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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After reading this article you will no doubt sense a bit of hostility towards Senator Kerry from young Iranians:
We have read how you refer to the theocratic regime in Iran as a ‘democracy’ we have heard how, if elected, as the president of the United States you intend to ‘engage’ this barbaric regime; this very terrorist regime that your own State Department lists as the most active ‘State Sponsor of Terrorism’.
Why is it, Senator, in all your statements, you don’t, even once, mention the oppressed and suffering masses of Iran? Obviously, as long as there is such preoccupation with appeasing the regime the people of Iran don’t even enter your equation!
These are among the less heated statements about Kerry’s plans to work closely with terrorists or ‘engage’ them if you will. I really would be interested in knowing what new set of american values he intends to institute. Like the Iranian students, I cannot see how any existing ones would apply.
Stop all the clocks. Cut off the telephone. Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone. For the UK’s University lecturers are going on strike. On Wednesday. Put it in your diary. It’s a catastrophe.
If anybody notices, of course.
“We’ve got the support of the students,” said one earnest lecturer, on the radio this morning. From what I remember of my own ear-ringed, combat-trousered, drunken oblivion, in academia, I used to just love lecturers going on strike. It was simply great for extending hangover recovery times. And with Wednesday being a traditional sports day, within British Universities, the lecturers, I presume, will only be sacrificing about three hours pay, from their 10am coffee break, which starts the morning, to the 1pm finish time, which ends their arduous half-working day.
So brave of them. Don’t ya think? → Continue reading: Bringing down the ivory tower
Government is not reason, it is not eloquence – it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearsome master
– George Washington, whose birthday it is today
I’m listening to an old nineteen thirties recording of some Dvorak symphonies. The conductor and orchestra are both greatly admired for this music, yet I find little pleasure in the experience. For me, symphonies, by their nature, only really work properly if the recording is decent, as the best recordings were from about 1960 onwards, but as these ones, made in the 1930s, are not.
Concertos are another matter. One of the greatest pleasures I’ve recently got from classical CD collecting is from the Naxos historical CD series. True, as with the symphonies, you don’t get the full orchestral picture clearly, but a solo instrument can still come across very clearly, despite the barrier of the decades. What classical music lover would deny himself the pleasure of hearing the teenage Yehudi Menuhin performing the magnificent Elgar Violin Concerto – recorded in 1932 with Sir Edward Elgar himself conducting – just because the recording quality is not quite up to modern standards? The orchestra is not all you’d like, but the solo violin is clear as a bell. → Continue reading: Reflections on the future of the musical past
The front page of the Telegraph today has news of Michael Howard facing a shadow cabinet revolt last night over his plan to impose a public spending freeze, with senior members of his front-bench team protesting bitterly about proposed cuts in services.
So far, so good. Cuts in budget, good news for the likes of Samizdatistas. Thumbs up for Howard? Bad front-bench team who reveal themselves for the incorrigible statists they are? Not quite.
The Conservative leader has been told by several senior colleagues that they are particularly angry at proposed defence cuts of £1.5 billion that, they fear, could badly damage the party’s standing in the Tory heartlands.
The Tory party is trying desperately make themselves credible by pre-emptying Labour’s smearing them with spending less on ‘schoolzandhospitals’. As one frontbencher puts it:
If the Tory Party is going to get its message across, we have to be in the marketplace. If people think we are going to slash spending, then we are not in that marketplace.
The Tories are so obsessed about getting elected that they are losing their grip on substance. Mind you, they lost that with Thatcher’s departure… She may have actually increased the size of the state in some measures, which is evidence of how hard it is to cut the hydra down to size, but she was certainly aware of the true role of the state. Michael Howard is not.
Some people say it is still worth voting – maybe but not when a a sad greedy bunch of oily politicians out of power are competing with a faltering greedy bunch of oily politicians in power.
I can think of all manner of intriguing discussions could be sparked off by this report in the UK Sunday Times:
MORE than 14,000 white Britons have converted to Islam after becoming disillusioned with western values, according to the first authoritative study of the phenomenon.
Some of Britain’s top landowners, celebrities and the offspring of senior Establishment figures have embraced the strict tenets of the Muslim faith.
The trend is being encouraged by Muslim leaders who are convinced that the conversion of prominent society figures will help protect a community stigmatised by terrorism and fundamentalism.
The new study by Yahya (formerly Jonathan) Birt, son of Lord Birt, former director-general of the BBC, provides the first reliable data on the sensitive subject of the movement of Christians into Islam. He uses a breakdown of the latest census figures to conclude that there are now 14,200 white converts in Britain.
Speaking publicly for the first time about his faith this weekend, Birt, whose doctorate at Oxford University is on young British Muslims, argued that an inspirational figure, similar to the American convert Malcolm X for Afro-Caribbeans, would first have to emerge if the next stage, a mass conversion among white Britons, were to happen.
The faith has made inroads into the Establishment. It emerged this weekend that the great-granddaughter of a British prime minister has converted. Emma Clark, whose ancestor, the Liberal prime minister Herbert Asquith, took Britain into the first world war, said: “We’re all the rage, I hope it’s not a passing fashion.”
I rather hope it is but my ambitions are irrelevant. The question is whether this is just a conversion du jour among people with a God-shaped hole in them or whether this is the start of Islam making serious inroads into native British society. If it is the latter then it certainly has some way to go. Out of a population of some 59 million or so, I don’t think a mere 14,200 could be called statistically significant.
The more interesting question for me is not in the number of conversions but the type and class of the converts. Assuming the article is accurate, the overwhelming majority of the converts are among (for want of a better term) the ‘rich and famous’. Now why is that, I wonder?
And just how different from the history of Christianity in these Islands which took hold in Roman Britain as very much a working-class movement and which filtered up to the ruling elites.
The article contains a tantalising clue:
Many converts have been inspired by the writings of Charles Le Gai Eaton, a former Foreign Office diplomat. Eaton, author of Islam and the Destiny of Man, said: “I have received letters from people who are put off by the wishy-washy standards of contemporary Christianity and they are looking for a religion which does not compromise too much with the modern world.”
This makes it sound as if these people are seeking a refuge. Perhaps this growing interest in the Islamic faith is more a variation on the post-modern/anti-progress/green politics which appear to be popular among the the very same people. Who knows?
Having said all that, I think it reasonable to at least postulate that the collpase of the Church of England has got something to do with this. From being the bedrock of national faith and the morally certain religion of empire, the CofE has shrivelled into a comically ludicrous NGO presided over by an Arch-Hippy. In other words, it has gone and shot all its own credibility in the head and is no longer in any position to offer anything to people for whom DVD players and all-night shopping are not enough.
Because of this decline, a lot of people rather assume that Britain is a post-religious country that has abandoned faith and embraced secularism as the national doctrine. But maybe that is not so. Maybe the ruination of the Church of England has simply left a vacuum waiting to be filled and a great spiritual thirst needing to be slaked.
There is nothing as heartwarming as a tax revolt. Yet, there are few governments in history that have to be taught the same lesson twice. Of course, the incompetence and vicious hatred that the transnational socialists who hold sway in Britain have for private wealth blinds them to the lesson that they will have to learn yet again. Tax people too much and they will stop paying, especially when they are old age pensioners on a fixed income, willing to go to prison at the age of 83, in order to publicise this injustice.
The council tax is a local tax based on property values that is used to pay for the local constabulary, the borough and the county council, or whatever local governance is in place in England. It funds a small part of their budget, the majority of which is funded by central government through a block grant. The Blair administration has passed responsibilities on to the local authorities without increasing their block grant. As a consequence, the increase in local authority budgets has a multiplier effect on the increase in council tax, leading to rises of ten to twenty percent, especially in the south of the country. The group most vulnerable to these increases are old age pensioners, who own their homes, and whose pensions rise in line with the retail price index rather than earnings. → Continue reading: The Squeaking Pips
Reading Dennis O’Keeffe’s recently published translation of Principles of Politics Applicable to All Governments by Benjamin Constant (1767-1830) – the IEA launch of which I reported on here – is like reading Samizdata.net on a really, really good day. Good in the sense that the writing and the ideas are good, I mean. Not in the sense that the story told is always a happy one. So I thought, why not turn that observation into reality, and recruit Benjamin Constant as a guest blogger? There was no editorial objection to the plan, so, here is the whole of Book IV Chapter Two, “The Idea Which Usually Develops about the Effects Which the Proliferation of the Laws Has and the Falsity of That Idea”:
People normally think that when the government allows itself to multiply prohibitive and coercive laws at will, provided that the intention of the legislator is clearly expressed, provided that the laws are not in any way retroactive, provided that citizens are told in time of the rule of behavior they must follow, the [84] proliferation of laws has no drawback other than cramping individual freedoms a little. This is not the case. The proliferation of laws, even in the most ordinary of circumstances, has the bad effect of falsifying individual morality. The actions which fall within the competence of government, according to its primary purpose, are of two kinds: those intrinsically harmful which government must punish; and arrangements contracted between individuals which government must uphold. As long as government stays within these limits, it does not establish any contradiction, any difference, between legislative morality and natural morality. But when it prohibits actions which are not criminal or demands the completion of those which have not become obligatory owing to prior contract and which consequently are based only on its will, there are brought into society two kinds of crimes and two kinds of duties: those which are intrinsically such and those government says are such. Whether individuals make their judgment subservient to government or maintain it in its original independence, this produces equally disastrous effects. In the first hypothetical case, moral behavior becomes hesitant and fickle. Acts are no longer good or bad by reason of their good or bad outcomes, but according to whether law commands or forbids them, much as theology used to represent them as good because they pleased God, rather than as pleasing to God because they were good. The rule of the just and the unjust is no longer in the consciousness of man but in the will of the legislator. Morality and inner feeling undergo an unfathomable degradation through this dependence on an alien thing, a mere accessory—artificial, unstable, and liable to error and perversion. In the contrary case, in which a man—by supposition—opposes the law, the result is first of all many individual troubles for him and those whose fates depend on his. But in the second place, will he bother for very long disputing the law’s competence in matters he considers outside it? If he violates prohibitions and orders which seem to him arbitrary, he runs the same dangers as he would infringing the rules of eternal morality. Will not this unjust equality of consequences bring about a confusion in all his ideas? Will not his doubts, without distinction, touch on all the actions the law forbids or requires, and in the heat of his dangerous struggle with the institutions menacing him, do we not have to fear that he will soon not be able to tell good from bad any longer, nor law from the state of nature?
Most men are kept from crime by the feeling of never having crossed the line of innocence. The more restrictedly that line is drawn, the more are men put at risk of transgressing it, however light the infraction. Just by overcoming their first scruples, they have lost their most reliable safeguard. To get around restrictions which seem to them pointless, they use means which they could use against the most sanctified of laws. They acquire thereby the habit of disobedience, and even when they want some end which is still innocent, they go astray because of the means they are forced to follow to achieve it. Forcing men to refrain from things which are not forbidden morally or imposing on them duties which morality does not require of them, is therefore not only to make them suffer, but to deprave them.
Wired reports that Russia has successfully tested a hypersonic anti-Star Wars weapon capable of penetrating any prospective missile shield, a senior general said Thursday. The prototype weapon proved it could maneuver so quickly as to make “any missile defense useless,” Col.-Gen. Yuri Baluyevsky, the first deputy chief of the General Staff of the Russian armed forces, told a news conference.
This exchange of statements has an air of nostalgia about it:
Putin said that the development of new weapons was not directed against the United States, and Baluyevsky reaffirmed the statement, saying that the experiment shouldn’t be seen as Russia’s response to U.S. missile defense plans. “The experiment conducted by us must not be interpreted as a warning to the Americans not to build their missile defense because we designed this thing.”
In Washington, Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was asked by reporters about the Putin statement. “If you’re in that business — intercontinental ballistic missiles and warheads — you want them to be survivable, and maneuverability is one way to increase their survivability against any potential defenses.”
I suppose the signs of new era are the following bits:
Putin said that Russia has no intention of immediately deploying new weapons based on the experimental vehicle. “We have demonstrated our capability, but we have no intention of building this craft tomorrow.”
Baluyevsky said that Russia had informed the United States about its intention to conduct the experiment and added that U.S. officials issued no objections.
We shall see.
CNetnews.com has an article about radio frequency identification that has become a hot concept, promising to streamline how businesses track and stock inventory, warning that companies may need to rethink their software infrastructures in order to make RFID work as advertised, say analysts and technology makers.
Early resistance to RFID adoption has come from civil liberties groups, which fear that the technology could lead to unprecedented surveillance of consumers. But industry watchers and technology vendors have identified a more mundane potential problem for RFID adopters. They warn that in the rush to launch RFID projects, businesses may be overlooking a crucial element necessary to allow the technology to work smoothly: Making sure back-end databases and business applications can handle the massive amounts of information generated by RFID-enabled systems. Kara Romanow, an analyst at AMR Research in Boston said:
Companies are going to have problems when they drop RFID on top of shaky infrastructures. In order to do RFID right, to see a true return, the first thing (a company) needs to do is finish a data synchronization initiative, and do it right.
Romanow believes that there are two popular scenarios among businesses working to develop RFID capabilities today: those doing just enough to keep demanding companies like Wal-Mart as a customer, and those with real long-term vision. According to the analyst, the first group will garner few returns other than short-term bragging rights to getting RFID up and running, while the second group will see true return on investment down the road.
The ballot boxes are the coffins of freedom. We will not take part in the funeral of freedom.
– A text message circulating on Iranian mobile1 phones yesterday
1 = US: cell phone
Madonna was wrong. We are not living in a ‘material world’, we are living in a ‘managerial world’:
A planned children’s pancake race has been dropped because of spiralling insurance costs.
Children at Okehampton Primary School in Devon had been looking forward to the annual event on Shrove Tuesday next week.
But the 80-yard run in the town’s Red Lion Yard has had to be cancelled because a risk assessment had revealed that 25 marshalls would have to line the race route to ensure public safety.
What good are marshalls? Ban this kind of thing altogether I say. What if a six year-old with a pancake, hurtling around the track at mind-numbing speeds, spins out of control and veers off into a crowd of helpless onlookers, leaving a trail of carnage and devastation in his wake?
No, no, no. Too terrible to even contemplate.
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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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