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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One of my all-time favourite bloggers – who also happens to be the funniest man in the blogosphere – is under attack from DailyKos contributor ‘dday’, who does not think Harry Hutton is particularly funny at all. This post raised the ire of ‘dday’ and provoked this response from the little pet. ‘dday’ starts off by qualifying his monumental whinge with a “some of my best friends are black, but…” type defence of his sense of humour :
I’m not above making fun of people. Actually I do it for sport.
For one so allegedly adept at the art of piss-taking, he does not seem to understand that whole irreverence thing. Later, ‘dday’ flashes his humour credentials again – just so everyone is sure it is not him with the problem :
I make jokes continually, so I’m pretty up on my joke construction.
You can imagine the sort of emasculated, PC jokes this guy would crack. I bet he’s about as funny as a gender feminist. Anyway, if the plight of those living in intellectual poverty concerns you, take a look at the “debate” via the links provided above. The related comments thread on DailyKos and that attached to the offending post at Hutton’s are also worth a read if you enjoy the spectacle of uncomprehending, outraged mewling from humourless dolts.
Most of us are familiar with Parkinson’s Law, the one that says that work expands to fill the time available for its completion.
However, a TV news report last night, discussing one of the recent travails of Britain’s Home Office in front of its recently constructed and newly occupied headquarters reminded me of another Parkinson’s Law – same Parkinson but different law – which says that whenever an organisation moves into a new, custom-built headquarters, it is likely to be not just heading for disaster but already there. Parkinson’s Law of Custom Built Head Offices alludes to the way that the process, first of deciding about the new building and then of getting settled into it, takes the attention of the people who matter away from the real job that they are supposed to be doing, and towards their own, as it were, domestic arrangements. They are celebrating past successes instead of contriving further success.
Contrariwise, people who are busy doing important and productive work that they are determined to press ahead with have no time to be fussing excessively about furniture and fittings, and they make do with whatever they have or can easily obtain from a catalog.
Once again, this law would appear to vindicated, and I can only apologise for not noticing this sooner. I’ve long known of this law. I often walk past the new Home Office, designed by star architect Sir Terry Farrell, on my way from my home to Free Market Think Tank Land, which is just the other side of the new Home Office from me. The Home Office’s very public difficulties in recent months have not escaped me. But the penny did not drop until last night.
The new Home Office was moved into in the Spring of 2005.
I’ve got a little list — I’ve got a little list
Of society offenders who might well be underground,
And who never would be missed — who never would be missed!
The Cereals Authority makes its hay with what is grown;
The Asset “Recoverer’s” take what you think you own;
The Office of the Regions now does what the council did;
The control of state surveillance is quite completely hid;
Elections are conditional, the Standards Boards insist;
They’d none of ’em be missed — they’d none of ’em be missed!
Chorus:
He’s got ’em on the list — he’s got ’em on the list;
And they’ll none of ’em be missed — they’ll none of ’em be missed.
Attending a Bruges group bash at the IEA yesterday, I had the opportunity to listen to the cogent James Bennett elucidating further on the concept of the Anglosphere. As always, the talk was clear and precise, dodging the pitfalls of contemporary topics that can blind many to long-term opportunities through a strong pessimism about Britain’s current predicaments.
Bennett’s arguments on the pervasive individualism that biases the English speaking countries towards liberty proved a welcome long-term antidote to the current gloom. Indeed, his accounts of the spread of English through India, and its transformation from a language of the elite to the masses, was described in terms of a social revolution.
Whilst we are trapped in the short-term carcrash that is the EU, the positive trends of globalisation and the adoption of English throughout India, China, Asia and Africa will prove far more beneficial in the long-term. We will know that the world is becoming far saner and far brighter when we see the outsourcing industry open its first call centres in Kabul or Waziristan. Their turn will come…
We seem to have become practically as theocentric at the higher levels of the administration as these people we’re waging war against. It makes me kind of uncomfortable.
– Christopher Buckley, interviewed in the Sunday Times Magazine
He’s talking about the US; but there are some discomfortingly morally aggressive Christians in charge on this side of the pond, too.
Best joke of the World Cup so far. Italy versus Ghana. An Italian gets an early yellow card for a nasty tackle, treading on the guy’s ankle. As Ghana’s Essien hobbles to his feet and we are shown the replay, John Motson says:
Yes, that’s the one FIFA want stamped out.
Not to say cracked down on.
It is now nearing half time, and although there have been no goals, it has been what they call end to end stuff. Ghana could well surprise. What have I said? Italy score! Someone called Perlo. Sorry, Pirlo. Earlier Toni nearly scored for Italy, and deserved to, slamming it against the underside of the bar with the Ghana goalie well beaten. Half time: 1-0 Italy. More goals to come surely, unless everyone gets heat exhaustion.
Earlier in the day, the first really crazy game. Japan 1-0 up over Australia with hardly any time to go, and I have to go out on an errand. Fine by me. You do not want to be sitting next to a computer (i.e. a fan heater) all day in this weather. And it must be far too hot out there in Germany for anything much to happen before the whistle. Out and about, only moments later, I hear yelling in a pub, look in, and find the Anglosphere celebrating Australia’s third goal.
What will Michael say?
Next up for the Aussies: Brazil. No worries.
Just spoken at vloggercon on the net neutrality panel. It was organised and chaired by the guys from blip.tv – Charles Hope and Mike Hudack, who was recently on PBS NOW programme debating the issue. The panel discussion was heated at times and only reinforced my opinion that this is one of the most important issues affecting the future of the internet these days. The points below reflect my position:
- The telecoms and cablecos are heavily regulated and their cries for free market are false. The industry is already warped and the argument against net neutrality based on the desire to keep government out of ‘markets’ is misplaced.
- The distinction between consumer and user is gone. It is in fact the ‘content’ produced by many individual vloggers that put the social media cat among the old media pigeons. The media industry has smelled the wealth of content and feels the urge to control it.
- A network that is heavily regulated and not very innovative is being used as a model of control and regulation for a network that is amazingly open, innovative in a historically unprecedented manner. So the government is imposing regulation from a closed and cumbersome industry to an agile and dynamic space.
- Nothwithstanding all of the above, net neutrality legislation is not the answer – it is more like ‘casting out a devil with the devil’. There is no fundamental understanding of the internet as a space, marketplace, world or a frontier (for more on this see Doc Searls’ article on Saving the Net). The debate should not be about the internet as a sum of pipelines and wires and content and packets delivered across an infrastructure. It should be in terms of protecting the space in which the individual has been empowered and the emergent benefits of interactions among those individuals that are having an increasingly sociall impact.
There was more but this is what I can think of whilst sitting in the middle of vloggercon still in full flow.
Update: In the heat of the moment, I forgot to mention my ‘solution’ – deregulate telecoms and cablecos so we have something resembling a real competition at the pipelines and wires level. Then the pipeline takers will not have a case to control content and what goes through. Susan Crawford sums it up well:
Think of the pipes and wires that you use to go online as a sidewalk. The question is whether the sidewalk should get a cut of the value of the conversations that you have as you walk along. The traditional telephone model has been that the telephone company doesn’t get paid more if you have a particularly meaningful call — they’re just providing a neutral pipe.
cross-posted from Media Influencer
However this time it is nice to hear of Islamic extremists killing themselves in ways that do not involve blowing themselves up on a bus in London or in a pizzeria in Israel in order to murder a bunch of civilians. More of this and faster please.
Good to see the stalwarts of the entertainment industry still have it in spades.
(Seen on Manolo’s Shoe Blog. Manolo also seems to have a fetish for a certain German entertainer.)
Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic
Tom Holland
Little, Brown, 2003
One of the great joys of my teenage years was hearing, with titles and composers attached, the very same classical music core repertoire that I had first been exposed to in my infancy. So that’s what that is, I would cry out with joy, as yet another familiar tune would finally identify itself as whichever overture or symphony or concerto it was. Lost chord after lost chord, found.
Reading Tom Holland’s Rubicon has been a similarly joyous experience.
After my infancy of listening to the BBC Third Programme, there followed an expensive education during which I absorbed only bits and pieces of what was being said. I emerged from this education with a fairly thorough understanding of the Bible and its various contents, even as I became ever more unconvinced by its claims. Geography and post-1066 English history were a solid enough basis for further reading and learning. But when it came to the ancient world, the pieces of the puzzle were too few to join up, the fragments of the picture too closely associated with the grind of being made to learn Latin and Greek, which for me never really got beyond word games. I recall being awarded ninety eight percent for a “Latin verse” exam. Even then, I knew that my achievement, such as it was, had nothing to do with poetry. As far as ancient Roman history was concerned, most of what I emerged with from my Latin lessons was a jumble of mysterious names, such as Labienus, Cotta, Vercingetorix, Jugurtha, Mithridates. Much was made in my Latin lessons of Rome’s subjugation of Britain, but only a vague version even of that really stuck.
At some point I acquainted myself with an approximation of the Hannibal story, with its epic crossing of the Alps, its equally amazing massacres of various legions at Lake Trasimene and at Cannae (216BC), and later Hannibal’s defeat, in 202BC at Zama, which was the one where Scipio Africanus left gaps in his line for Hannibal’s elephants to charge uselessly through.
Later on, further pieces of the puzzle landed on the still largely empty table. Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, for instance, and then Anthony and Cleopatra. I devoured Robert Graves’s I Claudius and Claudius The God, but mostly because of the evil Messalina’s exploits and because of all the gladiatorial gore. Not that long ago, I finally watched the movie Spartacus all the way through. More recently, I got hooked on Rome, the recent TV soap opera. But I missed the beginning of that, and was never really sure where the boundary was there between fact and fiction. (Verenius? Pullo? Still don’t know about them.) But it was still only bits and pieces. More big names had piled up in my head, like Crassus (Laurence Olivier in Spartacus), and I now knew rather more about Pompey (Kenneth Cranham in Rome). But I only caught these personages in the middles and ends of their careers. Given that Pompey’s career ended in defeat at the hands of Caesar, how did he get to be called Pompey Magnus, Pompey the Great?
For me, the joy of reading Rubicon is that the blanks have at last been filled in. Joy may seem an odd word to describe reading about events which involved so much suffering and disaster, both to Romans and to their enemies. But now that it has all happened, we might as well enjoy it. It would have been no fun to have been in a legion at Carrhae (53BC), say, where the career of Crassus came to its abrupt and appalling end, but me having a grand old time learning about it all isn’t going to make things any worse for anybody. And I really did enjoy this story. At no point while reading it was I ever bored or tempted to skip things. Seriously, it has been a long time since I have read a book with such rapt attention to what it was saying, with so little attention to what page number I had reached, and with such genuine disappointment when it stopped. → Continue reading: Tom Holland fills in my ancient Roman blanks
The BBC commentators were as doom-laden as usual for our one nil victory over Paraguay. But it was a useful victory and Lineker needs to listen to what Sven actually says.
But, watching the Italian Job afterwards with my friend and a bottle of Maltese Red, one could see how times had changed. In 2008, the coach transporting the gold to Geneva would have been decked out in white and red.
And I know the Mini chase scene would not work with this pattern…
I am in San Francisco right now with Adriana, who will be speaking on net neutrality at Vloggercon tomorrow with her Samizdata co-editor hat firmly affixed. Today, we will be attending Techdirt Greenhouse with fellow Samizdatista Hillary Johnson.
Upon arrival yesterday, Adriana and I went for a wander and took in the, er, sights. We passed by UN Plaza, where I snapped this nauseating image:
On the same pole, there is a sign warning vagrants not to peddle without a permit. Still, I would have loved to have taken a snap of the sign that Perry de Havilland and I spotted while driving around in San Francisco last year, which featured a beaming Asian-American woman with the following in bold letters:
Paying taxes really pays off!
Whenever I am in San Francisco, I cannot help but think of the great Ken Layne, who wrote in 1998:
San Francisco is truly the foulest place on earth. The nation’s most expensive city features $2,000 moldy little apartments, a filthy broken-down transit system, tens of thousands of bums on the dole, the nation’s worst newspapers, year-round crappy weather, and a local government that’s truly of and for the people. That’s because the people here are total idiots.
We are actually quite enjoying the weather, but the rest sounds about right to me.
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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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