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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Frequent commenter ‘Old Jack Tar’ has a rather different view than the one being offered up by the UK media regarding the conduct of some of the British naval personnel being held captive in Iran.
Ever since the capture by Iranian forces of fifteen British naval personnel, the UK news channels have been falling over themselves to praise female British sailor Faye Turney. I have heard her described as “professional” and “well trained” and “sensible”.
Really? I beg to differ. From the moment they were captured they should have responded with NOTHING except “Name, rank and serial number”. These people have a professional (and legal) requirement to keep their yaps shut and not give aid with their words to a clearly hostile foreign government.
Yet she appears to have written a ‘heartfelt’ letter home praising the ‘kind’ and ‘warm’ Iranians who kidnapped her at gunpoint, admitting the boarding party had strayed into Iranian waters, presumably in return for a kebab.
My equally ex-RN wife’s remark upon seeing Turney on TV wearing a headscarf was “I would have thanked them for giving me something I could use to strangle one of the guards with when I eventually make my escape, but if they want me to wear it, well I would have told them exactly where they can…”
My good wife is a forthright person and decorum prevents me from finishing her remarks.
“Professional” and “well trained” my arse. Yet I have the sickening feeling this woman will be lionised when she is eventually released.
Or at least he tried to, but her friends and family made sure she was never made aware of the sick actions of her daughter’s former schoolteacher.
As I say in the article, there is no law against being a jerk – nor should there be – but “It is a First Amendment right” is a coward’s excuse for trying to hurt a dying woman and her grief-stricken daughter. There are lots of things in life against which there are no laws, but which are heartless, meanspirited, and downright disgusting things to do to another human being. If you consider the US Constitution your moral guidebook, you need more help than any lawyer can offer.
Eliot Stein refers to himself as an “internet pioneer” (in gutless actions?) and takes great pride in the lengths he went to in order to distract Cathy from her waning health and to try to get her to focus her attention on him (“I WILL NOT BE IGNORED!”), which says almost as much about his character as you need to know. Eliot Stein, while Maia‘s schoolteacher, also posted nasty comments on Maia and Cathy’s blogs; when Maia’s school got rid of him, he came to work in a tuxedo on his last day and made sure to tell every class that his departure was Maia’s fault, which he must have known would lead to her being bullied and humiliated (which is exactly what happened).
Like I said, Eliot Stein is a real peach. And yet he still persists in the belief that Cathy could say or do anything which would make him seem more unfit to be around children than his own professed actions – of which he boasts with considerable pride. Would you want your kids to spend any amount of time around this man, let alone be stuck with him as a schoolteacher?
The Iranians have just committed yet another violation of the Geneva Conventions: publicly displaying the British sailors they captured last week.
This makes the third violation of the Geneva Conventions by Iran: threatening to try soldiers in uniform for espionage, interrogation of captured soldiers, and now public display of captured soldiers.
As noted earlier, the Geneva Conventions appear to be a one-way street, applicable only to the US and its allies. If anyone can find any expressions of outrage directed at Iran for violating the Geneva Conventions from the “usual suspects” who have been so concerned with US compliance with same, do please post them in the comments.
[Note: first sentence updated after the illegal broadcast of the soldiers was made.]
I think I must share a similar taste in humour to blogger Clive Davis. Like Clive, I cannot see what is so funny about Ricky Gervais, the man who gave us the spoof TV show, The Office, and does standup. He leaves me completely cold. On the other side, Clive is a Peter Sellers fan and so am I. Sellers’ reputation has been a bit trashed of late, by this scathing biography in particular and in a recent rather cruel film starring Geoffrey Rush but despite his real or alleged personal shortcomings, he towers above most of the so-called comic actors of today, with a few exceptions.
Clive has a picture taken from I’m All Right Jack, which ranks alongside Dr Strangelove – the Cold War movie of Stanley Kubrick – as probably one of the sharpest pieces of movie satire since the war. The film was made in the mid to late 50s, around the time of the Suez crisis, when the government was led by men of such standing as Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan. Manchester United’s Busby Babes had entered the European Cup only to be cruelly cut down by the Munich air crash. The Soviets had launched the Sputnik satellite. Ike was in the White House. Ayn Rand had completed Atlas Shrugged. The Hungarian uprising of 1956 had been mercilessly suppressed. These were, in retrospect, times that shaped much of our lives today.
In some ways the 1950s were quite a good time in Britain, as this recent book demonstrates. Crime was much lower than today. Grammar schools enabled bright working class children a chance to get up the educational ladder. The Tories ended rationing – “Set the People Free” – while Elvis, Chuck Berry and the rest of them began to come on the airwaves and push aside the stuffier fare. Certain aspects of life were still far less liberal than today, such as laws on divorce, homosexuality and censorship, although arguably free speech was actually more widely respected than today (I suspect some commenters will agree with that).
And there was the Goon Show, the brainchild of comic genius and all-round nutter, Spike Milligan. Sellers was one of that show’s brightest stars and later built a career in films, some of them of mixed quality. But Sellers’ brilliant portrayal of an ultra-leftist trade unionist in I’m All Right Jack is the pinnacle, in my view. He played opposite Terry Thomas (“what a fwightful shower!”), cast as the cynical factory manager, and Ian Carmichael, as the upper-class twit sent to work in the company. And in a strangely modern twist, young Richard Attenborough plays a shady businessman cutting arms deals with Arab states (nothing much changes, does it?). As a final twist of genius, that old news hand, Malcolm Muggeridge, is cast as a tv current affairs host.
The film beautifully captures the prevailing view of the ‘enlightened classes’ at the time, which was that Britain was not ‘modern’ or ‘efficient’ enough, and that what was needed to solve this state of affairs was a more meritocratic, technology-driven business ethic. This proved in fact to be the wrong diagnosis, an essentially corporatist one. The problem with the sort of world lampooned in this film was not that Britons were inherently lazy, stupid or venal; no, it was that much of Britain’s industrial vigour had been sapped by decades of rising taxes, regulations, and the not-exactly-trivial business of two major world wars. It was not until the failed experiments of Harold Wilson in the 1960s that people realised there were no technological, managerialist fixes to Britain’s economic stagnation. The ‘fix’ was in drastic cuts to marginal tax rates, deregulation and removal of trade unions’ privileges, starting with the closed shop.
I have heard it said that Sellers’ portrayal of a trade unionist was so good that it greatly annoyed much of the left. If that is so, he deserves a vote of thanks for sending up a destructive attitude so cleverly. If only we had someone of Sellers’ genius to send up the intrusive state of today.
It will not have escaped the notice of our regular readers that I have shown a somewhat less than charitable attitude towards the leader of the Conservative Party, David Cameron. I think the time has come to provide some reasons for my hostility.
I realise that some people (maybe Cameron supporters among them) would dismiss my onslaught as the product of a crotchety, pessimistic and intolerant personality. Well, as a matter of fact, I am crotchety, pessimistic and intolerant but I have what I consider to be very good reasons for singling out David Cameron as the particular object of my animosity.
I also want to make it clear that I am not hostile to Cameron because he is not a libertarian. I do not expect Conservatives to be libertarians hence they are called ‘Conservatives’. Nor am I bitter about the fact that he is not a Conservative either. I expect very little from the current crop of moral and intellectual midgets that have aggregated in the Conservative Party and I am seldom disappointed.
Nor am I especially, or even moderately, outraged by his brazen careerism, his opportunism and his readiness not just to be cynical but to openly be seen to be cynical (e.g. peddling his eco-friendly bicycle to work, a few yards in front of the gas-guzzling limo bearing his briefcase). To this extent Mr. Cameron is probably no better or no worse than any of the other political jobbists who have infested our public realm like a colony of plague bacteria in the lymph node of a 14th Century peasant and from where they can, and do, distribute their pathogens around the national bloodstream. → Continue reading: What’s that coming over the hill?
I am glad that things look to have become a bit more peaceful in Northern Ireland.
Would I be correct in guessing that this settlement may be one of the good things to have emerged from 9/11? This would be a pleasing thought, given the grief that Britain and the USA seem to have made for themselves in Iraq, provided its truth will survive serious scrutiny.
What I have in mind is that following 9/11 the USA took its first truly serious look at IRA terrorism, voters as well as just terrorism experts, and all that sentimental and unthinking Oirish blarney support for the IRA, which had over the decades turned into real money and real weapons on a huge scale, no longer seemed like a harmless slice of electoral politics and suddenly looked like a seriously bad idea. (I recall thinking as soon as the Twin Towers came down that the IRA would not like this.)
For, no matter what concessions have been gouged out of the North Ireland Unionists, and even though nobody directly involved in this settlement would dream of saying it out loud for fear of upsetting the new applecart that has now been bodged together, this surely means that the IRA has lost. For the time being anyway. They wanted Northern Ireland to be detached from the UK and to become attached to the Republic of Ireland, but this has not happened.
Or is this just a ceasefire? And will the IRA, Hezbollah style, merely use the settlement and the governmental privileges it gives them to prepare their next offensive? Presumably this remains the Unionist fear. Only time and lots of it will tell, but to an ignorant outsider such as south of England me, this seems real. If so, then the inevitable self-congratulatory noises emerging from the government, and the general media acclamation for the deal, would appear to be justified.
What to wear or not to wear when taking a mathematics test.
Amazing what academics spend their time researching these days. Or perhaps not. An old girlfriend of mine said she thought maths, like chess, was very sexy. Er, yesss.
A gentleman by the name of Fabian Tassano is justifiably angry about the raising of the compulsory school-leaving age to 18 years. Quite so. Arguably – and I do argue – the school-leaving age should be cut. Many teenagers, including the brightest, are bored stiff at school and their boredom leads to many of the disciplinary problems we see around us. Better, perhaps, to let teenagers work, discover the value of money, and then pick up their education when some of that youthful energy has already been channelled into a payslip. This has been the argument from a number of liberal educationalists, such as Prof. James Tooley, for years. Such a view horrifies the power-freaks in the political establishment who would probably like us all to stay in education until the age of 30, but the trend towards an ever-higher school/college-leaving age cannot go on.
Reading some history, it does seem as though we live in an age when in some ways, youngsters seem to stay young for much longer than used to be the case. By the time my old man was 18, he had already become an officer cadet in the RAF and by the age of 21, was navigating fast jet aircraft. One of my great uncles joined the naval academy at Dartmouth by the age of 15. The average age of many pilots in WW2 was 21. Now, if you believe the educationalists of today, a person aged 18 is not fit to put in charge of an electric toothbrush, and yet at the same time, things like the age of sexual consent have been reduced. So in some ways people are thought to be more mature, in other ways, less so.
I am a bit miffed that Tassano moans that Samizdata has had nothing to say on this issue. Had he been reading this blog in January, he would have seen that we were on the case, thanks to Alice Bachini. Pay attention, Fabian.
Bryan Appleyard has written a piece on the inimitable Guido Fawkes, but alas he has made a whole host of gross factual errors:
He started submitting entries to the transatlantic libertarian blog samizdata.net/blog, but they were never accepted, possibly because Samizdata was neocon and Staines isn’t. He’s a real libertarian, not a corporate shill like the average neocon. So he began his own blog, adopting the Guido persona.
Firstly, we did in fact publish quite a few of his various ‘guest post’ articles here on Samizdata… probably 70% of the ones he sent to us. And to find this out, all Bryan had to do was use the search box in the right hand sidebar of this blog to discover that.
Secondly, far from me (or Samizdata) being neo-con in contrast to Paul-the-libertarian, 95% of the time you could not fit a piece of paper between my views and those of Paul Staines. And of the 5%, I suspect the vast majority of our differences would be tactical, not philosophical. So as for me being a corporate shill, well Bryan is talking through the cushion on his seat, and that is putting it politely. If I am on the payroll of big business, my cheques must keep getting lost in the (state owned) postal service.
Thirdly, I did indeed turn down several of the-man-who-became-Guido’s articles for Samizdata but not a single one of them were rejected for ideological reasons. I turned down some because they were defamatory and other because this blogs does not really concentrate on party politics to the extent Paul likes to (and that is also why Guido and Samizdata are not ‘competitors’… we have quite different ‘mission statements’).
Not up to your usual standard, Bryan. Consider your arse fact-checked.
One of my lesser vices is that I take a certain childish delight in unexpectedly arriving at a party when all the other guests think I am on a different continent, or unexpectedly posting to Samizdata from Maputo. In truth, I am thinking that the “blogging from unexpected places” technique is getting a little tired. In addition, it often leads to my getting messages three days later from people who I might have wanted to meet, saying that if they had known I was in town they might have liked to have bought me a drink or shown me some interesting part of town I was not aware of. Therefore, let me do something a little different.
I will be in Paris from the 6th to the 10th of April – the Easter weekend from Friday morning to Monday evening. Does anybody want to get together for a Samizdata drinks session, or perhaps we could go out for dinner? The evening of Saturday April 7 might be good for it.
Secondly, does anybody know of a bar or pub in Paris that is showing the matches of the cricket World Cup live? In particular, I would like to watch at least some of the Australia v England game this is being played on April 8, Easter Sunday. Help on this matter would be appreciated.
In the “really long term planning” stakes, I will be in Singapore on Thursday December 20. If anyone wants to do an Asian Samizdata dinner that evening, that would also be a splendid thing.
And of course I shall be in many other places at various times in between.
Another episode of “The Trap’ has been shown… I gave it a pass given the low quality of scholarship and the high level of ‘argument by personal attack’ in the first one. It seems this low brow method was used against other targets in the latest episode, this time with the author of Public Choice Theory as one of the targets.
First a basic primer for the recent commenter to my earlier article. The personal life of a creative person has nothing to do with whether their creation is right or wrong. That decision is made in the marketplace of ideas and in the appropriate research journals. Anyone who thinks otherwise has something brown leaking out their ears.
If we judged ideas by the personal life of the creator, we would toss Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings in the bin. The man was a nutter who cut off his ear. Obviously his paintings must be garbage. Or maybe the whole basis of cybernetics is wrong! After all, Turing was gay! All those right wing conspiracy types must obviously think anything he created must be wrong! And Einstein? That wild haired fruitcake? Marx? A drunken womanizer!
Argument by ad hominem will get no one anywhere with anyone at Samizdata.
It also helps to have some knowledge of the subjects on which you expostulate, or to at least state your areas of ignorance out front. The idea that public workers do not work to make life better for their families just like anyone else is absurd: and that is what saying ‘Public Choice Theory is wrong’ means. Suggesting that markets will always ‘collapse to a point’ is absurd and counter-factual. It is not OFCOM that makes BBC ‘better’. It is competition with the high production values of programs from elsewhere that are indeed (more) free market than the UK in this respect. The rhetorical concept which is thus indirectly espoused by our commenter that “REGULATION is INDIVIDUALISM” is just plain silly.
I invite you all to read the comment on that previous article and disassemble the commenter’s argument into its weak component parts as I have not the time to do so at the moment.
I usually make the point of only ever smoking a cigarette or cigar on No Smoking Day. It is the principle at stake, dear reader. For the remaining 364 days of the year, however, I avoid the weed. But for those who are less bothered about the state of their lungs or just love to smoke, here is a must-have gadget.
I think if Ian Fleming were alive today, he would make sure 007 had such a case for his Q-branch gadgets and Turkish ciggies (via the always-diverting Boing Boing website).
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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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