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.
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Here is Roger Kimball, ruefully reflecting on Hurricane Sandy. For Kimball, the meteorological just got very personal:
Well, it was grim, Hurricane Sandy. We were prepared for something bad, but this storm, as we were warned, turned out to be like nothing I had ever seen.
Like nothing I’ve ever seen, that’s for sure. Little old England is a hurricane backwater, thank goodness.
We went back to our neighborhood this morning – it was a circuitous route, given all the downed trees and power lines. It was a devastating scene. Many houses were simply bashed in, crushed by the power of the waves. Even more (like ours, alas) were seriously flooded.
I’m sure there’s a moral here somewhere, probably having to do with hubris, nemesis, or some other unpleasant Greek offering. Or maybe it has to do with that old quip, Do you want to make the gods laugh? Tell them your plans.
Now for the Big Cleanup!
I’ll say.
A few thoughts.
Casualties seem, given the scale of the storm, to have been mercifully light. If so, that proves that the best defence against this kind of thing is to be as rich as you can before disaster strikes. Rich people are able to see what’s coming, to duck and weave, to tell each other what to do, and then to look after each other. Natural disaster is not followed by epidemic disease, the way it is liable to be among very poor people.
Samizdata has lots of American readers, including, presumably quite a few who have suffered directly from this storm. Commiserations from all of us, and here’s hoping you pull through in decent shape. If you have been seriously mucked about by this storm, you might want to ignore the rest of this and if you did I would entirely understand.
But I have to ask. What effect might all this have on the election? → Continue reading: Hurricane Sandy and its consequences
The deeper truth masked by all the ranting – and, it should be added, by the blinkers of many Western secularists – is that Christians are targeted in greater numbers than any other faith group on earth. About 200 million church members (10 per cent of the global total) face discrimination or persecution: it just isn’t fashionable to say so.
– Rupert Shortt
A recent blog post by Tim Worstall describes the lack of understanding that surrounds this embarrassing condition. He recalls his experiences as a chronic sufferer since childhood:
When at primary in Bath, good strong Bathonian. And the standard Eng middle class at home, like what I speak now. Of[f] we move to Italy to the Forces school when I’m 8. My mother still remarks on the near cockney (probably closer to what we would call estuarine now) that my brother and I both picked up in weeks. And started speaking as we walked through the doors of the school and dropped the moment we left them.
A SORAS survivor among his commenters, ‘Chris’, had an even more overwhelming attack,
“When I came back to England from British Guiana at 11, to attend an almost all-white boarding school, I had a strong Guianese accent – for about 10 minutes”
Another commenter, ‘Richard’ was a witness as the syndrome struck down a friend.
“… [he] said he could hear his accent change, in 2 or 3 stages, over the train journey home at the end of term.
Be aware that initial symptoms can seem trivial – hearing a person who has lived in England for half his life say, “put it down by there” within seconds of setting foot of the platform at Swansea station may not, at first, seem cause for concern. However without treatment “by there” can become interjections of “mun” or even “Ych y fi” with terrifying speed.
Although the disease is most common in its homolocutic form, in which people suddenly revert to an accent they thought they had abandoned years ago but did actually have at one time, it also has a heterolocutic variant.
At the London SORAS support group, I recently met Berenice (28) who blames the loss of her job at an advertising agency specialising in political campaigns on the heterolocutic form of the disease. At a creative meeting, she prefaced her query as to whether an advert suggesting that first time female voters might like to grant Ed Miliband the traditional jus primae noctis would really resonate with the youth demographic with the words “Not being funny or nuffink”, and was fired on the spot. Berenice was infected after discussing the weather with a work experience girl.
Some sufferers choose to carry an information card or medical alert bracelet in order to assist first responders when the victim himself can no longer communicate verbally in a way normal people can understand. ‘Quentin’ (not his real name), a plumber’s mate struck down with the disease after installing a combi boiler in this right posh house up on Primrose Hill, is very grateful he did. While just about still able to speak comprehensibly he called an ambulance to say he had “the most frightful case of SORAS” before lapsing into a kind of idiodialect in which the only words medical staff could understand were “yah” and “darling.” It was only his desperate gesticulation towards the bracelet while strapped to a medical trolley that stopped him being wheeled into the genito-urinary ward.
Related conditions such as TIGFAF – Talking In a Generic Foreign Accent to Foreigners – can be even more distressing.
The US Supreme Court is going to be discussing the legal doctrine of first sale today, in a case that has something to do with school textbooks but will ultimately have further repercussions. Your right to first sale means that you are allowed to sell on books and DVDs that you bought. However publishers are attempting to license, rather than sell, such materials, and these end user license agreements seek to prevent such selling on.
I find it hard to agree with either side in the debate. On the one hand, if you want to sell on a book that you bought in a book shop, this should not be answered with violence. On the other hand, if you write a book and want to sell it on the condition that the buyer does not then sell it on to someone else, this should not be answered with violence. What if you attempt to make this agreement and the buyer then breaks it? Refuse to deal with that buyer again and tell all your friends. Not practical? Consider alternative business models. The state should neither uphold nor prohibit specific business models, and I suspect it should not be involved in contract enforcement either.
For a publisher there are plenty of non-violent solutions, such as encryption, digital rights management, watermarking, subscription services or being so awesome that everyone wants to throw money at you.
The Americans will always do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted
– attributed to Winston Churchill
Should the word “rape” in the American term “statutory rape” be replaced with some other word?
I would argue in favour of replacement that it diminishes the perceived magnitude of the crime of rape in the ordinary sense (“rape rape” to use Whoopi Goldberg’s term, or “legitimate rape” to use Todd Akin’s) to use the same word for those cases of statutory rape where consent was present, or arguably present. It also makes calm discussion and clear thinking about the complex issue of consent much harder.
Incidentally, I think that most of the criticism that both Goldberg and Akin got for using the terms they did was unjust. They both deserved criticism for making public pronouncements about subjects of which they knew next to nothing. Goldberg apparently did not know that Polanski’s crime was indeed a particularly vile coercive rape of a minor. I suspect that she assumed that talented people from her own social milieu did not do that sort of thing. Akin had the silly belief that women’s bodies have the power to prevent conception by an act of will. However I do not think for a moment that when he said “legitimate” rape he meant that there were circumstances where rape should be permitted, and I do not think that those howling for his head really believe he meant that either. He just used the wrong word. He should have said “coercive rape” – but the very fact that people need to hunt around for a term that gets that across, and get into trouble when they get it wrong, is why I think the term of law should be renamed.
I am not arguing against the existence of such laws, although no doubt many of them could do with adjustment. I am told the term does not exist in English or Scottish law but it has certainly soaked into British public discourse, muddying the waters.
“The only intellectual satisfaction I took from the Dark Knight Rises was when I fell asleep and had a dream about socking Sigmund Freud in the mouth. Analyse that.”
Tim Stanley, in the course of writing a fairly scornful view of the new Bond film, which he hasn’t seen and doesn’t want to see.
I must say that I kind of get his point. Whenever I see a film described as “dark”, “gritty” or, even worse, a potential Oscar-winner, my BS detector comes on. But I generally like what Daniel Craig has done with the 007 role, despite the fact that he goes too far in looking like an army squaddie in a tux. He’s not Ian Fleming’s Bond, but solidly entertaining nonetheless. I am off to the movies on Saturday.
Anyway, this from Stanley is a corker, however unfair:
Craig is an excellent actor, but Bond is a part better played by a knitting catalogue model or a 60-year-old Lothario who charmed the producer’s wife. Craig gives the character emotional depth that it doesn’t deserve, while his physique turns Bond from a dandy super agent in a common-or-garden thug. Wit is impossible; charm has been replaced by threat. His body looks like it’s been put into one of those crushers at a car graveyard then forced into a pair of swimming trunks. And while Sean Connery and Roger Moore had laser pens and magnetic watches, Craig’s secret weapon is probably a snooker ball in a sock. Can you imagine this ape winning at Baccarat? Knowing the recipe for the perfect White Russian? He looks like his idea of class is not dropping your fish and chips in the middle of a fist fight.
All in all, I’m predicting Skyfall will have the charm and good humour of a night spent manning the phones at the Samaritans. Its miserabilism reflects a culture that thinks suffering automatically creates credibility – a world where X Factor contestants weep for our votes because last week their gran sustained a paper cut while opening a gas bill.
Here is a fine study in the New York Times of the writer and intellectual figure, Jacques Barzun. His views on art, culture and the state of our civilisation are all worth reading. He made it to almost 105 years of age.
Here is a Wikipedia page about him, which contains a full bibliography. Here is one of his better known books, From Dawn To Decadence.
Britain’s charities and quangos are now stuffed to the gunwales with Labour placemen, writes Fraser Nelson in the Telegraph.
Not news to you, perhaps, but news to many.
What can be done? Dante placed the simonists in the Eighth Circle, turned upside down in large baptismal fonts cut into rock, with their feet set ablaze, but I’m thinking in the shorter term.
You have to hand it to Peter Oborne, the newspaper columnist, for his ability to think several contradictory thoughts at the same time when writing for the need for the head of the BBC Trust, Chris Patten (a former Tory party chairman and Hong Kong governor), to resign over the Savile sex abuse scandal:
“And it is important that he [Chris Patten] goes very soon, because he is doing such damage to an institution that stands for everything that is best about Britain – integrity, fairness, and generosity. Above all, the BBC represents a common sphere of British public life which is not part of the marketplace, and yet not controlled by the state. Alongside Parliament, the NHS, the Army, the monarchy and the rule of law, it is one of our great national institutions.”
Well, if Oborne thinks that the BBC, an organisation that has the privilege of taking revenue in the form of a tax (the licence fee) levied on anyone who owns a television, regardless of their viewing habits, is a “great national institution”, and “not controlled by the state”, which is laughable, then how does he go on to say this:
“It is deeply unfortunate that, over the past few decades, the corporation has been colonised and captured by a narrow, greedy, self-interested and self-perpetuating liberal elite, ignorant of ordinary people and contemptuous of ordinary morality – hence, in part, the Savile affair. The unprincipled and arrogant conduct of that elite has provided a great deal of ammunition to the broadcaster’s enemies, such as the Murdoch press, and thus placed the BBC’s future in jeopardy.”
But if the BBC is a “great institution” – which I contest – then the fact that it has been “colonised and captured” by such terrible people must surely point to the problem that any state-privileged institution with certain monopoly powers, such as the BBC, can be captured by such people. The point is not to create such bodies with such privileges in the first place, since they almost always end up being captured or politically manipulated; or, to establish such powerful checks and balances that bad behaviour is rapidly dealt with. (In the case of the army and the legal profession, even they are not free of problems.)
The foolishness of Oborne is in his naïve belief that all that is necessary is for good and honest people to be put in charge of X or Y, and all will be well. The problem is not the people, but the monopolistic system in place. In all state bodies where an element of state privilege is involved, and where the competitive force of the market does not apply, the way to the top is often through political scheming rather than simple merit, although no doubt there are elements of meritocracy involved, at least in the early years of an institution when there is plenty of idealism in the air.
And the reference to the Murdoch media empire is typically misleading and gratuitous, since Murdoch has, in the face of the outrage about the behaviour of some of his journalists, shut down a newspaper (the News of the World), suffered major shareholder damage, and seen the potential breakup of his empire. Ask yourself this: in a year’s time, does anyone expect anything similar to happen to the organisation known, hilariously, as “Auntie”?
Needless to say, I should add that some of the same problems apply to the National Health Service, the UK’s socialised medical system which, despite some tweaks, still runs on the same quasi-Soviet basis as when it was created in the late 1940s. Savile was able, so it is alleged, to abuse young patients in at least one of its hospitals (Stoke Mandeville), and it is appalling that his activities were not stopped. I am not saying that a completely private medical system would be free of such monsters, but one has to ask whether the public’s almost religious view of the NHS, despite everything, is a hindrance to clear thinking about such matters.
“Obama went on to tell Romney: “You seem to want to import the foreign policies of the 1980s, just like the social policies of the 1950s and the economic policies of the 1920s.” So he’s Reagan, Eisenhower and Coolidge all rolled into one? Sounds way too good to be true, but one can only hope.”
James Taranto.
I suppose a person could argue that the 1920s were flawed in America because the boom of that era ultimately led to the Wall Street Crash of 1929, but can, say, Harding and Coolidge get the blame for the scale of the downturn in the 1930s? And a lot of good things were created and invented in the 1920s in the US. The major turd in the punchbowl was Prohibition and the associated surge in organised crime. As for the 1950s, yes, Eisenhower was no radical, but as a recent biography sets out, he was a wise leader in many ways, and the process of dismantling the Jim Crow regime in the South was under way before JFK got in. As for Ronald Reagan, well, to even hint that Romney could be a new Gipper, and take the US back to the vibrant 80s when the Soviets were on the run counts as a massive own goal for Obama. Just think what Romney must have thought: “God, this preening jerk actually tried to imply that I might try and have a re-run of the 1980s! I have got the White House in the bag.”
Finally, the 1950s in the US gave us lots of Hitchcock movies, Elvis, Chuck Berry, Grace Kelly, M. Monroe, lots of good novels, interesting aircraft and space-craft, and er, some of these beauties.
Any organisation that is not dependent upon its customers, whether a state or private monopoly, will eventually become self-serving. During my career I was party to many conversations about how to maximise profit for the owners of our businesses and provide attractive employment terms for our staff, but they all turned in the end to what our customers would want, or at least accept. We spent much more time worrying how to please customers than please ourselves. Satisfied customers who choose to come back are the only guarantee for owners, managers and workers in the private sector that they can achieve their personal goals.
As will all state enterprises funded by taxation, the BBC has become, in effect, a worker’s co-operative. The “customers” have to pay regardless, so they become irrelevant and the focus turns to the interests of its own people. No private business would survive the shit storm that is heading the BBC’s way. The share price would now be collapsing as investors tried to get out before the lawsuits begin. I confidently and sadly predict however that the BBC will survive. It has the coercive power of the state behind it and will simply take your money to settle the cases. It is the left establishment’s propaganda arm and they will rally to restore its reputation.
We are about to have an instructive, but depressing, demonstration of the realities of modern Britain. We will be able to compare and contrast the BBC news and current affairs teams’ handling of this story with their campaign against News International. Just imagine if the phone-hackers had worked for Newsnight and Savile had worked for Sky News!
– Tom Paine comments on the Saville scandal at The Last Ditch.
Follow the first link there and read the entire posting. Better yet, if you have the time or can make it, follow the last link and read the entire blog.
The latest posting there is entitled QC appointed to advise the BBC over Savile case. Says Tom Paine: “The expenditure of your money on the BBC’s defence begins.”
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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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