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]
|
The FT’s The Way We Live Now column reports that David Blanchflower is to appear before the Treasury select committee, as he has been appointed to the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England. I imagine he is up for it as an economist representative of the currently modish disguise of egalitarianism as a collectively-skewed hedonics.
So does Maggi Urry, one suspects. She writes:
Blanchflower’s most frequently quoted claim to fame is his co-authorship in 2004 of a paper entitled “Money, Sex and Happiness”. […] He calculated that increasing the frequency of sex from once a month to once a week would generate as much happiness as would a $50,000 a year pay rise. Depends, I would have thought on who the sex was with – the pay rise might be preferable.
I am a little more cynical. At British tax rates, I note that is approximately $750 a time. If you cannot get really good sex for less than $750 without a series discount then your grasp of the market is quite questionable.
Articles often reveal more about their author than their subject. A case in point is a fairly bizarre article by Martin Samuel in the Times. He writes about US warships being named to commemorate the 9/11 atrocities and moreover being contructed in part using steel salvaged from the WTC (I have no idea if this is true but I will take his word for it). He then goes on to say:
The ships would commemorate the attacks, if that is the right word, which it is plainly not.
If a warship named after something does not thereby ‘commemorate’ it, then what is the right word?
Exactly what is being commemorated anyway? Not the memory of the victims, as nothing is known of how they want to be remembered, and certainly not whether they would wish a warship to be dedicated in their name.
And so by that logic, the cenotaph in Whitehall and all those Great War memorials in almost every town and village in the UK do not ‘commemorate’ the victims of Britain’s various wars either, unless a Ouija board was used to conduct a post-mortem opinion poll of Britain’s war dead to see how they might like to be remembered. Or perhaps, seeing as how we British are so much more insightful than those funny Americans, the wise old Ministry of Defence as a matter of policy asks all servicemen “In the event you buy the farm for Queen and Country in some godforsaken hole we sent you to, what sort of edifice would you like us to use to commemorate your demise?”
Who knows in which direction their anger would be channelled? It could be that some of the dead might have thought over-reliance on warships was their downfall in the first place.
Well call me presumptuous if you like but from what I know of human nature in general and Americans in particular, my money is on the hypothetical post-mortem anger of 9/11’s victims being directed at the sons of bitches who murdered them, rather than at Presidents Clinton or Bush or the US Navy. Just a guess mind you.
While not excusing wicked acts committed by terrorists, it would be foolish to view the behaviour of terrorists as motiveless. If we regard terrorism as the work of madmen and unrelated to our relationship with their world, we learn nothing from history.
I love it when ‘sophisticated’ and ‘nuanced’ Brits and Europeans lecture Americans about history, given the millions and millions of corpses littered across Europe within living memory. Attacks by people from abroad are caused by interventionist foreign policies, clever Mr. Samuel tells us, with his wise Old World perspectives, which of course explains how places like Poland, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Greece, Czechoslovakia etc. managed to sit out World War II in peace by minding their own business.
Moreover whilst nothing is guaranteed in this life, as close to certainty as you may ever come is when someone says “While not excusing wicked acts committed by terrorists…” they are about to do exactly that.
His entire article tells us nothing about America, American foreign policy, the people who committed mass murder on 9/11, the people who died on 9/11 or even how to commemorate the untimely dead. All his article tells us is that Martin Samuel neither likes nor understands Americans. It also reveals that unlike many in the Muslim world whose perpectives have changed considerably since that fateful day in 2001, it is Martin Samuel who has a very poor understanding of cause and effect.
The NHS is now being instructed to turn its back on ‘alternative’ treatments such as homeopathy. This is a very good beginning… now all we need is for it to turn its back on non-alternative treatments too and Britain can start to allow a First World healthcare system to develop.
I think if you searched 435 randomly selected American homes, and 435 Congressional offices, you just might find more evidence of crime in the latter…
Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit.
An alteration of my domestic arrangements is afoot, and that caused me to have to relocate a bookcase today, so to do this, I had to empty the case of its books. Deep in the depths, I came across a tattered dictionary.
Because I am the sort of idler that will do anything to avoid work, even to the extreme of reading a dictionary, I opened it. In faint pencil, the name ‘Jack Wickstein, Port Augusta, 1928’ was written. It had been my grandfather’s. I wonder if it was a gift. Those were different times when you would give a young man of 20 a dictionary. However because he’d spent much of his childhood interned on the family farm, he never got a complete education, and he was the sort of fellow that never stopped trying to improve himself. So maybe the dictionary was not so illogical a gift after all. In the wake of the Great War, Jack’s Father had issued a family edict that henceforth the family was to avoid looking or sounding German, and an excellent command of the English language was a good way to go about this.
The dictionary itself is rather odd. The first pages are a series of colour plates devoted to underwater sea life. Then a list of worthies who contributed to the articles in the dictionaries. The names mean nothing to me, but the Universities were, and are, the cream of New England learning. I read the Introduction. One passage sprang out at me.
Every word, every term in this Dictionary is standard; that is, classic, or, in other words, adapted for use by the best speakers and writers. None other has been admitted, consequently the work will commend itslef to not only those who want to keep abreast of the times, but to all those who wish to have a thorough working knowledge of the language in which they are constrained to express their thoughts, ideas, and requirements. This is the language spoken today by almost 200,000,000 of the human race. It is believed that it is destined to become the universal language of mankind, as it is spreading to the uttermost corners of the earth, and even supplanting other tongues in their native strongholds.
Thus wrote the editor, Joseph Devlin, in 1925. Eighty years into the future, and his optimism about the future of the English language seems, if anything, to have been restrained. However, it is also a sign of the times that it is rare, if not impossible, to see such rampant optimism about the future in print.
Oh well. Blogging about it will not get the chores done. Back to work I go…
I have seen worse. Ian McKellen stole the show. Wait for the DVD.
At least I have an excuse for this…
The question I ask in the headline may not have an affirmative answer but the world’s stock markets have a decidedly shaky look at the moment. The British bluechip index is now at the level where it was at the start of the year, erasing all its gains. Some emerging market bourses have fared even worse. What is going on?
Inflation – which some economists had claimed was ‘dead’ – is possibly back, created as a result of the vast amounts of monetary liquidity sloshing around the global economy at the moment. For a while, red-hot growth in China, India and continued robustness to the U.S. economy may have bred a dangerous amount of complacency. We have a new head of the powerful U.S. Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke. Bernanke is clearly keen to establish his own policymaking persona after the long stretch of the Alan Greenspan years. There is a sense that interest rates could be headed up further. Gold prices have been above $700 an ounce, rising rapidly to a degree that has got some old-fashioned ‘gold bugs’ like me decidedly nervous.
So should we fear a recession is on the way? Not necessarily. The enormous motor power of the U.S. economy repeatedly counters the doomsayers. But there are clear risks. China’s state-dominated banking sector is stuffed with bad loans and investment is often wildly misallocated. The price of oil is acting like a tax on growth, although in time it may weaken if new energy supplies come on stream to slake demand (assuming governments allow it).
The economic sea may be choppy for a while yet. However, to counter some of the gloom read this sharp piece at the Mises Institute.
I have been criticized a few times for using the popular term ‘Islamo-fascist’ to describe, well, Islamic fascists such as the Iraqi & Syrian Ba’athists as well as the theocratic Iranian regime. Well if this report is correct (Iranian sources are denying it), they are planning to adopt a measure which should dispel all doubt as to the appropriateness of the term.
I oppose the ID card & panoptic centralised database plans of the UK government on the grounds it is a monstrous abridgement of civil liberties and truly deadly expansion of state power… but even on the utilitarian basis of the state’s own objectives, the entire scheme is a disaster in the making. This comes not from some civil rights activist but from an IBM researcher whose specialty is secure ID cards.
The big issue is that the UK government, plans to set up a central database containing volumes of data about its citizens. Unlike other European governments, most of whom already use some form of ID card, the central database will allow connections between different identity contexts – such as driver, taxpayer, or healthcare recipient – which compromises security. Centrally-stored biometric data would be attractive to hackers, he said, adding that such data could be made anonymous but that the UK Government’s plans do not include such an implementation.
Read the whole article.
(hat tip to commenter Shaun Bourke)
Among the main reasons for opposing a compulsory state ID card is the risk, all too real in a country like Britain with shoddy state-run IT, of being wrongfully identified. For example, imagine the danger of being wrongfully described as a criminal, and having that error imprinted in a database.
The risk is all too real.
Replacement Bus Service
If there are three words that can strike gloom into the heart of any traveller within the bounds of London, it is the phrase above. The art of getting from here to there is complicated by the dusty ejection from train or tube onto the road, where one is placed at the mercy of the traffic jams and Livingstone’s nightmarish road policy. Worse, the replacement bus must follow the path of the railway or underground, twisting and turning back upon itself, prolonging what was expected to be a straightforward and swift journey.
Such journeys are tolerable if there is time to relax and alternative routes prove just as long. But, if it is the last train or tube, and the only alternative is the night bus, then you are well and truly screwed. You will be a long time getting home.
There is another interesting article in the Washington Post about why it is a bad idea for conservatives to always support the Republican Party regardless of what it does. This closely echoes what I have been saying about conservatives in Britain supporting David Cameron’s Blairite Tory Party. The WaPo article does not take the pro-liberty stance on this I would (it is an article by a conservative for conservatives) but the underlying political calculus and logic behind it is hard to argue with: if your votes can always be taken for granted, do not be surprised if your views do not count for anything with the person you voted for.
The differences between the two main parties in both Britain and the United State has been largely an illusion for quite some time. In the US at least the Republicans and Democrats use very different cultural references and language to make themselves appear meaningfully different, but in Britain the utterances of David Cameron and Tony Blair are so similar that I would be willing to bet that if shown to a person out of context, most would be hard pressed to tell which of the men said what.
What makes the tribal loyalties of conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic so foolish is that time and again, year after year, those loyalties are not reciprocated. Tory policy towards the EU, where the parliamentary party has never reflected the views of the Tory rank and file, is perhaps the most extreme example but by no means the only one. Similarly it has long amazed me how conservatives who excoriated Clinton for trade protectionism and hugely costly ‘social’ programmes (a misnomer if ever there was) remained silent when G.W. Bush did the same in spades.
If conservatives are not willing to punish their leaders for fear of the Other Tribe getting elected, they have only themselves to blame if they get the same corrupting policies the Other Tribe’s leaders would have enacted anyway.
|
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.
|
