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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Time Rice has said that to write a great pop lyric you need to “fall in love with cliché”. Shahid Malik MP, who is one of the smartest and most personable of the younger New Labour generation (full disclosure: I know his brother, who is a brilliant computer scientist and an IT entrepreneur), has had a go at repudiating accusations about his parlimentary expenses. He says his allowance claims were “a million percent within the rules”.
If that is a deliberate attempt to package in a soundbite the suggestion (1) that he is intensely distressed to have been traduced, with the hidden message (2) that he is insufficiently numerate to have been conscious that the figures might look a bit odd, then it is an impressive subordination of cliché to the political purpose of asserting his honesty. It comes across as demotic and with the right tone of shock at being singled out. As long as Mr Malik is not subsequently proved to have done anything seriously wrong, he will be one of the winners out of this political crisis.
It is a weird world. A political career can be built on or destroyed by a few words. And the words need not be obviously rhetorical. It is all the smarter if they are not.
Update: [& typo corrected above.] He’s “stepped down” as a minister while suggestions that he has broken the ministerial code are investigated. That too strikes me as a smart damage-limitation move. Some commentators seem to assume I am defending him. I am not. I don’t have any opinion on the allegations. I’m admiring his chutzpah and musing on how subtle the game of media democracy is.
When I did education blogging I wrote a lot about something I called sovietisation. This referred to the baleful impact upon education of our present government’s mania for setting targets (often involving exam results) and then rewarding institutions according to how well they could fake reaching these targets. In this connection, see this posting by David Hepworth. It is based on a story that has already seen the light of day in Times Higher Education, although I couldn’t get further with the link in Hepworth’s posting than that.
This comment on Hepworth’s piece by a certain Rob Spence deserves, I think, slightly wider circulation:
I work in a university that’s in what is coyly termed the same “sector” as London Met – i.e. the widening access, non- “traditional” student sector. There’s a real tension between the government’s agenda to have 50% of people taking a degree, and the absolute imperative, driven by the funding model, to retain students. So on the one hand we are accepting students with at best a mediocre academic record, whose motivation is not study but lifestyle, and on the other we are being penalised financially if we fail to retain them. No-one can be surprised if these utterly apathetic students drift away, but the system insists that every student who decides, for probably very good reasons, that they don’t want to carry on, represents a failure on the part of the university, which then gets its funding reduced.
You are right, it looks as if they are cooking the books, but it’s actually quite difficult to keep track of non-appearing students, because whereas in the past we could just withdraw them, now we are expected to keep them on the books.
There are quite a few “ghost” students who register, but never turn up – we had one last year who registered, collected her student loan, and disappeared to Ibiza.
Quantifying success, eh? It can really get you into trouble. Especially if you are the government. You define success, but you end up trampling all over it.
You define educational success as, say, vast numbers of people going on to university who don’t really want to go on to university. But by the time the policy has worked its evil way, the thing being measured has done a cartwheel. In this case, the thing that the government pays for, people turning up at a university, is measured. But people vanishing soon afterwards is something that it is in nobody’s interests to notice. The university wants to hang on to the government’s money. The government wants to be able to boast about how swimmingly everything is going and how much it is helping. Only a few malcontents grumble, in things like blog comment threads, but if they get serious and loud about their grumbling, they too will find their interests seriously suffering, as they well know.
With enterprises that are responsible to themselves and to a gang of people in their immediate vicinity, people who are basically taking their own chances at their own expense, a mess like the one described so well by Rob Spence eventually gets corrected, because it costs too many people too much to persist with it. They change the definition of success to one that works better. Or they replace the boss, or even all the bosses. If all that fails, they shut the enterprise down and everyone goes their separate ways. Which is often acrimonious, because quite a few people may still be getting what they want for a price they can live with, but at least the badness for those who are not so happy with things stops. But when the government’s success measurements cause havoc, everyone is all too liable still to conspire to say that all is well.
What makes sovietisation so uniquely itself is the way that everyone knows the story – what is going wrong and why it is going wrong – but nobody has any interest in telling the story like it really is, up to and including the Minister for whatever it is being deranged, for he/she too depends on all those statistically encoded lies to tell the world that he/she is doing a great job instead of merely a very average or worse job. The Prime Minister likewise, come to that.
The answer is to denationalise everything. Not easy, I know. But necessary if you want this kind of nonsense to be kept within bounds.
All I can say is… hehehe.
Read the testimonials… hilarious.
At the bottom of this, you can read this:
This is a parody and in no way expresses any political ideology, nor does it intend to defame the BBC.
But don’t let that put you off. My thanks to this guy.
A US stealth aircraft, photographed while breaking the sound barrier. I don’t know why, given that Man has achieved the feat of breaking Mach 1 for more than half a century since the great Chuck Yeager officially did it first, but stuff like this still gives me a buzz.
The occupation of a member of Parliament would thereupon become an occupation in itself, carried on, like other professions, with a view chiefly to its pecuniary returns, and under the demoralizing influences of an occupation essentially precarious. It would become an object of desire to adventurers of a low class, and 658 persons in possession with ten or twenty times as many in expectancy, would be incessantly bidding to attract or retain the suffrages of electors by promising all things, honest or dishonest, possible or impossible, and rivalling each other in pandering to the meanest feelings and most ignorant prejudices or the vulgarist part of the crowd
– J.S. Mill, quoted in The Times on March 13, 1906, discussing the likely consequences of paying MPs for their service. I hope Patrick Crozier will forgive me more more or less copying his post in its entirety, but it really deserves repeating.
Norman – now Lord – Tebbit, famously the scourge of trade union militants and who also survived a murder attempt by the IRA in the mid-1980s (an ex-RAF fighter pilot by the way), is urging voters not to vote for the main political parties in the European elections. Instead, the implication is that folk should vote for UKIP. Well, that is Guido’s take on the matter.
Suddenly, the Tory Party does not look in quite such bouncy shape this morning. I guess when you have MPs trousering taxpayers’ money on a fairly impressive scale, it dents the brand somewhat. Like I said yesterday, though, the central problem of UK political life is not fiddling expenses. No, the problem is a continuing failure to push for a major rollback of the state, including removal of this nation from the clutches of an European federal state. Compared with how much money is wasted on quangos, or ID cards, or the rest of it, an MP’s claim for swimming pool maintenance is small beer.
It is a sign of how old this stuff makes me feel that I remember when Prince Charles delivered That Speech when he denounced plans for the extension to the National Gallery off London’s Trafalgar Square. I remember the stir that this speech caused, and how it prompted some people to suggest that Prince Chuck had no business opining on such matters and should shut up and focus on trying to make Princess Di happy, etc. But for all its flaws, the speech did highlight the frustrations that many folk felt, and still feel, at the sheer ugliness of some – not all – modern buildings. Being an ardent free marketeer, I object to state – not private – planning laws to enforce a notion of beauty, which after all is in the eye of the beholder; but unlike perhaps some classical liberals, I do get the point that a lot of modern, or even supposedly traditional buildings, are insensitively designed, ugly, and in many cases, they don’t actually function as buildings very well. My worry is that the “cure” of planning laws and listed building rules can be sometimes often worse than the disease. A listed building law can prevent a crumbling building from being intelligently refurbished, for example. And it is worth observing that left to itself, urban landscapes can develop, without planning of many kinds, a kind of “spontaneous order” (a la Hayek) that while it may not have the top-down planned elegance of some cities, has its own beauty and vigor. As I say, this stuff is subjective.
My thoughts on these matters were prompted by watching the BBC news this morning. A very angry, bearded guy who apparently speaks for the modern architecture profession is denouncing the Prince for his views, for apparently frightening off architects, for pandering to “public opinion”, etc. (I have no idea who this character is, nor greatly care). Even if this guy has a point, every time I watch an obnoxious performance like this, it is easy to see why Prince Charles’ views on architecture get so much attention. We live in an ugly world – is it no surprise that so many people would like something a bit nicer?
Related thoughts by Roger Scruton.
As a book it has its flaws – it does not pay enough heed to the role of Web 2.0 media – but in the light of recent events about politicians’ use of taxpayers’ money, Peter Oborne’s study of UK politics reads better than ever.
A question worth asking, in the light of all this, is whether a less corrupt political class would be better, or worse, at reining in public spending? In the 18th Century, for instance, the UK parliamentary system was deeply corrupt; there was a vast network of jobs and sinecures doled out to enforce political loyalty. And yet despite the drawbacks, the UK managed to forge an Industrial Revolution, build a large and effective navy and help to defeat Bonaparte and all those supposedly more efficient Frenchmen. The central point that needs to be remembered is that the corruption and venality of the UK political class of today coincides with a point in our history when about 80 per cent of the laws and regulations affecting we great unwashed are not written in Westminster, but in the EU; and further, that the state exerts a vastly greater degree of control over our lives now than was the case in the era of Pitt, Burke and Fox. So this stuff is both a sign of the unseriousness of our political class on the one hand, and also a sign of how much more the state and its functionaries matter, on the other. Cleaning up politics will not address the central problem that the state plays far too big a role in our lives in the first place. Take away the jam, and the flies will not be such a pest.
The first 10% off public spending could be painless for the public and popular.
– John Redwood
This report says that the debut of the latest Star Trek movie has set box office records. I am not a big ST fan – I prefer series such as Babylon 5, Battlestar G., Firefly and so on, but the trailer for the new film looks pretty good.
Long time readers know I am part of the senior leadership team of the National Space Society and specifically the person charged with oversight of the conference which happens around this time each year.
We are going south to Orlando, Florida this year; the hotel is marvelous and the program likewise. Our Orlando conference management team and our HQ have brought together an excellent group of speakers. Most of the powers that be within the new commercial space industry and from NASA will be there. (Notice one dour visage within the photo gallery belongs to our own occasional writer, Taylor Dinerman. )
If you happen to be in that part of the country, or can arrange to do so, I highly recommend dropping in. You can register here.
I do not have time to be a speaker myself and will be racing from task to task, but if you spend some time in the hallways and corridors you are likely to see me transacting society and commercial space business in between board and committee meetings.
Be there, or be a groundlubber!
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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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