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]
|
Finding myself uncharacteristically unable to give a flying fuck about what is in the news today and therefore unable to murder helpless pixels merely to write about politics or world events, I took advantage of my inamorata being away on business to escape the Ivory Tower and go bathe in the blood and beer of popular culture… yes, I just saw Doomsday, a post-Apocalypse Mad Max-meets-28 Days Later action splatter flick.
It is a movie that sets its sights low and consistently hits the target. Okay it does get a bit wobbly when any character has to speak for more than fifteen seconds, which thankfully occurs rarely. That said, much as I enjoyed this exceedingly low-brow gore-fest, Rhona Mitra is simply better than the movie. She is superb as the quipping but mostly taciturn harder-than-nails action chick with the one thing so many action heroines lack: physical presence. Also this movie has the best and most brutally ended action-girl-on-action-girl fight scene, well, quite possibly ever.
And the ‘eye thing’… very cool.
But I am not writing this to praise Rhona… well, actually I am…
…no…no… the purpose was to repeat what an old Scottish chum of mine said to me on the phone this evening when he unexpectedly called me up and I told him I had seen Doomsday.
“Oh yes, that film is a hoot!” he replied, “but it just made me wonder, maybe the Apocalypse is just Glasgow at chucking out time on a Friday evening, only it never ends. And people who can eat deep fried Mars Bars will eat anything.”
My thanks to Shane Greer for alerting me to what, on the face of it, seems like very good news, from Northern Ireland:
The education minister has said she is very disappointed by grammar schools planning to set up a company to run independent entrance exams.
I was not disappointed at all, when I read that. If there is one thing that really, really needs to be got out of the clutches of the state, it is school examinations. Schools and parents and children need to be able to choose the best exams to take, and employers need to be able to choose which exam results they will take seriously. That way, exam results will change to suit the needs of the times, but will continue to be a meaningful test of educational excellence.
More than 30 schools have said the tests in English and maths, will be held over either two or three days.
The Association for Quality Education said the exams would be held in venues across Northern Ireland.
So far so good. But this is where the report becomes less pleasing:
However, Caitríona Ruane accused the schools of being elitist …
Ah yes, elitist. What kind of a vicious school wants to teach only those pupils whom it wants to teach, and to teach them really well? Monstrous.
… and said they could face legal action from parents.
Parents, that is, demanding better exams results. At present, the government pays for all such litigation. An independent exam system will have to pay the costs of resisting all such legal challenges for itself.
Now comes the really scary bit, the bit that got me putting this here, rather than only, say, here:
“They have a choice, people always have a choice,” the minister said.
“What I would say to them is think very carefully before you go down the route of bringing boards of governors into situations were they may find themselves spending their time in court.”
This is the language of the Mafia.
What is happening here is that the state has made something, in this case exam results, so complicated and legally challengeable that only the state can easily afford all the litigation involved in supplying such a service. Then, they impose “progressive” and “radical” change, i.e. they wreck the state system. At which point, some people and some institutions try to make an independent go of replacing the formerly adequate (albeit ruinously expensive for the mere taxpayer) state service with one that they have devised themselves. And, legally, they can go it alone. They can do this. But the laws they have then to obey are so complicated that it will cost them an arm and a leg.
Back door abolition of whatever it is the politicians want abolished, in other words. Nationalise part of something. Throw money and laws at all of it, thereby herding everyone into the arms of the state system, on purely cost grounds. Then shut down whatever bits of the state system they always had in mind to destroy, and defy the “private” sector to respond, in an impossible legal environment that only the state can afford to function in.
Only very wealthy institutions can afford in their turn to defy such arrangements. Politicians duly denounce them as: very wealthy. If the private sector decides to charge quite a lot for the now very expensive service that they provide, they are accused of charging a lot. And the politicians use those excuses to pass yet more laws, if they prove to be necessary, turning difficulty into impossibility. There’s a lot of it about.
The overall result in this case, Shane Greer fears, will be the destruction of the really quite good top end of the Northern Ireland education system.
I just came across this. What’s happened is that they’ve discovered another Vivaldi opera, and classical music blogger Jessica Duchen is less than thrilled:
Vivaldi was an astonishing character with a hugely colourful life. But isn’t there a limit to how many of these rattly, twiddly baroque things the market can take? After all, most of them feature either a one-name title (eg Tomasso, Soltino, etc) or a massively long one (Il trionfo del blogorissimo classicale di Madamina Duchene), arias da carping hell for leather for several hours trying to sound inventive on the reprise (my favourite carp is to be found in halaszle, Hungarian fish soup), not to mention recycled bits and bobs from other works, a harpsichord sounding as harpsichords do, a swarm of wasps where the violins ought to be and a reluctance to cut even one note leading to hellishly uncomfortable theatrical experiences as the reverential principles of Richard Wagner are applied willynilly to music that was actually designed as background entertainment to business meetings, illicit love affairs and the odd bit of orange throwing.
Well said. Or to put it another way, the trouble with the authentic movement is that it isn’t actually very authentic. But the real point here is not the alleged tedium of Vivaldi operas, so much as the exuberantly self-centred relish of her own eloquence with which Madamina Duchene writes about them. Lovely.
Tim Worstall has interesting things to say about the difference between social status and economic inequality, pointing out that the two things only occasionally map onto each other, a fact which does rather undermine the egalitarian argument that reducing economic inequality will reduce differences in status. A good point indeed: in the former Soviet Union and in heavily statist countries today, for example, there was and is a gulf between the citizenry and the cliques that run the show. This exists to a lesser extent, however, in the mixed economies of much of the rest of the world, where ‘new class’ of people – bureaucrats, politicians, media folk, academics, quangocrats, etc, hold considerable power and influence, even though they may earn less than say, a Goldman Sachs bond dealer. The gap was arguably far harder to bridge than is the case in the more fluid situation one finds in a pure market order where the process of ‘creative destruction’, to quote the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, destroys once-dominant businesses and dynasties and creates new ones in a never-ending cycle. Tim also makes the good point that having high status is often little to do with money at all. Fame, or having a prestigious job, or being an influential commentator, or whatever, often counts for far more than how much money one has in the bank. Ask yourself this: who has more status in British society – the editor of the Times or a hedge fund investor?
Another way of thinking about the difference between being rich and status is this: in some cultures, where acquiring wealth is sneered at or even suppressed, what counts is the accident of birth, or the ability to pull the levers of political power, or manipulate opinion in some way. As you will, gentle reader, no doubt guess, I think that one of the great things about the pursuit of wealth is that it is, in one of the deepest senses, profoundly egalitarian. Think about all those media commenters who sneer at ‘ghastly chavs’ messing up the view in the South of France or taking cheap flights to Malaga: what this point of view admits, in a way, that capitalism makes it possible for the masses to get on the same ladder as those dealt a good hand by accident of birth. I still think that part of the motivation for the Green movement or strict controls on immigration and population growth is a desire to cut off the ladder of opportunity for the masses (yes, I know this is a bit of ad hominem argument but I think it carries some validity).
For a great book on the subject of envy, which of course lurks beneath a lot of complaints about status and inequality, I recommend this classic study.
Anyway, as Tim rightly points out, people who think that ironing out economic inequality through such methods as steeply progressive income taxes will narrow gaps in status are liable to be disappointed. Humans are by nature a competitive species, and ranking folk according to some metric or other is ineradicable. Also, as the US writer George Gilder wrote in his masterful early 1980s defence of supply-side tax cuts and entrepreneurship, the folly of progressive taxes and other methods is that they do not eradicate inequality. Rather, they fossilise existing patterns of unequal wealth distribution and encourage the most ambitious people in a society to channel that aggression into less benign forms. Not an original insight, of course – Samuel Johnson, the 18th Century writer, made the same point – but one that needs to be rammed home from time to time.
Samizdata has now been going for more than half a decade, and since what I am about to say has been becoming ever more true throughout that time, I may have said what follows before. So if you have already read, marked, learned and inwardly digested all of this, apologies, and on to the next posting.
I want to make a point about the nature of voting in British general elections. It now looks as if there is going to be a Labour melt-down, in the next one of these. A whole generation of Labour MPs seem about to lose their jobs, and whole new swarm of now diligently obscure Tories seem about to step forward to take their places. Setting aside what one feels about these two groups of people, why the completeness of the switch? Why these huge lurches, from massive Thatcher majorities, to massive Blair majorities, and soon – it now appears – to massive Cameron majorities? Even if the next general election does not yield the anti-Labour landslide that everyone is starting now to anticipate, we all know that it could. In the years when I first noticed party politics in Britain, parliamentary majorities were never this big, or they never seemed so. Parties lost elections, but they weren’t crushed, the way they get crushed now. Now, we live in an age of electoral landslides. Why? What has changed?
It may simply be that I have changed. Maybe landslides always happened from time to time, but I only started noticing rather recently. That could be it. Also, in a similar comment debate about this sort of stuff, here or somewhere, I seem to recall being accused of describing London rather than England or Britain when I talked this way. But I do think that there is something else going on here other than me just being me, living where I do. I think that the electorate has also changed. This posting makes an essentially rather simple point, but be warned now, it does it at somewhat tedious length. If you push that “Read more” button, you may rather quickly want to read less. → Continue reading: The age of political landslides
This story in the Daily Telegraph today about Burmese officials allegedly pilfering foreign aid and selling it just reinforces any prejudice one might have about the efficacy of sending aid to a country governed by thugs. It is not obvious to me what, if anything, the major powers could or should do about this. Outright military intervention seems unlikely and given the stretched resources of western powers, unwise. However, given its rapid economic ascent, one might hope that India could exert some influence for good, which is preferable to that of China.
Right at this moment, though, the main emotion one might feel about Burma and its plight is one of dark despair.
Actually, it is even worse than that.
– An unnamed BBC news journalist with whom I unexpectedly found myself drinking on Saturday, when asked if the BBC really is the Stalinist bureaucracy it is reputed to be.
Glenn Reynold’s has a review at Pajamas Media of Ron Paul’s best selling new treatise, “The Revolution: A Manifesto”.
He has beaten me to the punch as my copy is waiting for me in New York City and I will not see it until Thursday, No problem though: Glenn seems to have almost exactly the same opinions I expect I will have. This is not so strange after all. We are both Heinlein Libertarians with a long shared background.
I guess I will just have to sit back in my favorite upper west Columbia University hangout (a Starbucks) and watch some of the regulars go apoplectic. Some times I just like to be evil.
But you knew that.
Like the diarist and blogger Diamond Geezer (now that’s what I call a brilliant name), I have come to value much of the scenery in the southeastern pocket of ours in England. If you are planning a daytrip and cannot face a long drive but want something that just about gets you away from the capital without being all precious about it, there is a lot to be said for Whitstable Bay in Kent’s north coast. It is not grubby like Margate or impossibly twee; it is in fact a bit like Southwold in my old stamping ground of Suffolk. The place has several good pubs and restaurants so it pays to book in advance to guarantee a table in the height of the summer. Yours truly and Mrs P. drove down on Sunday and got there early enough to ramble along the coast before filling our faces with lots of seafood. I visited the area several years ago and forgot how pleasant it is. The existing owners of the seafront properties have not – yet – sold up and given the presumably high price of property there, will not do so and make way for tall hotels. I am all for freedom to develop but I hope that the place does not get spoiled. I guess that in such a place, even without planning laws, owners almost operate a sort of tacit law that states: “Don’t mess this place up and ruin the long-run value of your own property”. I think this sort of unspoken desire by property owners who are proud of an area not to foul it up is actually a good example of how order and harmonious building design of sorts, comes about without the need for planning laws at all.
I’ll be back, as a certain Governor of California might put it. For two hours’ drive from central London, it takes a lot of beating.
“If the BBC was given charge of a three star Michelin restaurant, it would puree all the food and feed it to its customers through straws.”
– Stephen Pollard.
Some splendid person, writing pseudonymously in the obscurity of an open thread on the Guardian’s Comment is Free semiblog, has provided a parallel text translation of the Report of the Independent Scheme Assurance Panel. His discussion begins here. It deserves a wider audience. Excerpt:
DAMN, I really must get back to work, but this is just so wonderful…
3.3 Identity management within Government
Early on, the Panel challenged the assumption that existing sources of identity data should be ignored in favour of a new set.
Like a lot of people, we couldn’t understand why the NI number and its related data wouldn’t do.
However, safe and reliable maintenance and use of a shared asset across multiple parties is a challenge for any organisation, not least Government with its many departments, each with its own priorities, objectives and challenges.
Then somebody showed us the figures that with a total population of 60M people in this country, maybe a sixth of them under 16, there are over 75M currently-issued NI numbers, and we finally started to understand that the entire current system is a complete balls-up.
People say to me, “Don’t worry, it won’t work.” I would like to remind them that grand government schemes that are not working tend to be adopted anyway, and all the suffering they cause is declared a good thing, necessary for the progress of the nation. Lysenko’s ‘winterizeation’ of wheat, did not work. Protectionism does not work. Most of the world’s ‘development’ projects do not work. It did not stop governments implementing them at the expense of humanity. It does not stop massive numbers of politically influential people still believing in the grand reconstruction of deep natural systems and human institutions by government power, and devoting their working lives to promoting it. The National Identity Scheme still has every prospect of being Britain’s ‘Great Leap Forward’.
(Hat-tip: Wendy M. Grossman)
We have witnessed two weeks of unravelling. A fortnight where the socialist foundations of New Labour were exposed by the electorate after Brown’s redistributionist endeavours foundered upon the rocks of his middling class taxcut dogwhistle. And their unionist pretensions were undercut by Wendy Alexander’s referendum put option. Salmond will never buy.
The disaffection with New Labour is a confluence of favourable attitudes and pernicious circumstances. The expansion of clientelism widens the contacts between the state and the working poor. Not those on incapacity benefit, not those on income support, but people who apply for tax credits or pensioners on the borderline of poverty. These people never put money by for adverse circumstances or sickness or retirement, since they had to fund state monopolies through taxation or national insurance. Their plight is imposed by the state and they are forced to recoup the taxes paid through the bureaucratic process of tax credits and means testing.
We forget our history at our peril. Nobody likes a state employee snooping in our lives and people will vote to put them back in Brown’s cuticle. There is only so far the state can intrude, even in a social democracy. Britain has never been a liberal democracy as liberalism died with Campbell-Bannerman, our first “Prime Minister”. Yet, the dismantling of war socialism was a popular move that assured Tory ascendancy throughout the nineteen-fifties, even with Eden’s reversal at Suez. Blair took note that consumerism trumped jingoism.
We have heard that the British people show greater trust in the state than their foreign counterparts. Why? Because the British political system, in the past, has been responsive to state intrusion and has reversed its effects. ID cards were abolished over here. That is why Britain survived as an admixture of monopolistic services and the judicious application of state power. New Labour revealed that the settlement had been overturned by all mainstream parties, with the help of Thatcher’s radical centralisation. All law-abiding citizens found themselves facing unprecedented scrutiny from the government and they responded with true British grit: they walked elsewhere in unprecedented numbers and said “Fuck you!”.
This makes the Tory achievement even more astonishing than it already appears, since so many of their natural constituency have emigrated.
So, Cameron, the people want government off their backs. Adverse economic circumstances and higher taxes, the inevitable outcome of socialism have increased their taxes and reduced incomes. New Labour wanted a voting bank and they found that state dependency equals Northern Crock (especially in Crewe) . Scything waste will reduce expenditure. It is not difficult. Reduce pork, reduce taxes.
|
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.
|
Recent Comments