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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Like his blogging Highness, Glenn Reynolds, while I love the visual cleverness of Mad Men, the TV series, and the brilliance with which this show has caught the mood of the time, I find the series rather depressing. I mean, the guys who are portrayed as “having it all” in an age of heavy smoking, drinking in the workplace, womanising and the rest seem to be, a rather depressed bunch. It is a series that certainly plays to the stereotype of business as venal and zero-sum – which is what anti-capitalists like to think it is. But these guys and gals certainly knew how to dress snazzily for work.
But whatever one thinks of the sense of life communicated by the series, Jon Hamm, who plays the main character, Don Draper, is unquestionably a compelling actor who has created one of the most memorable characters in TV drama for a long time (he certainly seems to have quite an effect on this lady). It will be interesting to see what he does next.
A thought occurs to me: Hamm makes a potentially good James Bond and even looks more like the character of Mr Fleming’s books than Daniel Craig, even though the latter actor did a very good turn in Casino Royale.. But the last film, Quantum of Solace, while brilliant in its stunts, was awfully humourless and bereft of character development. And it would not be that big a shift to cast an American in the role: our Jim is an Anglosphere character, anyway.
“In Soviet Russia, tractor production figures were always on the rise. In modern Britain we have our own equivalent: the annual increase in exam passes and improvement in grades, celebrated just as enthusiastically by the governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major as by those of New Labour. It is all built on a lie.”
Stephen Pollard.
I agree with some of Mr Pollard’s analysis, although I do not detect any support by him for the idea that the problem is more profound than whether schools adopt “progressive” or “traditional” methods. The whole notion that compulsory education might itself be a problem is not even addressed, nor does he touch on the idea of home schooling. And Stephen P. just takes it as read that however crap schooling may be, that the model of sending children to these places between the age of X and Y is broadly okay, it is just that the structure is a bit wonky and the teachers are all ideologues, etc. The problem goes a bit deeper than that.
Watch this and weep for what once was and is now gone.
Arnold Kling has been debating – in a friendly way – with fellow US blogger Will Wilkinson on the relative power of exit, the ability to take oneself and one’s business away from place A to B, for example, with “voice”, such as voting. There is a good Wikipedia item on the forces of “voice” and “exit”. Arnold is definitely an “exit” man and is in favour of things like creating new nations and the power to secede and emigrate. I need to think a bit more about the exchange between Will and Arnold before commenting at great length, but my two cents on this issue amounts to observing how the right of an individual to take his or her money out of reach of a country’s tax net to a less oppressive place has come under a harsh spotlight because of the recent case of Swiss bank UBS.
As I keep saying, the current crackdown on certain so-called tax havens shows that some political leaders understand the power of “exit” only too well; they know that if folk can emigrate, take their money and affairs abroad, then that puts a monkey wrench into the wheels of Big Government. And so there is no wonder that such Transnational Progressive organisations as the OECD and the rest are kicking up a stink about the supposed evils of tax evasion, and putting huge pressure on such countries as Switzerland. It is, in my view, rather important that escape routes remain plentiful, and multiply.
Yes, that’s three posts from me in a day. My holiday break in France seems to have done the trick.
Here is a story about a woman, who recently died at the great age of 98. She helped send thousands of young Jewish people to safety in WW2. This is an amazing story. Her tale needs to be more widely known. RIP.
This is pretty poor stuff from the normally astute James Forsyth. In fact, his remarks about Dan Hannan’s recent blunt comment about the UK’s Soviet-model healthcare system smacks of cowardice:
The last week has been one of the worst the Tories have had in a while. As Pete said on Friday, a bad week in August is unlikely to do lasting damage. But the Tories should learn from the events of then past few days: they have been thrown onto the defensive not by clever Labour attacks but by their own unforced errors. Alan Duncan was a fool to say things to a prankster who he had never met before that he did not want made public and Dan Hannan should have realised that a Tory politician criticising the NHS in the context of the US healthcare debate was going to be grist to the left’s mill.
Oh I see. So Dan Hannan, and indeed any other Tories, are to be urged to only talk about the problems of state command-and-control healthcare/whatever in the most muted, domestic terms, without any reference to how such issues are handled overseas. Marvellous. Such timidity, when the Tories are way ahead in the polls, means that they will lack much in the way of post-election credibility in making any changes to the vast moneypit of the NHS if the Tories get into power. Hannan, by reminding Americans of the great mistake their elected representatives might make in going down the socialist path, is also doing his party a favour. One wonders whether Hannan, who famously raced up the YouTube rankings for his wonderful denunciation of Gordon Brown, has made some of his UK colleagues – Hannan is a Tory member of the European Parliament – rather jealous.
Then James Forsyth goes onto say:
“You can say that in an ideal world both Duncan and Hannan should have been able to do what they did. But however disappointing it is that people abuse a politician’s hospitality by breaking confidences or that policy debates get reduced to 140 characters, Duncan and Hannan should have behaved more sensibly. Their actions suggest that some Tories have yet to acquire the discipline that is needed if the Tories are to fully capitalise on the opportunity that the next few months will present them with.”
That Alan Duncan is a bit of a buffoon is true, but the Hannan example that James Forsyth seizes on worries me. Does he think that the Tories are going to win an election by saying as little as possible about their intentions, or by coming out with a relentless, mind-numbing set of Blairite soundbites, and hope that nobody notices or cares? The danger of Forsyth’s analysis – and this is something I have noticed from some of the Coffee Houser’s commenters in recent months – is to reduce politics to nothing more than a form of sport, like football or cricket. It goes a bit like this: “Mr X dropped a bit of a ball by saying Y the other day. Such unforced errors means that both parties go into the election/match/tournament with a point to prove”. There is no real difference between this sort of analysis and my reading about why Manchester United is a bit short of defensive cover or why Tiger Woods’ knee injury is proving a problem.
And of course, as some of our commenters like to point out, the politics-as-sport schtick is all part of a broader, “Metacontext” where the same, broad, statist assumptions about what is thinkable are ringfenced, with a supine MSM aiding the process, even driving it. Certain issues are “difficult”; certain comments by MPs or officials show they are “not team players” or mad, or whatever. It is terribly corrosive of serious thought about the problems that the UK faces, such as frighteningly high levels of public debt. If the Tories feel they cannot talk with any honesty about the huge cost of socialised medicine, it does not say much about the rest of their agenda, or suggest there is much chance of progress on any but the most superficial of fronts.
And people occasionally ask why we have little hope for any improvement under a Conservative government.
“The British haven’t lost their fondness for liberty. We never had it.”
(Taken from this comment by Ian B)
There are lots of bridges in Normandy – like this elegant beauty of civil engineering – but in this very pleasant region of northern France, few such constructions carry more historical significance and reminders of the costs of war than this one. I visited the Pegasus Bridge museum during a very enjoyable trip to the region last week on holiday. I also went to Arromanches, which has an excellent exhibition about the Normandy landings. You can see the remaining bits of the old Mulberry harbours that were used by the Allies to land their equipmment before the main ports along the French coast were eventually captured.
Most of the folk in France last week were enjoying the usual August holidays without a care in the world. I like to think that is what the men who fought so brilliantly to liberate the Continent would have wanted us to do: have a good time.
Old Holborn considers the new disposition of the state and highlights, in that Hayekian warning, of the extension of the state through arbitrary fines and the presumption of guilt. What is forgotten is that the agents of the state are still few and far between: without the ballast of a mass party to back them up, they remain an irritant, rather than a overarching totalitarianism. One can live without hearing or seeing these actions in person.
Nevertheless, state functionaries will wish to find ‘efficient’ ways of exercising their power. The database state is meant to replace the mass party as a vehicle for co-ordinating and controlling all activities. Yet, some means of identifying and punishing perpetrators is still required, as technology is still insufficient to achieve this goal. Hence, the rise in channels for informing and denouncing those who dissent.
After all, East Germany required ten percent of the population…
According to Radio Free Europe,
Rovshan Nasirli, a young Eurovision [song contest] fan living in the Azerbaijani capital Baku, says he was summoned this week to the country’s National Security Ministry — to explain why he had voted for Armenia during this year’s competition in May.
“They wanted an explanation for why I voted for Armenia. They said it was a matter of national security,” Nasirli said. “They were trying to put psychological pressure on me, saying things like, ‘You have no sense of ethnic pride. How come you voted for Armenia?’ They made me write out an explanation, and then they let me go.”
(Hat tip to Gene of Harry’s Place and Robert Wright of the The Daily Dish.)
In other news, Health Secretary Andy Burnham has accused Tory MEP Daniel Hannan who said on US TV that the US healthcare system was generally better than the NHS of being unpatriotic. Senior figures from both the Labour and Conservative parties have denounced Hannan and demanded an explanation.
An election is coming. Universal peace is declared and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.
– George Eliot
UBS has been closing the secret accounts of its American clients, forcing them into the cold, tax lawyers say. Many Americans with undeclared accounts have sought leniency by making voluntary disclosures to the IRS. Meanwhile, UBS has reported large outflows of deposits, which go beyond its American clientele.
Union Bank of Switzerland is haemorrhaging clients, not just American ones who have unwisely not stuffed their US passports in a shredder, but others too who no longer trust the bank with their privacy.
Frankly UBS was insane to do business in the USA in the first place, given the mafia-like behaviour of the American tax authorities, and the way I see it, this is just a very bad business decision being punished by clients voting with their feet money in favour of more discrete and less bombastic banks that cater to people with the quaint notion that their own money belongs to them and not the IRS… or any other rapacious state.
And any US nationals throwing themselves on the mercy of the thuggish IRS seriously need their heads examined. At the first sign of trouble, and this has been brewing a long time, they should have sold up and got the hell out of the USA for good. The weather in Costa Rica is really very nice, guys, trust me, and your money buys a whole lot more down here.
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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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