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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I really have no idea whether this will work or not. But whether it triumphs or bombs (so to speak), I think this is probably Europe’s biggest story today. Certainly it’s the most portentous for Europe’s long term future.
Muslim headscarves and other religious symbols are almost certain to be banned from French schools and public buildings after a specially appointed commission told the government yesterday that legislation was needed to defend the secular nature of the state.
The 20-member group, appointed by President Jacques Chirac and headed by the national ombudsman, Bernard Stasi, recommended that all “conspicuous” signs of religious belief – specifically including Jewish skullcaps, oversized Christian crosses and Islamic headscarves – be outlawed in state-approved schools.
La France! You’re either part of it, or not, and not is not an option. (By the way, I love that France’s “national ombudsman” is called “Stasi”. You truly wouldn’t dare to make that up.) And since the French state and its doings are just about the most important thing in France, what the state ordains is a very, very big deal.
Meanwhile, here in the lackadaisical old UK, we don’t do anything very much to ensure that the U bit continues to happen. (See also my previous posting immediately below.) We just do to our human imports whatever we would have done anyway. We show them the Premier League, Coronation Street, the All New Top of the Pops (yes Samizdata is always at the cutting edge of what the youngsters are excited about) on the telly, and if they want to join in fine. If not, fine also. That’s how things are done in Britain. We just squirt all over them the general joy and misery of being British, and they swallow it or shake it off to taste. Whatever these soon to be ex-newcomers do to fit in, or don’t do, we then decide to be a Great British Tradition.
It will be interesting to see which of these two profoundly contrasting methods does the business better. And when I say “interesting” I really do mean interesting. I don’t mean I’ve already decided but want to hedge my bets, I mean I really will be fascinated to see how these two dramas work themselves out. This is the kind of thing that makes me want to live to be a hundred and fifty, to see how it all turns out.
Both approaches have their extreme hazards. Both could work out well.
What’s the French for fingers crossed?
Arts & Letters Daily links to this article by Leo Marx in the Boston Review. Here are its first two paragraphs [their italics in our bold]:
When I was teaching in England in 1957, Richard Hoggart, a founder of the British school of cultural criticism, told me about having met a young Fulbright scholar who identified himself as a teacher of something called “American studies.” “And what is that?” Hoggart asked. An exciting new field of interdisciplinary teaching and research, he was told. “But what is new about that?” It combines the study of history and literature. “In England we’ve been doing that for a long time,” Hoggart protested. “Yes,” said the eager Americanist, “but we look at American society as a whole – the entire culture, at all levels, high and low.” Hoggart, who was about to publish The Uses of Literacy, his groundbreaking study of British working-class culture, remained unimpressed. After a moment, in a fit of exasperation, his informant blurted out: “But you don’t understand, I believe in America!”
“That was it!” Hoggart said to me, “then I did understand.” It was unimaginable, he dryly added, that a British scholar would ever be heard saying, “I believe in Britain.”
Of course it could just be coincidence, but I reckon this contrast does illustrate rather nicely the power of academic ideas.
Britain is now ruled by an elite which is busily breaking it into fragments and melting them into the European Union. I’m not saying that this is necessarily as terrible an idea as some writers here think it is (although personally I think it’s a pretty bad one), but it is nevertheless beyond denial that this is what they are doing.
The USA, on the other hand, is still very much together.
Granted, in 1957 there was a lot less Britain to believe in than there was, or still is, USA, but still …
On the other hand, I dare say that “American Studies” perhaps now means something rather different to what it meant in 1957.
It annoys the hell out of me when I hear the chattering classes in Britain describe this country’s decrepit socialist National Health System as ‘the envy of the world’… and it astounds me when idiots in the USA think it should be emulated over there.
As someone who has all too much first hand contact with the NHS, as well as having been at the tender mercy of other nation’s healthcare systems when I have broken bones, crashed cars, got shot, fallen through a weak floor, head-butted a flying bottle, been bitten by snakes/dogs/rats/, skied into trees, caught exotic unpronounceable tropical diseases and all the other things that happen to folks such as myself who travel to far off places and foolishly venture out of the hotel… and I can assure you that the NHS is at its best nothing special compared to much of the rest of the world and at its worst, it absolutely sucks. I certainly never saw a dirty ward in a hospital in Croatia or Ghana or the USA like those I have seen in Britain’s state run hospitals.
In reality, not only does the NHS provide indifferent care (an appointment I needed once took 11 months to arrange), it does so at vast cost and in reality a large chunk of the burden of healthcare is done privately. In fact, the NHS could not survive without a large healthcare private sector, the size of which Eamonn Butler points out over on the Adam Smith Institute’s own blog.
When my grandfather was gravely injured a few years ago, the treatment he received from the NHS was adequate – but after it became apparent that he was not able to look after himself any more due to brain damage, my family ended up shelling out well over £40,000 ($70,000) per year to keep him in a private nursing home which did not smell of piss. I am not complaining, after all what the hell is money for if not for something like that? However the role played by the non-state sector is a largely unsung one and I wish more people in Britain realised that the fact the state does not provide a healthcare service does not mean one will not be provided. If the state did not take such a whack of tax money to fund the monstrosity that is the NHS, far more people would have healthcare insurance.
Of course that might not end up costing much less than the existing system but the evidence outside Britain suggests it would certainly produce a higher quality system than the one of de facto healthcare rationing in use in the UK now.
The Home Affairs Select Committee met last night to consider Big Blunkett’s plan to impose compulsory National Identity Cards on innocent British citizens. They interviewed some of the Home Office officials who have accepted responsibility for disassembling our civil liberties by implementing the cards.
Of particular interest to the Committee was the cost of the scheme. Despite being asked no less than seven times, the Home Office officials repeatedly refused to answer the question saying only that it would be between 1.3 thousand million and 3.1 thousand million pounds. As Committee Chair John Denham pointed out, a range of 2 thousand million pounds is unacceptably broad. And that’s assuming that the project remains on budget!
This unwillingness to talk openly about cost suggests a possible weak point within the Government. It is probably worth pressing this when contacting your MP or the media.
It’s especially ironic that the reason given for refusing to answer was “commercial confidentiality”. It seems that civil servants expect to have their privacy protected whilst they invade ours.
Full story in The Guardian
Cross-posted from The Chestnut Tree Cafe
The estimable Austin Bay has a midstream assessment of the Iraq campaign and occupation. Grades are mixed. Given Mr. Bay’s knowledge of things military and strategic insight (he was a supporter of the Iraqi campaign for hardnosed geopolitical reasons), the mixed grades bear some pondering. Read the whole thing (its not long), but a few excerpts struck my eye:
The number of Free Iraqi police and paramilitary personnel in the field is a rough yardstick, but ultimately Iraqi security is their job. The major U.S. mistake prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom was failing to create a functioning Iraqi constabulary. The United States had 3,000 exiles training in Hungary, but that simply didn’t cut it. Interim coalition grade: D.
The March-April military campaign was a huge success. Saddam’s regime collapsed quickly, with few civilian casualties. The strategic demonstration of American power was dramatic, and it put teeth in the U.N.’s 1991 resolutions. Some day, U.N. sanctions may mean something again. Final Grade: A (No attack from Turkey, so no A+. A northern attack would have swept Tikrit and the Sunni Triangle, conceivably diminishing the current opposition in these Baathist districts.)
International contributions to Iraqi reconstruction, both in number of contributors and total capital is a strategic political measure. Interim Grade: C-
One measure that he does not address is control of Iraq’s borders with neighboring sponsors of terror. Until this occurs, Iraq is not secure. I’m not sure how we are doing on this front, but I read Austin Bay to find out stuff like this!
Interesting, and to my mind somewhat pessimistic, overview of the current situation.
The New York Times startles today with an editorial that is all in favor of personal responsibility rather than legal diktat. The topic: speed limits.
With the conviction Monday of Representative Bill Janklow of South Dakota for vehicular manslaughter, the West’s fondness for fast driving is again in the news, this time as part of a tragedy. Mr. Janklow sped through a stop sign near his hometown, Flandreau, S.D., last August and killed a motorcyclist. He has resigned from the House and faces up to 11 years in prison.
Mr. Janklow’s very conviction is proof that Westerners’ love of speed has its limits. But the limits are those dictated by duty and personal responsibility, not by law.
Western attitudes about speed limits have always been misconstrued: we do not encourage deviant behavior so much as personal responsibility. It’s an antiquated stance, this resistance to limiting individual freedom, and it is often used as evidence of our irresponsibility.
We can hold individuals accountable for bad choices without limiting everyone’s freedom.
Needless to say, the author is not a regular staff writer for the NYT, but nonetheless, the publication of these thoughts without a single sneer of condescension by the panjandrums of the Upper West Side is worth recognizing. It is almost impossible to find criticism of the nanny state in the Times, but here it is.
Hat tip to Samizdata reader Mr. Haas for the pointer.
There were big anti-terror/pro-democracy demonstrations in Baghdad today. Glenn Reynolds points out they were noticed grudgingly, when at all, by the ‘professional’ ‘media’. A few years ago this would have meant the story didn’t exist.
Times change.
Scaled Composites carried out its seventh drop of SpaceShipOne on December 4th. According to the test report, pre-ignition propulsion system checks seem to be moving forward nicely:
Objectives: The seventh glide flight of SpaceShipOne and new pilot check out. Full functional check of the propulsion system by cold flowing nitrous oxide. Completed airspeed and positive and negative G-envelope expansion.
Results: Launch conditions were 48,400 feet and 115 knots. All propulsion components, displays and functionality performed as designed. The feather was extended after a 4G pull-up to the vertical at 24,500 feet and rudder used to induce sideslip and yaw rates while “going-over-the-top”. The vehicle recovered to a stable attitude and descent after only a single oscillation. The landing pattern was flown following established procedures resulting in a satisfactory touchdown.
December 17th is less than a week away, very close to two weeks from when this flight test occured. That is close enough to the intervals between the last three tests one could expect at least a drop test on the Wright Brothers First Flight date. I still think an in-flight engine ignition and a short burn is within the realm of possibility.
Running short of last minute Christmas ideas? Want to understand what it’s like to be a ruthless statist? Look no further than Medieval: Total War. I was at a loose end last week, alone with a laptop, a CD drive, a hotel bedroom, fifteen quid burning a hole in my pocket, and a nearby South London branch of WH Smiths. There are many terrible things such a situation can tempt a man into, so I leapt into one of them regardless. Finding a bargain-basement copy of Medieval: Total War, for £14:99, I loaded up the sucker and got going. I started as the English, on the easy level, from 1087 onwards, my mission to conquer the whole of Europe by 1487. Three hundred and fifty years later, virtually the whole of Europe is now dominated by England, I’ve destroyed the French and the Germans, almost as good as beating Australia at Rugby, and I’m about to conquer Constantinople. Unfortunately, I remained unable to do any of this without keeping the provincial tax levels at ‘Normal’, i.e. 50%, rather than ‘Very Low’. Though as an Austrian, I did resist going for ‘Very High’ taxes, at 70%, to pay for my insatiable desire for more troops, better weapons, Royal Knights, and Welsh Longbow men.
If you do get the game, try to get up to the Halberdier and Swiss Pike men level of building technology. Both soldier types are lethal, especially at cutting up enemy cavalry.
In a two-way split game, you first of all play a game of strategy, sort of like a complex form of chess, on an Olde Worlde map of Europe, with the construction of buildings, fleets, the training of soldiers, assassins, princesses, and various alliances. You have to build up certain levels of technology, based on your provincial castles building program, before you can train up certain types of more professional soldiers. You then press an ‘end of year’ button, a bell tolls, and you move into the second stage of the game where your campaigning soldiers go into full 3-D battles, with opposing armies, with the same battle engine currently being used in the Time Commanders television series.
What I really liked about the game was its insistence that you look after trade, and keeping your provincial populations happy. Yes, only in order to keep your tax levels up, and to avoid expensive rebellions from the serfs, but Professor Hoppe’s analysis that monarchy is better than democracy, though still much worse than proper liberty, becomes more persuasive by the day.
Is the game addictive? I’ll say. I’ve had to ask my wife to hide the disks when I got home. But have no fear. I have a sneaking feeling I’m getting Railroad Tycoon for Christmas, so I can pretend to be Dagny Taggart. I wonder if it has a John Galt extension pack? Should a man my age be doing such things? I have absolutely no idea. But it certainly beats watching television, especially the vacuous rubbish on the BBC. I wish I could give up the BBC completely. Has anyone in the UK tried it? I’d miss Top Gear, of course, but virtually all of the rest of it you can keep. Except for John Humphries on the radio, this morning, when he literally laughed in Chancellor Gordon Brown’s face, as El Gordo tried to persuade the Welsh Rottweiler that his new open-ended National Insurance tax is in some way different from income tax. It was almost worth the licence fee. Almost, of course, but not quite.
The President does not want to end slavery. The Congress does not want to end slavery. But the Lord God Jehovah wants to end slavery, and slavery shall come to an end.
– The father (a bishop) of Orville and Wilbur Wright, just when the Civil War was getting started. Check out the context in this fascinating Friedrich Blowhard posting, about that, but mostly about the aviation achievement of the Wright brothers.
In the week of the increasingly embarrassing Turner Prize, here (I found it via these people) is news of some art that Samizdata can really get behind:
Since 1998 Italian artist Antonio Riello has been making very special weapons as artworks. Assault rifles, pistols, machine guns, carbines, sub-machine guns, hand grenades, rocket launchers and any kind of contemporary military guns are restyled by the artist as high fashion accessories for sophisticated ladies.
And for a certain sort of gentleman, I’m guessing. (Although those ball and chain things at the top of the picture collection don’t look to me like they’re for self defence at all.)
Weapons from all over the World are used: American M16, Russian Kalashnikov, Israelian UZI, Italian Beretta and many others. Recently also armours in steel, plastic and Kevlar are made to protect ladies against urban dangers.
Globalisation. Good.
In this artproject the glamour of fashion system is mixed with the common perverse and morbid fascination for weaponry.
Yeah yeah. They have to say that.
These works – made using leopard skins, brightly lacquered colours, jewels, furs, trendy fabrics and special technological appliances – play along the thin line between fashion and trash.
Miami Vice aesthetics you might say.
LADIES WEAPONS are a sort of hybrids born from the most outstanding contemporary Italian features: the obsession for personal security and the passion for elegance and fashion.
I would have preferred passion for personal security and obsession for elegance and fashion, but like I say, they have to say that guns are bad. This is Italy remember, not Arizona.
Every artwork has a name of a woman (“CLAUDIA”, “TAMARA”,….) and exists only in one exemplar.
Where is allowed the artist uses real weapons, in the countries where is forbidden artworks are based on perfect replicas.
“Where is allowed.” There’s your problem. And of course, “perfect replicas” are only allowed “where is allowed” also. This art is presumably illegal wherever replica guns are flaunted in places “where is not allowed”. Oh well, it all adds to the buzz.
My guess is that the Art Nazis, to coin a phrase, won’t allow this stuff to qualify, because it is itself far, far too “obsessive” about guns to be allowed into polite Euro-society. As “art”, it will never catch on. It’s typical Euro-trash half-baked goodness/uselessness, in other words. More work is needed.
This guy should stop titting about with “only in one examplar” nonsense, go to America, and mass produce these things. Forget art. Embrace the gun culture, and help to make it (even more) fashionable.
When he gets there, he will course have to deal with the fact that in America they presumably have a lot of this kind of kit already, selling healthily (not to say obsessively), with no thought of art at all.
(By the way, and flying off at somewhat of a tangent, “Art Nazis” is a phrase I recently invented, which I think may have a future. I say invented, but I googled for it after thinking of it for myself, and I did find this use of the phrase, to describe the idiot/villain art critic at the centre of Tom Wolfe’s splendid little book The Painted Word.)
Those wacky guys at b3ta.com, or one of their many photoshopping friends, did a paranoid, Robocopish rethink of how speed cameras might soon be operating. The pictures may still be there (left hand side – scroll down) but will soon be gone if they aren’t gone already. It’s that kind of site.
If you can’t find anything speed camera related, I’ve stuck the pictures up on my Culture Blog, so that White Rosers can give the matter some more prolonged thought. (I don’t think I’m allowed to stick up pictures here, which is probably a good thing.)
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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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