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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Michael Blowhard hits a very important nail on the head with this:
In fact, art and science have little in common. However much science is influenced by such factors as personality and culture, it’s empirically based; it’s testable. The powder goes ka-boom when a match is touched to it or it doesn’t. Actual progress is made; disputes between rival views are finally adjudicated. If you understand the science of today, you basically understand all of science. (And let’s set aside for the moment the kind of babble about “uncertainty” and “chaos” that art intellectuals love to indulge in. As far as I can tell, they’ve got no better a grasp on the scientific meaning of those terms than I do.)
In art, none of this is the case. Testable? Well, the success of “Star Wars” certainly demonstrated something about what movie audiences were ready for in the mid-’70s, but “McCabe & Mrs. Miller” has probably meant more to actual filmmakers. A lost weirdo painter (Henry Darger) is discovered and causes a sensation; a previously unknown art tradition (Tuva singing, for instance) gains notice. A prominent artist – Longfellow, for instance – is forgotten.
In the field of art, all this is normal. In science, it wouldn’t be. A great discovery remains a great discovery; and no one’s reviving the theory of phlogiston.
There were various comments afterwards trying to say that science is more like art than people think. But people (and Michael) are right and these commenters are wrong. Science is all about communal progress. Art is all about individual responses. Scientific theories compete according to which of them, in the collective opinion of the scientific community, constitutes the most progress. That science progresses, in the words of one of these commenters, “one funeral at a time” just means that scientists can be stubborn idiots, not that science is a matter of subjective individual whim. Truth, in the end, is a communal matter. The truth is what you and I and everybody else who is paying attention have, in the end, to agree about. Artistic excellence on the other hand …
One commenter even suggested that Michael Blowhard ought to read more Feyerabend. This comment is my nomination for the silliest and most potentially disastrous blog comment of the year 2002. Michael Blowhard’s brain is an important blogosphere resource, but although I’ve never met him I sense that he’s the sort of person who would read Feyerabend, just because some twat anti-philosopher of anti-science had suggested this on Blowhards. Michael might emerge from the experience mentally unscathed, but the downside risk doesn’t bear thinking about.
The importance of all this, as Michael himself explains very well, is that if you do accept that art “progresses”, then you immediately install a “taste mafia” in power who are there to tell you where art is just now, and where it’s been, and where it’s going. After all, if art is like science, that means we all must all defer to the art scientists, doesn’t it? And a vertical third finger to that. Or maybe the second finger also, Agincourt longbowman style.
Tomorrow I hope to be meeting with my Little Man who will be installing my Cullture Blog for me. So far the operation has resembled the sad time about ten years ago or so when I tried to install a shower. While this worked, it had the two standard British shower settings: Far Too Hot and Far Too Cold. Then it stopped altogether. I do hope that my Culture Blog grief is all happening now, and that soon it will start and then just get better and better the way a British shower never would.
The Blowhards have both inspired me and relaxed me about this project. They have inspired me by their very existence, and they have relaxed me by doing a proper culture blog so properly that I don’t have to worry about doing that myself and can just have some fun with my one, as and when I feel inclined.
As I have previously, ‘poverty’ is a measure of envy and class hatred Here are some measures that could make poverty worse or better.
One might imagine that importing wealthy people into a country would help reduce poverty: Bill Gates turning up in the United Kingdom with £40,000,000 would increase the average wealth of British inhabitants. In fact this makes “poverty” worse according to poverty-campaigner logic.
Let us imagine a country with nine inhabitants: a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h and i. If a, b, and c have incomes of 100 per year, d has 90, e and f have 50, h has 30 and i has 20, then total income is 540, average income is 60 and the poverty line is 30 if calculated as 50 per cent of average, or 36 if calculated as 60 per cent of average.
The next year Bill Gates arrives with an income of 500. He employs h and i for an extra 20 per year (more than they were getting before). The result is: Bill Gates 460, a, b and c 100 each, d has 90, e and f have 50, h now also has 50 and i has 40. So everyone is out of the poverty level of the year before.
But this is where relativism kicks in: the new poverty line is 52 or 57.2 (depending on the 50 or 60 percent definition). So Bill Gates has not only ‘failed’ to lift h and i out of poverty by giving them jobs that paid better, he has impoverished e and f, who were previously not poor, even though neither e nor f has lost any income.
This tells us the first lesson of tackling “poverty”: no wealthy immigrants must be allowed. In fact all inward investment is bad according to this reasoning. Now imagine that the 1,000 million poorest people in the world (average income 0.01) were to come and live in this country instead of Bill Gates. Also imagine that none of them become billionaires but remain objectively poor.
Total income becomes 10,000,540. Average income drops to 0.01000054 per year. So h with 30 and i with 20 are 3,000 and 2,000 times wealthier than the average, despite no increase in objective income. Also the billion paupers have incomes of 0.01 which is over 99.99 percent of the average, so none of them are “poor”, even though they can’t afford to buy a bread roll.
Note that if half of the billion paupers were to raise their income to the previous average (60), they would be “evil exploiters” of the poor, so would h and i, even if they were to lose 90 percent of their incomes (to 3 and 2 respectively). This means that immigrants who are below the poverty line must be kept there for the sake of “social justice”!
Therefore although all the billion immigrants will starve, they will not die in vain: they will have brought about social justice. A believer in immortal souls who suggested this policy, would be insane but sincere. The problem is that most socialists and social democrats are atheists…
In the British case executing all elderly people aged over 60 who live alone on less than average household incomes would statistically eliminate poverty: either they would be dead, or more likely they would choose to live in groups of two or three and therefore rise towards average household income levels. Executing all students would also have a similar effect. Slaughtering everyone who lives alone would be a guaranteed success in a “War on Want”.
This may appear insanely evil. Yet I have just described the policies of the Cambodian holocaust: Pol Pot really was ‘tackling poverty’.
Picture this: A CIA official in handcuffs, standing in the dock of the European Court at Strasbourg while a calcified, gravelly German judge hands down a life sentence.
Far-fetched? Yes, but theoretically possible by dint of the orders issued by the Whitehouse,
“US President George W Bush has authorised the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to kill about a dozen terrorist leaders named on a secret list prepared by the White House…”
which has made waves in Europe:
“EU legal and constitutional experts in Brussels said Monday that the killing in the European Union of suspected terrorist leaders on a list drawn up by the White House would be considered murder, even if the person had been authorised for such a liquidation by the law of his home country.”
So, let’s imagine that a CIA trigger-man clips Mahmoud Al-Nutjob on the steps of his student hostel in Berlin. Is said CIA man going to be arrested by the German police? If so, is he going to be prosecuted by the German state? Would the US government intervene? If so, what form would that intervention take?
I think that there could be a just a little friction here.
*Tip to any CIA agent who may find himself in the above situation: don’t try the old ‘I was only obeying orders’ defence. It won’t cut much ice with Germans.
Truly awesome video footage taken from an American AC-130 gunship. [Media Player required].
Presumably, the footage was taken in Afghanistan.
Everyone knows the old joke. Q.How can you tell when a lawyer is lying? A. His lips are moving.
It’s not true of course, but it is an accurate reflection of the popular antipathy towards lawyers in general; something which too many lawyers themselves have done much to foster.
Still, I hope enough of my fellow Brits will be able to cast aside their natural cynicism of the legal profession for just long enough to applaud Matthias Kelly, the Chairman of the Bar Council, who has announced that he intends to take on this ‘highly illiberal’ government:
“”There is something about the Home Office that brings out these really penal instincts in people. Mr Blunkett is profoundly illiberal. We have a system that is fair and I want to preserve fairness. I do not want to sacrifice it for short-term political expediency, which is what I think much of the language of the debate being run by the Government is about.”
Admirable sentiments from Mr.Kelly. He has hit upon the truth that the abolition of our liberties is, in some senses, a by-product of incompetence rather than a deliberate political ambition. It has everything to do with a government that is desperate to be seen to be doing something in response to the voters increasing concerns about spiralling crime rates (or, in any event, the general perception of greater crime and violence).
I wish Mr.Kelly every success with his campaign and I hope he will not be deterred by the inevitable response he will elicit from the government and its supporters, that he is motivated by greed and self-interest. It is no secret to anyone that barristers do very nicely from the system as it is and it is, therefore, all too easy to dismiss any genuine concerns they may have as fears for their own pocket.
Such allegations may or may not have any basis in fact but, truth be told, I don’t care. Self-interest is always a reliable motivator and I would be only too pleased to witness it being put to a good use for a change.
It is also pleasing to note that concerns about this illiberal government are now being publicly aired by the ‘great and the good’, a class to which Mr.Kelly assuredly belongs. Thus far, nobody of any public standing has been willing to rock the NuLabour boat. Let us hope that others follow his lead and begin to break their, hitherto, shameful silence.
As for Mr.Kelly, who knows, perhaps he has been reading the Samizdata.
I suppose it’s a bit too tin-foil hattish to suggest that this might have been timed to coincide with the official visit of Syria’s President to Britain by the police to recruit paid informants sounds like exactly the kind of thing said President might recognise from his own Ba’athist tradition.
“A £500 reward is being offered to people who tell the authorities about persistent drink-drivers over Christmas.”
Question: How will either the informant or the police know if the alleged ‘drink-driver’ is ‘persistent’? I suppose the informant could swear blind to the fact, provided they needed the money enough.
Of course, the Syrian regime has nothing to do with it at all, though it does have all the ring of ‘police-state’ snitch culture so sadly prevalent in that part of the world. No, the reality is that this is yet another back-door admission by the state that it has now passed more laws and regulations than it can possibly enforce and so has little choice but to co-opt the polity into acting as its eyes and ears.
What next, I ask myself? ‘Kids, report your parents for not paying their taxes’?
Perry de Havilland gave a talk about “a year in the life of samizdata”, last Friday, at the Tim Evans Parents household, which which got me thinking about the rise of amateurism generally, and the rise of the amateur Foreign Correspondent in particular. I found myself arguing that the present tendency of the blogosphere not to have real foreign correspondents is surely temporary.
Yes, the blogosphere is now a whole lot stronger, as Perry said, in editorial comment on the news than it is in news gathering itself, but soon, I surmise, there will be many new “foreign correspondents” blogging away. I might have added, but did not, that for many of us the majority of bloggers are already foreign correspondents on account of so many of them living in the USA, and many of us not.
How on earth would I have found out about Trent Lott, and about what an imperfect person he is, had it not been for the blogosphere?
(And yes, that is a fine double monosyllable to be called isn’t it? “The name’s Lott. Trent Lott.” But apparently he’s not that kind of forthright, no nonsense person at all. Very nonsensical indeed it would seem. This I have learned from the blogosphere’s numerous American correspondents, lead of course by the ultimate foreign correspondent, Instapundit.)
And the network is growing. One of the more exotic ones is a (for me) recent discovery called China Hand. Here are the concluding paragraphs of a recent piece from him about the recent rise of Chinese Christianity:
I should have seen the writing on the wall in the 80’s when my old teacher, a rabidly leftist ex Red Guard, suddenly started sending Christmas cards. Even today when I passed one of the glitzy new department stores in Huizhou – its whole forecourt is covered in Christmas trees.
→ Continue reading: The rise of the amateur Foreign Correspondent
Yesterday I saw an advert in the London Underground that I think said something interesting about the differences between different countries, namely the cost per minute of ringing them up.
The advert was for something called Alpha Telecom which is apparently some sort of internet something-or-other for ringing people up in foreign parts.
I can’t explain how that works, but I can give you the different prices for the different countries with which we Brits would appear to be in regular phone contact, because I jotted them down. The numbers don’t say which countries are the best. But perhaps they do say something about which countries work the best. It would seem that distance has nothing to do with anything here, which I guess because this is the Internet we’re talking about. The INternet murders distance. What seems to matter is degree of serenity or confusion at the destination of your call.
All measurements of differential national merit strike me as interesting. What does it cost to become a citizen legally? What does it cost to become a citizen illegally? (Do some countries pay you to join?) Who gets the most sporting medals? What are the different credit ratings of different national governments? What proportion of people are wearing shoes? Driving cars? Connected to the Internet? Can read and write? Who scores highest and lowest, in the opinion of some bunch of people in Washington DC who measure “freedom” in different countries, and which countries have changed their scores the most since last year or in recent years? When does each country’s “tax freedom day” arrive, ditto? And so on. Well, maybe this cost of phone calls thing is another such score, albeit a very crude one.
So here are the scores, in pence per minute I assume: Austria 4, Somewhere illegible (Canada I think) 4, France 4, Germany 4, Hong Kong 7, Ireland 4, New Zealand 4, Pakistan 20, Spain 4, Sweden 2, USA 3, Australia 4, India 20, South Africa 8, and: Internet 1.
So, if I’m right about what this all means, the most efficient country in the world is the Internet, followed by Sweden, followed by the USA, followed by all the brand-X Western democracies. I think that Sweden and Hong Kong are the most interesting scores, the former for being so low, the latter for being rather high. Ireland and Spain have reputations for incompetence that they would seem to be shedding fast. I also wonder if Hong Kong, and maybe also South Africa, have gone or are going up, and whether either India or Pakistan are coming down from their current twin peaks.
But maybe I’m quite wrong, and it means either nothing at all, or something very trivial. I’m sure our many techy readers will elucidate. If you do, gentlemen, could you include an explanation of what this system actually is and does, because I can’t make it out at all. Surely a telephone is a telephone, and the Internet is basically something you look at and type into and get email in and out of with a computer, with occasional videos and tunes as decoration. How can you phone the internet?
Central London was the venue for another demonstration by the Countryside Alliance today, timed to co-incide with a parliamentary debate on the proposed regulation of fox-hunting.
“”We don’t want an unjust bill, which does not have the support of the community to which it applies and I think we are looking at a serious amount of trouble if that happens…”
Judging from the latest reports from the broadcast news, that ‘serious amount of trouble’ is upon us as some 1500-2000 countryside insurrectionists are locked in battles with police and traffic in and around Westminster has been brought to a standstill.
It appears that not everyone in Britain cravenly rolls over when confronted by authority.
After being fined for a very trivial motoring ‘offence’, Leon Humphreys reponse was, ‘fight me for it’:
“A court has rejected a 60-year-old man’s attempt to invoke the ancient right to trial by combat, rather than pay a £25 fine for a minor motoring offence.”
Not surprisingly, his invitation was declined and the fine increased. Still, you’ve got to award the guy some brownie points for his sheer cojones.
Patrick Crozier has seen a round in the ongoing debate regarding state imposed ID cards… and he did not like what he saw.
Please don’t ask me why I was watching Richard and Judy (a sort of British ‘Oprah’) the other day but I was. They were having a discussion on ID cards with Tony Blair’s Big Buddy Lord Falconer on the pro-ID card side and Mark Littlewood of the pressure group Liberty putting the case against… and Littlewood lost.
I had better explain the way the argument went. Falconer said that it was all about cutting down on social security fraud and immigrants working without work permits. Falconer made a mistake in insisting on calling it an Entitlement Card (shades of the Community Charge) but otherwise he did fine. “Nothing to worry about” was the message.
Littlewood made two points. The first was that it didn’t work – there was plenty of experience on the Continent to show that was the case. The second was that it would be used by the police to harrass and intimidate members of racial minorities.
I have to say I didn’t find this particularly convincing. There is a rather odd belief in Britain that Continentals do everything so much better than we do. This is allied to the even odder belief that to criticize anything the French or Germans do is tantamount to xenophobia. To any “progressive” the argument simply won’t wash.
And as for the harrassment argument I am sure any self-respecting policeman can find ways to harrass people ID cards or not.
Which got me thinking – how would I make the case against ID cards? Well, for starters, I wouldn’t make it by making appeals to abstract notions like freedom and liberty. From what I can work out the vast majority of the British public simply have no concept of the term let alone a desire to see it preserved or extended.
The problem is that if you abandon abstracts you have to start talking in practicalities. You could mention that it is expensive, maybe a billion or so, but frankly in government spending terms that’s peanuts. And anyway, it does kind of miss the point. We are trying to make the claim that ID cards are a bad thing not merely an expensive thing which might do some good but that the costs outweigh the benefits.
You could say that it will prove very useful to future dictators and tyrants. But no one in Britain (outside libertarian circles) believes that will ever happen. “Goose-stepping Nazis here? Don’t be daft!” would be the attitude.
So, what on earth should we say? I think it is best to consider where the drive for ID cards comes from. Falconer himself said it: social security fraud ie the state and immigration ie the state again. This is a state policy to patch over the failures of previous state policies.
I think this is the line of attack that is likely to work best. Something along the lines of: “Isn’t it amazing. For a thousand years we Britons have been amongst the freest and most prosperous peoples of the world. In all that time not once outside a grave national emergency has our government ever forced us to possess identity cards. Even Bloody Mary had no use for them but this government does. What does that say about this government? I’ll tell you what. It tells us that it is uniquely incompetent…”
Well, that’s my stab.
Patrick Crozier
The following posting was written with my education blog in mind. However, although in general this enterprise is rattling along fine, it is for the time being ungettatable. I’m hoping that this is (a) because this is now Sunday afternoon and every internetter in the world is internetting and my blog empire’s hardware can’t cope, or even better (b) because Atlas (he knows who he is) has unshrugged and is finally getting Brian’s Culture Blog going, but in a way that has interrupted normal service. Alternatively, (c) one of Richard Branson’s slaves read what I put about his Lord and Master on Transport Blog the other day and has turned the Virgin army of hackers loose on my life, in which case it was nice knowing you all.
Anyway, I read what follows through again and found that it will do okay also for samizdata.net so here it is:
Joanne Jacobs links to the following piece of dialogue, originally posted on Notes From The Ghetto Teacher on October 29th.
Today, we were discussing 15th century literature and the invention of the Gutenburg Press. I asked them to write a short essay on what they’d learned from the chapter and lecture. One of my students tentatively raised his hand:
Student: Miss?
Me: Yeah, baby?
Student: When was the 15th century?
Me: Between the 14th and 16th, baby. Do you mean what years are in the 15th century?
Student: Aww … dawg … naw … I’m sayin’ … what century was the 15th century in?
Me: [pause] Write it down a piece of paper then read it back out loud.
Student: [writes it down slowly] Fif-teenth century.
Me: Right. So, what century is that?
Student: That’s what I be aksin’ you.
Some days, I just want to throw my chalk.
Now I have far less experience of teaching in a ghetto than does the Ghetto Teacher (she presumably has quite a lot and I have none), but what I want to know is: what would have been the problem with just giving the answer, along the lines of: “The fifteenth century means the one hundred years between the year 1400 and the year 1500”?
→ Continue reading: Well when was the fifteenth century?
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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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