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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Poor Roma. The Italian football team – which is actually pretty good – has so far not had a good time of it against Manchester Utd. And with Ronaldo, the Portugese ace forward scoring a hatful of goals for ManU, the pain gets worse. Even more so when this young man, who hails from the island of Madeira, not only possesses incredible skill on the ball, but relishes sticking the ball between an opponent’s legs (known as “nutmegging”), flicking the ball in such a way as to bamboozle a defender, etc. Electrifying stuff to watch. Ronaldo, to an extent that many highly-paid players do not, understands that football these days is competing for wallets and time with all manner of entertainment.
But some of those who come up against him do not like it very much. I can sympathise, up to a point. But I do not think this man sets out to grind his opponents’ faces into the dust. It simply his way of playing the game. If the current generation of footballers cannot take it when a winger players coruscating football, god knows how they would have handled the late George Best, who used to take on opponents for fun, even put his foot on the ball to take a breather, then make a face and challenge them like a matador (he could also play a bit).
This sort of stuff does raise issues of sportsmanship, though. There is a fine line, not always easy to draw, between outrageous skill on the one hand and taking the mickey out of an opponent, on the other. Sport, as Brian noted the other day, can tell us a bit about life in general. Great skill is something to marvel at, but we generally do not like taking the piss. But on this occasion, I do not think that the arguably best footballer of our times is doing that. I was far too young to have seen Best, Pele or Di Stefano in their prime, but I am grateful, even as a supporter of another team, to watch this wizard weave such magic.
The reasons why people upset their neighbours continue to grow:
A weightlifter has been fined £70 for exercising too loudly. Giran Jobe, 36, was charged with 47 breaches of a noise abatement order after neighbours complained that his two-hour training sessions with dumbbells left them unable to sleep. A council team investigating complaints about noise from his top-floor flat in Margate, Kent, found that at times the level hit 100 decibels – as loud as a rock concert.
I have not come across this reason for neighbour annoyance before. Anyway, in my experience, the most irritating thing about going to a gym – as I do at least twice a week if possible – is the pounding, Chavvy music that these businesses insist in piping into the rooms. There seems to be some assumption that you get better exercise if there is lots of noise assaulting the ears. Maybe it is to do with the idea that certain sounds encourage quick exercise: there might even be academic studies proving the link between a raised exercise rate and music. I suppose this makes sense; anyway, dancing is one of the best exercises of the lot. Although the JPearce dance technique is unlikely to catch on anytime soon, you will no doubt be relieved to know.
‘Market’ was the sixth word I ever learnt – after ‘This little piggy goes to…’
– Dr Eamonn Butler, author of The Best Book on the Market. Isn’t it great how we get children understanding buying and selling months if not years before the anti-market teachers can get their claws on them?
Apparently they are exclusive alternatives. According to Wired:
Maine is now the lone state not to have been given an extension to long-delayed Real ID regulations, after three fellow protesting states – Montana, New Hampshire and South Carolina – got their extensions in the last two weeks despite not pledging allegiance to Real ID.
What was it Maine in particular did to offend? There is no clue. One might suspect being the easiest to blockade has something to do with it. Bullies like to pick on the weakest victim when making an example.
Assuming no actual bombs get on the plane, then it scarcely matters who the passengers are – particularly since the rules did change in one important respect on September 11th 2001 and few are likely to sit quietly and do what a hijacker says, as they were advised to before that date. If someone could explain to me why any identification at all is needed to board a plane – other than that the government just wants to know where you are going – then I’d be most grateful for the explanation.
[* Yes I know that is New Hampshire, but presumably it is in the line for the DHS’s third degree.]
Here’s this gem from Reuters:
Cuba seeks more user-friendly socialism
There is something almost pathetic about the following paragraph from Reuters, as if the ability of people to trade with one another is some sort of wonderful present given by Father Christmas, rather than an extension of the basic right of every human to sustain life and flourish happily:
Bans on the sale of computers, DVD players and other products have been lifted, and Cubans who can afford it can now stay at tourist hotels and buy a cellphone.
Agriculture is being decentralized, farmers can decide for themselves what supplies they need and the prices paid to them are rising to boost food production.
Seriously, these steps represent real progress. If the reforms are real, it clearly makes sense for the US and other countries to lift sanctions against the country. A sharp dose of free trade should put a stake in the heart of the failed Marxist experiment in that island for good.
Meanwhile, let’s hope sanity eventually returns across the Atlantic in Zimbabwe. Surely, one of the great lessons of the 20th century, continuing to this day in Cuba, Zimbabwe or for that matter, Venezuela, is that state central planning is a disaster, whether applied to agriculture or anything else.
If you want to know why Bishop Hill is one of my favourite bloggers just now, you need look no further than this delightful posting today, which I now reproduce in its entirety:
There’s a lovely anecdote doing the rounds of climate sceptic blogs about Sir David King, the climate alarmist and former chief scientific adviser to the British government.
It seems that President Putin asked some of his leading scientists to meet Sir David when he went to Moscow as part of the entourage of the foreign secretary. King apparently launched into his standard spiel about how we’re all going to fry, but was a bit taken aback when the assembled scientists told him he was talking rubbish. When they had the temerity to list all the scientific evidence which refuted his claims of impending armageddon, our man was left looking a bit of a ninny and turned on his heels and stormed out of the room.
The story is doubly interesting because it’s related by someone called RCE Wyndham in a letter in which he tells Robin Butler, the master of University College, Oxford, that the college can expect no donations from him this year because the appointment of King to head Oxford’s Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment.
The letter can be read here.
Fascinating. But then I googled Sir-David-King-Putin, and came across this, from about two months ago (you need to scroll down a bit):
Sir David King, who as the Government’s Chief Scientist played a key role in the investigation into Litvinenko’s murder, has accused the Russian president of masterminding the murder of nearly 300 of his own people in the Moscow apartment bombings in 1999, which Putin blamed on Chechen terrorists.
“I can tell you that Putin was responsible for the bombings,” Sir David claimed to Mandrake at the Morgan Stanley Great Britons Awards. “I’ve seen the evidence. There is no way that Putin would have won the election if it wasn’t for the bombings. Before them he was getting 10 per cent approval ratings. After, they shot up to 80 per cent.”
I am not sure which came first, the mass murder accusation or the environmental ambush. I think it was the ambush that began all this. But either way, they really don’t like each other, do they?
It might make a rather good play. It’s always best when appalling people fail to get on. Imagine what the world would be like if they were all on the same side. I know, I know, not that different.
The Royal Air Force marks its 90th birthday today. There will be a flypast over central London at 1pm, so if readers have a digital camera, keep it nearby.
My comment below on youth crime prompted a lot of good comments. My thanks for Civitas, the think tank, for commenting about this admirable venture to encourage youngsters to learn discipline, pride and have a lot of fun at the same time.
It is not all bad news out there, thank goodness.
… this guy needs to buy a cat and take some well deserved ‘chill time’ for, oh, the rest of his life maybe?
“So I got down with my back to the grenade and used my body as a shield. It was a case of either having four of us as fatalities or badly wounded – or one. I brought my legs up to my chest in the brace position and waited for the explosion.”
The short version: he set off a booby-trap (the old tripwire/grenade shtick) in the middle of his patrol, jumped on the grenade and his body armour and the stuff in his backpack took the brunt of the explosion. Other than getting blown through the air, this Royal Marine walked away pretty much in one piece. Fortitude and insane luck are a very cool combination.
Let me offer the Lance Corporal a career suggestion: head back to civilian life and get a job doing endorsements for a certain backpack manufacturer.
I do not always follow politics. When things are going well for politicians I do not like I prefer not to think about it. But now, I am thinking quite a lot about Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister.
Two labels have been attached to Gordon Brown, in succession. First, there was the big clunking fist metaphor. But now, this picture of a grim but determined, horrid by decisive individual, has been replaced by a quite different clutch of descriptions, most of which involve the word “dither”. This transformation was famously described by Lib Dem wrinkly Vince Cable as from Stalin to Mr Bean. So, which is true?
The answer is: both. If all that Gordon Brown was was Mr Bean, we could all relax, except those of us in the immediate vicinity of the man, such as his wife, secretaries, immediate subordinates, children, and anybody unfortunate enough personally to encounter him in the course of his staggerings around. But Gordon Brown is Mr Bean with the powers of a Prime Minister – Mr Bean a hundred feet high, able to ruin thousands with one ill-judged swipe of his arm, one petulant kick. This is not somebody who dithers only about whether to have one lump or two or perhaps three, although the telly-comedy sketchers are surely at work on that very notion as I write. This is a man who can, as and when he feels inclined, shut down this entire industry, or that one, or that one, depending on what he finally decides, or on what he merely hears himself saying or finds himself doing. He could rescue that whole area of the nation’s life from ruin, if he could only make up his mind about it, and he may do that or he may not, which actually, if you think about it, means that he will not. It is the combination of his vast powers to wreck (mostly to wreck) with his inability to decide on a “vision” – that is to say, on a recognisable and single path of wreckage which most of us could feel safe about not being in the way of – that makes this man so particularly scary, even by the standards of your average Prime Minister.
Blair at least seemed at least to have arrived in office with some idea of the limits of government power, and to have various notions about relying on it a bit less (along with others that involved relying on it far more). During the Blair years, Mr Blair would announce policies, some of which were sensible, and Mr Brown – the brooding, glowering dragon-in-a-cave Wagnerian bass Mr Brown – would either pay for them and mess them up or else just mess them up by not paying for them, depending on his mood. As methods of government go this one could have been a lot worse, although, as we are now discovering to our cost, it could have been a lot better. But now, our ruler is a fussy and insomniac incompetent, Mime with the powers of Wotan, but without Wotan’s hard-won wisdom. As somebody said over the weekend, what you want is somebody intelligent but lazy. What we have is an industrious fool.
The final touches to the story of the Brown moment are been inked in by the political commentators, and I do not believe that Mr Brown is going to be able, ever, to shake loose from these judgments. He is out of touch. He is terminally (Janet Daley makes much of the Terminal 5 fiasco) incompetent, and his followers are in disarray.
What follows? Will Mr Brown’s party sack him? Soon, I mean. It seems unlikely, but maybe. Will Mr Cameron be any better when he eventually takes over, as he surely now must? Ditto.
Blogger Clive Davis, who is well known to us at Samizdata, has this distressing report about an attack by youths on his teenage son. He’s not been impressed by the response by the police. It will not ease Clive’s anger one jot to hear that I had exactly the same experience when I was mugged in Clapham nine years ago. The police jotted down some comments, took a statement from me, including a description of the attackers (I managed to hit one of the bastards quite hard, I am glad to say). About a week or so later I was contacted by Victim Support, offering counselling, which I politely refused, although I was grateful for at least some followup. I had bad headaches for about a week and had to take several days off work. It is, as Clive and the rest of us Londoners know only too well, a regular occurence.
What to do about it? That is the big question, perhaps one of the biggest questions of public policy in Britain. Sure, the economic worries arguably are taking a greater share of the chattering classes’ time right now, but the long-running issue in Britain, at least since I have been interested in public affairs, is the continued uptrend of yobbery and violence in British society. It has been blamed on many things, with varying levels of plausibility: the lack of authority figures that can inspire and instill respect in youngsters, mostly boys; the breakdown of the family and the rising levels of single-parenthood, which in turn is encouraged by perverse incentives, such as the Welfare State. Throw in a culture that celebrates, or at least does not condemn, yobbery and violence plus the decline of manual labour and lack of outlets for youngsters who are not academically gifted, and you have quite a toxic mix. As for the last point – the decline of manual labour – I certainly do not think that could or should be reversed, given all the gains we have enjoyed from the move to a more service-based economy. But it is a problem that has to be thought about. I personally think one step would be to cut the school-leaving age and hack away labour market restrictions so that apprenticeships can be viable. What so many kids lack is a chance to learn a skill and quickly experience the pride of earning a proper wage. It would be a start.
Time magazine has already caused a stir with this front cover. Good. Sometimes it takes a foreign news publication to tell it like it is about what is happening. Not very “Cool Britannia”, is it?
Anyway, my best wishes to Clive and his family.
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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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