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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It was a old con trick in London’s East End. A street urchin would ‘hobble’ somebody’s parked car (usually by crawling under and pulling the connectors from the starter motor) and while the stricken owner was wondering how they were going to get home that night, up would pop said urchin, now as Good Samaritan, who would offer to get them going again…in return for a modest fee.
Those motorists were the lucky ones. The rest of us have been forced to hand over sums that are far from modest to urchins that we actually elect and as a result of an almost identical modus operandi.
Since HM government has dedicated much of the last 50 years to sucking every last drop of blood from our veins and is now shocked, SHOCKED to discover that the simple desire to save for one’s retirement is complex and forbidding. Of course it is. Since every successive Finance Act introduces new mechanisms for wealth-grabbing, financial service providers have had to twist and contort like Rumanian gymnasts in order to keep shirts on their customers backs. Just as an anti-body bombarded by viruses develops an ever-more impressive arsenal of chemical defences in order to stay one-step ahead.
The result is a business of pensions and savings that is so brain-gougingly complicated that many professional accountants and bankers admit that they no longer understand it.
So now the grift. HM government comes to the rescue on it’s White…sorry, Diverse Charger to save us poor peons from drowning in a sea of pure gobbledegook. Hooray for the government!!
Tom Burroughes has a dream for the government, I have a message: F*ck off and leave us alone. We’ll build our wealth quite nicely without you.
A few days ago my phone line went silent. I rang BT (British Telecommunications plc). After about ten minutes and several phone calls later, trying to dodge past multiple choice computers and computerised music, I eventually got to talk to some helpful humans. Do you, they asked, have any extensions on your line? (One badly behaved extension can shut everything down, it seems.) Yes, several. Unplug each one, they said, one at a time, and see if things improve. The extension in my bathroom was the culprit. It had got wet. When I unplugged it, all was well again. So, aside from the difficulty of getting through to the helpful humans in the first place, a good result. Another of the humans rang me the following day to check that all was well, which it was. Thank you gentlemen, great job, wonderful.
But then earlier today I had another call, from a market research company calling “on behalf of BT” wanting to ask me more questions about my “experience” with the fault I’d reported. I told them the story you have just read, minus the complaints about the multiple choice computers and the moron music. I said that I was very satisfied with the advice I’d been given, and that my problem was solved. No, no engineers had called. No worries. Okay?
No. Not okay. Would I mind “answering some questions” about all this? What?! I thought I just had. This would apparently take “about five minutes”. I said yes I would mind. I’ve just told you the story, for heaven’s sake. Write that down.
What was depressing about this call today was that although this was clearly an intelligent human doing the talking, he, unlike the people who had actually helped me, was obviously reading from a script, and this script had beaten all the commonsense out of him. I just couldn’t face five minutes (or more) wading through this conversational treacle just when I had got deep into doing something else. So, I said I would mind, and that was that.
Afterwards I felt bad about this. BT had helped me. Why couldn’t I answer a few questions? I felt guilty, and then angry about being made to feel guilty. Grrrr!
So, having snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, by telling me (eventually) how to handle my phone problem, BT then snatched defeat back again by trying to inflict an annoying conversation on me, and then making me feel bad about having said get lost.
Now that I think about it, it also annoys me intensely when BT calls me to ask whether I’d like my phone bill reduced. Yes, I say. Then please tell us which numbers you use most often. This is insane. They know the answer to that at least as well as I do, because they list it all on my phone bills. And after I’ve told them that, how many more questions will there be? I say: “If you want to cut my phone bill, then cut it. When you’ve decided about that, I’ll decide about whether I go on using BT. Put that in your questionnaire!” Jesus. But of course they can’t, because there’s no question that goes “Is this call driving you insane?”, and no box for “Yes it f***ing is!”, in this particular idiot script. You can feel BT’s market share collapsing during calls like these, right in front of their idiotically self-blinded eyes.
BT are fine at installing phones. Their engineers are fine, and great to deal with. But when it comes to the ancient and ignoble art of using telephones to drive people crazy, BT’s “marketers” and “market researchers” are, in my experience, among Britain’s leading offenders. It’s ironic when you think about it. Britain’s biggest phone company uses its own product to drive its own customers crazy.
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Dealing with and being dealt with by big organisations on the phone doesn’t have to be like this. BT should take some lessons from Viking Direct, from whom I and the Libertarian Alliance get our office supplies.
When I call Viking Direct it’s a human who answers, not a machine with a recorded humanoid voice, and she usually does this straight away. Sharon (“This is Viking Direct my name is Sharon how may I help you?”), or whoever, is most definitely the product of her training. But she uses her computer to make things easier for me rather than more impersonal and pre-scripted, for example by checking exactly which printer toner cartridges I ordered last time and ordering the exact same ones again, or by volunteering that there’s a special offer on A4 paper so I can have it even cheaper than usual, which, chances are, makes me order a couple of extra boxes.
Note that, BT. She tells me about the price cut, and immediately arranges for me to get it. There’s no nonsense about me having to tell them which item I order most frequently.
Nor does Sharon try to bash me into a pre-scripted conversational prison. We simply talk, like the two humans that we are. There’s the big clever machine, and there’s Sharon and me making maximum use of it, two people working intelligently together, both of us on the same side.
And nobody ever rings me up later to pester me about whether Sharon and her computer have been helpful, presumably because if they want to know this, they simply stand behind her and listen, or perhaps listen in on another extension.
Another for our “triumphs of capitalism” collection, don’t you agree?
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You will not be amazed to learn, if you don’t know it already, that whereas BT is a quasi-governmental, heavily regulated organisation which it is complicated and costly to take your business away from, Viking Direct, although big and bureaucratised, is nevertheless out there every hour of the day in the freest bit of the free market, the bit where me taking my business elsewhere is as easy as me picking up a different catalogue and trying a different number. Which is all part of why I haven’t and don’t plan to.
BT on the other hand, I may be switching from …
Socialism really only makes sense if you think that economies are like pies and fairness is all about deciding who gets what slice of that pie… it is the belief that economics is a zero sum game, or that the size of the pie remains the same and all that ‘society’ (meaning state) can do is cut it more fairly.
As this is of course a demonstrable absurdity, given that producing new services and products and opening up new markets actually increases the size of the ‘pie’, it follows that wealth destroying socialist notions of ‘fairness’ are also demonstrable absurdities. This is the ‘fixed wealth fallacy’ that we have often mentioned on this blog… the reality is that me getting richer does not make you any poorer.
Thus it is refreshing to see that Brendan O’Neill, a writer for what used to be called ‘Living Marxism’ and is now called Sp!ked, is also rejecting the fixed wealth fallacy. Making Americans consume less cosmetics or buy less pet food will not make people less poor in the Sudan or anywhere else.
As a result, given that worthy blogger Brendan describes himself as ‘anti-capitalist’, I can only assume that what he is actually ‘anti’ is the sort of statist corporatist capitalism that all libertarians also abominate. It sounds like Brendan is well on the way to being against trade tariffs that discriminate against the third world and against the notion that states trade with each other (in reality people and companies trade with each other)… in short, Brendan seems to heading towards the logical consequence of rejecting the fixed wealth fallacy: laissez faire capitalism.
What say you, Brendan?
I cannot but note the discrepancy between compensations awarded to people who suffered from defective products on the opposite sides of the Atlantic. Take for example the classic(!) case of Stella Liebeck who was awarded $2.9 million in damages for spilling a cup of McDonald’s coffee on herself.
Compare this to a case in France, where it apparently takes more than a hot cup of coffee to claim damages, which are, in any case, nowhere near as spectacular. A French court has ordered two medical associations to pay damages to the family of a woman, Pascale Fachin, who died a horrible lingering death from the human form of mad cow disease (vCJD) after growth hormone treatment was administered with contaminated products to the tune of €394,000 (£253,060). Oh, and a paltry few thousand €uros to friends who looked after Fachin during her illness.
Go figure…
Not just blind but deaf, dumb and stupid
I have just had the pleasure of reading through a 221-page report sent to the British government on what should be done to make us save more.
Attending the press conference, I listened to the mild-manner Ron Sandler take us through the thicket of tax codes, rules and varied practises of Britain’s Byzantine financial industry. Nodding off for a second, I fell into a strange dream:
“Ladies and gentlemen, today’s report on how to stop shafting the British saver is brought to us today by Prof. Tom Burroughes of Libloony University. He has kindly produced this report, which, er, is rather short.” Cut to moi: “Members of the press, you will see my report is only one page long. Its recommendation is brief – abolish taxation and get government out of the savings business. Period. End of story.”
At this point a strange noise emerges from the assembled hacks. Muffled cries from back of the room…
I suddenly woke up, hope no-one noticed my nodding off, and listened for an hour about differential tax codes, the need for fewer rules on X rather than Y, blah, blah. blah.
NASA Glenn announced today it has demonstrated high-power electric propulsion with a type of thruster known as a Hall Effect thruster. They say the test unit, known as NASA-457M is
“A giant leap toward enabling high power electric propulsion was recently demonstrated. With power levels up to 72 kW and nearly 3 Newtons of thrust, NASA’s Glenn Research Center, Cleveland, has designed, built and successfully tested a 50 kW-class Hall thruster.”
The technology will have important commercial satellite applications. The possibility of more than doubling commercial payload masses to Geostationary Orbit (GSO) is certain to impact the bottom line of the entire GSO service industry.
Work of this sort is the modern equivalent of what NACA did for the aviation industry in the early days of american aviation.
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Times may be modified by CNN to within 30 minutes of the scheduled time.
Most of the news I hear from South Africa is bad. AIDS. AIDS denial. Crime. And black politicians blaming everything on white racism and trying to impose equal outcomes by the force of law, as opposed to equality before the law with the outcomes coming out as they will. As a sports fan, I particularly noticed what sounded like a truly vile quota rule, insisting that there had to be at least one black player in the national cricket team. They also, I learned today when digging deeper, had a rule that provincial cricket sides had to have at least four “players of colour” in them.
The good news is that they are now scrapping these quotas. South Africa’s Sports Minister is having “talks” with South Africa’s United Cricket Board. But assuming that talk is all that ensues, that the Minister is reassured rather than determined to over-ride and over-rule, and that the quotas will indeed be got rid of, this is the best news I’ve heard from South Africa for quite some time.
Positive discrimination rules of this kind perpetuate the process of judging people according to skin colour and collective racial membership rather than on individual merit. The South Africa cricket quota rules were bound to give rise to the suspicion that individual players, even players who in fact fully deserved international recognition, had in fact only got into the national team because of “politics”.
Quota rules are especially depressing in sport, because sport has traditionally been an arena where, because results matter so much and because individual merit is so hard to ignore, hitherto disadvantaged racial groups have time and again been able to make their first big strides towards social and legal equality, lead by their greatest individual sportsmen. From a TV documentary screened in connection with the recent soccer World Cup about the great Pele, for example, I learned for the first time what a big part the unavoidably brilliant talent of that great sportsman played in breaking down the racism so powerful in Brazil in the nineteen fifties. (Brazil won the recent World Cup, with a team containing, of course, numerous coloured players.)
Assuming that the South Africans really have now dumped their cricket quota rules, I am even willing to say, retrospectively, and despite their obvious ghastliness, that I can see why they had these rules, temporarily, and that I can see what they may have achieved with them. By flagging up the issue of non-white participation in cricket in this aggressively interventionist manner, the South African cricket authorities at least made it clear that they were serious about involving all South Africans in cricket and not just white South Africans. The quotas may now have ended, but the UCB has made it very clear that all the other efforts South African cricket has been making to achieve greater equality of cricketing opportunity (and thereby in due course lots of non-white international representation on merit), such as new pitches and new coaching schemes in non-white areas, will continue.
Science is a volatile subject. Traditional science originated from observations of the physical, specific and the immediate. As it progressed to modern science, the turning point being the Newtonian framework for understanding the universe, its evolution to Einstein’s theory of relativity and later quantum theory and computational science, it has increasingly concerned itself with abstract and often counter-intuitive concepts. In recent years a number of alternative scientific paradigms have sprung up and regardless of whether they end up being the next orthodoxy, they have already demolished some of the foundational theories in many scientific fields. Science, itself subject to evolution, pushes the Final Theory further as its horizons expand.
Religion is a stable and more or less fixed subject, certainly compared to science. It does make statements about physical reality and human affairs, but it does not concern itself with the temporary and the transient. I am therefore surprised that Brian can make such definite comparative statements about the two:
…the Book of Genesis makes claims about the origin of the earth and of its biological contents which, as was well understood in the late nineteenth century when these matters were first debated, are in total opposition to the theory of evolution. Either God was the maker of heaven and earth (as I was made to proclaim every Sunday morning when I recited the Creed at school) and men and beasts and plants and bugs, along the lines claimed in Genesis, or he was not.
You can’t have it both ways. Only by completely overturning what Christianity has meant for the best part of two thousand years, as the Church of England seems now to be doing by turning Christianity from a religion into a political sect, can you possibly believe that there’s no argument here.
I do not know whether you can have it both ways, but I am certainly not convinced by Brian’s argument. It doesn’t do to point out that one is ‘an orthodox twentieth century boy’ in one’s scientific ‘dogmatism’ and then proceed making sweeping suggestions as to intellectual viability of religion as a whole. The underlying assumptions at work here seem to be: a) the religious texts can only be interpreted in the 19th century fashion and b) the traditional understanding of evolution is correct and/or final. I shall not grace Brian’s use of the Church of England’s website with any assumptive force or category.
 The book of Genesis, written many moons ago, does contain some very specific and visual claims about how the world came about. The interpretation Brian is familiar with would have been based on 18th century ‘deism’, a rather mechanistic understanding of the world, gradually upgraded with the scientific knowledge as it progressed into 19th century. It wasn’t until 20th century that several scientific disciplines have been shaken to their axioms but none of the tremors have yet been translated into a wider meta-contextual knowledge, quantum theory being a good case in point.
 Brian says that ‘creationism’ is in total opposition to ‘evolution’. Without getting bogged down in definitions, if creationism means that the world was created, word by word, according to the book of Genesis, as some fundamentalist Christians insist, then I agree with Brian. However, that neither confirms validity of evolution as currently understood nor confines Christianity to the dustbin of the unscientific and irrational.
Let’s have a look at evolution. One of the foundations of the theory of evolution is natural selection. According to a modern paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, the fact that there are thousands of potential shell shapes in the world, but only a half dozen actual shell forms, is evidence of natural selection. According to my favourite scientist and complexity theorist, Stephen Wolfram, you don’t need natural selection to pare down evolution to a few robust forms. He also discovered a mathematical error in Gould’s argument and there are, in fact, only six possible shell shapes, and all of them exist in the world.
Organisms evolve outward to fill all the possible forms avaiable to them by the rules of cellular automata. [ed.note: Cellular automata are a set of self-reproducing mathematical rules.] Complexity is destiny – and Darwin becomes a footnote. A mollusk is essentially running a biological software programme.
Stephen Wolfram’s discovery about the nature of the universe suggests that the complexity that we see in the natural world can originate from very simple rule(s). One of the implications of his work is that it creates a ‘bleeding-edge’ scientific theory that proposes that the entire universe – with its perplexing combination of good and evil, order and chaos, light and dark – could have been started by a First Mover using a dozen rules.
It is therefore possible that neither science nor religion are ‘finished’ with their understanding of the nature of reality. For science, new paradigms may change the way it views the universe(s). For religion, it may not be necessary to revise its texts as the ‘creationist’ interpretation becomes irrelevant in the light of new scientific knowledge. One thing is certain though, I have more sense than to start debating religion with a devout atheist and especially one whose atheism, in his more lucid (i.e. not anti-religious) moments, is entirely rational. I merely object to the very narrow interpretation of ‘science’ and ‘religion’, namely Christianity, used to make a rather glove-in-your-face point.
Jack Heald poses some interesting questions to Brian‘s views on science and religion.
Brian Micklethwait is spot-on in his analysis of the conflict between the claims of orthodox Christianity and the claims of Darwinism. Any Christian Church and any Christian person that believes orthodox Christianity and Darwinism can peacefully co-exist is deluded.
But I wonder why someone who posts to a “critically rational” blog would claim to believe that “creationism is bunkum”.
Is it because he is already a committed materialist and Darwinism is the only theory of origins which supports his beliefs? Is it because so many so-called “creationists” are such obvious idiots? Is it because the prevailing weight of public opinion is biased towards Darwinism? Is it because anyone who claims that creationism is a better scientific model is reviled as a bible-thumping fundamentalist, and he cannot bear to be lumped in with those folks?
Surely it’s not because he has carefully weighed the evidence and decided Darwinism is a better model. I have yet to find anyone who, after carefully reviewing the data, concludes that the evidence supports the Darwinian model and contradicts the creationist model.
Are the implications of creationism a little scary? Certainly. But are scary implications any reason to avoid studying anything? Only for the uncritical and the irrational.
Jack Heald
In his article yesterday, Brian agrees with the most ridiculous Christians in order to denounce them. This is all too familiar, he used the same polemic tactic when denouncing Ayn Rand.
In the first place, Darwin’s theory needs extensive modification: the actual mechanism of change isn’t confirmed by paleontological findings: one quarter-horse, three-quarters giraffe, then two-thirds giraffe, then half-giraffe, leading up to modern giraffes. There seems to be sudden bursts of extinctions and sudden appearances of new creatures, which is inconsistent with the Darwinian account of progressive change. It would make more sense to call the Theory revolution than evolution.
Second, the origin of the universe appears to have been a sudden event (a ‘Big Bang’). The Genesis account of the creation of the universe is as good an illustration as any available to us. Compared with what other theories were in circulation in 2,000 BC it’s remarkable. What evidence does anyone have that Big Bang was something other than a deliberate act? I know I can’t prove the Christians wrong about the creation of the universe. Brian apparently thinks that because humans weren’t made on the sixth day, therefore God didn’t create the universe. He may be right, but the assertion is not logically valid. That means that a conclusion that CAN be true if the premises are false is logically invalid.
We could use In the following logically valid reasoning:
Premise 1: Either God created the universe as described literally in the book of Genesis or Darwinian evolution is true.
Premise 2: Darwinian evolution is true.
Conclusion: Therefore, God didn’t create the universe as described literally in the book of Genesis or Negative that God and Creation are true.
But what the argument has not demonstrated is that Darwin and God are exclusive:
The conclusion – Negative that God and Creation are true – is not valid from the premises listed above.
If Darwinian theory is true then both premises are true. But if God actually started Big Bang (for example by sneezing) and Darwinian theory merely describes what happened next, then the conclusion is false. Nothing in the premises excludes this possibility, therefore the argument is logically invalid.
Third, making any point about Christianity in relation to the nationalized Church of England is as relevant as using British Leyland in 1970 as a case example of capitalism. This doesn’t stop some people from doing so: mostly anarchists who think the USSR was an advanced capitalist society.
I look forward to Brian’s dismissal of logic as the devil’s script. 
I’ve been having philosophical thoughts on the Tony Martin affair and some of those thoughts crystalized as I was talking it over with my business partner, a fellow who grew up on the Falls Road.
Government has scarce enough reasons for existing at all, but very few citizens would disagree the core of the “social contract” is protection of person and property. In a healthy community this is the primary role of the police. A free society will not have enough police to have them everywhere, nor will it allow mass surveillance and the corresponding destruction of privacy. Citizens will be expected to defend themselves. They will know police are their friends, always ready to help them in time of need.
Tony Martin’s actions should hardly be noteworthy enough to make the local news. If the incident were noted at all, he would be reported as an exemplary citizen doing exactly what is expected of any good citizen. He would have wounded or detained the troublemakers. The police would have come by, thanked him and perhaps had a spot of tea to pass the time until the ambulance arrived to haul the sorry carcasses off for patching up so a judge could put them away.
Mr Fearon would now be serving a very, very long sentence. He would be held up as a total disgrace, a human being with no intrinsic worth.
But we do not live in a healthy community. Good citizens are fair game for scum; if the scum get hurt they are lionized as downtrodden victims. Meanwhile the real victims are dragged off and given a good swift kick in the goolies for good measure.
This is an unstable situation. If good citizenship is held in contempt there will soon not be any. The social contract has been violated and the result will not be salutory. If there is one social good people will not do without, it is personal safety. If the government can not supply that good, the provision of it will go underground. One should not find this idea surprising as a good fraction of the economy has already done so. Those of Statist mentality don’t seem to understand there is a “conservation law” at work. If there is a demand for a good and they promise to provide it and do not, words will not replace the missing quantity. An underground method will appear and will grow until it satisfies the need. If the government interferes with the underground service provision, we’ll end up with Colombian Neighborhood Watch cartels.
If you want a view of the future this insane treatment of Mr Martin has in store for you, look to the sectarian communities in Belfast during the depths of the Troubles. The government did not, and could not (and was not welcome to) deal with local crime. But the streets here were safer than those of London or Dublin. There was very little crime of any sort for the simple reason the community did not allow it. No one spoke about exactly who the fellows in the ski masks were even though they were friends and neighbors. The men folk went out and “took care of” street crime by the simple expedient of “taking care of” the trouble makers. If you were into robbery and such you got a warning. Then you got your knees done. If you were too stupid to get the point by then the next lesson was final. Rapists got the final lesson first and rape was virtually nonexistent.
It’s no surprise crime is on the rise now that the Troubles are history. You still hear about punishment beatings, but they are less severe and less common than before. I am not saying this is right; I am not seeing it is good. It is just the nearest to home example of “conservation of justice” I could come up with.
Government is not the sole source of justice. If it fails to do it’s job; if it fails to encourage good citizenship and honour those who openly defend their property and person we will have vigilantism. Men and women in masks. 3am executions of trouble makers. Disappeared criminals who might have only served a prison term in a normal society. All this and the climate of fear that goes with underground violence…
..for if the government does not provide the goods, others will and they will not have the luxury of leaving witnesses alive.
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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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