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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For the last decade my Conservative acquaintances have been waiting for the Blair government to reintroduce socialist economics, confident that any month now they would. And for that same decade, I and friends of mine like Tim Evans have been saying: You don’t get it, do you? They aren’t going to do that. For as long as you fight these people on this terrain, you’re doomed, doomed. Start dealing with the fact that mothers on TV comedy shows don’t want their daughters going out with Conservatives, because Conservatives are too peculiar and too nasty. That’s your problem.
The Conservatives are still as peculiar and nasty as ever, but now, suddenly, the “Blair government” is the Blair government no longer. We now we have a Brown government. New Labour is back to being Labour. And now that public spending really is about to do a huge leap into the wild red yonder, all that the Conservatives can find to say is that they will do public sector extravagance better. Patrick Crozier‘s other blog linked, earlier this week, to an article by Matthew Parris in the Times of London(*) which spells all this out.
But give the Conservatives a few months. They’ll eventually get what’s happening. After all, they’ve been waiting for this for a decade.
Why has Tony Blair let this happen? He has built his whole position in British politics on not allowing Labour to ruin the British economy, and thereby making it unnecessary for Britain to vote for those peculiar and nasty Conservatives.
Could it be that he blames the recent relative success of the British economy for the fact that younger British people don’t seem to believe with anything like sufficient fervour in Britain getting itself stitched into the European Union? Could it be that he wants to wreck the British economy, again, so that we will then be willing to run to Europe for cover, again?
I don’t think it’s anything so cunning. After all, we had an economic semi-miracle by voting economically-conservative six times in a row, four times for the Conservatives and twice for Blair. So if we carry on voting economically-conservative, i.e. voting for the Conservatives again (as peculiar and nasty as ever, but now necessary again), we could semi-rescue the British economy, again.
No. I just I think that Blair has become bored with being the Prime Minister of, as a Bond villain once put it, these “pitiful little islands”. He wants to be the King of the World.
(*)=we have a Samizdata.net policy against linking to The Times of London as they charge for access to their archives and restrict access by people not in the UK.
EDF is the state monopoly electricity company in France. It owns numerous private power companies around the world, especially in the UK. President Chirac proposes to keep EDF as a nationalized company at least until 2004 and to refuse foreign competition in France (the Socialists agree).
However, an interesting dissident is Nicolas Sarkhozy (Minister of the Interior and successful Mayor of the Paris suburb of Neuilly). He is reported as saying privately:
“I’m for the privatisation of EDF, but it’s not possible right now because we don’t know what it’s worth.”
The report appeared in Le Canard Enchaine, so it probably wasn’t an intentional leak on the part of the Minister.
One of the failings of the French libertarian/classical liberal politicians is that they don’t have a model for change that includes tackling unions and re-assuring voters about crime (most French libertarians talk of cutting public spending on police forces). What the ASI and Tim Evans refer to as “Micropolitics” and creating incentives for the bureaucrats to go along with reform is alien to French libertarians: they’re divided between executing them or sacking them without a pay-off.
Nicolas Sarkhozy is a conservative in a more Thatcherite mould: horribly compromising with corporatism at least 60 per cent of the time, but who also knows that the left is the common enemy.
It will take some sort of coalition between people like Sarkhozy and the French liberals to get reforms moving in France. The more I look at the French scene the more I feel the lack of a French Freedom Association and a French Adam Smith Institute. Their students could use a Paul Staines too.
J. Michael Straczynski, creator of Babylon 5 writes in answer to a question about Canadian taxes:
“I was able to get a waiver on LoTR because it was a short-term engagement, but on Jeremiah I’ve been paying Canadian taxes (as well as American taxes) since day one. Even so, my Canadian tax burden is still far less than the average Canadian has to shell out every year, percentage-wise. Though I’m still somewhat of a newcomer, my feeling is that, frankly, the Canadian people are getting hosed. I understand the dilemma of having a very large country and a very small population that has to support that infrastructure, but even so they’re just getting hammered out of all proportion and reasonableness.”
So the question for the Blessed Tony Blair is, what excuse in a crowded little country where the infrastructure is crap, like the UK?
Batten down the hatches, stock up on vital supplies, head for the hills and stay there – IT’S COMING!!!! According to the British press we’re all doomed, DOOMED by a huge lump of rock hurtling at us from outer space at unstoppable speeds and due to impact at just about the same time as the British Conservative Party is finally showing signs of a revival.
Meanwhile, Antoine Clarke thinks that the very existence of the thing could constitute an Islamic Heresy (presumably not if lands on Tel Aviv though).
Now I know that none of us are likely to be losing any sleep tonight but, nonetheless, isn’t this recent bout of angst about apocolyptic death from the skies a bit, well, medieval?
“Rejoice, brothers, it’s heading for Brussels”
Gibbering Dark Ages peasants pointed at manifestations in the sky and took them for portents of impending doom. Were they merely prescient? Or are us humans prey to pre-programmed primordial collective fears regardless of our technological advances?
Musically inclined Samizdata readers will be familiar with the reportage we’ve had over the months, from Dale Amon especially, about what computers, the internet, etc., are doing to the orthodox music business. Basically, the orthodox music business is finding it harder to do business. I found this reportage strangely unsatisfying. Okay, this is the kind of music-making that computers, the internet, etc., are making more difficult to do, and more difficult to profit from. I didn’t doubt the truth of this, but something was missing from the story.
Then I read an article in NY Times by Kevin Kelly (to make this link work you have first to register with NYTimes.com, but this worked fine when I did it), which contained sentiments like this:
If this … power of the digital copy were to play out in full, the world would be full of people messing around with sound and music much as they dabble in taking snapshots and shaping Web pages. The typical skepticism toward a scenario of ubiquitous creation and recreation of music is that it is always easier to read than to write, to listen than to play, to see than to make. That is true. Yet 10 years ago, anyone claiming that ordinary people would flock to expensive computers to take time from watching TV in order to create three billion or more Web pages — well, that person would have been laughed out of the room as idealistic, utopian. People just aren’t that creative or willing to take time to create, went the argument. Yet, against all odds, three billion Web pages exist. The growth of the Web is probably the largest creative spell that civilization has witnessed. Music could experience a similarly exuberant, irrational flowering of the amateur spirit.
This was more like it. Dale and his ilk had been telling me what the music business would not be like any more. But Kelly was telling me what it would be like.
I mention this because Instapundit, which has always been strong with the “impact of technology on the music business” stuff, is now also onto this, the creative rather than the destructive side of the story. Glenn Reynolds, himself a musician, links to another musician/blogger, Eric Olsen, who makes a similar point to Kelly’s:
The parallels between music-creation software and blogging are unmistakable: both enable “ordinary people” to enter into areas of creativity and, equally important, distribution, that were only previously available to select professionals: those who were allowed to pass through the portals of either the press or the record labels by the guardians at the gates. By enabling a large number of people to engage in these activities, both technologies are democratizing their respective fields and battering the barriers between “creator” and “consumer” in both directions.
Maybe, Tom Burroughes, this is where the next bit of British popular musical excitement will come from.
Britpop now is as musically dead as it has ever been, at any time since the arrival of the Beatles. Mostly, it’s just an excuse to dress up and have a bop around, led from the stage by a lipsyncing group of formation dancers who have abandoned all pretence of being able to play any instruments. Does anybody remember an old TV show called “Come Dancing”. That’s what Top of the Pops is subsiding into: elaborately dressed young(er) people dancing about for the entertainment of dewy eyed oldies. Half the tunes in the hit parade now were written before the current performers of them were born. Kylie Minogue’s music is mostly just an excuse for us all to gaze at her cute smile and state-of-the-art bottom. Rap, which is often offered as the answer to where interesting pop music is going these days, is all about words and rhythms. It doesn’t actually need music to be attached to it at all.
There’s nothing wrong about any of this. There’s nothing wrong with boy and/or girl groups spending five hours rehearsing dance moves to every hour they give to rehearsing music. There’s nothing wrong with pre-teen girls caring what pop stars look like and move like, rather than what they sound like. There’s nothing wrong with black versifyers versifying, accompanied only by drum machines. Kylie Minogue’s smile is delightful and her bottom is one of the great glories of contemporary British culture. It’s all very entertaining. It just isn’t very fascinating musically.
Will a new generation of Britbloggers change all that, by putting the music back into music?
First the print media. Now music. For the next big-media green bottle to fall (when our computers have all got big enough to accommodate the results), see David Carr‘s Libertarian Alliance Cultural Notes No. 44. This is called “DIY Hollywood“!
Responding to my praise for golf, Steven Gallaher (of I don’t know where, but his email has “us” at the end of it, so I’m guessing somewhere in the USA) says this:
On the other hand, my observation of the golfers I get paired with on those occasions when I go to the course alone is that most do not care to suffer the consequences of their actions, and so they don’t. Lies are improved and mulligans are taken. Short puts are never attempted; they are assumed to be made. Per-hole score is capped in one way or another (often twice par).
Which presumably means that you don’t score yourself as having taken any more than eight shots on a par four hole, even if you actually took eighteen. I don’t know what a mulligan is, but it sounds equally sneaky. This all reminds me of the stories about Bill Clinton’s dubious self-scoring habits as a golfer.
Perhaps our approach to golf is a reflection of our approach to life. If so, what does that say about our culture?
As usual, Steven, the news about our culture is not good. We’re all doomed, doomed. According to reliable eyewitness accounts, Western Civilisation has been in headlong and uninterrupted decline at least since the time of the ancient Sumerians, i.e. ever since anyone has ever kept reliable eyewitness accounts of anything. Either that, or you play all your golf in Arkansas.
I’d just like to say how impressed I was by the insightful piece on soap opera television by Patrick Sullivan the other day. It kind of chimes with an observation I made about the profoundly anti-business culture on television drama several months ago on Samizdata.
For me, what is so god-awful about Eastenders, and for that matter other soaps in the UK like Emmerdale Farm, Coronation Street and so on, is that they represent human beings as essentially victims of events, not as efficatious beings. If anyone is portrayed as strong, it is either a woman who is showing her strength by having to resist the charms of a dodgy man, or a crook or thug using his ‘strength’ to overpower or trick someone else. People in business rarely get presented in a positive light. Take Coronation Street. The shopkeepers and pubowners seem fairly wholesome types, if rather pathetic, put-upon folk who clearly are bored by the grind of their jobs. Any major businessman is a crook – period.
Another theme of British soaps is betrayal. Husbands and wives cheat on each other relentlessly. Indeed, infidelity, between married couples and long-term partners, is a constant theme. And lack of trust and loyalty is shown all the time in business.
In mitigation, all I can say is that the scripwriters feel that issues like betrayal and dishonesty add lots of spice to the stories, whereas wholesome behaviour is bound to be boring. I kind of understand that, but I think nevertheless that the genre in the UK is overwhelmingly skewed in one direction. Another problem is that soaps – with the odd glorious exception – rarely contain much deliberate humour. If you do laugh at a soap star it is usually at their expense for crummy acting or a silly voice.
If you watch a British soap for any length of time, you come away with one abiding message – Life Sucks. Which is pretty much why I loathe the whole lot of ’em.
Bring back Dallas…at least they were rich!
The good news is that it looks like there is no significant support for the US joining what can only be described as a monstrous tax cartel with truly global reach being advocated by the high tax states of Europe.
This is truly splendid but do not for a moment think that this is the last we have heard of attempts to end the ‘unfair’ competitive advantages of lower tax economies.
There is an interesting article in the print version of Inside The Vatican (sorry, no article link at their meagre on-line site) about Rabbi Israel Zolli, formerly the Chief Rabbi of Rome from 1939 until 1945.
So if Pope Pius XII was an anti-semitic pro-Nazi collaborator in Italy as some have claimed, why did Rabbi Zolli convert to Christianity in 1945, professing his admiration for the pontiff? Zolli was certainly in a position to know what the truth of the matter was! The fact the Pope was no supporter of Zionism did not mean he was antagonistic to Jews.
Clearly the reality is the calumnies against Pius XII have more to do with modern agendas than historical facts.
As I’ve often said before, my own political journey began to the left of the Nolan chart. One of the reasons it did not end there was the forward into the past mentaility I ran across time and again. The problem is, there are important issues at stake in the United States, issues with far more import than the assinine Politically Correct Hate Me I Was Born Here mentality.
Some of the very foundations of freedom are under threat. Rather than go into details, I suggest you read and act on these two: Lessig and Stallman and UCITA.
My message to the Left: GET OFF YOUR FRIGGIN’ ARSES AND JOIN THE 21ST CENTURY BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE!
I was just wondering if the asteroid – currently projected to hit Earth in 2019 and destroy a continent – happened to land on Mecca…
Is this thought heresy to to a Moslem? Would scientific efforts by Christians or worse, atheists, to deflect the asteroid be an interference in God’s purpose?
I think we should be told.
Basking in the anticipated riches from sales of Samizdata consumer durables, Perry e-mails to suggest, “Natalie should consider a shop for her site… a nifty line in ‘Ninja Librarian’ tee-shirts?” Thank you, Perry, but I have already launched my own mug and T-shirt business, and while doing it had the inspiration that will make me the next Bill Gates. As capitalists you might be interested in my business model. Start up costs are zero. Running costs are zero. Depreciation is zero. Losses from theft, breakage and catastrophes of nature are all zero. Profits, it is true, are also currently running at an integer number between one and minus one, but it’s early days yet. The Great Thought came to me while I was thinking of what to give my 48,888th visitor, a chap called Dave. Suddenly it came to me:
“You win a… um… free endorsement of whatever T shirt, baseball cap or coffee mug you happen to own anyway. It is now an official nataliesolent.blogspot.com shirt, cap, mug or other promotional article. Tell all your friends!”
“Virtual micromanufacturing,” as I like to call it is the true child of the information age, with all its virtues of instantaneousness, flexibility and asypmptotically trivial transaction costs. You don’t like the Ronald MacDonald logo on your nataliesolent.blogspot.com mug? Just look hard at your much more tasteful 1802 Sèvres card dish and reassign that coveted Natalie identity at the speed of thought. Just In Time manufacturing has nothing on this! It remains only for the delighted customer to send me his money.
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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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