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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One of the most notorious features of Britain’s socialist-inspired near-collapse of the 1970’s were the insanely militant trade unions who helped drive much of our remaining smokestack industries either out of the country or onto the scrapheap.
Industrial disputes were such a common feature fo everyday life that they became a cultural as well as a political phenomenon. I can remember in particular a popular joke about a trade union official who calls a meeting of his members to announce that, from now on, they would only have to work on Wednesdays.
A moment’s silence while this sinks in. Then one worker shouts from the back: “What, every bloody Wednesday”?
I wonder if a Gallic version of this joke has been doing the rounds in France:
The French government called yesterday for a renegotiation of the 35-hour working week introduced four years ago by the previous, Socialist-led government to create jobs and reduce unemployment.
It begs the questions of exactly what these people have rattling around in their heads that leads them to believe that forcing everyone to work less will create jobs? I suppose we should call it the ‘fixed quantity of time fallacy’.
Left-wing politicians countered that the government was starting a “witch-hunt” to disguise its bad economic and budgetary management. Even independent economists poured scorn on the government’s arguments and figures.
Well, I would love to know exactly who these ‘independent economists’ are. Unless they actually meant to say ‘economists from the Independent‘ in which case their opinions deserve about as much respect as those of French left-wing politicians.
But the Grand Union of Philosophy Professors (which probably counts most of the adult population among its members) is not going to lie down for this. In fact, they will vote with their feet. From the cafes and bookshops they will pour forth onto the streets of Paris in droves and legions, complete with banners, drums, whistles and George Bush rubber face-masks. Nobody is going to tell them to work for a living when they can agitate for a living instead. Street protest is their last growth industry.
The Skeptical Environmentalist
Bjorn Lomborg
Cambridge University Press, 2001
This is not exactly a book of surprises for me, since I have read Julian Simon, Donald Bailey, et al., but apparently it has caused a stir and much hostility, which I can only assume is because all the other sources haven’t attained the same (desired) publicity. It is a big book – 352 pages plus 160 pages of notes etc., divided into six sections:
- The Litany – the media consensus that things are getting worse. Lomborg sets out to counter this in his section “Things Are Getting Better” and examines “Why Do We Hear So Much Bad News?”
- Human Welfare – population, life expectancy, food stocks, general prosperity, leading to the conclusion: unprecedented human prosperity.
- Can Human prosperity Continue? The “Are we living on borrowed time?” worry, is answered reassuringly in the sections following on food, forests, energy and raw materials, water.
- Pollution – air pollution (decreasing in the developed countries, correlated with increased prosperity), acid rain (a false scare), indoor air pollution (greater everywhere than outdoors, resulting in allergies and asthma), water pollution (exaggerated and decreasing), waste disposal (not a problem as far as enough space is concerned).
- Tomorrow’s Problems – exaggerated fears over chemicals and pesticides causing cancer etc., also over biodiversity loss and species extinction, the last from figures grabbed from the air, and a long section of global warming (pp. 258-324). This may be the section that has caused most trouble. Lomborg does not deny that “anthropogenic” additional carbon dioxide may have caused, be causing or will cause global warming but he does make clear the variation possible and the excessively alarmist nature of some of the forecasts. He also points out that money spent on reducing the earth’s temperature could be better spent and that the dislocation of the world economy would reduce the expanding prosperity that makes possible the necessary efficiency needed to bring about the desired results.
- The Real State of the World is a generally hopeful one, basically summarising the message of the rest of the book and including a section on GM foods. There is also a discussion of the costs of protection measures; thus the Environmental Protection Agency (in the US) spends $21.4 billion to save 592,000 life-years (though how this figure was attained isn’t clear to me). A Harvard study estimates that 1,230,000 life-years could be saved for the same money. This is a good source-book, with something interesting on every page. I find it pretty convincing.
For those who find Mondays blue and tired and for those who might be inspired to a change of career… Ladies and gentlemen I give you:
Dissect a frog online!
Via Monkeyfarts
Note: Any resemblence to characters real or imagined is purely coincidental and the editorial team of Samizdata.net shall not be held responsible for any dissections of the insinuated individual.
Telegraph reports that Gordon Brown and Jack Straw are leading a rearguard action to block David Blunkett’s plans for national identity cards despite Tony Blair’s backing for the scheme.
Mr Blunkett wants a compulsory scheme and has proposed that those who do not qualify for the card will not be able to work legally or get access to health care, education and public services. But so far he has failed to get Cabinet backing. Cabinet sources say a “fierce battle” is being waged with Mr Brown and Mr Straw expressing the strongest doubts.
The Chancellor has said that the Treasury will not meet the cost of issuing the cards, which are expected to cost individuals up to £40. Several other ministers, including Charles Clarke, Education Secretary, Peter Hain, Leader of the Commons, and Patricia Hewitt, Trade and Industry Secretary, have voiced reservations about the cards
Telegraph opinion section had a good editorial on identity cards last week.
Having failed to win the argument during its six-month consultation period on what it then called “entitlement cards”, the Government now seems determined to press ahead with a national, compulsory ID card scheme. This has been a most peculiar exercise in policy presentation, perhaps because the Cabinet is divided and because opinion polls suggest several million people would defy the law by refusing to apply for one.
It draw attention to the fact that the government seems unable to make up its mind precisely what these cards will actually achieve.
It is important to be clear what Mr Blair is proposing: every person in the land will be required to pay £40, give over an image of his or her iris, and have private information stored on a central database. This is an uncomfortable thought in itself. To suggest that this is all about protecting civil liberties is simply insulting.
This is like something out of a comic novel:
The players know who they are, the media knows who they are and, thanks to the internet, millions of members of the public know who they are.
But yesterday, despite fears that fans of the clubs involved in the Premiership rape allegations would publicly finger the suspects at the tops of their voices, football crowds showed uncharacteristic restraint.
Just to make sure, sound engineers turned down microphones to prevent obscene chanting being heard by television viewers and radio listeners. But there was no need. Football fans, armed obviously with a better working knowledge of the law of contempt of court than the editors of some of the websites and papers they read, kept any taunting of the players involved in the 17-year-old girl’s claims to themselves.
So, no chanting on matters that are sub judice.
Glenn Reynolds has an interesting article with links on violent crime. US murder rates have continued to drop over the last ten years and are now at the lowest seen since the 1960’s.
Meanwhile, as we have seen in the last week, murder in the UK has been skyrocketing. One of the linked articles also reports something many of us have predicted. If cheap guns cannot be bought, they will be manufactured.
It turns out that is exactly what is happening in the UK. It is not as if gunsmithing were a high technology endeavour. Is there anyone out there who truly believes hand-made items manufactured in 16th century London workshops cannot be built to much higher standards in a 21st Century London garage?
Where there is a customer, there’s a way.
PS: An interesting thought struck me whilst off in the shower… we may be on the verge of a new generation of experimental and creative armourers here in the UK.
The Kinder, Gentler Military: Can America’s Gender-Neutral Fighting Force Still Win Wars?
Stephanie Gutmann
Scribner, 2000
First published in 2000, nothing could better illustrate the subordination of the military to the civil power than this account, by a woman journalist, of the submission of the male-oriented former to the feminist-dominated latter. Since it is modern political dogma that men and women are equal, the recruitment of women into the fighting forces becomes obligatory. This book is a description of how this is done, and what happens afterwards. As yet, the result has barely been tested in battle conditions, so the problems are being confronted in peacetime.
There is ample evidence that if physical equality was the criterion, few women would qualify – after training intensively, a batch of women, in it for the experiment (not recruits), reached the standard of the weakest males (p. 251). At the same time as trying to pretend that females could be the equivalent of males in tough fighting with enemies out to kill them, they were presumed so vulnerable that they needed protection from all forms of harassment by their comrades, which meant that the sexes couldn’t really interact – and when harassment changed into acceptable behaviour, that was just as bad – the pregnancy rate soared.
There is a long account and analysis of the notorious “Tailhook” party in 1991, post-Gulf (pp. 156-188) “when we had finally gotten over Vietnam” which led to numerous dismissals of top airforce brass and a greatly lowered morale of the rest, resulting in a haemorrhaging of disgusted qualified pilots, at a cost of $lm each for training. This was ostensibly about harassment, though most of the women present could either take care of themselves, expected what they got or went there to get it. Even during a rowdy “gauntlet”, when someone shouted “I’ve lost my pager”, everything stopped until it was found. The woman who led the complaints benefited to the tune of $5+m – and left the service. After Tailhook, everything was about gender, … [it was] the worst event for the Navy since Pearl Harbor.”
Of course, the whole burden of the book is that the US armed forces are not being treated by Congress and the media as a fighting force whose efficiency is paramount, but as a section of society which can be moulded into something with quite a different agenda from fighting and killing, though what that is is difficult to define – that men and women are basically equal and if it doesn’t always work out that way, it’s the men’s fault.
The book ends with a series of recommendations, granted that the forces should remain open to women:
- Eliminate recruiting quotas for women;
- Have separate-sex “boot camp” training;
- Have high and equal standards there;
- Restore “openness” and be frank about the problems, not just put them down to “sexism”;
- Exonerate the personnel victimised after Tailhook (“Witchook”);
- Separate the social service personnel from the fighting forces;
- Copy the practice of Marines, who seem to have fought through the “gender” nonsense largely unscathed.
There has been much amusement lately at the promises made by the Conservatives here in Britain – higher government pensions and lower taxes. Although Arnold S. in California has been making similar promises (indeed he actually got a new spending program passed in California as recently as last November – the after school thing).
Whilst I would agree that the Conservative Party does look very silly with the headline “Conservatives promise higher pensions and lower taxes” (whatever the details about getting the money by abolishing certain means tested benefits for the old and getting rid of a lot of the “New Deal” – “welfare to work” programs), I think that the all the amusement does miss an important point.
There seems to be no great support among the voters for the reduction in the size and scope of government. Now I can remember when there was such support – the late 1970s, then very many people (perhaps most people) supported the reduction of government spending, but this is simply not true now (in spite of government spending on the Welfare State being vastly higher now than it was then).
To abolish the Conservative Party and create a new party of the ‘centre right’ would solve nothing if there is no market for such a party.
To be fair some of the enemies of the Conservative Party seem to understand this. For example Peter Hitchins (of the Mail on Sunday) wishes to get rid of the Conservative Party, but he does not wish to replace it with a free market party. No, he fully supports government railways (in fact he still bangs on about the foolishness of the private ownership of the railways even though the structure was re-nationalized some time ago), and he supports anti-Americanism, the B.B.C. ‘Licence Fee’ (TV tax) and lots of other nasty things.
It would not be fair to say that Hitchins and his ilk favour “Social Democracy plus black leather and goose-stepping” (Peter Hitchins is not a Nazi), but he and his friends are certainly not free market folk, and have nothing but contempt for the old free market ‘ideology’ of Britain. They are rather like the old ‘socio-imperial’ crowd of paternalists that surrounded Joseph Chamberlain.
Whether the Conservative Party continues to exist or not the problem (for free market people) remains the same – the vast majority of voters do not support cutting back the Welfare State and the believe that every economic and social problem should be met by new government laws or better enforcement of old laws (this, again, was certainly not true in the late 1970’s – when most people supported deregulation).
Why has public opinion in Britain changed so much? This is a question too long and complicated for me to answer here (if I can answer this question at all), but I do know that until public opinion changes or can be made to change, no political party favourable to liberty will prosper in Britain.
I’ve just bought a new digital radio and it’s wonderful. Finally, I can receive BBC Radio 3 without analogical interruptions, which are perpetual where I live, in London SW1. You’d think that London SW1 would get good radio signals, wouldn’t you? But no. Too many towers? Too much electro-wizardry protecting the Queen and her Ministers? The weird weather conditions here in inner London? You tell me. (Truly, do tell me. We have a famously informed commentariat here.) Whatever the reason, until now I simply could not listen confidently to a Prom, say, without having to get up and fiddle with the damn radio every ten minutes, and as often as not all my fiddling would be powerless to stop the bonfire noises and the distortions.
But the new radio is fabulous. The sound is damn near as clean as a whistle, with no hint of an interruption. And it is especially fabulous when attached to my existing lo- to medium-fi CD playing system, thereby enabling me to tone down the treble and tone up the bass, which is how I prefer things. For some annoying reason, portable radios and CD players no longer seem to have treble or bass nobs built in to them. Is this the influence of the rise of Pop and the fall of Classical? (There goes another opportunity to distinguish yourself with a pertinent and informative comment.)
Talk of treble and bass makes me sound like a hi- rather than medium- to lo-fi-er. But so long as the sound meets my minimum quality threshold, I’m content, and my minimum quality doesn’t cost that much. The main thing is that treble/bass thing. I certainly don’t need to spend the many hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of pounds that you see mentioned in the review pages of hi-fi magazines, or in the hi-fi pages of the classical CD mags at the back, where loudspeakers look more like Daleks than the rectangular little boxes that I have.
The new radio is little handbag type object and it only cost a hundred quid, reduced by twenty at Dixon’s. It also has a built-in CD player, which means, what with my previous portable CD player having conked out, that I can now again play CDs quietly in my bedroom or living room, instead of having to switch up the main system in the kitchen whenever I want to listen outside the kitchen, and infuriate my neighbours. The treble/bass thing is a nuisance, but some kinds of music are more vulnerable to this limitation that others, so I’ll be fine. Harpsichord music, for example, doesn’t seem to worry about what would normally be too much treble.
So this is a quantum leap in my listening pleasure, like being given a vanload of unfamiliar CDs. And I also think that my pleasure throws light on three apparently rather separate sonic issues of the last few decades.
� First, hi-fi-ers were disturbed by what they regarded as the sonic imperfections of CDs compared with the old vinyl gramophone records.
� Second, the recording industry itself is infuriated by the apparent indifference of the public to the new Higher Figher formats like SACD.
� And third, there is the fact that the fastest growing sector of the music business is “historic” reissues on CD.
What gives? → Continue reading: Adequate sound is adequate: what matters is not being interrupted: thoughts on digital radio, SACD and the historic reissue business
A Life Against the Grain: The Autobiography of an Unconventional Economist
Julian L. Simon
Transaction, 2002, hardback
This is a posthumously published work:
Julian Simon died suddenly and, according to the doctor’s report, instantly of his first and only heart attack on February 8th, 1998. He had just returned from a trip to Spain where he had been awarded an honorary degree from the University of Navarre. He was in very good spirits and showed no signs of fatigue or illness.
So runs the initial “Comment” by his widow, Rita J. Simon. I had wondered how he died, having learnt, with regret, the fact from the mention in a Laissez-Faire Books Catalogue, and even feared that, given his history of depression, he might have committed suicide, a fear justified by his admission in this book that he had contemplated doing so while in depression, being prevented by thoughts of his family responsibilities.
The Autobiography of an Unconventional Economist, as the work is subtitled, had been finished, apparently over a year before, in a much longer form (900 pages – though whether they are equivalent to the page size of this 359 page book is not indicated) and has been edited by his widow, with acknowledged support. There may have been a misprint or two I have forgotten, but the only obvious textual fault is not filling in internal references to other chapters, which are left as 00, awaiting specification in the final revision. There is an unfulfilled promise of a bibliography of JLS’s publications in the text, but not even a normal list of previous titles at the beginning. His death date is not given on the reverse of the title page, with the usual guff there. All this said (at perhaps unnecessary length) I must say that the book is a very interesting one, less so perhaps for its ideas – these are in his other books – than for information on the personality of its author, though even here there is a possibly involuntary veil of reticence. I hasten to add that I don’t just mean about sex, a rather welcome exclusion, but rather why he feels dissatisfied with himself. He obviously had a happy marriage and his three children grew up satisfactorily (Ch 17); he had no money troubles and always did the job he liked or, if it wasn’t suitable, changed it.
Although his reassuring ideas about world resources and the environment had not gained widespread acceptance by the time he died, he does not seem to bear ill will to anyone. He may have thought that he didn’t manage his life effectively – but this would conflict with his propensity to work at whatever took his interest. This gives an episodic feel to about the first two thirds or so of the book; when is the action really going to start? → Continue reading: An Unconventional Economist who underestimated himself
Patrick Crozier reflects on the privacy dilemmas of celebs, in this case the soccer celebs who are being accused of gang rape.
He concludes: (1) privacy for such people is dead (“I found out the name of the club involved in 10 minutes”), (2) for a celeb simply being cleared is not enough, (3) this affects the club(s) hugely (well yes! – BM), and (4) If Patrick were an accused celeb he’d tell the truth in public (either way) quickly.
The whole thing (not that much longer than this) is here.
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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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