A healthy nation is as unconscious of its nationality as a healthy man is of his bones. But if you break a nation’s nationality it will think of nothing else but getting it set again.
– George Bernard Shaw (in the Preface to John Bull’s Other Island – 1904)
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December 18th, 2002 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
 I clearly recall that first time I attended a meeting of the Libertarian Alliance here in London. The guest speaker, a very earnest but rather monochromatic fellow (whose name, I must confess, I cannot now recall) was issuing forth on the subject of the purpose of the Libertarian Alliance and what its goals should be. His conclusion was that those goals should, at the very least, include ‘the spreading of good ideas’. That sounded like a worthwhile project and, indeed, it is one in which I am engaged to this day. But, how to do it? That’s the real trick. Marketing is dead simple when you’re peddling, say, luxury motor cars. But if you’re peddling the kind of ideas that make luxury motor cars both possible and widely available then you tend to find that you’re butting your head against a brick wall of indifference. Perhaps we should take a leaf out of the book of those people who spread bad ideas because they seem to be enjoying no end of success, especially in Southern Africa:
Now one would think that the experience of a lunatic marxist regime transforming a neighbouring country from a relatively prosperous bread-basket into a ‘Year Zero’-type hellhole would provide a pretty stark lesson in ‘How Not To Do Things’. But, such is the seductive power of those bad ideas, that they can trump even the most graphic and immediate realities. And so British libertarians are left wrestling with the puzzle of how we capture that magic driver for impelling bad ideas and turn it to good use. It is a thorny and will-sapping problem but one of far less magnitude than the one facing those South Africans of European or Asian descent. As far as they are concerned, all I can say is that I sincerely hope that they have an exit strategy because the day that they’re going to sorely need one appears to be getting closer. December 18th, 2002 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
I was reporting the events in and around Parliament Square yesterday afternoon, for a French magazine. Having previously attended the 1998 Countryside March and the 2002 Liberty & Livelihood March, I was able to observe the differences in mood. In 1998 the typical banner read “Please listen to us!” Yesterday was not a peaceful protest but an act of civil disobedience. I took a careful look at the people, mostly men who took on the police. One looked like a soccer hooligan, baseball cap, beer gut and the drooling stupidity of English nationalism at its worst: the police didn’t even bother arresting him when he broke through the police cordon. The others were in their late thirties or forties. They looked more like farm labourers than landowners. They also looked rather more interested in provoking a battle than dialogue. The campaign badge said “Bollocks to Blair”. No pretence at dialogue there. In all the police acted with almost incredible restraint, police horses were shoved backwards by huntsmen who tried to unbuckle saddles and throw riders. Smoke bombs were thrown by Real C.A. activists, sometimes at police. The Real C.A. activists, who have promised a campaign of direct action against the ban on hunting, were handing out Real C.A. stickers but not wearing them themselves to avoid detection. Some of the demonstration leaders were giving instructions in Welsh to confuse the eavesdropping Special Branch. There were eight arrests, but most of the violent offenders were allowed to rejoin the crowd. I overheard a reporter interviewing a campaigner and asking why they didn’t go through the normal channels: support the Tories, for instance. The reply indicated that for these protesters at least, they have to create their own opposition. Shortly before I left I heard a police officer saying to a mother with two young children who were screaming “Blair Out!” and cheering a particularly vigourous charge against the mounted police:
He looked as if he’d just realised that his parents could be attacking another part of the human shield of police. Unlike his Parisian police counterparts in 1943, he has the option of refusing to collaborate. December 17th, 2002 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
Following on from yesterday’s fracas, first-hand reports are now on-line at the website of the Countryside Alliance. Of particular note is the report from Parliament Square by Simon Hart:
That sentiment has a vaguely familiar ring to it. I’m sure I’ve heard it somewhere before. December 17th, 2002 | Comments are closed
Michael Blowhard hits a very important nail on the head with this:
There were various comments afterwards trying to say that science is more like art than people think. But people (and Michael) are right and these commenters are wrong. Science is all about communal progress. Art is all about individual responses. Scientific theories compete according to which of them, in the collective opinion of the scientific community, constitutes the most progress. That science progresses, in the words of one of these commenters, “one funeral at a time” just means that scientists can be stubborn idiots, not that science is a matter of subjective individual whim. Truth, in the end, is a communal matter. The truth is what you and I and everybody else who is paying attention have, in the end, to agree about. Artistic excellence on the other hand … One commenter even suggested that Michael Blowhard ought to read more Feyerabend. This comment is my nomination for the silliest and most potentially disastrous blog comment of the year 2002. Michael Blowhard’s brain is an important blogosphere resource, but although I’ve never met him I sense that he’s the sort of person who would read Feyerabend, just because some twat anti-philosopher of anti-science had suggested this on Blowhards. Michael might emerge from the experience mentally unscathed, but the downside risk doesn’t bear thinking about. The importance of all this, as Michael himself explains very well, is that if you do accept that art “progresses”, then you immediately install a “taste mafia” in power who are there to tell you where art is just now, and where it’s been, and where it’s going. After all, if art is like science, that means we all must all defer to the art scientists, doesn’t it? And a vertical third finger to that. Or maybe the second finger also, Agincourt longbowman style. Tomorrow I hope to be meeting with my Little Man who will be installing my Cullture Blog for me. So far the operation has resembled the sad time about ten years ago or so when I tried to install a shower. While this worked, it had the two standard British shower settings: Far Too Hot and Far Too Cold. Then it stopped altogether. I do hope that my Culture Blog grief is all happening now, and that soon it will start and then just get better and better the way a British shower never would. The Blowhards have both inspired me and relaxed me about this project. They have inspired me by their very existence, and they have relaxed me by doing a proper culture blog so properly that I don’t have to worry about doing that myself and can just have some fun with my one, as and when I feel inclined. December 17th, 2002 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
As I have previously, ‘poverty’ is a measure of envy and class hatred Here are some measures that could make poverty worse or better. One might imagine that importing wealthy people into a country would help reduce poverty: Bill Gates turning up in the United Kingdom with £40,000,000 would increase the average wealth of British inhabitants. In fact this makes “poverty” worse according to poverty-campaigner logic. Let us imagine a country with nine inhabitants: a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h and i. If a, b, and c have incomes of 100 per year, d has 90, e and f have 50, h has 30 and i has 20, then total income is 540, average income is 60 and the poverty line is 30 if calculated as 50 per cent of average, or 36 if calculated as 60 per cent of average. The next year Bill Gates arrives with an income of 500. He employs h and i for an extra 20 per year (more than they were getting before). The result is: Bill Gates 460, a, b and c 100 each, d has 90, e and f have 50, h now also has 50 and i has 40. So everyone is out of the poverty level of the year before. But this is where relativism kicks in: the new poverty line is 52 or 57.2 (depending on the 50 or 60 percent definition). So Bill Gates has not only ‘failed’ to lift h and i out of poverty by giving them jobs that paid better, he has impoverished e and f, who were previously not poor, even though neither e nor f has lost any income. This tells us the first lesson of tackling “poverty”: no wealthy immigrants must be allowed. In fact all inward investment is bad according to this reasoning. Now imagine that the 1,000 million poorest people in the world (average income 0.01) were to come and live in this country instead of Bill Gates. Also imagine that none of them become billionaires but remain objectively poor. Total income becomes 10,000,540. Average income drops to 0.01000054 per year. So h with 30 and i with 20 are 3,000 and 2,000 times wealthier than the average, despite no increase in objective income. Also the billion paupers have incomes of 0.01 which is over 99.99 percent of the average, so none of them are “poor”, even though they can’t afford to buy a bread roll. Note that if half of the billion paupers were to raise their income to the previous average (60), they would be “evil exploiters” of the poor, so would h and i, even if they were to lose 90 percent of their incomes (to 3 and 2 respectively). This means that immigrants who are below the poverty line must be kept there for the sake of “social justice”! Therefore although all the billion immigrants will starve, they will not die in vain: they will have brought about social justice. A believer in immortal souls who suggested this policy, would be insane but sincere. The problem is that most socialists and social democrats are atheists… In the British case executing all elderly people aged over 60 who live alone on less than average household incomes would statistically eliminate poverty: either they would be dead, or more likely they would choose to live in groups of two or three and therefore rise towards average household income levels. Executing all students would also have a similar effect. Slaughtering everyone who lives alone would be a guaranteed success in a “War on Want”. This may appear insanely evil. Yet I have just described the policies of the Cambodian holocaust: Pol Pot really was ‘tackling poverty’. December 17th, 2002 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
Picture this: A CIA official in handcuffs, standing in the dock of the European Court at Strasbourg while a calcified, gravelly German judge hands down a life sentence. Far-fetched? Yes, but theoretically possible by dint of the orders issued by the Whitehouse,
which has made waves in Europe:
So, let’s imagine that a CIA trigger-man clips Mahmoud Al-Nutjob on the steps of his student hostel in Berlin. Is said CIA man going to be arrested by the German police? If so, is he going to be prosecuted by the German state? Would the US government intervene? If so, what form would that intervention take? I think that there could be a just a little friction here. *Tip to any CIA agent who may find himself in the above situation: don’t try the old ‘I was only obeying orders’ defence. It won’t cut much ice with Germans. December 17th, 2002 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
Truly awesome video footage taken from an American AC-130 gunship. [Media Player required]. Presumably, the footage was taken in Afghanistan. December 17th, 2002 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
Everyone knows the old joke. Q.How can you tell when a lawyer is lying? A. His lips are moving. It’s not true of course, but it is an accurate reflection of the popular antipathy towards lawyers in general; something which too many lawyers themselves have done much to foster. Still, I hope enough of my fellow Brits will be able to cast aside their natural cynicism of the legal profession for just long enough to applaud Matthias Kelly, the Chairman of the Bar Council, who has announced that he intends to take on this ‘highly illiberal’ government:
Admirable sentiments from Mr.Kelly. He has hit upon the truth that the abolition of our liberties is, in some senses, a by-product of incompetence rather than a deliberate political ambition. It has everything to do with a government that is desperate to be seen to be doing something in response to the voters increasing concerns about spiralling crime rates (or, in any event, the general perception of greater crime and violence). I wish Mr.Kelly every success with his campaign and I hope he will not be deterred by the inevitable response he will elicit from the government and its supporters, that he is motivated by greed and self-interest. It is no secret to anyone that barristers do very nicely from the system as it is and it is, therefore, all too easy to dismiss any genuine concerns they may have as fears for their own pocket. Such allegations may or may not have any basis in fact but, truth be told, I don’t care. Self-interest is always a reliable motivator and I would be only too pleased to witness it being put to a good use for a change. It is also pleasing to note that concerns about this illiberal government are now being publicly aired by the ‘great and the good’, a class to which Mr.Kelly assuredly belongs. Thus far, nobody of any public standing has been willing to rock the NuLabour boat. Let us hope that others follow his lead and begin to break their, hitherto, shameful silence. As for Mr.Kelly, who knows, perhaps he has been reading the Samizdata. December 16th, 2002 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
I suppose it’s a bit too tin-foil hattish to suggest that this might have been timed to coincide with the official visit of Syria’s President to Britain by the police to recruit paid informants sounds like exactly the kind of thing said President might recognise from his own Ba’athist tradition.
Question: How will either the informant or the police know if the alleged ‘drink-driver’ is ‘persistent’? I suppose the informant could swear blind to the fact, provided they needed the money enough. Of course, the Syrian regime has nothing to do with it at all, though it does have all the ring of ‘police-state’ snitch culture so sadly prevalent in that part of the world. No, the reality is that this is yet another back-door admission by the state that it has now passed more laws and regulations than it can possibly enforce and so has little choice but to co-opt the polity into acting as its eyes and ears. What next, I ask myself? ‘Kids, report your parents for not paying their taxes’? December 16th, 2002 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
Perry de Havilland gave a talk about “a year in the life of samizdata”, last Friday, at the Tim Evans Parents household, which which got me thinking about the rise of amateurism generally, and the rise of the amateur Foreign Correspondent in particular. I found myself arguing that the present tendency of the blogosphere not to have real foreign correspondents is surely temporary. Yes, the blogosphere is now a whole lot stronger, as Perry said, in editorial comment on the news than it is in news gathering itself, but soon, I surmise, there will be many new “foreign correspondents” blogging away. I might have added, but did not, that for many of us the majority of bloggers are already foreign correspondents on account of so many of them living in the USA, and many of us not. How on earth would I have found out about Trent Lott, and about what an imperfect person he is, had it not been for the blogosphere? (And yes, that is a fine double monosyllable to be called isn’t it? “The name’s Lott. Trent Lott.” But apparently he’s not that kind of forthright, no nonsense person at all. Very nonsensical indeed it would seem. This I have learned from the blogosphere’s numerous American correspondents, lead of course by the ultimate foreign correspondent, Instapundit.) And the network is growing. One of the more exotic ones is a (for me) recent discovery called China Hand. Here are the concluding paragraphs of a recent piece from him about the recent rise of Chinese Christianity:
→ Continue reading: The rise of the amateur Foreign Correspondent December 16th, 2002 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
Yesterday I saw an advert in the London Underground that I think said something interesting about the differences between different countries, namely the cost per minute of ringing them up. The advert was for something called Alpha Telecom which is apparently some sort of internet something-or-other for ringing people up in foreign parts. I can’t explain how that works, but I can give you the different prices for the different countries with which we Brits would appear to be in regular phone contact, because I jotted them down. The numbers don’t say which countries are the best. But perhaps they do say something about which countries work the best. It would seem that distance has nothing to do with anything here, which I guess because this is the Internet we’re talking about. The INternet murders distance. What seems to matter is degree of serenity or confusion at the destination of your call. All measurements of differential national merit strike me as interesting. What does it cost to become a citizen legally? What does it cost to become a citizen illegally? (Do some countries pay you to join?) Who gets the most sporting medals? What are the different credit ratings of different national governments? What proportion of people are wearing shoes? Driving cars? Connected to the Internet? Can read and write? Who scores highest and lowest, in the opinion of some bunch of people in Washington DC who measure “freedom” in different countries, and which countries have changed their scores the most since last year or in recent years? When does each country’s “tax freedom day” arrive, ditto? And so on. Well, maybe this cost of phone calls thing is another such score, albeit a very crude one. So here are the scores, in pence per minute I assume: Austria 4, Somewhere illegible (Canada I think) 4, France 4, Germany 4, Hong Kong 7, Ireland 4, New Zealand 4, Pakistan 20, Spain 4, Sweden 2, USA 3, Australia 4, India 20, South Africa 8, and: Internet 1. So, if I’m right about what this all means, the most efficient country in the world is the Internet, followed by Sweden, followed by the USA, followed by all the brand-X Western democracies. I think that Sweden and Hong Kong are the most interesting scores, the former for being so low, the latter for being rather high. Ireland and Spain have reputations for incompetence that they would seem to be shedding fast. I also wonder if Hong Kong, and maybe also South Africa, have gone or are going up, and whether either India or Pakistan are coming down from their current twin peaks. But maybe I’m quite wrong, and it means either nothing at all, or something very trivial. I’m sure our many techy readers will elucidate. If you do, gentlemen, could you include an explanation of what this system actually is and does, because I can’t make it out at all. Surely a telephone is a telephone, and the Internet is basically something you look at and type into and get email in and out of with a computer, with occasional videos and tunes as decoration. How can you phone the internet? December 16th, 2002 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
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