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]
|
Following on from Brian Micklethwait’s earlier post, the likelihood of a Euro-poll in the current UK parliament, is looking increasingly distant. However, as this related Telegraph leader article puts it:
… sincere euro-fanatics need not despair entirely, for the proposed European constitution would make the question of euro membership largely redundant. Under its terms, Brussels would “coordinate the economic and employment policies of the member states” … In such circumstances, the right to mint our own currency would be like Scotland’s right to print its own banknotes today: symbolically important, but no guarantee of economic independence. Perhaps Mr Blair is playing a longer game than we think.
So in John Prescott’s future ‘Europe of the Regions’, governed by the European Constitution, we could get ‘co-ordinated’ into the euro currency zone with or without the needless inefficiency of a referendum on the matter. We may not lose the pound, but one pound sterling could be devalued by the ruling European junta into being exactly equivalent to one euro, and then pegged there indefinitely until the day finally arrives for the assumption of Emperor Blair to the throne of Euro-topia. The need for any currency, of any kind, will then disappear, of course, as we all collapse into each others’ arms in a brotherhood of love and not-for-profit compassion.
Though saying that, if I were Tony Blair one hundred percent of my thoughts would be concentrated on my getting just to the end of this week, never mind the possible future glories of my imperial splendour. But he’s a slippery customer; I would never put anything past him.
I’ve already linked to this amazing Guardian article from my Education Blog, but it deserves wider blog-reader notice than that.
Sandra Thompson was used to her son’s weekend rhythm – the immediate relaxation and laughter of Friday afternoons, the dark mood that descended every Sunday as another week loomed. “With the first mention of school, Thomas must have had the same thoughts – are they going to be at the bus stop, are they going to get me today, do I have enough money on me to cover what they take?
He should have been out of there.
Mother and grandmother offer a picture of a boy whose main problem seems to have been his inability to behave like a child. “He loved being one-to-one with adults,” says Sandra. “He loved to have conversations, but you couldn’t talk about something silly. He always wanted to know adult stuff, and sometimes I didn’t have the answers. He was constantly asking about the war with Iraq, and wanting to know the ins and outs of what countries had been attacked in the past. He always wanted to know what it was like to be older. He couldn’t wait to learn to drive, get his own place, go to college, make his fortune.”
So why the hell did he have to wait? Okay, I will give you the driving, but why not his own fortune, his own place, his own life?
While waiting about to make his fortune and start his life, he filled in time by going to anti-Iraq-war demos. He was pretty good at that apparently.
This is the bit that made me most angry about being a member of this pathetic dim-witted species of ours.
In his final report, the headteacher of his primary school described Thomas as one of the most courageous boys he’d ever met because of the years of bullying he’d survived.
What is so depressing is the sense you get from all the adults who presided over this disaster that there was simply nothing they could do about it. “He couldn’t crack it in school.” And I couldn’t crack it when I tried to make it in the building trade half a lifetime ago. As soon as I realised I was hopeless at doing building I stopped doing it, and did something else. It really wasn’t a difficult decision to make.
Here’s this teacher, the Head of his School no less, and he is well aware that this poor kid is being driven crazy, but what could he do? Birds gotta fly. Fish gotta swim. And boys gotta go to school, no matter how completely horrible it is for them.
No.
More than 200 mourners packed St Paul’s Church, Wirral, to say goodbye to Thomas Thompson, many of them children. By the day after the funeral, Sandra had received so many cards that she had to display some of them on the floor around the mantelpiece. “He was a lovely lad,” says his grandmother, “and he touched a lot of people’s hearts.”
So why the hell didn’t they do something to help the poor kid while he was still alive?
I have to force myself to be sympathetic to mother, because frankly, it doesn’t come very naturally to me.
Her eyes get wet. “It’s hard. You’re empty. There are no words to describe it. You start asking yourself all sorts of questions. Were you a good parent? Did you do everything you possibly could have done? Should you have bypassed his decision and gone up to the school? But how would you ever have let him grow up if you’d done that? You go round in a circle – if only, what if? You do live through but the one thing that you can never get over is that you’ll never see him again in this life.”
You were a bad parent. You didn’t do anything like all that was possible. You shouldn’t just have “gone up to the school”, you should have yanked him out of there. And any world which didn’ t tell you that loud and clear is crazy.
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman gets it at least partially right with his latest column:
We are attracting all these opponents to Iraq because they understand this war is The Big One. They don’t believe their own propaganda. They know this is not a war for oil. They know this is a war over ideas and values and governance. They know this war is about Western powers, helped by the U.N., coming into the heart of their world to promote more decent, open, tolerant, women-friendly, pluralistic governments by starting with Iraq — a country that contains all the main strands of the region: Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds.
. . . .
In short, America’s opponents know just what’s at stake in the postwar struggle for Iraq, which is why they flock there: beat America’s ideas in Iraq and you beat them out of the whole region; lose to America there, lose everywhere.”
→ Continue reading: The big one
Thinking has been given a bad press. Feeling did not devise a law of gravity: thinking did.
– Madsen Pirie, quoted in a Guardian article on ’emotional literacy’
Last week we had a rather stiff debate on the downsides of Coalition policing in Iraq here, here and here.
In this post Salam Pax responded to a recent email. He could just as well have been reading and responding to the comments of many of our readers. Go read it.
As for me, the more I read, the more I like the guy. I hope someday we will either have the honour of his presence at a Samizdata London Blogger Bash, or an opportunity to sit an afternoon in a Baghdad cafe with him… sipping only culturally allowable beverages of course!
Absolutely appalling interview with Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm unearthed at the National Review Online’s bloggish Corner:
IGNATIEFF: In 1934, millions of people are dying in the Soviet experiment. If you had known that, would it have made a difference to you at that time? To your commitment? To being a Communist?
HOBSBAWM: This is the sort of academic question to which an answer is simply not possible…I don’t actually know that it has any bearing on the history that I have written. If I were to give you a retrospective answer which is not the answer of a historian, I would have said, ‘Probably not.’
IGNATIEFF: Why?
HOBSBAWM: Because in a period in which, as you might imagine, mass murder and mass suffering are absolutely universal, the chance of a new world being born in great suffering would still have been worth backing. Now the point is, looking back as an historian, I would say that the sacrifices made by the Russian people were probably only marginally worthwhile. The sacrifices were enormous; they were excessive by almost any standard and excessively great. But I’m looking back at it now and I’m saying that because it turns out that the Soviet Union was not the beginning of the world revolution. Had it been, I’m not sure.
IGNATIEFF: What that comes down to is saying that had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of fifteen, twenty million people might have been justified?
HOBSBAWM: Yes.
→ Continue reading: The face of the enemy
There was a White Rose relevant piece by Alasdair Palmer about the DC Stevens case in yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph.
The more repulsive the crime, the greater the temptation to weaken the burden on the prosecution to prove its case beyond reasonable doubt. Child abuse – and child pornography cannot be produced without child abuse – is a very repulsive crime. Yet the result of giving in to the temptation to lower the standard of evidence required to convict someone suspected of child abuse is inevitably that innocent people are convicted.
That’s good, but I recommend all of it.
For an attack on many of the articles that get cited here, arguing that the US Government’s War on Terror is dangerous for civil liberties, see Straight Talk on Homeland Security by Heather Mac Donald in City Journal (lLink from Iain Murray). Penultimate paragraph:
When the War on Terror’s opponents intone, “We need not trade liberty for security,” they are right – but not in the way they think. Contrary to their slogan’s assumption, there is no zero-sum relationship between liberty and security. The government may expand its powers to detect terrorism without diminishing civil liberties one iota, as long as those powers remain subject to traditional restraints: statutory prerequisites for investigative action, judicial review, and political accountability. So far, these conditions have been met.
We here are mostly not opponents of the War on Terror, but we are opponents of it being used as an excuse to expand government power in ways that will then be available to government officials to use across the board.
We agree here that it isn’t a zero sum thing between liberty and security, but that’s because we believe security is best protected by free people protecting themselves and each other. Some of us might even agree that the government “may” expand is powers with no harm done, but that’s hardly the point, is it? “So far, these conditions have been met.” And there the disagreement really begins. But that “So far” suggests that we and Heather Mac Donald might in due course all be re-united.
I always feel that whenever someone says that there is “no question” of something happening, it means there is and someone’s just asked it, and I now realise that I further suspect that when someone important enough to be quoted about it says that something is “essential”, without actually saying that it is going to happen, the game is up there too. If that’s right, then this is bad news:
The scientist in charge of setting up Britain’s DNA databank, which will collect information on the lifestyle, health and genes of 500,000 people, said he will oppose any attempt by police or the courts to gain access to the data.
In an exclusive interview with The Independent, Dr John Newton said strict confidentiality is essential if the UK Biobank project is to enjoy the public confidence it needs to succeed. Three years ago, police forced medical scientists in Edinburgh to hand over the confidential data of another research project to prosecute a volunteer in the study.
Critics of the UK Biobank, which aims to compare the influence of genes and lifestyle on the health of half a million volunteers, says there is nothing to stop this information also being used by the police, employers or insurance companies.
This paragraph sounds better:
But Dr Newton said there were no plans for a national biobank covering the entire population. He also questioned whether the information held on UK Biobank would be of any interest to the police. “People fear police will take a DNA sample from the scene of a crime, do a DNA test on it, then go to Biobank and run that DNA against our 500,000 and say, ‘OK, it was you’, and fish them out. As far as I understand it, they won’t be able to do that. We will not have done the entire DNA sequence of every participant, so we will simply not have the information on the same genetic variables that the police use [for DNA fingerprinting]. It is very difficult to say ‘never’, but I can’t see how Biobank will help police.”
But I suppose the danger here is not that this is already checkmate for genetic confidentiality, but that things are advancing (i.e. perhaps getting worse) one little step at a time.
First things first. First establish the principle that it’s okay to have a national DNA database. Then beef up what’s in it, to the point where the police could do what Dr Newton says they now couldn’t. Then allow the police to do just that. Then other government agencies get in on it …
On Wednesday evening, for reasons too complicated to explain (which partly have to do with the disaster that is transport in London), I found myself walking down the high street of Clapham in wonderfully multi-ethnic south London. (This is not the same place as Clapham Junction, which is some distance away). This area seemed to have more nice bars and restaurants than it did the last time I was there, and half way down the street I saw a place called the “Bierodrome“. Despite this slightly silly name, I looked at the menu beside the door and saw a vast number of fine Belgian beers listed. As I am a little partial to fine Belgian beer, I walked in and sat down. Most of the beers were bottled, but they had around ten on tap. I ordered a Grimbergen Blonde. This is not an especially obscure beer, but it is certainly a good one.
When you go into a bar in Belgium, every beer has its own special glass. These have the name of the beer on the side, and vary in shape depending on the kind of beer, as (it is claimed) different styles of beer taste best in different shaped glasses. Some of the weirdly curved glasses also look kind of cute. The size of the glass also varies from beer to beer. This definitely makes sense, as beers differ greatly in texture and alcoholic strength. It also gives Belgian bars some of their character. Walk into a good bar, and there will be hundreds of different glasses on the shelf behind the barman. Belgian beers are often 7%, 8%, 9% alcohol, and these are best consumed in relatively small quantities. The Grimbergen Blond was at 7% only moderate by Belgian standards, but rather strong by English standards.
When I ordered the beer, I didn’t specify a size, as I just expected that I would be given a size appropriate to the beer in question, as happens in Belgium. However, I was given a cute, curved, Belgian style glass, but very big. I asked the barman, and he explained that it was a pint. You see, I was in England. If you are in England and order a beer without specifying the size, a pint is what you get. With English beer this is excellent. In fact, it is superb. English beer is usually (but not always) weaker than some continental drinks, and lends itself to larger glasses.
That was fine. → Continue reading: English beer measures and the liberal French state.
There can be few afflictions more tragic and debilitating than blindness.
So I sincerely hope that this qualifies as some sort of breakthrough:
A blind man can see again after being given a stem cell transplant.
Mike May, of California, had been blind for 40 years since an accident at the age of three where he lost one eye and was blinded in the other.
The operation transplanted corneal and limbal stem cells into his right eye.
My very best wishes to Mr.May and to medical team who restored his sight. The possibility that this technique can be used to help blind people everywhere is something that is worth hoping and praying for.
I cannot recall hearing of such a petulant outburst from the normally stately and dignified BBC:
The controller of BBC1 launched an unprecedented attack on Rupert Murdoch yesterday, calling the media billionaire a “capital imperialist” who wants to destabilise the corporation because he “is against everything the BBC stands for”.
Sounds like my kind of guy.
Lorraine Heggessey said Mr Murdoch’s continued attacks on the BBC stemmed from a dislike of the public sector. But he did not understand that the British people “have a National Health Service, a public education system” and trust organisations that are there for the benefit of society and not driven by profit.
Methinks the executives of the BBC sense that they are in trouble. They realise that ‘Auntie’ no longer enjoys an exalted status as a national treasure and, hence, is vulnerable.
The time-honoured and global reputation for fairness, accuracy and objectivity is something they have dined out on, abused and terminally tarnished. And, even if this were not the case, in an era when the market provides so many choices, it is impossible to stem the growing discontent with the arcane and punitive television tax that funds the BBC.
But it’s all the fault of Rupert Murdoch and his band of evil capitalists. (Oh, and George Bush of course).
|
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.
|
