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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It has emerged that the Provisional IRA, rather than its deniable offshoot the South Armagh Republican Action Force, was responsible for the 1976 Kingsmills Massacre. If you do not know about that event, the grim story is here.
On 5 January 1976, the 10 textile workers were travelling home from work in the dark and rain on a minibus in the heart of rural County Armagh.
….
A man asked their religions. There was only one Catholic left on the bus. He was identified and ordered away from his Protestant work mates. He was able to run off.
The lead gunman spoke one other word – “Right” – and the shooting began.
Mr Black was the only one to survive.
It seems almost indecent to let such an event be the starting point for a more general line of thought, but that is the way the mind works sometimes.
I had remembered the Kingsmills massacre. The last question put to the men and the awful choice of what to answer when you did not know whether the terrorists asking were Loyalist or Republican had stuck in my mind. Today I have advanced a little further in knowledge: I now know that analysis of the guns used confirms that it most likely was the IRA after all. The thing is, though, that my level of knowledge, which I tend to think of as average, is actually way above average. I have known for three decades that this massacre occurred. I knew that a few days previously five Catholics had been murdered and that the Kingsmills massacre was carried out in reprisal for this. And here’s the point, I know that there are Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, Republicans and Loyalists, and could give you a basic account of which side is which and how that situation came to be.
My own background is Irish Catholic. My family loathed the IRA. So I grew up paying a slightly above average amount of attention to Northern Ireland and I noticed over the years that plenty of people in the world literally did not know that there were any Protestants there. These people thought that that it was a case of “the English” occupying Ireland. Partisans on the Republican side also spoke thus, but selective rather than complete ignorance was their problem, as it was for partisans on the Loyalist side. The way in which those soaked in the history of a conflict can blank out the other side and talk of “the people” when they mean “our people” is tragic but a quite different phenomenon from that of ordinarily well educated members of society who simply have no idea – but not, alas, no opinion.
I have explained the existence of a Protestant population in bad French and worse Italian. I remember reading of angry editorials in American newspapers of thirty years ago that appeared to be unaware that the Republic of Ireland was an independent state. Colonel Gaddafi of Libya – now there’s a name from the past, wonder what happened to him? – at one time was visited by a delegation of Protestant paramilitaries who convinced him that this was not a straightforward anti-Imperialist struggle and got him to cease sending arms to the IRA.
I think a few of the commenters to this article still literally do not know of the existence of the Protestant population. If they do know of it, they ain’t showing it.
The ignorance that is rational for individuals can do great harm.
What are your experiences of spectacular historical ignorance? What effect does that ignorance have? To count, examples should not be the ignorance of the illiterate and semi-literate. There are millions on Earth who do not know the world is round. That is sad but not interesting. What is sad but interesting is the state of those for whom some basic historical fact is an “unknown unknown”, to use Rumsfeld’s formulation.
On second thoughts, why confine ourselves to history? A Scottish friend of mine relates that some of people she talks to in her part of the world literally think that the financial crisis of 2008 arose because bankers took “all the money” for bonuses. They think the government could get all the money back and make everything OK again, had it but the willpower. Discussing the matter, she modified that slightly, and said that if these friends and acquaintances were ever to articulate the idea I have just described they would probably see that it could not be correct, but they never have articulated it. This is in a Labour-voting but by no means deprived area near Glasgow, but I would not bet on the proportion of people thinking thus in my Tory part of Essex being much different, for all that ‘banksters’ keep the local economy going.
These holes in peoples’ knowledge will have their effect in the end. One could call it trickle-up ignorance.
“The fundamental story about consumer taste, in modern times, is not one of dumbing down or of producers seeking to satisfy a homogenous least common denominator at the expense of quality. Rather, the basic trend is of increasing variety and diversity, at all levels of quality, high and low.”
– Tyler Cowen, Creative Destruction: How Globalization is Changing The World’s Cultures. Page 127. First published in 2002.
Counting the true cost of the arts cuts is the headline on a Guardian article by Mark Brown. It starts (emphasis added):
A very good thing, the Lost Arts website, was launched on Thursday in Westminster with the aim of of recording all the organisations, initiatives, projects, commissions, tours and more that will be lost due to cuts in public spending on the arts.
It will also keep a running total of money lost to the arts and the money lost to the Treasury as a consequence.
The initiative is a collaboration between eight unions: the Musicians’ Union (MU), Equity, The Writers’ Guild of Great Britain, the NUJ, Bectu, Unite, Prospect and PCS.
If you follow the link you get to Lost Arts. The front page currently says:
Money lost to the arts since 30.03.2011: £20,392,023.
Money lost to the economy since 30.03.2011: £40,784,046.
Emphasis added, again. The latter figure is exactly twice the former. I suppose this is a reference to the claim made by John Smith, President of the FEU, in the comments that “Every £1 invested in the Arts generates £2 for the wider economy”.
£2 out for every £1 in is really very modest as such claims go.
Ever before I wrote this, I was on the lookout for Fixed Quantity Of… theories, and even more since then. Usually these theories are fallacies. Often, changing how something is done, and in particular changing the rules or the overall setting within which something is done can quite dramatically change, for the better or for the worse, both the quantity and the quality of whatever is being argued about.
Here is another such theory/fallacy, the Fixed Quantity of Education fallacy. Toby Young takes aim at it here. He and some friends of his are setting up a “free school”. Their critics in the state education sector object, because this new school will suck educational excellence out of their schools and make it available only to a privileged few.
In particular, it is said that this new school will draw middle class children away from state schools, to the educational detriment of these schools. State educators who talk like this sometimes make it sound as if most of the good teaching that goes on in their schools is done by middle class children rather than by educationally expert adults. Perhaps they have a point.
But the amount of satisfactory educating going on is very variable, depending on how relaxed or restrictive are the rules about how it may be done and who may do it. (For instance, if it were forbidden for parents to educate their children at home, that would, I believe, sharply diminish the supply of good education.) Toby Young says that the real reason the detractors of the educational venture he favours are so vocal is that they fear being shown up as bad educators, by a new school that creates a vast new surge of educational excellence, thereby proving that they could be doing this too. No upper limit on the total amount of available education is stopping them, only their own stupid educational ideas and habits. I am sure that he has a point.
NHS North Central London operates under strict data protection guidance and is taking the matter extremely seriously. We have started an investigation into the issues raised by the loss. We are liaising with the office of the Information Commissioner.
– A spokesman from NHS North Central London, responding ineffectually to questions from The Register about having recently lost a laptop containing 8.6 million health records. The laptop was “password protected”, apparently, so everything is okay.
I am very sad to hear the news that a libertarian acquaintance of mine, Richard Garner, has died at a young age. I don’t know any more details. Richard used to write a fair number of excellent comments over at this blog’s comment threads. I used to like chatting to him at conferences and other gatherings; I remember getting a cheery invite from him to join him and others at the recent “rally against debt” in central London.
My condolences to his family and many friends. He will be missed.
Too many of our internet dreams depend on the internet being far less vulnerable to governments than it actually is.
– August, commenting on a posting at my place about Bitcoin.
I suggest comments about what August says about the internet: here. Bitcoin comments: there.
Our own Michael Jennings does his bit to stave off a new Ice Age by his almost obsessive amounts of globe-trotting, and I cannot compete with that, but I did my little bit at the weekend, as did a lot of other crazy people, by attending this event in France.
Ever since I watched the Steve McQueen film about the extraordinary 24-hour race in this part of France, I have wanted to go to Le Mans. I was not disappointed. The sight and sound of the cars setting off for the race, and then thundering down the Mulsanne Straight, or twisting around the S-bends after shooting down the track under the Dunlop Bridge, was unforgettable.
There is, I suppose, something very elemental about getting excited about the sight of such things, and of course, there is the satisfaction in how Man, by mastering technology, can produce cars able to go flat out for 24 hours and drive at such speeds, competitively, and live to tell the tale.
I shall definitely be going back.
The dependably dismal Archbishop of Canterbury, a man who thinks his god favours a massive force backed regulatory state which takes one person’s wealth implicitly at gunpoint and gives it to someone else, get a well phrased hammering by Graeme Archer:
It is obscene, Dr Williams, that some people choose not to work, and are better off as a consequence than those who do not make such a choice. Such people are less deserving than others. If there are no jobs available, what are all these Polish men doing on this bus, at 6.30am? They deserve more than to be viewed as taxable cart-horses.
And you? On an average salary? Trying to raise a child and thinking about having another? Coming to the conclusion that you might be able to balance commuting against mortgage costs, if you moved to an unpopular area farther out than you’d like? It must be hard for multiple houseowners such as Mr Cruddas, or the Archbishop in his palace, to understand: this is life, for most of us. And we’re not fascists because we make a distinction between the deserving and the undeserving when we see where our tax is spent.
Read the whole thing. My only regret is Archer does not follow the moral argument to its logical conclusion.
I see that my fourth (approximately, I think) cousin John Micklethwait, Editor of the Economist, whom our own Paul Marks disapproves of so severely, is this weekend attending a meeting of the Bilderberg Group.
I learned about this list of potentates thanks to a link to it from Guido Fawkes, and I consider it rather significant that such an august media personage as Guido should be positively drawing our attention to this gathering.
When the internet got seriously into its stride, and particularly blogging, at or around the year 2000, you would have thought that observation and analysis of the global elite would have exploded. After all, detailed analysis of these persons and their thinkings and their doings was the quintessential Story They Don’t Want Us To Know, in other words, a story that was ready-made for the internet.
Yet, actually, very little was said about these persons and their meetings and their secret thinkings aloud, by regular people as opposed to the people who were already fascinated by such things. Oh, I’m sure that the people who had been banging on about the evil Bilderbergers for the previous quarter of a century immediately started publishing vast screeds about these persons on the internet. But, or so it seems to me, very few other people paid such talk very much attention. And so, pretty much, it has continued.
Why? Was it because bloggers who dipped their toes into these hitherto forbidden waters were visited by sinister people in sinister raincoats at sinister times of the night? Did those who mentioned the Bilderberg Group on the internet suffer mysteriously fatal road accidents?
I can’t speak for others, but the thing that kept me away from talking about Bilderberg meetings and similar things was not the fear of Them, but the desire not to be thought completely mad, by people generally. → Continue reading: Is the globe now ready to start thinking seriously about its elite?
I have pretty much ignored the Weiner Dong flap as I am not much fussed about how the man gets laid. Whether he is true to his wife, a kinky netizen or as much a womanizer as some of my musician friends of old does not much matter to me. His political stands would be equally obnoxious to me whether he be Saint Weiner or an alley cat guitarist. However, I could not pass up this brilliant little bit of poetic license from the always humorous Iowahawk which Taylor Dinerman pointed out to me.
`My name is Weinermandius, Dong of Dongs:
Look on my junk, ye mighty, and despair!’
As oft saith Glenn Reynolds, “Read the whole thing.”
I tend to have a “half empty” view of the world – but even I do not believe that the British population contains no pro freedom people. Indeed I believe that there are millions of pro freedom people in Britain – and basically the British book trade was telling us all to bugger off, that we were not welcome in the book shops.
Well we got the message – it is not all “the internet” that is the reason for the decline of the British book trade, basically they were telling non-socialists that our custom was not wanted.
– Paul Marks
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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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