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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I do love Guido:
Knife crime is the media scare of the moment and on Sunday Jacqui Smith spun Sky News that “something would be done”. The knife carrying and stabbing classes would be taken to hospital A&Es to confront the results of their crimes.
See the snag? Sounds tough and progressive to triangulating wonks. Sounds more like adding insult to injury when you are lying on a trolley bleeding, hoping you won’t catch MRSA – “Here’s Wayne, he is very sorry he stabbed you”. Doctors and the opposition went ballistic. By lunchtime today the plan was dropped.
The official line here is that They’re As Bad As Each Other, but I actually think that the Cameron regime, as and when it materialises, might show real glimmerings of adequacy, at any rate compared to this lot. I realise that much of my optimism is based on believing David Cameron to be a liar, and not as bad as he says he will be about such things as the environment (which I am basically opposed to), and taxes (ditto), and EUrope (ditto again). But I think it is reasonable to hope for the best, as well as to fear that he might be telling the truth. Except re EUrope, about which I assume Cameron to be lying only in hinting that he might do a teensy bit of good.
Meanwhile, it says a great deal about the terminal state of this present government that they are now making such particular fools of themselves in the one solitary area that they used until a year or two ago to excel at, namely manipulating the contents of the newspapers and the television. They have taxed and regulated the British economy into stagnation and presided over the relentless decline of all public services except weather forecasts and cricket commentaries, and this process of degradation began, or rather continued, as soon as they were voted in in 1997. But they used at least to be able to boss the newspapers. Not any more.
John Redwood MP has a blog, which is very party political as is only to be expected of a party politician, but I find him quite good. Not so long ago he had a posting entitled Legislation – just a longer press release?
You sense that everyone in and around the government has now come to similar conclusions themselves, about themselves. It is being said that what is keeping Mr Brown in his job is that they are all far too busy abandoning ship to care who the captain is. Although, maybe they are being too pessimistic about how badly they will do. Presumably their extreme pessimism comes from reading the newspapers every day.
There was coffee. Life would go on.
– William Gibson. The Winter Market.
In truth, the anthology Burning Chrome contains some very fine short stories. I tend to think that it is a shame that Gibson gave up publishing stories pretty much immediately after he published his first novel, however iconic that novel might have been.
Last night I attended a flat warming party, given by fellow Samizdatista and newly certified Brit, Michael Jennings, and very enjoyable it was. Just the right mixture of nice people I know well (such as Johnathan Pearce and his Missis, and I rather think I may have met the legend that is Thaddeus Tremayne), nice people I know a bit, and nice people I didn’t know at all. And while there I found myself trying to think of good party questions, to replace the often excruciating “And what do you do?” that can cause such tedium and such embarrassment. And rather to my surprise, I overheard myself asking a rather good party question, namely: Have you ever been near to death? The good thing about this question is that brushes with the Angel of Death are fairly random, and that quiet little bod in the corner is almost as likely as the grand and confident ones stage centre to have a good yarn to tell. Granted, if you have a very grand job which involves clearing up minefields in war zones, you’ll probably trump anyone who is merely talking about being missed by speeding bus by half an inch, but despite that tendency, this question, together with the answers it elicits, does take us all out of our everyday preoccupations and make us see the world, and the people in it (e.g. the strangers you meet at parties), a bit differently, just as nearly being dead itself does. Which is what parties are partly for, aren’t they?
Someone asked, by way of clarification, whether I meant that thing where you feel you are moving towards a very bright light. No, not necessarily. That’s a great story, of course, if you have one like that. But any terrifying or dramatic circumstance that could have killed you, and preferably which you knew at the time could have killed you, is a good answer. Having to tightrope-walk across a burning beam a hundred feet above the ground, being violently attacked or robbed, missing a plane flight when the plane you missed subsequently crashed, getting your toe stuck at the bottom of a swimming pool and thinking that this was about to be your last swim and your last anything, that kind of thing. Bright lights are strictly optional.
The best answer I heard last night was from a guy (one of the ones I’d never met before) who was doing some sketching or painting or whatever in Jordan, and was accused by some knife-wielding locals of being a spy. They held the knife to his throat. Luckily a third party convinced them that he was harmless, but for a few moments there … you get the picture.
My best near death experience was when I was a very small boy and I fell out of a second story window at my grandmother’s house. I landed on a small strip of lawn, right next to some very spikey railings. All I remember was waking up afterwards, so it missed that element of pure terror (“I really thought this was It” etc. etc.) that the best near death stories have, but like I say, that’s my best shot. An A&E doctor recently started choking me, while looking down by throat with a small, flat little wooden poker like you used to get with icecream, and I briefly experienced what death by asphyxiation must feel like. But I howled at her to stop which she did, and I never really thought I would die, so that hardly counts at all. My point being that this is not an excuse to tell my own personal right-out-of-the-stadium story along these lines, because I have no such story.
But maybe you do have such a story. This evening it occurred to me that this question would also be a good way of starting a Samizdata comment thread, and in a way that might take us away from our usual stamping grounds, of politics (appallingness of), space rockets and flashy airplanes and cars (splendidness of), and such like.
So, what near death experiences have you had?
Glenn Reynolds links to a video interview of numerous Louisiana citizens whose property was stolen by the police and sometimes destroyed. It was a time when that property was most needed.
Just because you have a badge does not mean you are not a criminal. The New Orleans police are storm troopers in my book and cowardly ones to boot. What else can you call heavily armed men who beat up an old lady and steal her revolver?
Now that some people have recovered their stolen property, it is perhaps time to severely punish these warriors without a clue. Criminal prosecution could be possible in a few cases. As to the rest, perhaps there are grounds for a class action suit for cost plus and triple damages against the city. At the very least, these ‘officers’ should be told to their face that their actions were illegal, unconstitutional and not even close to being American.
They really need to be taught a lesson about who runs things in a free country. The fellow at the end of the video said it succinctly. It is not our country any more.
It is damn well time we took it back.
Liberty is always dangerous – but it’s the safest thing we have.
– Bob Geldof That is pretty good; but liberty is not a thing. It might be better to say it is the safest choice we have.
Flicking through the television sports channels yesterday morning, I came across the Red Bull air race series, with the latest heat run out of Detroit. Fantastic. In terms of sheer skill and eye-popping adrenalin entertainment, this race takes a lot of beating. It makes Formula 1 motor racing, for example, look positively tame, even though I have no doubt that the actual skills involved have a fair amount in common. For a start, the pilots will sometimes pull a G-force of up to 8 or 9 times, which is the sort of thing you associate with astronauts or jet fighter pilots, for which there is a need to wear a pressue suit to stop blacking out.
The race series is continuing in London soon. I am going to find out if I can get my hands on any tickets. It could be difficult.
Apologies if there is no link here – I am having a problem with this function today. A quick Google will bring it up: check out the great photos.
At a time when the credit/money bubble financial institutions are in crises the Economist chooses to lead with a story on Mr Cameron – the leader of the British Conservative party. I can not claim to have read the story as I do not find Mr Cameron very interesting – at least compared to other matters. And, as I am British and have been an active member of the Conservative party since the end of the 1970’s, if he was of such great interest to anyone (other than his family and friends) it would be surely be me.
In case anyone makes the defence that the financial crises was not known at the time when the Economist went to press…
Well the absurd government created Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae had not lost 50% of their stock market value when the Economist went to press – but their problems were obvious, as were the problems of the compassionate lender to the poor (always run a mile from a company that says it is in business to help the poor) Indybank of California, the run on that enterprise was well under way.
The people at the Economist could have made some reasonable predictions about the general financial situation, but they did not – or at least did not lead with them. I will make the prediction now that the the gutless Bush Administration will not order the arrest of the corrupt Mr Johnson (the ex head of Fannie Mae and leading Democrat) as this would upset his friends, such as Senators Obama and Durbin and Congressman Barney Frank – and we must not upset these upstanding individuals…
…Any more than we must upset Speaker Nancy Pelosi by having a Presidential press conference asking people to telephone her to ask why she will not allow a vote in Congress on whether or not to allow more drilling for oil at a time of record fuel prices – although it is fine for Speaker Pelosi to have a press conference telling everyone to telephone the President Bush to blame him for high fuel prices.
Of course the Economist did have other stuff in it:
A brief look, thanks to the library, showed an article sneering at Governor Bobby Jindal (the upcoming Republican and someone the Economist shows signs of fearing) and another puff piece about the all wise Senator Obama – this one claiming that his cynical habit of saying anything to get elected (even, supposedly, reversing positions he has held all his life – well reversing them till after the election) is a good thing, and pointing to his economic advisers as the height of “sensibleness”.
No doubt they will prove about as sensible as the fanatical collectivist Paul Krugman – a man the Economist long favoured.
I could go on, for example examining their obituary of the late Senator Richard Helms and showing how the obituary shows the Economist writers do not understand the nature or effects of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but I will stop here.
Anyone who is still buying the Economist is beyond rational argument.
It may be disgustingly authoritarian, but it is risibly incompetent too. It appears the Home Office has just spent a very large amount of UK readers’ money making a vast online advertisement for NO2ID. We’d despaired of reaching ‘the youth’ ourselves, too expensive. I’m very glad they decided to do it for us.
With audience participation. Which embarrassingly for the Home Office shows ‘kids’ not to be quite the suckers they’d hoped. Enjoy.
I was intrigued by this:
American movies have forgotten how to portray heroism, while a large part of their disappearing audience still wants to see celluloid heroes. I mean real heroes, unqualified heroes, not those who have dominated American cinema over the past 30 years and who can be classified as one of three types: the whistle-blower hero, the victim hero, and the cartoon or superhero. The heroes of most of last year’s flopperoos belonged to one of the first two types, although, according to Scott, the only one that made any money, “The Kingdom,” starred “a team of superheroes” on the loose in Saudi Arabia. What kind of box office might have been done by a movie that offered up a real hero?
Up to a point. There is no doubt that much of what James Bowman says here is true. John Wayne-style movies just do not seem to get made any more, but I am not sure that heroism is dying out completely. I love the film, Apollo 13, for instance, for its realistic portrayal of the mental as well as physical heroism involved in getting the Apollo craft safely back to Earth after the craft suffered a massive loss of oxygen.
His point about “superheroes” is true: I thought the recent Iron Man film had some heroic as well as downright funny moments. As for other stuff, the last James Bond film, Casino Royale, while also not totally realistic, was a much grittier, tougher 007 film than recently, has at its core the fact that Bond is a hero who takes on the baddies.
The trouble is that heroism is often idealised, but I don’t have a problem with this if it involves “supermen” characters, like the last Batman film, which was pretty heroic, not to mention 300, the re-telling of the doings of ancient Greece. Outside of Hollywood, there are all those heroic Hong Kong action movies. Not to mention a film that was actually called Hero. Some of the Japanese anime films also are full of strong, uplifting moral themes.
So I do not think the cupboard is bare. But Bowman does make a good set of points about the lack of “real-life” hero films. I suspect that if there is a dearth of heroic figures on screen, some of it is down to how people, in their revulsion against war in general – a perfectly normal reaction – have taken against the military virtues. But as I hope some of the examples show, there is more to heroism than courage under fire.
Where I think there is a real problem, which the article does not really touch on, is the lack of any heroic characters in movies about business. I keep banging on about this, but it is a real pity that almost all businessmen and women are potrayed as morally sleazy or downright evil. A shame: I regard some entrepreneurs and their willingness to take big risks as heroes.
Quiz: name your top 5 most heroic films, of any genre.
I have spent twelve of the last sixteen years of my life living as a foreign citizen in the United Kingdom. I have spent this time on a mixture of student visas, the “UK ancestry” visa (which allows citizens of Commonwealth countries with a British grandparent to live and work in the UK) and for the last two and a half years as a permanent resident (or with “Indefinite Leave to Remain”, as the British immigration jargon has it). My immigration status has always been pretty uncontroversial, I have never been a drain on the resources of British taxpayers (quite the opposite, given the taxes I have paid). This has not stopped the Home Office from insisting that I jump through a whole variety of bureaucratic hoops, answer a large number of impertinent questions, and suffer an assortment of petty humiliations with a fair amount of regularity. The level of competence of the Home Office in administering all this has never been high – when I was studying at Cambridge, it was well understood that the usual way of renewing a student visa involved sending your passport to the Home Office, and then applying to your country’s embassy a few months later to replace a lost passport before making a quick trip to France to get your paperwork processed at the border on the way back – but in recent times (the start of which coincides quite closely with the Labour Party coming to power) the frequency with which hoops must be jumped has increased and the fees that must be paid to jump through each hoop have become ever higher.
However, last week, my need to deal with the Immigration and Nationality Directorate of the Home Office came to an end. At an in truth rather touching ceremony at Wandsworth Town Hall, I affirmed my allegiance to Queen Elizabeth the Second and was naturalised a British citizen. This does not affect my Australian citizenship, and I now have dual nationality. A couple of days later, I did what most new citizens do fairly quickly, and sent off an application for a British passport. The fee that is payable in this instance is not nearly as high as that payable when renewing an immigrant visa these days, but must none the less be paid. The passport application form came with another form on which I could fill out credit card details to pay the fee. The form stated that I could check the current fees on the website of a different section of the Home Office, the recently renamed Identity and Passport Service, or that I could alternately leave the amount blank on the form. The amount of the fee is not printed anywhere on either of the forms: this presumably makes it easier for the Home Office to increase the fees repeatedly without the trouble of reprinting forms. If I did this, the Home Office would charge the correct amount to my credit card and there would be no delays due to the possibility of my incorrectly sending the wrong amount. I therefore left this blank. On Tuesday, I noted that the approximate amount that I expected had been charged to my credit card, and I was set to receive my new passport within a couple of weeks.
However, yesterday I received a letter stating that my passport application could not be processed because I had not paid the correct fee, and this would not be done until I sent an additional £3. What apparently happened was that someone received my form, filled in an incorrect amount, and then somebody else noted that I had paid the incorrect amount and sent a letter to me demanding more money. If I had filled in the form with the correct amount in the first place, this would not apparently have happened. I was able to rectify this today by calling the enquiry line of the Identity and Passport Service, explaining the situation, and giving them my credit card details again so I could be charged the additional £3. My passport will hopefully still come in a couple of weeks, but it has been delayed by this and I have been inconvenienced. The enquiry line was an 0870 number, for which the charges are high and the called party receives a portion of the charge for the call, so I have paid a small amount of additional money for this, too.
This is all mildly amusing, but there is perhaps a moral. Theoretically, when I became a citizen, one thing I gained was the right not to suffer the petty humiliations and bureaucratic hassles and incompetence from the Home Office that a non-citizen goes through just to live here. I would personally argue that such humiliations and hassles are no more justified in the treatment of non-citizens than they are in the treatment of citizens, but the population as a whole does not generally seem to agree with me, and politicians seem to believe that there are electoral points to be gained in actually increasing and enforcing such hassles.
Or perhaps not. Perhaps this is just a demonstration of the nature of our government and our bureaucrats. It is not hard to see the ID card as little more than a way to extend the humiliations and hassles that non-citizens receive to the time after people become citizens, and to extend them to the native born as well. The Home Office body that will implement and enforce the ID card and associated database is of course the Identity and Passport Service. It is not terribly encouraging that my first interaction with this Service after becoming a citizen involved their making an error for which they blamed me, charged me, and inconvenienced me, even though I had done everything correctly. I suspect we should all get used to it.
One mechanism for ensuring the individual does take responsibility for his or her health is social stigma. For many a year we have been enjoined to cease stigmatising the morbidly obese, the terminally drunk and skagheads, because it really isn’t their fault — and as a result an important means of combating these social ills has been thrown away. Stigmatising has a point; it is not just fun to shout abuse at fat people, it is socially useful too.
– Rod Liddle, who talks some sense, although he is a bit of a yob himself.
Update: some people have asked if I support all of his argument. I do not. For a start, obesity is not something one can define precisely; secondly, it can add to the generally authortarian, bullying atmsophere in which we live if it is deemed acceptable to make all kinds of fun of the largely-built, or whatever. But Liddle is quite correct to locate the issue of personal responsibility and to get away from the victim-culture angle that is so often exploited by the medical profession and their political friends
Apparently, the humourless twerps who lead many of the world’s main industrial nations got a touch of the vapours over these parting remarks from the President as he left the G8 cant-fest in Japan:
The American leader, who has been condemned throughout his presidency for failing to tackle climate change, ended a private meeting with the words: “Goodbye from the world’s biggest polluter.”
He then punched the air while grinning widely, as the rest of those present including Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy looked on in shock.
Oh please. Mr Bush, who I imagine is fed up to the back teeth at the preening hypocrisy, moral posturing and downright dishonesty of the Green lobby, has clearly decided that the US is not going to be ashamed of being an industrial nation. The constant calls by various environmental groups for the US and other major states to slash CO2 emmissions by more than a half by tomorrrow afternoon or whatever are unworkable, and they know it. The massive cost of shifting energy sources to supposedly cleaner ones could help to tip parts of the world economy into recession or make the existing slowdown even worse; the push for biofuels, for example, is, arguably, hurting poor people in countries that are traditionally highly dependent on grains etc for basic foodstuffs.
In case any commenters ask, no, I am not a climate change denier, but I do seriously doubt whether a massive cut in carbon emissions over the timescale demanded by some is going to work without causing havoc.
No, I am glad Mr Bush gave his rival leaders the verbal equivalent of a kick in the nuts. More please.
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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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