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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“The flat tax makes sense” says The Daily Telegraph this morning, in an editorial which coincides with the release of the Adam Smith Institute report on this. In the US, President Bush has identified tax reform as one of his top three priorities – along with pension and court reform – for his second term. And many of his advisers are keen for him to tear up the thousands of pages of the federal tax code and replace it with a single tax rate of 17 per cent, and even that payable only on incomes over $36,000. Every time in the past that the US has slashed its tax rates – under Coolidge, Kennedy, and Reagan – it has enjoyed a boom, and the US Treasury has actually raked in more taxes, and with the richest taxpayers contributing a far greater proportion. So this idea seems like an all-round winner.
Bush must be cheered by what he sees in other countries, too. A number of the EU’s new members, like Slovakia and Estonia, have gone for the flat tax. So has Russia and the Ukraine. Hong Kong too. Even China is thinking about it.
There’s a good deal of interest here in Britain too. That’s partly because our clever Chancellor of the Exchequer has made the tax code so complicated that nobody understands it. Tolley’s Yellow Tax Guide, the professionals’ bible on the UK tax system, now runs to an unliftable 7000+ pages across four volumes. People are hungry for the change. And so, in both the UK and US, it’s worth pushing for.
Update: Poland is bringing in the flat tax too.
There is an interesting article on Reuters about how the vast Indian film industry, or ‘Bollywood’ as it is widely known, is reflecting something of an improvement in relations between India and its neighbour, Pakistan. The article says that Pakistanis, once badly portrayed in Indian films, now get a more rounded image.
It is always unwise to make big conclusions about a few examples of popular culture, but bear in mind that in nations like India, the movie industry has enormous influence, particularly over the young. And if millions of young Indian people increasingly come to look at their Pakistani peers as regular, ordinary folk, then something very positive is happening in one of the fastest-growing movie and entertainment businesses in the world. It is all the more heartening given that only a few years ago the airwaves were thick with fears about a major military clash between India and Pakistan over the disputed territory of Kashmir.
Globalisation in action, perhaps?
Everyone is entitled to their sensibilities, however wacky, just so long as they do not try to make them the law of the land. As a result when I describe Los Angeles Times writer T. J. Simers as a ‘weird prude’, it is not with the sense of loathing, hatred and vitriol I would have used were I under the impression he was suggesting that his disquiet over a picture of a beautiful young woman in a pair of shorts (and presumed wish to see people share his puritan values regarding women) be reflected in the law of the land by imposing censorship.
But a ‘weird prude’ is indeed what I think he is. Whilst I see that bizarrely the age of consent in the benighted state of California is 18, in the vast majority of the world and even in much of the USA, the age at which one is permitted to engage in sex is 16. Moreover even if for some reason you conclude that the age at which young adults should actually have sex should be 18, surely only the most purblind would actually expect a 16 year old to be asexual even if they were abstinent.
So when an attractive physically active 17 year old has a picture taken wearing no less clothing than that in which millions of people have seen her win tennis tournaments…
… T. J. Simers asks, no doubt thinking the true answer is beyond the pale:
Now what do you think when I tell you the girl in the ad is 17 years old?
Well, yeah. The girl is question is Maria Sharapova and since she won Wimbledon, quite literally tens of millions of people know exactly how old she is. And what do I think? I think “Nice legs! What a babe”. I am, distressingly, old enough to be her father, but that does not change the fact she is a very attractive young woman. So what?
He continues:
Sharapova may or may not be the most mature 17-year-old the world has known, but she’s still 17. A kid. And if the message to young girls everywhere in the L.A. area is that sex sells – rather than Wimbledon championship tennis, shame on anyone who rewards AEG this week and takes their daughter to Staples Center.
Where were her parents? “There you go,” said Lindsay Davenport. “I wouldn’t do it, and I can tell you my daughter wouldn’t either.”
Well Lindsey Davenport was a great tennis player but I for one am also relieved she never struck such poses, though gallantry prevents me from elaborating what I think are the obvious reasons for that. But why oh why does Mr. Simers or Mrs. Davenport think a 17 years old should an asexual being? The advertisement was not one in which Maria Sharapova was offering to have sex with anyone, just displaying her athletic assets (her body) in a way in which many would find rather attractive. Being attractive does indeed sell so why pretend otherwise? Is the fact she is not pictured in the act of playing tennis somehow make her sexuality more obvious than these…
  Clearly this is not a young woman who is in denial regarding the fact she is a sexual being and hardly seems like some bewildered victim of heartless ad man dressing her up as Lolita. I rather doubt the camera man had to wrestle a teddy bear out of her arms to get her to strike that pose. For T.J. Simers to find the WTA image offensive is perverse and suggests to me that he must have some quaint notions of what 17 year olds are really like and how people should perceive them.
Millions and millions of people are married or in long term sexual relationships by the time they are 17 and many of those are also parents, which suggests that the peculiar notion of infantilising young adults and calling them ‘kids’ for as long as possible is rather far off the mark.
I think what really made this whole thing seem so daft to me was that I have just got back from an interesting exhibition about the Crimean War which features an account of a 14 year old who had accompanied the British forces on that campaign and it all really does make some of the modern notion of a strict division between adulthood and childhood seem truly preposterous when talking about a worldly 17 year old Russian woman who, if you have ever heard her interviewed, is obviously no fool.
There is something profoundly odd about the mindset of a certain ilk of conservative.
Alaa of the Messopotamian has some choice words about the hellspawn of Fallujah and how our troops should deal with them:
For the valiant soldiers doing battle in Falujah today: like the medieval knights, you have engraved on your shields severed heads of kidnapped victims, murdered children, the hundreds of thousands of the dwellers of mass graves. You are the instruments of the Lord’s retribution. Have no mercy on this vermin, they do not deserve any.
God bless you and protect you for you are doing his work.
It seems the enemy forces are turning more and more to Saddam’s old tried and true methods: threatening and killing children, the elderly and even pregnant women. Iraqi’s would like to see the lot of them off to a very deep location with an exceedingly tropical climate.
The Adam Smith Institute will be hosting an event called Democracy & the Blogosphere next Tuesday 16th November. The speakers will be Stephen Pollard, William Heath, Sandy Starr and yours truly.
The event is ‘jacket and tie’ at 6:15pm and will be followed by a reception at the ASI at 23 Great Smith Street, London, SW1P 3BL
Anyone who would like to come along should send an e-mail for an invitation.
No interrupting when I am interrupting!
– Adriana Cronin
Having said nice things about Instapundit in my previous post (below), I feel compelled (i.e. choose) to add that I have also today criticised him, here. My complaints concern, first, the unfortunate picture that is used at the top of his recent Guardian articles, and, second, a visual blemish that disfigures his otherwise impeccably laid out blog. Briefly, when he has a picture to the right of a posting, it usually has text jammed right up against it. When I have a picture on the right of something I post, it does not do this. The conclusion is inescapable: I am better person than Instapundit.
Queue an HM Bateman Cartoon, entitled The Man Who Criticised Instapundit, featuring a handsome, smiling, carefree young man (me), surrounded by guests in shocked statue poses who have just heard what he said.
I don’t usually much enjoy denunciations of liberal bias, because they so often seem to me to be as tediously and unthinkingly abusive as the liberal consensus that they denounce so often is. But I did enjoy this piece by Mark Bauerlein, entitled Liberal Groupthink Is Anti-Intellectual (linked to recently by Arts & Letters Daily)
The essence of Bauerlein’s description of liberal bias is that it is a social process, and not just a political conspiracy. Quote:
The problem is that the simple trappings of deliberation make academics think that they’ve reached an opinion through reasoned debate – instead of, in part, through an irrational social dynamic. The opinion takes on the status of a norm. Extreme views appear to be logical extensions of principles that everyone more or less shares, and extremists gain a larger influence than their numbers merit. If participants left the enclave, their beliefs would moderate, and they would be more open to the beliefs of others. But with the conferences, quarterlies, and committee meetings suffused with extreme positions, they’re stuck with abiding by the convictions of their most passionate brethren.
Quite so. What I like about Bauerlein’s piece is that it addresses how it feels to be a typical academic. And your typical academic does not feel biased, in the sense that he thinks what he thinks through a great and continuous effort of mental will, in full knowledge of several alternatives. On the contrary, he thinks that what he thinks is the most natural thing in the world. So, if you do call him biased you immediately lose him, and prove to him only that you are stupid, about this and about much else.
Unchallenged extremism is one problem. Another is the resulting tedium. Bauerlein takes a J. S. Mill line, to the effect that even if the orthodoxy is right (which he doesn’t think it is) it still needs to be kept on its intellectual toes by facing regular in-house challenges.
But he writes about liberal academics more as confused and ignorant barbarians than as fully functioning enemies. His job is not so much to oppose them as to rescue them. He feels sorry for them. → Continue reading: On liberal academic groupthink and on why it may be worse in the USA than in Britain
Blogging will not turn bad writers into good ones, but it can make life a whole lot better for good writers.
The fear among them (us? – I vomit the verbals, you judge) is that if you just fling your stuff up as it gets done so that it can immediately be read by all those greedy readers forthwith and at no cost, you will, at best, become a world-famous pauper, a super-celebrity beggar, famous on six continents for not having two cents to rub together. Buddy can you spare a Paypal payment? Well, at least blogging gives the downtrodden a voice.
Oh, you do occasionally get paying gigs out of all that unpaid stuff you churn out. But think tanks are one thing, and actual paying readers are something else again.
This is why I find the news that Scrappleface has just had a book published so very interesting, from the point of view of blogging in general, if not of this particular blogger.
I caught myself thinking yesterday that although I could blog about this book, I could not actually review it because I have not yet read it. But actually I have, I assume, read quite a lot of it, as soon as it came out. It is, I am entirely confident, very good and very funny. If you enjoy poking fun at Democrats etc. as much as he does, you should buy it. You will love it.
Seriously, we bloggers must all hope that this book sells really well.
At present, most regular publishers probably regard blogging as just one great big given-away cowpat on their lush and expensively priced pastures. But if the idea gets into their heads that they can grow a whole new crop of expensive books in this ordure, well, this could really bring the old media and the new back into bed with each other.
Think about it from a publisher’s point of view. What do publishers do? What they do is edit stuff that they have finally got into their hands. So, let the mainstream, big name editors surf the blogs and find their writers there. They can feel happy and powerful choosing material that has – blessing upon blessings – already been written and is already on their desks. No begging phone calls, and ordeal by deadlines. (Deadlines are hell for writers, but imagine what they are like for hard-pressed publishers.) The entire job is already on their desks and in their hands.
As for readers, well, writing as a reader, I do not notice any decline in my enthusiasm for books, or in anyone else’s. Books are nice. You can read them in the lavatory, and in coffee bars and trains and bank and supermarket queues. You can give them as Christmas presents to human beings, or to members of your family.
As blogs multiply in number, the need for people to spot the best ones and pick out their best bits is bound to grow. Bloggers have shown a great enthusiasm for picking out their favourite bits by everybody else, today. But not many have shown themselves willing to plough through their favourite blogs and tell the rest of us which are their favourite bits from a year ago, two years ago, and (for let us look ahead) ten years ago. (Personally I cannot be bothered to pick out my own favourite bits by me.) Publishers have just the people to do this, and just the product (books) in which to display the fruits of such labours.
Bloggers. The new book writers. We can all hope.
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row by row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard among the guns below.
We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe;
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If yea break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
– John McCrae
In my office today in the City, at 11 o’clock, on the 11th of November, hundreds of us switched off our phones, stilled our keyboards, took our eyes off our spreadsheets, and marked two minutes’ silence for the men and women killed in defence of this country.
A lot is written about what Poppy Day ought to mean, but for me, the son of a former RAF aircraft navigator, cousin-in-law of a fine member of the US Air Force and descendant of two Royal Navy commanders, the meaning is very clear. I would not now be able to blog my inconsequential libertarian thoughts without the sacrifices made by others. It is as simple as that.
XCOR Aerospace, the Mojave spaceship company which provided floor space and food for many of us who attended the first commercial suborbital launch in June, has announced a contest.
The prizes will be given to the persons, groups or companies who provide working steam engines fulfilling the contest specifications at various levels.
Yes, spaceships really can use steam engines. There is a lot of waste heat floating around a rocket engine so it makes sense to use some of it to operate the engine. If you are a home machinest or have a small engineering company and think this might be fun, go pick up the rules and the pump interfaces specification.
Ad astra my friends!
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, all rights reserved
Reports from Paris indicate that there has been a marked improvement in the condition of Yasser Arafat.
He’s dead.
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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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