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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I don’t believe that the Conservative Party has a future. I think most of its members will either go away or pass away over the next ten years. I also reckon that Labour will win the next election (perhaps with a new leader), which will be extremely upsetting for many of the current generation of Conservative politicians.
However, Oliver Letwin MP, at last night’s Adam Smith Lecture, offered the sort of evidence, which if sustained over the next three years, could yet force me to change my mind. It is also an exception to my rule never to listen to political speeches, when trying to predict the future.
But then Mr Letwin is no ordinary politician. His speech was Sustainability and society. He started by setting the infamous Mrs Thatcher remark “there is no such thing as society” into its context and then announced that the rest of what he was going to say was consistent with her full statement.
He then listed four main themes and stuck to them. These were:
- Society is irreducibly complex
- Simplistic targets can be exceptionally destructive
- Crude intervention damages natural regeneration
- Natural systems are able to absorb limited disruption, then degrade suddenly and irreversibly
Especially cute was the use of the ecosystem of the tropical rainforest to illustrate the harm that social engineers can inflict on society. Mr Letwin also described the damage caused by spin-initiatives in the National Health Service and housing estates in the manner of a don discussing the pernicious effects of Byzantine tax policies. Mr Letwin was precisely such a don dissecting Marxist philosophy before entering think-tanks and politics. The deliberate refusal to make the attack emotional or personal was all the more powerful. Mr Letwin didn’t spell out every detail. I figured out for myself that the last point could be a description of the accelerating shambles of the railway, state health system and of course the criminal justice system.
I could have written everything Mr Letwin said on the contrast between local decision making being less bad than remote decision making.
He then answered questions openly, without being afraid to disagree.
Mr Letwin responded to the fear that local tyrants would replace remote bureaucracies. Local tyrants are easier to persuade of the error of their ways or to remove if necessary. Also the harm would be inflicted on fewer people at a time, and mistakes could be rectified quicker.
Mr Letwin also outlined his ideas for a ‘Freedom Audit’ for new legislation. This would at least mean that politicians and civil servants would have to invent ingenious excuses why the most oppressive price of legislation was really liberating. This would force the issue of freedom to be raised before a law was rushed through Parliament.
He also gave his case for drug criminalisation in answer to a Cambridge University student who asked what ingenious excuse Mr Letwin could find for explaining that drug prohibition was in fact liberation. Mr Letwin took that point on the chin and admitted that drug criminalisation was a violation of liberty and “inconsistent with the libertarian position”. He defended this on the grounds that for an individual to destroy his intellect was something that should not be allowed. He also claimed that it would be inconsistent to legalise some drugs and not others (True!). But in his view the total legalisation would cause the collapse of civilisation as we know it. However, he did add that cannabis might not be properly categorised as a drug, which he considered a technical issue.
There are three problems for Mr Letwin’s approach (which I suspect he understands full-well). One is that Labour could steal any or all of his actual proposals. To his credit Mr Letwin appears content with this: he would prefer to be in opposition with the government doing the right thing than in government doing the wrong thing. The other is that a lot of the centralisation he talks about was pushed through by his own party: at some stage he will have to say “We were wrong”, it is unclear whether Mr Letwin will be allowed to say it. Finally, will Mr Letwin’s colleagues have the intellectual integrity to keep to this approach, or will they quickly lose their nerve.
Already Sean Gabb is admitting that he may have to change his tactics towards the Conservative Party. If Mr Letwin can silence our separate criticisms, they’re doing something right.
I was asked by someone at the reception afterwards if I thought Mr Letwin would swing young voters to back the Tories. On that performance I said “No, but they would have been intrigued…”
And I love this even more.
“Campaigners against the European single currency were accused on Tuesday of insulting the memories of the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust by likening euro supporters to Adolf Hitler.
My, my how touchy these people are! I rather think the point of the advertising campaign is to illustrate (quite correctly) that the dream of a United Europe was among Hitler’s visions. Now I am always wary of reductio ad Hitlerum as a base emotional tool but, as it happens, this one is merited.
“The Commission was unreseved in its criticism of the campaign. Jean-Christophe Filori, acting commission spokesman, said on Wednesday that it was in “appalling bad taste” and “beneath contempt.” He added that such an act only pandered to “base xenophobic instincts.”
Since when has an aversion to Hitler consitituted ‘xenophobia’? Oh yes, silly me, ever since ‘xenophobia’ became another base, emotional tool.
These idle disputants overlooked the invariable laws of nature, which have connected peace with innocence, plenty with industry, and safety with valour.
– Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter 30
Not a phrase to grab you by the heartstrings, is it? But these are the words to listen out for if you want your child to learn to read properly. “Synthetic phonics” tells you that this is probably being done properly. If, on the other hand, they tell you that they’re using “eclectic” or “a mixture of” methods, watch out. “Dyslexia” looms.
I also put “dyslexia” in inverted commas, because what we have here is that very common modern phenomenon, a damaged brain diagnosed as caused by its own inherent damagedness when actually it is a brain that has been damaged by having damaging signals thrown at it from outside. The mental radar screen registers muddle not because it is muddled, but because it has been muddled.
The situation is actually a little more complicated than that, or the problem would probably not have got as bad as it has. There is just enough physical basis for the notion of “dyslexia” for the false claim to persist that dyslexia and dyslexia alone causes all reading difficulties, and for a multi-billion pound industry to spring up to fail to solve the problem. The reality is that good teaching automatically gets around almost any inherent, genetic predisposition towards reading difficulty, and teaches virtually all children to read successfully. Bad teaching, on the other hand, is something that the majority of children can hack their way past. They do it with difficulty, but they do it. The become literate despiteall the muddle they are subjected to. But not so the “dyslexics”. They don’t “crack” reading. They don’t get its inherent nature, because they have not been explicitly taught it.
And the explicit nature of reading that is not taught to an appallingly huge number of children these days is that each letter has a name and makes a sound or sounds (the name and the sound(s) not being the same! – obvious point but frequently overlooked), and that when you are confronted with a word, that is to say with a string of letters, the way to spell it out is to spell it out, one letter (or letter group like “ch”) at a time. Don’t guess. Don’t read only the first letter and then guess. Don’t look for the pattern of the “whole word”. Read. That’s synthetic phonics. Dee Oh Gee spells duh- o- guh- DOG.
Why don’t they teach that in all schools? Because they are ess tee you pee eye dee? Because they are mostly parts of a N-A-T-I-O-N-A-L-I-S-E-D I-N-D-U-S-T-R-Y? Both, and much more that’s far too complicated to explain in a posting that would keep anyone’s attention.
So what brought all this on? Partly of course, I’m getting into the swing of having arguments that will eventually find their proper home in ‘Brian’s Education Blog’. But the particular provocation was a really good article in last Sunday’s Observer (Review Section, cover story).
You can also chase up the synthetic phonics story in more detail by going to the website of the Reading Reform Foundation.
I spent a couple of torpid hours on Tuesday afternoon listening to the billionaire hedge fund king and now globetrotting philanthropist George Soros give a talk to a British parliamentary committee. Soros is the man who, to the everlasting gratitude of the British public, attacked the pound sterling in the foreign exchange markets during September 1992, ejecting this country out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), a move which allowed the pound to fall to a level that made it possible for British goods to be profitably sold abroad once more. So one might have thought that the Hungarian-born finance wizard would be a hero to this humble hack. Alas, the man has feet of clay, and very big lumps of clay at that.
Soros has spent the last few years ruminating about the many dangers of global capitalism, which is a bit like Formula One racing ace Michael Schumacher warning about the risks of high-speed motor racing. Soros thinks the globalisation of capitalism, while not without a few benefits, is full of dangers and problems, which require rules and international watchdogs to run things. Here are a few snippets:
“The major causes of poverty are bad governance and bad location.”
Well, I agree bad governments contribute to poverty, and there are dozens of examples of how collectivist regimes of various stripes have beggared their populaces and retarded wealth creation down the centuries. Take the current miserable example of Zimbabwe, for example. But bad location? Does Soros think that unfortunate geography causes poverty? Then how does he explain why places like Hong Kong, with hardly any natural resources apart from good shipping links, are fabulously wealthy, while most of Africa, with huge mineral wealth, subsides in misery? The same goes for large chunks of Asia and parts of Latin America.
“Governments are less well situated to provide public goods than they were because they cannot tax capital as they used to. We need to strengthen international institutions for the provision of public goods.”
Well, all I can say to that is – thank heaven for multinationals. By George, George has got it! International capital flows are cramping the ability of would-be socialist spend-it-like-water governments from doing what they used to do. The likes of British Prime Minister Tony Blair have been forced, through gritted teeth, to rein in old socialist habits on the knowledge that financial markets will punish those habits in a heartbeat.
George Soros is clearly a highly clever man when it comes to making dollops of money beyond most folks’ wildest dreams, but I fear that like many in his case, he has almost rebelled against the free market order in which he made his billions out of guilt or perhaps more honorably, out of a desire to help mankind from his lofty vantage point. It bears out the point I have sometimes heard in libertarian circles that capitalists often make the worst advocates of the classical liberal order.
I love this, from the “in fact” section of the July 2002 issue of Prospect (quoted in its turn from The Guardian World Cup guide):
In Paraguay, duelling is legal if both participants are registered blood donors.
This sublime example of the art of contriving to practice a politically incorrect past-time by attaching it to something politically very correct is an inspiration to all. What next? Feminists Against Income Tax? (Nice Acronym, that on.) Gays For Globalisation? Guardian-readers for the Right to Hunt? (We already have Feminists Against Censorship and those gay gun guys in America called, if I recall it right, the Pink Pistols.)
And this is the first sentence of an excellent review article in the same issue of Prospect by Malise Ruthven, called “Radical Islam’s failure”.
The attacks of 11th September were the last gasps of a moribund Islamist movement. Terror is a sign of failure, deployed when political mobilisation has failed.
With each passing day, the number of intelligent people focussing their intelligence on 9/11 and all that grows. If this article is anything to go by, the whole mess may get settled sooner than pessimists like me now fear. I do like Prospect.
Rep. James A. Traficant Jr. (OH) was convicted of tax evasion in a Federal court recently. Interestingly, he is an outspoken tax critic. Does anyone remember a similar case about 15 years ago? Traficant is not the first congressional tax critic to be silenced with a prison sentence.
Attorney Linda Kennedy from Virginia believes there was significant judicial misconduct by Judge Leslie Brooks Wells. You might want to read about it. If you find yourself in agreement, you might even want to join in the complaint.
“Quis custodiet istos custodus?”
A Muslim woman in Florida who demanded the right to wear her veil for her drivers license photo has won her case. At first blush this seems silly. But think of the consequences for liberty! She has set a precedent. If you are a Florida resident you now have a way around State mandated identity photos. All you need to do is establish a religion which forbids it… and have a good lawyer ready to ram the precedent back down the Court’s throat when they try to play by a double standard.
Thinking about the applications of this to Northern Ireland is enough to put me on the floor laughing. Wouldn’t it be fair enough to let the lads wear their ski masks for their NI driver license photo’s? If they have a culture of violence shouldn’t we be culturally sensitive about their cultural needs? Just because they only blew other people up is no reason to think they don’t deserve the same respect!
“Ein Volk! Ein Reich! Ein Euro”
Anti-euro campaigners have co-opted Adolf Hitler into their latest advertising campaign. Ageing rocker Sir Bob Geldof and restaurateur Gordon Ramsey are also among the celebrities, businessmen and politicians who feature in the advert to be shown in cinemas for three months from July 12. Campaigners said in the film they had tried to get across the idea that the euro is undemocratic and not inevitable.
Responding to the “No” campaign’s advert, Simon Buckby of the pro-euro “Britain in Europe” lobby said:
“We always knew the anti-Europeans were a joke and now they’ve turned into a bunch of comedians.”
Oh dear…
This is in essence what the ‘Visigrad Four’ (Slovakia, Hungary, Poland and Czech Republic) are telling the EU as they loudly protest at the prospect of not having their inefficient antiquated agricultural sectors subsidised by other sectors of the greater European economy when (if) they join the John Maynard Keynes Fan Club European Union in 2004.
Quite why anyone thinks farmer are entitled to protected status compared to, say, construction or pharmaceuticals or software or little plastic widget manufacture always seems to avoid coherent discussion, but I assume the logic is that if they are going to join the Swine Society, then they must be given a full place at the trough.
Actually if the poor fools are indeed successful at getting into the EU I hope they get their way, thus vastly increasing the strain on the monstrous Common Agricultural Policy and bringing the day of financial implosion of the entire EU a giant step closer.
Of course the preposterous Prince Charles could not care less if working people have to pay inflated prices for their food. No doubt next he will demand the EU and State put an end to the ‘obsession’ of common working people with cheap holidays and cheap motor transport… oh… I forgot, they already did that by taxing the hell out of petrol (75 percent of the cost in the UK) and propping up inefficient airlines with anti-competitive practices.
In order to get to their respective Valhallas, Comedians are supposed to die on stage like Tommy Cooper, Mountaineers on the north face of K2, Racers behind the wheel at Le Mans, Warriors in battle and Rock Stars are supposed to die in a hotel room with a stripper.
Hoka Hey John, you were one of the great ones and nothing if not dependable.
I went back to my mother
I said “I’m crazy ma, help me.”
She said, “I know how it feels son,
cos it runs in the family.”
A British news story today concerns the constant and presently insoluble problem of violence in schools. Pupils attack teachers. Parents now attack teachers. Some teachers have always been hateful to some pupils. Pupil-to-pupil violence has long been so routine as to be regarded as an intrinsic feature of juvenile human nature. What is to be done?
Are you a free(ish) adult? If so, ask yourself what you do about unwelcome violence in your life. Answer: if the violence occurs in places you don’t have to frequent and have no control over, then you stay away in future. If the violence invades your turf, you ask it to leave, and if it doesn’t you call the police. Mostly this works. It’s called freedom of association. Unwelcome violence is mostly dealt with, by the same methods used to solve the problem of unwelcome rock music emerging from unwelcome loudspeakers, unwelcome propositions from street traders, unwelcome programs invading your television. You keep clear of it. You withdraw your consent. You switch it off. You concentrate on the things that everyone directly involved thinks are okay.
But most schools, and especially most state schools, don’t work by these rules. There the assumption is that badness won’t be walked away from. Teachers must teach everyone, however appalling and unwelcome and uninterested in what is being taught. Parents are entitled to education for even their most grotesque brats. Bad or even sadistic teaching has to be complained about and negotiated with. Bullying requires a national help line and a national policy in order that it may fail to be eradicated. Badness (which just means something that those involved vehemently disagree about) must be corrected, reformed, improved, and when all that fails, punished, agonised over, fussed over, Ministerially taken charge of and, finally, tolerated.
It is inevitable that a parallel but alternative universe of educational niceness will arise, and it is. Nothing in this educational free market is taking place without the consent of all those directly concerned. Pupils who refuse to follow the rules which the teachers insist upon have to leave. Teachers whose teaching seems pointless or nasty or educationally worthless have to find others to teach, or other things to teach, or something else to do. Parents who don’t like what they’re getting keep looking. It’s called freedom.
I have in mind that some time during this new century I will start a specialist blog devoted to education issues, very roughly along the lines of Patrick Crozier’s UK Transport, although less expert about education “policy” than he is about transport policy, and in general rather more chatty and personal. If I do get this going, stories from and advertisements for this alternative and expanding voluntary universe of educational excellence will be especially welcome.
If you have such stories now, don’t wait for Brian’s Education Blog… send them to Samizdata!
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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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