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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[M]aterial prosperity enables people to develop morally as well as intellectually. It provides the very basis through which individuals can begin to live like humans and not act like animals.
– Neil Davenport, in the course of a sp!ked piece that neatly demolishes David Lammy’s barmy theory that British teenagers stab each other because they want to be rich. Lammy’s article is more wide-ranging in its insanity than Davenport allows. He ends up advocating compulsory social service and apprenticeships for all as a cure for gangs.
A few days ago, the venerable Glenn Reynolds linked to an article published in the Asia Times titled Americans Play Monopoly, Russians Chess. The article, written by pseudonymous columnist Spengler, is something of an interesting read, as it offers up a comprehensively explained and intriguing motive for the former superpower’s recent machinations in Georgia.
Many Western commentators ascribe the recent Russian belligerence to a newly acquired military ability able to act upon the yearning of its current leadership which is trying to recapture the glory days of Soviet power. A good dollop of credible force applied carefully should make Russia’s tiny neighbours wake up to the fact that they are kissing the wrong butt. Spengler contends that the truth is rather less vainglorious; Russia’s recent adventures represent moves in a long-term game in which the country’s very survival is at stake.
After all, it is – as any moderately informed individual knows – facing what present-day figures predict to be a near total demographic collapse in the coming years. Russia is, says Spengler, exercising a grand strategy to eventually absorb the Russians and other ethnic populations living in the nations in its so-called “near abroad”, declaring them all Russian and thus halting the country’s disastrous population decline. This will also ensure the minority status of the Muslim population in Russia (the only ones who are breeding) and, lo and behold, win the survival of the nation in the eyes of those pulling the levers in the Kremlin. It is an insightful alternative analysis of what is driving the crisis in Georgia – not groundbreakingly so, as I am certain a number of Samizdata contributors and commenters could have provided us with much the same explanation – but nevertheless well worth consideration. → Continue reading: An amoral solution to Russia’s existential crisis
Firstly the many people who signed up for the ‘special’ text message announcement of Senator Obama choice for “running mate” were treated with great disrespect. Democrats were out singing the praises of Senator Biden (for example on Fox News) on Friday morning. Then an aircraft was sent to pick up Senator Biden from Delaware and take him to Chicago (this was first spotted by a blogger I believe) – so that he could appear with Senator Obama in the Saturday event.
This was duly noted (by both American and international media) as confirmation that Senator Obama had picked Senator Biden.
Everyone paying even slight attention knew.
Everyone from evil ‘rightwing’ foes of all that is ‘socially just’ in Britain (people like me), to casual watchers of, for example, Indian English language television.
Everyone knew – accept those activists who had trusted the Obama campaign to send them a text message and were away from the broadcast media or the internet. The texts were not sent out till this morning.
As for Senator Biden himself: a totally pro-union (i.e. supportive of government special pro-union laws) politician. And someone who is ardently in favour of expanding the size and scope of American government health, education and welfare programs – a Welfare Statist.
Almost needless to say Senator Biden is also a ‘gun control’ man and so on.
However: Senator Biden’s son will be off to serve in Iraq this October – which will show patriotism. And Senator Biden himself is strongly anti Castro – and is clearly from the non-communist left. Perhaps this is what Senator Obama meant when he promised (on CBS) that he would pick someone with very different opinions from his own, who would “challenge my thinking”.
Jeff Randall, writing about the excellent performance by Britons so far in the Olympics, reckons some people are getting all het up about the sort of folk who have been winning the gongs:
Unfortunately, no sooner had our rowers, cyclists and sailors collected their medals than the carping started – largely on account of their successes being clocked up in “posh” sports. That a disproportionately high number of these British champions went to fee-paying schools is regarded by some as a symptom of a divided society, evidence of a deep-rooted malaise.
In place of celebration, there is consternation: dark mumblings about the benefits of privilege. In the warped view of the Grumblies, middle-class successes are to be resented, as if, like those of drugs cheats, their places on the awards podium were the result of improper behaviour.
Britain’s middle classes are already in the dock for heinous crimes, such as seeking the best schools for their children, paying extra for private healthcare and determining the output of Radio Four. Now, it seems, they must endure being rubbished for having the audacity to produce results in a sporting arena that the nation expected to be dominated by foreigners.
He has a point, but I have not sensed much of this sort of snide carping. What I tend to notice from the coverage has been how pleasant and modest most of the sportsmen and women, of all backgrounds, appear to be. I watched as one guy with a thick Scouse accent was interviewed after he fought in a hard boxing bout against a chap from China, I think, and I remember thinking of how decent and philosophical the man was about his chances of success. The meritocracy of the whole event, and the way it has reached people of all classes, is what has shone through.
For all that I dislike the politicking and corruption that goes along with the Games – I dread the likely bill of the London Olympics, which I oppose – there can be no denying that the folk who have done well in th Games, from all nations, are, with the odd exception maybe, pretty admirable sportsmen and women and that bleatings about their class have not been much in evidence.
Randall continues:
But, for me, the finest moment was when the British men’s coxless fours rowed down the formidable Australians to snatch gold. Some will denigrate them as “posh boys”, largely because they can tell the difference between an adjective and an adverb, but that doesn’t make them substandard Olympians.
Quite. It is a pity, though, that something like accent or polish in a TV studio now is considered a measure of a sportsman or woman. After all, our Jeff speaks with the twang of London, so I am not sure what is going on there.
Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to match over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labours, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances; what remains, but to spare them all care of thinking and all the trouble of living?
Alexis de Tocqueville, quoted in The Constitution of Liberty, by FA Hayek, page 251.
This paragraph remains a superb summary of the essential flaw in what we nowadays call the “nanny state”. Unlike a proper nanny caring for little children, the paternalist state has no interest in raising children into adulthood, but instead, infantilises the public, hence finding ever more justifications for treating the populace like five-year-olds.
At least the moral scolds of the early 19th Century as related in entertaining fashion in this book at least relied, in part, on moral exhortation rather than outright bans all the time, although there was plenty of that. But De Tocqueville and other great classical liberal writers spotted the authortarian dangers of do-gooderism from an early stage in modern, industrial countries. It seems a shame that the lessons have still not been fully learned.
On a related point, I see that California, which seems to be in the grip of puritan buffoons, is now referred to in some parts as “Nannyfornia”. In fact, if you Google up the term, it says, “Did you mean California?”. That’s gotta hurt.
A new film is out later this year in the US taking the p**s out of Michael Moore. It looks quite amusing. Here’s the trailer. Some of the one-liners are excellent.
“We live in a world where Ben Affleck won an Oscar and Robinson didn’t. Where’s your god now?”
Dirty Harry’s Place, talking about the late, very great Edward G. Robinson.
As a fairly regular user of Heathrow Airport and other UK airports such as Gatwick – the former has suffered all manner of problems due to loss of baggage, massive queues – this, on the face of it, looks a good development, but I have my reservations, as I will explain later:
Aug. 20 (Bloomberg) — BAA Ltd., the owner of London’s Heathrow airport, should be broken up and its Gatwick and Stansted terminals sold off to foster competition in the U.K. capital, antitrust regulators said.
The unit of Spanish builder Grupo Ferrovial SA provides a poor service to airlines and passengers and has shown a lack of initiative in planning for additional capacity, the Competition Commission said today, recommending that the company should also be stripped of either Glasgow or Edinburgh airport in Scotland. BAA said the analysis was “flawed.”
Hmm. The problem partly stems from the fact that when BAA was originally privatised by the former Tory government, it was sold as a monopoly. That is not, in and of itself, a terrible thing so long as there are other competing transportation businesses. But there were not other big airports owned by non-BAA businesses to compete, especially against the crucial hub of Heathrow. In a previous Samizdata posting on the Snafu of the opening of Heathrow’s Terminal Five, one commenter pointed out that one issue that is sometimes overlooked in issues like this is restrictions on new airport builds by the planning authorities. Well indeed. I think there is a good case for building an airport to the eastern side of London, on the flat lands that sit to the north of the Thames (it is not as if this is an area of outstanding natural beauty). It would relieve some of the air traffic now coming over the capital, which would be good for abating noise as well as removing a potential safety and security issue of thousands of aircraft flying into land over the middle of London.
Getting planning permission for a new airport is, under the current system, very difficult. Yes, there are, in the UK, a lot of old, disused military bases left by the RAF and the USAF, such as in Oxfordshire, Lincolnshire, and East Anglia and bits of Kent. However, the trouble is that such bases were deliberately built miles away from major urban centres, to prevent the danger that an attack on such a base would hit a large city. So you have th situation of huge runways turning into rubble in the middle of Suffolk but of no real use to commuters in London. So we would need something a bit closer. Another matter to bear in mind is that southern England is not very large: airspace is at a premium and already crowded, if not quite so bad as during the Cold War, when the UK was covered in airbases.
I am not, as a free market purist, at all happy to see a private business broken up at the behest of a state regulator, but then we should recall that BAA was originally put together as a state business and sold as a monopoly as a matter of state policy. When its current owners, the Spanish firm Ferrovial, bought BAA, they must have known that failure to sort out the problems might have incurred the wrath of the regulator. It would be nice in a total free market not to have to bother about such things, but it would have been failure of basic due diligence for Ferrovial’s lawyers not to have warned their managers that competition issue might arise. Well, it jolly well has arisen at last. We would not, as the old joke about the Irishman giving street directions to a tourist, want to start from here. But here is where we are. If there is a chance of putting a large, competitive fire up the backsides of BAA’s management, there is a chance, however slender, that the experience of coming to and from the UK by air might be a tad more pleasant in future.
I could not help but be struck by the nice, polite, and almost friendly manner of the police officer making violence-backed threats in the video below (“If you refuse this [random] search, you will be arrested.”). It may not be news to you that the face of the police state is often a perfectly pleasant one, but I think it is worth spreading the word.
(Full disclosure: I work for Qik, and it was one of our users who live streamed the above video from his mobile phone to the web using our software.)
“Never brush your teeth if you’re dressed in black. Don’t trust a man whose eyebrows meet in the middle. Always put the shower curtain inside the bath. Life is forever teaching us lessons, and here’s another that I learnt last week: it’s impossible to be mates with celebrities.”
– Sathnam Sanghera
With all the troubling economic news that has come out of late, such as the UK Northern Rock fiasco, or the US housing and mortgage crunch, there has been a fair bit of headscratching on how bad it could all get. Amity Shlaes has an item looking at the mistakes made in the 1920s and 1930s around the time of the Wall Street Crash and the subsequent depression. In a nutshell, she says that errors on monetary policy, a disastrous ratcheting up of protectionism and intervenionist economics turned a bad but temporary situation into a catastrophe. This book also comes to the same conclusion and points out how much of Roosevelt’s New Deal failed, even on its own terms, to work, since unemployment actually was worse by the outbreak of WW2 than when FDR was elected.
Meanwhile, to keep us in a jolly mood, the Daily Telegraph highlights some recent economic data from those old-style monetarists at Lombard Street Research, pointing out that there has been a dramatic contraction in the “broad money” measure of the US money supply, known as M3. The Fed stopped publishing data on this in 2005, on account of it not being reliable. That sounds a bit fishy to me. Anyway, the author of the piece, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, points out that sharp moves in his measure presage significant changes, either inflationary or the opposite. He is surely correct. For much of the ‘Noughties, the world was awash with cheap money, much of it in the form of recycled savings from Asia. To a degree, the spigot has been shut, with an obvious impact on asset prices.
My only caveat here is that Pritchard has tended to be a bit of a permanent “we are all doomed” voice these days. If I earned a pound every time he had predicted the demise of the euro, for example, I’d be able to retire to the South of France. But he may be right this time.
The sheer number of articles suggesting that we are seeing a return to the day of the ‘Cold War’ are such that frankly I cannot even be bothered to link to one. Certainly the Russian Bear has been more overtly unfriendly as of late, and I do think Russia needs to be taken seriously in the way any collection of armed thugs need to be taken seriously.
However it is absurd to contend that Russia as a long term threat in the way the Soviet Union threatened the world for more than fifty years. Hapless Russia has a near mono-culture economy (GDP the size of Italy, for gawd’s sake) and catastrophic demographics that make Europe seem like a stud-farm (Germany, Poland and Austria more or less total the same population as Russia’s ‘hordes’). The appropriate personification for Russia circa 2008 is not an oil fuelled Genghis Khan, threatening to surge once more across Eurasia… no, it is more like a drunk with a knife unable to admit they have terminal liver disease… a vodka fuelled Genghis Khan’t if you will.
Surely a policy of political containment is really all that is needed while nature, rust and liver sclerosis on a Biblical scale do the rest. Probably the most damaging thing we could do to hasten the deflation of the absurd delusions of the thuggish Russian political class would be to make it easier for young Russians, and Russian money, to get the hell out of Russia and move west.
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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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