|
|||||
|
Britain’s government has a website telling us all manner of splendid things about how we are protected by the state now that we have David Blunkett watching over us… and what we should do in the event of a spot of bother happening when Blunkett is off on a tea break. Yet it seems a more, well, candid version of this site has also helpfully been made available to us by our political masters. (with thanks to the eagle-eyed Guy Herbert for spotting this) July 28th, 2004 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
 July 27th, 2004 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
If you have enjoyed the discussion about commercial space and the future here on Samizdata, you might find The Space Meetup of interest. The Meetup website is a good example of ways in which internet entrepreneurs are building businesses on the community aspect of the internet, and in this case assisting the creation of a global community in the non-cyberworld. July 27th, 2004 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
I found this interesting site called Abandoned.ru (via the irrepressible Good Shit) and as ‘Tears for Fears’ once said (said he, showing his age), there is a beauty of decay. For an old cyberpunk like me, stained concrete, jagged bare metal and pools of water under ruined roofs are a rhapsody of shadows for the darker parts of the soul. Go check out Uryevich’s excellent series of photo essays. And yes, I am so ready to play Stalker… July 27th, 2004 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
Senator John Kerry had one of those moments the other night. For reasons best known to themselves, the Democrats have decided to hold their presidential nominating convention in Boston, Massachusetts. Two findings have emerged from this decision. First, that Americans outside the North-East are being reminded that the Democrats have a liberal New England candidate, with limited appeal outside his backyard. Second, that the traffic chaos caused by the Convention is very unpopular with the inhabitants of that town. Conspiracy theorists claim that the Republican Governor of Massachusetts has deliberately botched up the arrangements. So in front of thousands of baseball fans, Sen. John Kerry was introduced to throw the first pitch of the match between the Boston Red Socks against the New York Yankees on Sunday. First, the fact that the Democratic Convention was happening in Boston was booed by virtually the entire 36,000 crowd. Then most of the crowd booed again (although there were cheers) when Kerry was introduced. Then the macho-man threw the ball short, and the catcher missed. Cue mirth, giggles and fun on the George W Bush blog. Memo to politicians and actors: never work with babies, animals or baseball fans. July 27th, 2004 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Bourgeois Epoch Born to Rule: British Political Lives Like most people, I have never read a word of Marx, but that does not make The Bourgeois Epoch any the less enjoyable, especially since it tells us that not just were his predictions hopelessly wrong (as everyone knows), but that his historical research was negligible and that his analyses of the revolutionary crises of his own time, of which there were quite a number, were inconsistent, not only with each other, but with the actual facts as they happened. The writings which Hamilton analyses are ones written ad hoc between 1848, a year of revolutions and attempted revolutions, and when The Communist Manifesto was publshed, and 1851, when Louis Napoleon ended the French Second Republic with a coup d’etat. Marx attempted to interpret history as a sort of economic jungle-warfare conducted between distinct classes. There is a sense of unreality here, when it is realised that what we think are great movements, events and landmarks, such as the Renaissance, Reformation, the discovery of the New World, the rise of nations and struggle for domination, even the not so long ago Napoleonic War, Marx regarded as irrelevancies and unimportant surface phenomena compared with what was really going on. And what was that? The aristocratic feudal order was being replaced by the the Bourgeois Epoch, the rule of the bourgeoisie. This, by its capitalist system would propel the rest of the population into a proletariat, which, driven into increasing misery, would revolt against it and take over. The prospect of this was, in the words of The Communist Manifesto, “a spectre that [was] haunting Europe”. Except, as Hamilton points out, there was no true proletariat, in the industrial sense of large numbers of factory-workers, on the Continent at the time. Marx and Engels were mesmerised by what was going on in Britain, where there were factories and an industrial proletariat, though not one that had any strong propensity to revolution. France, and Paris in particular, was still at the “artisan” stage, small workshops with a boss and a few employees. Hamilton remorselessly and elegantly dismantles Marx’s whole construction. In the first place, as he reiterates again and again, the bases for his theories are entirely assertions, without any foundations in research. Thus to Marx (and Engels) England, the most developed industrial country, must have had a bourgeois revolution, and since its Civil War ended by deposing and executing its monarch and abolishing the House of Lords and the Church of England establishment, that would be it. There was, of course, the Restoration in 1660, which brought back the monarchy, the House of Lords and the Church of England, and the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, which replaced a Catholic with a Protestant King. These events do not seem to have affected Marx or Engels, and rightly so – for the Civil War was not a bourgeois revolution. “The rich merchant oligarchies in the cities were either cautiously and selfishly neutral or sided with the King as the protector and patron of their political and economic privileges.” If Marx had examined the structure of British governments throughout the next two centuries, he would have noticed to what extent the aristocracy remained in control. This was because they knew the ropes; an actual bourgeois exception, Bright, brought into Gladstone’s cabinet, purely as a political makeweight, was a misfit and a disaster. The middle class, in fact, was quite content to have a governing class running the country and leaving them alone to make their money. Perhaps the clearest statement to this effect was made to the French historian Hyppolyte Taine by “one of the greatest industrialists in England”. This anonymous tycoon said bluntly: “It is not our aim to overthrow the aristocracy: we are ready to leave the government and high offices in their hands. For we believe, we men of the middle class, that the conduct of national business calls for special men, men born and bred to the work for generations, and who enjoy an independent and commanding situation.” This was a state of affairs about as far from class warfare as it is possible to conceive. Moreover, unlike today, there were no sources of career politicians, top civil servants and diplomats (who had to be, of course, fluent in French) other than the richer landed gentry. → Continue reading: No Marx for Historical Research July 27th, 2004 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
One of Spain’s top banks, Santander, is making a bid to buy the British banking firm Abbey plc, the mortgage lending firm which used to be a building society (what Americans would know as a Savings and Loan). I do not have much to say about the specifics of the deal. It is all a part of the merger, acquision and disposal process which is a healthy part of capitalism and the efficient allocation of scarce capital. Maybe the shareholders of either firm have strong views on the matter but I do not. However, what is interesting to me is what this deal says about Spain’s development as an economic power. Spain is one of the success stories of the past few years. When I went to the glorious city of Barcelona last year I was struck by how prosperous and dynamic the place was. I hear and read similar impressions from other sources. Much of this has to do with the determination of Spanish entrepreneurs to throw off the shackles of former failed socialist policies and embrace a more liberal economic culture, which former centre-right premier Aznar helped spawn. Let us hope the new socialist government elected earlier this year in rather shameful circumstances after the Madrid bombings does not mess it up. It would be a grave error to infer too much from the acquisitive activities of a Spanish bank in Britain. But I get the feeling that this grand old nation is flexing its economic muscles again, and who knows, making a distinct improvement to the quality of Britain’s economy while getting richer as well. Good. It feels appropriate somehow. There are hundreds of thousands of British expatriates living in Spain so it perhaps fitting that Spain’s biggest companies are trying to get a piece of the action in the UK. (As an aside, I would like to know what the Spanish-based blog Iberian Notes makes of this). July 26th, 2004 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
I’ve legged it. ‘opped it. There was no defining moment. No shock of recognition. No clap of thunder. There was nothing, really. I had regarded Europe and Britain with lazy distaste for so long it had become woven into the woof and warp of my daily thoughts, barely surfacing. The encroaching communism-lite of the EU, supinely submitted to by the 400m or so people who live there, most of whom have never experienced real democracy… that revulsion was always in the background… …and the eagerness of the repellent Blair to give away our country, which he does not understand, or even know very much about, to ‘Europe’, an area of the world that sinks deeper into global irrelevance with every silly little ‘summit’ with red carpets and photo ops, every self-involved, fidgety little treaty between themselves that has no relevance to the rest of the world, every encroachment by anonymous apparatchiks into the lives of the citizenries. With their happy blindness to the fact that world has long moved on from regarding Europe as a beacon of intellectual and political sophistication, and the diminishment of the continent’s economic influence on international events, the EU has begun to take on the comedic, self-involved air of a light operetta. At home, Blair is chasing indigenes out of the country at a rate of knots. People fear for their lives in the most lawless country in the advanced world. The overweening ego that oversaw the dissolution of the civil society, outlawed self-defence and nurtured a sense of grievance among the criminal classes, promoted thought fascism and other forms of bullying of the electorate, impudently routinely over-stepped his remit as PM, created ever more taxpayer-funded slots for the lumpen nomenklatura, awarded special privileges to selected segments of the public – not because they had earned them by making a contribution, but because their inexplicable privileges threw the people whose families have lived on this turf, and formed its civil society, for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, off their stride. Who dared say him nay? No one. OK. Peter Hitchens has been a brave voice. And a few others. But by and large, the Brits don’t seem to mind. They get tax credits for the large wodge of their income taken from them by the state, some of which is returned to them as supplicants. Don’t worry. Be happy. → Continue reading: Verity doesn’t live here any more July 26th, 2004 | 74 comments - (Comments are closed)
Whenever we touch on the issue of state controlled health system versus private healthcare, we get a smattering of outraged readers who cannot understand why we attack that venerable (in their eyes, not ours) dinosaur, the NHS. It’s free and for everybody they screech, you heartless capitalists… would you let your parents/grandparents/children die without treatment and care, if they couldn’t afford to go private?!. The fact is that those I care about are more likely to be in need of treatment and care, as a result of coming into contact with the NHS. I want them to stay away from the NHS, and the government to give them back their money taken to support the giant leech known as national healthcare.
As James Bartholomew writes in the Telegraph opinion section one is vastly safer in a private hospital and the danger of getting MRSA is a risk affecting patients of the NHS.
This is a result of the fundamental dynamics (or statics) of the public sector, not any lack of funding. There is no legitimate role for the state in healthcare, education and many other sectors that it appropriated for perpetration of what is so misleading called ‘public services’.
Indeed, unless you take their money first and then help yourself to it… July 26th, 2004 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
From David Carr’s posting (quoting the Independent newspaper):
I have a cunning plan. Immunisation is crude and easy to avoid, especially for immigrants and people who move. What is needed is a form of treatment that is visible and difficult to fake. Vaccines can be expensive and there is a whole problem of producing and storing them. The paperwork involved in ensuring that all children have been vaccinated is complicated and errors can creep in. So the obvious solution is a full frontal lobotomy with a tatooing on the forehead. Consider a few benefits of such a scheme.
What is a little puzzling to me is how many schemes are being done to children which would be considered highly objectionable if applied to say ‘black people’. Part-birth abortion is virtual infanticide, we have NHS doctors calling for premature children not to be incubated. We have conscription into schools, prohibitions of all sorts, cameras in classrooms to allow parents to watch, ID cards for children. Child rapists and killers can get shorter jail sentences than a child has to spend at school, (and they sometimes gets jobs in schools). Child criminals are effectively told to “do it again, you have to kill someone before we do anything”, so the honest children get preyed on. The only short-term way of preventing this sort of abuse would be if children had the right to vote. Would four-year olds come up with worse lunacy than that which they have to endure? July 26th, 2004 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Keys to Eygpt Empire of the Plains:Henry Rawlinson and the Lost Languages of Babylon These two books together give an excellent picture of two pioneers in the decipherment of long-lost writing. In a more exact sense, Jean-Francois Champollion was the true pioneer, first in the field, working alone, in chronic poor health and constant poverty, exacerbated by an unstable political environment and, although achieving world recognition, dying young. Rawlinson consciously aimed to emulate Champollion’s achievement in deciphering hieroglyphics, by doing the same for cuneiform. He was, in contrast to Champollion, fortunate in his financial circumstances and in having an iron constitution, sufficiently robust for the environment in which he worked which, though certainly itself politically unstable, was in marked contrast to that back home in Britain, which had a government tolerant to the point of indifference as to what one of its representatives in the Middle East actually did. Both had state-funded jobs and both worked at their problems in what might be called their spare time. The academic world of Champollion was, however, state-dependent; Rawlinson’s was not. The last dated hieroglyphic known was carved in 394 AD. It is surely an indication of the intellectual blind spot of the classical world that the writing and language of Ancient Egypt were available during the heyday of the Roman Empire, but that neither can have been of sufficient interest to its scientists and scholars to provoke study, interpretation and preservation. Alexandria was the cultural capital of the Western world from, say 250 to 50 BC, but there is no evidence that it left a legacy that included the millennia of Egyptian civilization. So all that has survived to help us understand it are some bi- or trilingual inscriptions, the most famous of which is the Rosetta stone. It is always nice to hear again the story of its discovery by the French and its acquisition by the British, and another account of Napoleon’s misconceived expedition to Egypt. → Continue reading: Decipher July 26th, 2004 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
This is the best animation I have come across in a good while. It it appears to be a genuinely non-partisan poke at the Bush vs. Kerry contest and although it may take a few minutes to download it is slickly produced and very funny, even for an Englishman. July 26th, 2004 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
|
   |
||||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||
