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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So he’s gone. Stephen Byers, formerly Secretary of State for the Department of Local Government, Transport and the Regions has resigned. And just when I thought he’d never go. You just can’t tell.
Now, all the speculation is about who should replace him. Should it be invisible Charles Clarke? Or should it be Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon? Neither is about to set the world alight. Of the two, Hoon, would seem to have the best credentials to step into Byers’s shoes: not only can’t he manage the news, but I understand he’s rapidly buggering up the armed forces.
But I have got a much better and simpler idea. One that will almost certainly solve our transport problems.
Abolish the Department.
It only goes back to 1919. Before then we had the best railway in the world. We had already built most of the tube. Electric trams, taximeter cabs and motorised buses plied the streets of the capital looking for trade.
And then Transport got a Ministry and a Minister: Eric Geddes. It got off to a bad start – forcibly re-organising the railways and hamstringing their profits. So started their steady decline. And after the bad start things just got worse. London Transport was nationalised halting development in its tracks. Not satisfied with that they then decided to nationalise the whole railway. The decline just gathered pace. And so on and so forth.
Luckily the Ministry’s incompetence was masked by the growth of road transport. But even there motorways were built too late and in insufficient numbers.
Almost every move the Department has ever made has made things worse: expanding the railway, then cutting it; expanding the road network then slamming on the brakes. They couldn’t get nationalisation right. They couldn’t even get privatisation right.
Politicians are not part of the solution: they are part of the problem.
Patrick Crozier
Despite Perry’s recent preoccupations, Samizdata seems to be bowling along nicely, doesn’t it? The pattern is, there’s an eight hour silence, Perry is out on the town trying to sign up more Samizdatans and getting somewhat “tired”, I decide it’s up to me, I post a page-and-a-half of waffle about whatever comes into my head and other Samizdatans read it and say to themselves we can’t have all those Americans thinking all this is is Brian waffling we’d better do something. So they do. And I now have some rambling to do in reply.
I liked Paul Staines’ bit about Britain’s growth rate having sunk like a stone. What this confirms is that British government income is now as high as it can be. Increasing the percentage rate of taxation doesn’t increase government tax income, it merely slows the economy down and causes government income to remain static. Similarly, if the government were to reduce the percentage rate of tax, government income wouldn’t decrease. This would merely cause the economy to surge forward, and the smaller slice of a bigger cake would end up being the same size as the bigger slices of smaller cakes. Britain is now at the top of the Laffer Curve. Isn’t that exciting? In plain English, the bastards are taking us for the absolute maximum amount they can, and if they get any greedier we stop coming through their bit of the forest.
If they truly want to spend more on the British National Health Service they are going to have to spend less on other things.
Aaron Armitage liked my ramble about gun-control, but wants to add that: “… people who are more likely to be shot are more likely to buy guns for self-defense. In other words, the risk of getting shot causes the gun ownership, not the other way around.” Quite right. Capitalise the P, take away “in other words”, and we have another anti-gun-control aphorism for the collection.
I didn’t pay much attention to that David Caruso movie, but by the end Marg Helgenberg was making excellent use of a gun to kill a bad person. David Caruso, if I understood matters correctly, continued to disapprove and instead of remaining with Marg like a Real Man and having some more sex with her in her swimming pool instead buggered off to Rio de Janeiro. Good riddance. Whatever happened to David Caruso? (E-mailers: I do not care what happened to David Caruso.)
I was delighted that Alice Bachini responded to my bit about pram design. I feared that this pram posting had disappeared into the oblivion bucket labelled Things That Belligerent Men Of A Certain Age In T-Shirts With Jobs In IT Don’t Care About. “Prams? Prams?!?!?!?! We want threats to H-Bomb the Middle East, girls in black leather on motor bikes, GNP statistics, guns, jet planes, pictures of Kylie Minogue in see-through clothing …” [stay tuned gentlemen]. “We may not be Real Men, but at least when we’re sitting at our computers allow us to pretend that we are.” Etc.)
Anyway Alice, thanks. You caught me committing an error I’m fond of denouncing others for, which is another Fixed-Quantity-Of fallacy, in this case the Fixed Quantity of Infant Attention fallacy. Your point being: outside stimulation increases the total capacity of infants to pay attention to things in general, such as and including Mum. They don’t either attend to the outside world or to Mum. They pay more attention to both. Makes sense.
That’s enough rambling for now. I’ll get to Antoine later. As usual, most of what he’s saying I agree with.
Well, it seems the Communist state of North Korea is not letting its downtrodden citizens get so much of a sniff of the World Cup tournament, which kicks off this weekend. Anti-football snobs may claim this is a rare example of the benefits of Communism, but as an (admittedly currently depressed) Ipswich Town and England fan, this story surely demonstrates the evils of what Marx has spawned,
Dodgeblog is doing a multi-part series on sex, drugs, and rock & roll… well as Andrew is a rock critic, these are subjects about which I would venture he is more than passingly familiar 
Update: Part II and Part III are also up.
Alice Bachini has some views about Brian Micklethwait’s article Which way did your pram face?
It’s not just outward-facing prams that are new; what about all those carriers and backpacks that allow babies to view the world from a user-friendly height? I think a social change is very definitely afoot, and a libertarian change for the better as well. But I don’t think all this is just the result of parents consciously trying to encourage more outgoing interactions for their offspring. Nor do I think that it contradicts with the kind of intimate mother/baby relationship Brian associates with the National Childbirth Trust. I think parents are just being more sensitive about what kids actually enjoy doing, and the result of this is inevitably good.
It’s much more fun to watch the world from Dad’s shoulders than to be stuck in a pram with only a row of plastic bunnies for company. Although even if you do have plastic bunnies nowadays, they are likely to be all-singing, all-dancing electro-bunnies which recite the alphabet in fifteen languages at the press of a button, the real world is still very often more fun than the gimmicky or “educational” toys that adults seem to think babies will enjoy.
Kids, including babies, want more, more, more, and capitalism with all its mind-blowing array of baby entertainments and transport machines, meets more and more of their wants. And parents know this is good for their development, because they can see how happy they are and how much they are learning from all that interesting stuff. Whereas in the 1950s little Billy would have spent all day in his pram, his cot or his playpen, nowadays he gets to go to exciting places and meet interesting people with fun toys. So things are getting better, in a pro-human beings, libertarian direction.
But mostly, we just aren’t inclined to leave them screaming in boredom if putting them somewhere more stimulating cheers them up. As this represents good parenting, it doesn’t detract from the mother/child stuff so much as adds to it. Happy people tend to get on better with each other, and you’re not walking round town all day; sometimes you are sitting together at home on the sofa, watching the “Super Duper Sumos” and drinking “Sunny Delight”.
Alice Bachini
Brian Micklethwait thinks that there are plenty of places in the world which don’t have welfare states but do have problems of relations between Moslems and non-Moslems. Well, funny he should say that…
I’m a fan of Charles Murray’s writings on the “underclass” which I mean to refer to a class of mostly young males who drift in and out of the labour market and depend on welfare ebenfits or crime for their livelyhoods. The unsocialized males fail to adopt the role of economic producer or father. Young women produce children as if they were paid to do so. One of Brian’s neat expressions is to say that a welfare state may not be intended to pay people to be poor, but the outcome looks a lot like it.
Looking at the Palestinian camps one might think these are devoid of welfare statism. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Palestinian refugee camps are run by international government agencies, such as the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (U.N.R.W.A.) in Gaza, the Gaza Strip and Amman, Jordan. The Palestinian territories are arguably the most heavily “cared for” places on Earth (the former Yugoslavia is another candidate). Oldham, Bradford and other trouble spots in the U.K. display similar characteristics: high levels of state intervention to “help” immigrant communities.
As someone who has signed-on the dole more than once and stood in hospital queues for many hours for emergency treatment, I’ve often found myself daydreaming about blowing the whole thing away with a nice heavy-calibre machine gun (bombs haven’t been the same since remote controls and timers). This had nothing to do with other people in the queue, they’re fellow sufferers, nor the people behind the bullet-proof counters (well not often), they’re mostly reasonable people asked to turn shit into gold by their superiors and their victims alike.
When there’s a riot in a town “by Moslems” it would be interesting to check exactly who is rioting, what their parents really think of it (not what a TV crew “finds”), what their source of income was before the riot, and exactly what the target was.
I’m guessing that most Moslems over 35 years old regard rioting in Britain as stupid and dangrous to all Moslems: actually it reminds me of “Rebel Without A Cause”, except these youngsters have a cause to justify themselves. Crime, especially 1) crime by those whites who see themselves at the back of the welfare queue and, 2) street drug trafficking, is main cause of Asian militancy in Britian. In the Palestinian camps, what more glamorous thing is there for an energetic young man to do?
None of this, I may be told, explains flying aeroplanes into skyscrapers. That however is so similar to the adolescent antics of the Leftist terrorists of the 1960s and 1970s in Western Europe. Note that two adolescents who weren’t Moslems tried to copy the terrorists (one in Italy, one in Florida).
The solution to that problem is to make it clear that anyone who crosses the line between wishing to “blow it all away” and actually buying a heavy-calibre machine gun for the purpose is going to fail, and die, and their names will either be forgotten or misspelt. I can’t remember the names of minor players in the Red Army Faction or the Red Brigades: will anyone remember what-his-name the guy who organised the hijaking in twenty years time? Not Bin Laden, the one who arranged the pilot training.
The most upsetting thing for a young fundamentalist terrorist is not being taken seriously. Conversely, talking up a gang of teenage virgin boys with small willies whose parents don’t understand them into the heroic vanguard of a billion fanatics on the march is fulfilling their wildest dreams. I won’t be popular in the US for thinking this but 9-11 was basically a bigger version of a crazy joyride, albeit deliberately stirred up by some truly evil people. Rather than execute these kids it might actually be a better deterrent to set them loose, but never to allow them to wear trousers or underwear again.
The people who point these kids in the direction where they do the most damage are people we should be worrying about. Frankly their motives are no different whether ecologist, socialist or racial supremacist: hatred of global markets and capitalism. I don’t believe the leading fundamentalists believe in it any more than Stalin believed in withering away the state.
So the two reasons for not getting excited about a Moslem threat are: 1) most Moslems feel threatened by the same thing Brian does, for example Southall is very near Heathrow airport, 2) it encourages those who want to create a war between Islam and the West. I rather like the approach taken by the British courts when I.R.A. terrorists used to stand trial (before the politicians decided to take them seriously). The judge would simply consider the crime and the appropriate sentence. The convicted murderer would be refused any legal recognition for the political motivation of his actions. I could write at length on this subject, but it would monopolize this blog. Perhaps Brian and I should discuss this offline and come back with an understanting on where we disagree.
The accumulation of medical information by the state is a bad idea for too many reasons to list here. The reason its being done is part of the desperate attempt to make the National Health Service work at any cost. For my part I look forward to the News of the World (a very downmarket British tabloid) informing us which cabinet minister’s wife has head lice, which one takes Prozac, who’s receiving treatment for haemorroids and which cabinet minister’s children won’t have the autism jab.
Of course it is rather difficult arguing against breach of doctor-patient confidentiality on pragmatic grounds: first national databases could be handy in a bio-warfare emergency, it would be handy for the state to know where the greatest threat of smallpox epidemics are. Second, lawyers caved in on this issue of client confidentiality, banks on financial records, now doctors. Oddly enough the most principled professionals are the media. Perhaps it makes a difference that journalists, unlike doctors or lawyers, aren’t working in a licensed sector: a journalist who rats on sources is competing with others who will protect theirs.
The existence of the blogsphere and web media provides a “back street” media which is what the medical profession needs right now. If we had a flourishing industry of back-street abortionists, state centralized records would be meaningless. I confess that’s the most unlikely argument I’ve ever put forward for banning abortions.
Perry’s internet connection has been on the blink all day, on account of it being cable-based. That little power cut (see my previous post below, end of) apparently deranged his cable company. (His cable TV was out also. I hate that. Always keep business and pleasure on separate kit, I say. That way, when one fails you can still do the other.) Anyway the upshot is I promised Perry I’d shove something onto Samizdata tonight. Which is now.
Well the blog fairy has spoken, and I have my topic. It’s one of those mildly entertaining American movies (I’m combining blog pleasure with the pleasure of late night junk TV) about decorative but badly behaved people with nicer houses and swimming pools and weather than they deserve. It stars David Caruso and Marg Helgenberger and is called Elmore Leonard’s Gold Coast. And the David Caruso character has just said something calculated to annoy Samizdata and just about all its friends and readers everywhere:
“People who don’t own guns don’t get shot as often as people who do.”
That sounds like one of the big pro-gun-control mantras to me. Now most anti-anti-gun-controllers are no doubt familiar with all the wrongnesses of this mantra, but indulge me. It’s a somewhat new claim to me, and I want to explain (basically to myself) what’s wrong with it.
Error One – that the only bad thing a person with a gun can ever do to you is shoot you. But of course there’s something else, in fact a lot else. He can threaten to shoot you, and then without actually shooting you he can do lots of other bad things to you, or that you would otherwise have stopped him doing. So even if owning a gun yourself might have got you into a gun fight, the risks of such a fight might easily have been preferable to what happens as a result of you not being able to even threaten such a fight. Not getting shot is not a guarantee of happiness. You may not get shot, but you may be raped, or robbed, or powerless while your family ditto. There are worse things than getting shot, even than being shot dead.
Error Two – most of the above applies also to when you are attacked by someone physically stronger than you, but when neither you nor he has a gun. It all applies if, for example you are an averagely strong male who is not good at hand-to-hand combat, while he’s an above averagely strong male who is. In those circumstances you brandishing a gun makes all the difference (provided you’re willing to use it), even if you do take the risk that the physically stronger attacker does have a gun after all and waves it back at you in “self defence”.
Error Three, and I think this is my biggest objection – the benefits of widespread gun ownership among non-criminals for the purpose of self-defence are dispersed throughout society. Even if it were true that “people who own guns don’t get shot as often as people who do”, and even if getting shot was the worst thing that could happen to you, and the risk of getting shot was the worst risk you could take, that still wouldn’t mean that non-criminals being forbidden to own guns (the real world effect of gun control laws) is a good public policy. The widespread existence of non-criminals willing to take the risks alluded to by the David Caruso character may not make life safer for each non-criminal gun-owner, but between them these people sure as hell make for a better world. And if enough non-criminals can be persuaded to accept these burdens, the criminals pretty much give up, and the guns need never be fired, just owned. Think of the non-criminal gun-owners as soldiers in the war against crime, a war which they and only they can win. And think of David Caruso as the guy who says, don’t be a soldier, you’ll only get yourself shot at. That may make sense, even if the “only” is overstating things. But pacifism as a public policy absolutely does not make sense merely for that reason.
As for the claim that it’s the job of “experts” – like the good police – to do all the good gun-fighting against the bad criminals, and not the good civilians, well that seems to me like saying that you can win a land battle with the massed ranks of your own infantry stripped of all their weapons, but backed up by “expert” air power. Tell that to the Marines.
That last little metaphor might actually have contributed something useful to the argument, in the form of an aphorism worth copying and pasting to other places. Keep writing for long enough, and eventually you find yourself being brief, and to the point.
My speaker at my fast approaching last-Friday-of-the-month discussion evening for this May (the 31st) will be Gerald Hartup (who has just started something called Liberty and Law – no website as yet – which sounds interesting). The subject, a tricky one, will be “How to Talk About Race, Culture, Immigration, Asylum, etc.”. I don’t want the evening to degenerate into a nitpick about the current British government’s current asylum policies, from the point of the view of the current British government, and with the assumptions that underpin the current British debate about these matters. What I want us to think about is: What should those assumptions be? I want us to think about meta-context, to coin a phrase. We’ve had plenty of discussion along such lines here, as you may have noticed.
I think I already know one of the rules for such discussion, which is that you should always talk about these matters with the mind-fix in place that maybe there’s an actual, honest-to-God asylum seeker listening to what you’re saying. This is one of the big facts behind Political Correctness. “Now we have to worry about the feelings of Afghans and Somalis and Slovaks.” Damn right we do, and a good thing too. Part of the `right wing’ thing is that you don’t have to do this and shouldn’t have to do this. But you do now. One of the things I most like about writing for something like Samizdata is that, what with all these hundreds of hits we have every day, this mind-fix isn’t entirely artificial. Such people really might be reading in, such is the potential reach of the blogosphere. And someone might definitely be reading in on this who falls into the category of those who can say in all honesty: “Some of my best friends are asylum seekers.” I really like that.
Example. Another speaker I’ve already fixed is the estimable David Carr, who’ll be doing September of this year (the 27th), giving us an update on what’s happening in the Middle East. One of the reasons I fixed this event with such enthusiasm was that David’s talk last year on the same subject was good in particular in the exact way I’ve just referred to.
David’s sympathy – his “bias” you could say – is with the Israelis, but there is bias and there is bias. There’s the kind which causes you to be blind to facts or to conceal facts or even to just make up non-facts, and to be blind to the feelings of anyone except your own folks. And then there’s the kind of bias which consists of admitting that yes, this is where your “bias” is, but nevertheless managing to describe things accurately and fairly. I recall with particular pleasure that present at that meeting which David addressed was another British guy who had spent quite some time in the West Bank, among the Arabs there. His “bias” was a very different thing to David’s. Yet when it came to the facts of the matter – who did what when, what all the biases of the various actors in the drama were, and so on – this Arab-friendly man and David were in complete accord. I can’t say we managed to actually solve anything Middle-East-wise that night, but that particular degree of agreement I found very pleasing.
If this coming Friday is as good, I’ll have no complaints. Email us if you are interested in learning more about these meetings. The London SWPosh area has just had a mysterious power cut lasting a quarter of a second (a phenomenon I’ve never experienced before). I’m all okay, but Perry’s phone connection has temporarily collapsed, so send emails to me at if you want to be sure of getting through.
Yesterday at Instapundit, just in case there are any Samizdata readers who read this but not that, there was a link to a story in the Boston Globe about the failure of anti-gun laws to control crime, in Britain. Depressing. The story. And the fact that the story seems only to be being told in America.
Three cheers and bloody hurrah for Iain Duncan Smith for having some backbone and standing up to both our government and Spain’s over the latters petulant and childish demands on Gibraltar
It’s been an awful long time since any mainstream politician of any stripe stood up to the demands of Europeans over anything but such feathers has he ruffled that:
“Iain Duncan Smith suffered a diplomatic rebuff prior to his three-day European tour, starting today, when Spain’s prime minister cancelled plans to meet him.
And it looks like IDS is not going to back down. Good. Now if he can stand the carpetting he is assuredly going to get in the press (“xenophobe, anti-Europe, intransigent, extreme right-winger…yadda…yadda…yadda”) then we’ll know that whether he’s actually got a brass set or not.
Believers, show discernment when you go to fight for the cause of Allah, and do not say to those that offer you peace: “You are not believers,” – seeking the chance booty of this world; for in the world to come there are abundant gains. Such was your custom in days gone by, but now Allah has bestowed on you His grace.
-The Koran 4:93
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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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