under pressure. However my sympathy-meter is stuck at nought. The police have spent decades campaigning vigourously to abolish just about every right of the citizens to preserve their own security and, of course, the means to do so. The natural consequence is that they have arrogated that burden onto themselves and it is a burden the can neither cope with nor discharge. Truly that is a zero-sum game.
Yes, I think something will have to ‘give’ but knowing this country as I do, I doubt very much that it will be the pathology of total control that has caused the problem in the first place.
Another bracing dose of perspective from Victor Davis Hanson:
[A]fter September 11 we will either accept defeat and stay within our borders to fight a defensive war of hosing down fires, bulldozing rubble, arresting terrorist cells, and hoping to appease or buy off our enemies abroad — or we will eventually have to confront Syria, Lebanon’s Bekka Valley, Saudi Arabia, and Iran with a clear request to change and come over to civilization, or join the Taliban and Saddam Hussein.
[B]y any historical measure, what strikes students of this war so far in its first two years is the amazing degree to which the United States has hurt its enemies without incurring enormous casualties and costs.
As always with VDH, it pays to read the whole thing.
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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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