Combinations of wickedness would overwhelm the world, did not those who have long practised perfidy grow faithless to each other.
-Dr Johnson, ‘Waller’, Lives of the Poets, 1779-81
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May 15th, 2002 | Comments are closed
 Via Instapundit, I went to i330.org (13 May 2002 20) for this ‘distrousering’, as my late father would have put it, of Matthew Engel, for writing silly things about the USA and its guns. I remember Engel as a very funny cricket writer. I used to buy The Guardian just for him during test matches (that’s cricket internationals for all you uncricketpersons out there). Then he became the Editor of Wisden, the annual cricket bible. I think the difference was he likes cricket, whereas he isn’t, as The Guardian’s man in the USA, allowed to like the USA, except the bits of the USA that don’t like the USA either. We ought to do this kind of thing. Not with British correspondents in the USA but with US correspondents here. Are there any? I bet if there are they get all kinds of things wrong. May 15th, 2002 | Comments are closed
A quick thought for ye – why do we hardly hear a peep from the UK Conservative Party any more about tax cuts and the importance therof in spurring entrepreneurship…not to mention the moral case for such cuts. Has that party, the party that once bravely slashed the insane top rate of income tax from near-100 percent to a more tolerable but still-too high 40 percent, totally given up the fight? Shadow Chancellor Michael Howerd has said nothing on the subject. Truly pathetic. And yet, contrary to conventional wisdom, I reckon that an aggressive tax-cutting agenda linked to a wholesale critique of our monopolistic public services like health care and education could reap dividends. By buying the Blairite idea that tax cuts equals putting granny on the streets and letting little Johnny without enough teachers, the Tories are playing straight into socialist hands. Come on you pathetic Tories, take a slide on the Laffer Curve! May 14th, 2002 | Comments are closed
Well that is certainly what the redoubtable Sarah Lawrence thinks and on the basis of his latest idiotic article I am inclined to agree. Now it is well known amongst regular Samizdata readers that I am not reflexively pro-Israel but the notion being peddled that Arafat is not part of the terrorist problem in the Middle East is so patently idiotic that I can only speculate that this is indeed what Sarah categorises it as… an example of The Big Lie technique from a person who sees the world in Chomskyist terms, i.e. devoid of any objective meaning at all. 
Spiffy graphic by Scrofulous Steve! May 14th, 2002 | Comments are closed
Alex Singleton of Liberty Log rang me at 5 am this morning (not quite, but it felt like that) to check that I’d got a cheque he had sent me for travelling expenses (yes thanks), and he also mentioned that they’re thinking of starting some kind of campaign up there concerning the alleged superiority of Muslim culture. He mentioned a Reason online article. I’m in the middle of reading it now and I enthusiastically recommend it. It’s called “In Praise of Vulgarity” and is by Charles Paul Freund, which is probably a name known to lots of Samizdata’s readers but is one I haven’t attended to before. The article was published in March, but better late than never if like me you missed it the first time around. I’ve just finished the bit about the USSR’s “stilyagi” subculture of the immediate post-WW2 era, and am about the read the bit about Algeria, and the use of pop culture there to get back at the Islamist suppression of the everyday pleasures of life. I just checked the Liberty Log link above to make sure it worked, and they link to this article too, and you can see Alex Singleton’s brief comments on it. May 14th, 2002 | Comments are closed
Every age has a language of its own; and the difference in the words is often far greater than in the thoughts. The main employment of authors, in their collective capacity, is to translate the thoughts of other ages into the language of their own. May 14th, 2002 | Comments are closed
There was I thinking it was looking like a slow news day when, apparently, Israel drops a political bombshell on the Palestinians by voting against the establishment of a Palestinian State. Except it wasn’t quite the Israeli government but the Likud Party and, on second sight, it wasn’t quite such a bombshell either. However the development deserves comment if only for the brows it appears to be furrowing round the Blogosphere. General opinion seems to be that it is a serious blow to the prospects for peace and a snub to Washington. I beg to differ. No, the vote by the Likud Central Committee (59% to 41%) was actually a re-affirmation of a long-time plank of the Likud manifesto that there shall be ‘no Palestinian State West of the Jordan and it is a posture that says far more about Likud in-fighting than it says either about the ‘Peace Process’ or Washington. Ariel Sharon is in the peculiar position of riding high in the opinion polls whilst appearing as a dithering embarrassment to many within his own party. Sharon had actually abandoned the above-mentioned Likud principle whilst in power because that’s the kind of thing leaders have to do in the cut-and-thrust of diplomacy and compromise. But it is meat-and-drink for his arse-kicker-in-chief, Benyamin Netanyahu, Likud’s blue-eyed boy, who has made no secret of the fact that he has his sights firmly set on the cat-bird seat. It was Netanyahu that sponsored the motion and, to everyone’s surprise (maybe even his own) actually won it. It makes little material difference to facts on the ground. Until there is a change of Palestinian leadership then all talk of a Palestinian State anywhere remains so much moonshine. Likud’s reaffirmation of its traditional hard-line stance does not represent a change of heart or policy but rather a formalisation of extant positions. It will make a material difference to the bit of ground on which Sharon is standing for it’s a humiliation that will remind him that he cannot take his own party’s support for granted nor ignore the theatrically ferocious Netanyahu snapping at his heels and every other part of his anatomy. I have read that this shows that Netanyahu is even more hard-line than Sharon but that is a simplification. Netanyahu is not in the hot-seat so he has the licence to act as man-of-the-hour for the party faithful and play the firebrand. Were he to find himself back in the premiership again, he would have to play the International Statesman and that means confronting and making hard choices. The same kind of hard choices Sharon had to make. President Bush may well be losing sleep tonight, but not over this. May 13th, 2002 | Comments are closed
It seems the death of Dutch politician and media commentator Pim Fortuyn, which continues to reverberate in the blogosphere and elsewhere, has shed light on just how useless the words ‘left’ and ‘right’ are when it comes to making sense of the political and cultural landscape. An article in the latest edition of the UK weekly magazine The Spectator by Melanie Phillips, makes an attempt to figure out how Fortuyn grappled with the issues of defending secular, liberal democracies against influences thought to be malign, like militant Islam. But she fluffs it. Take this dumb paragraph:
Phillips’ attacks legalisation of drugs, voluntary euthanasia and same-sex marital unions, all causes Fortuyn championed, and avers that such “libertarianism” undermines liberty. Eh? Surely the common thread running through his stance on tax, public sector services, and social issues like drugs was support of arrangements arrived at by consenting adults and a general desire to stop Big Government getting in the way. His opposition to unchecked, massive immigration from largely non-Western societies was predicated on a fear that such freedoms were under threat. One can argue whether his fear was justified or not – I am not entirely convinced either way – but Fortuyn’s views struck me as entirely coherent. As for liberalism’s roots in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, that strikes me as only partially accurate. Unlike some atheists, I do fully appreciate the contribution of this religious tradition to liberty (such as the doctrine of Free Will) but for starters, what about the heritage of Greece and Rome? What about the Enlightenment? Phillips’ analysis is flawed because, ultimately, she cannot see how freedom can flourish without state-imposed restraints. Nowhere is there any grasp of how order and rules can evolve spontaneously from below, rather than be imposed from above. This is a shame because Phillips does have some good things to say, particularly on how Fortuyn has forced many commentators used to thinking of politics through certain prisms to sharpen up their act. May 13th, 2002 | Comments are closed
One of the many joys of blogging is that you don’t have to say everything, you can be content to say something, and the something I want to say here is that I want to add my little voice to the chorus now saying that Brink Lindsey’s recent book Against The Dead Hand – The Uncertain Struggle for Global Capitalism is very good. I’ve not read all of the book yet, but Lindsey’s description (see for example chapter 2: “The Industrial Counterrevolution”) of the wider public policy atmosphere around 1900 is as good as I’ve ever encountered. You can read detailed blow-by-blow descriptions of the “Economic Calculation Debate” which are as good, and far more detailed of course, but a persuasive sense of how it all fitted into the big wide world out there, then and since, is harder to come by. I’m now dipping into the more current stuff, which is much enriched by the fact that Lindsey works at the formidable Cato Institute. Here’s a typically good quote (on page 192):
By way of a personal footnote, I’ve also recently dug up an old piece of propaganda I did for a libertarian-conservative gang of stirrers at the University of Exeter, circa 1992, written by my wise and wonderful self. It’s a list of 37 reasons Why I am a Libertarian (Libertarian Alliance, forthcoming Real Soon Now), each starting with “Because”. Here’s Because Number 24:
Which is pretty much the same meme. And good memes can’t be bounced about too much and too often. But I digress. My basic message here is, if you’ve any time at all to do it: Read Brink’s Book. May 13th, 2002 | Comments are closed
There’s nothing like a Socialist to get someone who really despises the Working Class, is there? via David Harthill May 13th, 2002 | Comments are closed
You could project the keyboard onto the upper back of a suitably placed loved one and combine blogging with giving him or her a massage. May 13th, 2002 | Comments are closed
A group of Harvard and MIT professors, spearheaded of course by MIT’s Noam Chomsky, is calling for the Harvard endowment to sell its investments in a variety of companies which “benefit from or support the Israeli military.” (If the Harvard-MIT Divestment Campaign has its own website, I cannot find it; but this story in The Harvard Crimson cites IBM, General Electric and McDonald’s as examples of such firms targeted by the Campaign.) What exactly does the Campaign hope to accomplish? Even if they got their way, this action would not cause the slightest bit of economic harm to Israel. This would be the case even if we were talking about an institution with vastly greater holdings than the Harvard Endowment trust. The only way for Harvard to sell its shares of IBM or McDonald’s is for some other investor to purchase them (duh!) Perhaps they spend too much time listening to the empty suits on MSNBC and other “instant analysts” on the tube, who attribute every dip in the stock market to a “sell-off,” never considering that every share traded on the floor of the NYSE is both purchased and sold at the same time. Maybe you can chalk this up to delusions of grandeur, or the mistaken notion that Harvard holds as much sway in the financial world as it does in the intellectual realm. One of the most important (and under-reported) trends in the economics in the last 20 years has been the rise of “institutional capitalism” — financial institutions such as pension funds and mutual funds now own an outright majority of all corporate equities, rendering bit players such as the Harvard endowment largely irrelevant. In any case, this represents an awfully strange way to try to pressure the Israeli government. So why are they doing it? I can think of two reasons … essentially they must believe that the Campaign serves some political or propagandistic purpose, because it is difficult for me to believe that they think their actions will directly punish Israel in any way. Symbolism — elevating the cause to the level of the anti-apartheid movement. In the 1980s, there were a variety of disinvestment campaigns leveled against South Africa, and the Campaign wants their own cause elevated to the level of the global struggle against apartheid. I don’t think that I need to explain why such a comparison is preposterous, but they are trying to create that linkage in people’s minds. (This makes even more sense in light of the protestor I met in Washington a few weeks ago, who told me that the Palestinians were ‘the N May 12th, 2002 | Comments are closed
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