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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Geoff Boycott: A Cricketing Hero
Leo McKinstry
first published by Partridge, 2000, fully revised and updated edition published by Harper Collins, 2005
Sportsmen seem to be arranged along a spectrum. At one end are those who are so naturally gifted that their careers are, to them and to us, a gift. They don’t have to think about it, they just do it, with supreme grace and style. You watch them, and marvel. You think: I could never do that. But glory be, homo sapiens can do it. Because look, he just did it, although heaven knows how. At the other end of the spectrum are sportsmen of relatively average talent, who, by supreme effort and constantly applied strength of mind and character, make the most of what they have, often defeating more naturally gifted opponents who haven’t learned to fight until too late. These talent maximisers do better than they have any right to, so to speak. You watch them, and you think: If I tried that hard, I could do that do. You probably couldn’t, because you are probably as lacking in the necessary mental strength as you are lacking in natural talent (and they actually have rather more natural talent than you do along with their superior mental attitude), but that’s what you think while you watch.
When cricket fans like me think of supremely gifted cricketers, we think of players like David Gower. Gower unforgettably (I watched it live on TV!) hit his first ball in test match cricket for four, as if he had already been playing cricket at the top level for half a lifetime. And when we think of cricketing talent maximisers, the men who make the absolute most of what they have, we think of Geoffrey Boycott.
Because they have to think so hard about their game, the talent maximisers tend to make the best coaches and the best commentators. Having made the most of their own talents, by analysing relentlessly what needs to be practiced and applied on the pitch, and having applied their conclusions with total discipline and single-mindedness, they are ideally prepared to bring the best also out of others with similarly imperfect natural gifts. The talent maximisers are likewise well prepared to explain what’s happening to us ignorant onlookers, because they have been analysing this relentlessly for the previous twenty years. Thus it is that Geoffrey Boycott, having been for so long such an effective and successful – if often hideously slow-scoring – opening batsman for his beloved Yorkshire and for England, is now a very skilled coach and one of the world’s most effective, sought-after and immediately recognisable commentators.
I don’t usually read sports biographies. Niagaras of cliché, most of them. But when I saw the names of Geoffrey Boycott and Leo McKinstry on the cover of what was obviously a widely selling paperback (if it wasn’t widely selling it wouldn’t have been in the sort of shop I saw it in) I didn’t hesitate. McKinstry is a writer already known to me, and probably to many other readers of this blog, in particular for his many Spectator pieces over the years. Boycott is Boycott, still a unique figure in English sport. He is still commentating now on international cricket, in his typically trenchant, no-nonsense style, and in that delightfully immitable Yorkshire accent of his. He is also a man who seems to proceed through the world surrounded by a force-field of controversy and confrontation, in both his cricketing and his personal life. Yorkshire cricket has been plunged into such rows in recent decades that no cricket fan however casual could fail to notice, and nor is any cricket fan like me unaware of the black cloud of tabloid coverage concerning Boycott’s trial and conviction for assaulting some woman or other, whom he was having a fling with, or something. Many, me included, used at first to suppose that Boycott was gay, but more recently a very different, very un-gay and now not nearly so private Boycott life hit the headlines. What was that all about? I knew that even at new-in-a-real-bookshop full price this book had to be worth a punt, and I was not wrong. → Continue reading: Geoff Boycott and the vices and virtues of selfishness
Here is a great new book to cheer libertarians as we draw close to the sixtieth anniversary of the National Health Service. Written by the director of Nurses for Reform, Dr. Helen Evans, and published by the Institute of Economic Affairs, ‘Sixty Years On: Who Cares for the NHS?’ not only shows that the country’s top 100 health opinion formers no longer actually believe in nationalised healthcare but, gloriously, this book fundamentally challenges the medical monopoly inherent in all health systems around the world.
Citing a huge array of free marketeers the work is awash with glorious quotes like this one from David Friedman:
Both barbers and physicians are licensed; both professions have for decades used licensing to keep their numbers down and their salaries up. Government regulation of barbers makes haircuts more expensive; one result, presumably, is that we have fewer haircuts and longer hair. Government regulation of physicians makes medical care more expensive; one result, presumably, is that we have less medical care and shorter lives. Given the choice of deregulating one profession or the other, I would choose the physicians.
Quoting our own Brian Micklethwait we again read:
Far from being obvious to me that a truly free medical market would be disastrous, I believe on the contrary that such arrangements would be of huge benefit to mankind, and that the sooner medicine is done this way the better.
Things would not, inevitably, be perfect. Some fools would make crass blunders, by ignoring manifestly superior medical services for the most frivolous of reasons, and by patronising the most notoriously incompetent. Some such fools would perish from their foolishness. Others would merely be unlucky. No law can prevent either stupidity or bad luck, although the world is now filled with the particular stupidity which consists of refusing to face this truth, and with the many luckless victims of this stupidity.
Powerfully, he concludes:
Given that for most people the avoidance of suicide rather than suicide is the objective, a truly free medical market would enable them, for the first time ever, to purchase steadily improving medical advice and medical help, and at a steadily diminishing price.
One of the most pernicious restrictions on medicine imposed by the current medical regime is the restriction on advertising. In a free market rival medical procedures, rival medical ‘philosophies’, rival views on the relative importance of confidentiality, hygiene, speed of treatment, riskiness of treatment, and so forth, would all battle it out in the market place. ‘Alternative’ therapists would be allowed to prescribe potentially dangerous drugs, as only government favoured therapists may now. It would be up to the patients to pick therapists who seemed to know what they were doing and their look out if they chose badly. The already thriving medical periodical press would assist with voluminous comparative advice, praise and criticism.
In such a free market, any number of different medical styles could be practised, and patients would make their choices.
Evans’s book is a must read for libertarians. It is also a tonic for the period of NHS propaganda we will no doubt endure over the next couple of weeks.
I have eased up a bit on “serious” blogging the last few days – I almost felt I had reached the point of mid-summer blog burnout – and have been too busy with other stuff, not least work. But I cannot resist linking to these fine folk who have set up a blog dedicated to the ferociously competitive world of barbecue food. God, I feel hungry already. No doubt those citizens of Jefferson’s Republic are gearing up for 4th of July. In a moment of transatlantic solidarity, may I ask commenters what sort of BBQ’s they will be doing on that day to give me some ideas?
I’ll be back to bashing Gordon Brown and the rest of them later, I promise.
I rather like this observation from Simon Hoggart:
But it’s not just the bigots who confidently announce what’s on the deity’s mind. Often on Thought For The Day on Radio 4 (the equivalent on Radio 2, at around 9.20 on the Terry Wogan show, is usually less embarrassing) someone declares solemnly that God believes this, or God wants that. Usually God turns out to have the same views as a north London bien pensant, who wishes the best for everyone, within certain limits.
He’s completely right. The Most Reverend, the Most Fluffy, Archbishop Rowan Williams is, in his determined niceness, on precisely as solid ground as is his scarey African co-churchman whom I just heard pronounce on Radio 4 that The Bible says the punishment for homosexuals is death and we are not entitled to disagree with God’s word. The ground is precisely as solid because it really amounts to ‘Because I say so. This is what scripture means because this is what I wish it did mean. It accords with the sort of society I want to live in, and therefore it is correct.’
At the risk of waking the throbbing-veined antimussulmen among the commentariat, the same is true of all proponents – and almost all interpreters – of a religious world-view. Those who say cosily with Tony Blair that Islamist terrorists are engaged in a “dreadful perversion of the true faith of Islam” are on precisely as strong a ground as both the followers of ibn Qutb and their countersupporters in western fearfandom, who say that that is what Islam ‘really’ is. Tapdancing in a vacuum.
The assertion of ‘truth’ is meaningless without the possibility of falsehood. The oxymoron ‘true faith’ invariably means the model of a religion, his own or someone else’s, that the speaker prefers, the one that gives him the most explicable, grippable, world.
They all say, without any real self-doubt, and without the glorious dramatic irony of Alf Garnett: “It stands to reason.” No it doesn’t. It is the opposite of reason. All of it.
Some of our long term readers may have noticed I have not posted a great deal on Iraq over the past several years. This is not due to any change in my support for the war or for the fine soldiers who have fought through dark times and bright. The real reason is the type of war being engaged in the last several years is one in which I have insufficient expertise to really comment on. Weapon systems and correlations of forces and international intrigue I deal with well… but cointerinsurgency strategy and tactics is not one of my strong suits. As an example, I was not for the surge when it was first proposed because I felt a too heavy foot print would cause us more trouble than not. I was decidedly wrong, but at the time no one seemed to be making a clear and cogent case for the other way.
Now some one has. I recently finished reading Michael Yon’s “Moment of Truth In Iraq” and found it a marvelous learning experience. While some of this material may have been published on his web site at the time it was happening, the book puts the events and tactics in perspective.
He shows how at one point we really were making a muck of things by applying the wrong tactics. There were things happening in the middle phase of this war that I found disquieting but was unable to place into a broader context. Michael Yon has done so.
Michael shows how General Petreaus consistently succeeded where ever he was placed in Iraq because he did indeed know how to go about things. Where I would have thought putting a few soldiers here and there right in the middle of the population would make them think more of us as invaders, Yon shows how it did the exact opposite. It created trust and faith that we had their backs. You could really only know this by being there.
He shows how misunderstanding the tribal power structures was a mistake of the first order and that learning that lesson and working with the grain of the culture instead of against it has led to success.
I highly recommend this book.
“The fundamental story about consumer taste, in modern times, is not one of dumbing down or of producers seeking to satisfy a homogeneous least common denominator at the expense of quality. Rather, the basic trend is of increasing variety and diversity, at all levels of quality, high and low.”
– Tyler Cowen, Creative Destruction: how globalisation is changing the world’s cultures, page 127.
The efforts to slay the tax dragon in Massachusetts have advanced past the last of the expensive hurdles. According to Carla Howell and Michael Cloud:
We collected over 22,117 raw signatures from around the state, sufficiently distributed to meet the state’s requirement that no more than 25% of them may come from any one county. We should end up with plenty to meet the 11,099 certified signature requirement – with a kevlar cushion to slow the challenges from the teachers’ union.
We’re jumping through the last legal hoops necessary to get on the ballot.
We already told you about the legal hoops we had to jump through last fall to get the first 76,000+ certified signatures.
We turned in these additional 22,117 signatures to 319 different town clerks June 18th.
Now we’re waiting for the town clerks to certify those signatures so we can turn them into the Secretary of State by July 2nd. That wouldn’t be very hard – except the town clerks don’t have to give us back our petitions until just two days before July 2nd.
Massachusetts signature drives are hard as hell. Ask the Republican U.S. Senate candidate who just failed to make the 2008 ballot.
We’re almost done. Finally.
it appears they have our enemies quaking in their boots this time around. According to
The North Attleboro Sun Chronicle:
In the meantime, legislators said the ballot initiative has an excellent chance of passing, considering a similar proposal got 45 percent of the vote in 2002.
Poirier said voters feel there is nothing they can do to lower gasoline or food costs and may see wiping out the income tax as the only step they can take to save themselves money.
This is the November contest I look forward to with glee. The passage is likely enough and the libertarian impact great enough that not even MSM will be able to ignore it. If we win this one, it will only be the first of a cascade with which we will sweep the nation.
So if you are in Massachusetts or nearby, get out there and help Carla and Michael fight the teachers union front organization and the AFL-CIO and other hard-line socialist organizations who will be out defending their God, the State.
The assault on liberty could be worse than it is in the United Kingdom. We are nothing like Zimbabwe, say – or Jersey.
Jersey? Yes. And I don’t mean the partly imaginary lawless land of the Sopranos and Frank Sinatra. The supposedly sleepy tax-haven and holiday resort a few miles off the Normandy coast, the oldest possession of the English Crown still in hand*, has entirely astonishingly, and almost secretly, converted itself a police state in the last fortnight:
The report in the Jersey Evening Telegraph is so concise it can only be quoted in full:
The Home Affairs Minister has sent shock waves through the legal profession by authorising the indefinite detention of suspects without charge.
On 5 June, Senator Wendy Kinnard amended the criminal code that had limited pre-charge detention to 36 hours.
She did so under delegated powers enjoyed by the minister under the terms of the Police Procedures and Criminal Evidence (Jersey) Law.
However, that same law states that before such changes to codes are made, the minister is required to publish a draft of the changes and consult interested parties. She did neither of these things – a failure that has left the Island’s criminal lawyers stunned.
The new code came into force on Thursday, but no statement was released to either the media or the legal profession.
Why? What crisis of state is afflicting the Channel Islands?
Suspicious British readers may note that Jersey ministers are accustomed to do what they are told by the UK government. The facts that this peremptory administrative action shortly preceded the House of Commons debate on police detention powers, and that the resistance to HMG’s policies had had some effect by pointing out there are other jurisdictions, where the gutters do not run with human blood, in which long detention without charge is unknown, may be entirely unrelated.
* Pedant’s corner: the dukes of Normandy held the Channel Islands for more than a century before they took possession of the English Crown.
In view of recent legal developments this humble blogger would like to state that her comment over breakfast last Thursday consisting of the words “That Shami Chakrabarti is never off the telly” was mere banter and persiflage and in no way, shape or form meant to suggest that contact between Ms Chakrabarti’s anatomy and said machinery was of a rumptitious or tumptitious nature.
UPDATE: Oh dear, judging from the comments, that was another of my jokes that sailed straight off the edge of the world. I commented later:
“The point was, and I do apologize – though not in a way that admits liability! – if my attempt at making it in a funny way was not clear to all readers, was that while I’m all for the stand David Davis is making, Shami Chakrabarti threatening to sue someone over an ‘innuendo’ so mild that it wouldn’t have looked out of place in the mouth of Bertie Wooster, is petty and trivialises the issue.”
Blimey! This is what the deputy leader of the BNP said about the Davis by-election:
We would argue that these people [jihadist extremists] should not be in the country in the first place, but if the price we have to pay for the accommodation of millions of immigrants is the scrapping of our ancient rights, then it is not a price worth paying.
It seems they have principles deeper than the anti-immigrant feeling that people like me assume is their prime appeal. That’s a very pleasant surprise, though for this open-border freemarketeer rationalist and sexual anarchist they have a little way to go to catch my vote. HMG on the other hand makes a big fuss about its ‘anti-racist’ credentials, but is happy to appeal to xenophobia at every conceivable opportunity in order to promote the destruction of liberty for its own sake.
Tim Worstall provides a suitably terse response to the latest piece of economic illiteracy from leftie writer Richard Murphy, who is against admirable things like avoidance of high taxes, and who now is supporting measures to prevent, or at least hamper, investors from making money by “shorting” the shares of firms they think are likely to perform badly.
The practice of “shorting” seems to get a certain class of person all upset. Earlier this year, when the shares of HBOS, the UK banking group, came under pressure, the cry went up that those irresponsible wreckers called hedge funds were deliberately trying to destroy the firm to make a fast profit. What this ignores is that if there were not investors willing to temporarily borrow stock as part of their short-selling tactics, then this would reduce the total number of counterparties in a market, and reduce liquidity and efficiency in the pricing of shares, which is a bad thing. Illiquid markets – which can produce big jumps up or down in the prices of shares – are generally not good places to be in, particularly for smaller investors.
If I take a dim view of a company that I do not own, shorting lets me act on that view and maybe make some money out of it. Quite why this is so terrible, Mr Murphy does not bother to explain.
Some time ago, when I wrote about this topic, one sarcastic commenter moaned that I was insulting the intelligence of readers by trying to explain what “shorting” is. I reject that criticism since it s plainly obvious that even among supposedly intelligent people, the workings of the financial markets are mysterious. And what people do not understand, they fear.
The Irish “no” vote on the EU’s Lisbon Treaty has already had some positive effects, such as the lessening chances of the European major states attempting to create a tax cartel. Well, we can all hope, anyway:
France has dropped plans to push forward with tax harmonisation under its European Union presidency, following Ireland’s rejection of the Lisbon treaty.
Christine Lagarde, French finance minister, told the Financial Times that while the proposal for a common consolidated corporate tax base had not been abandoned altogether, Paris would no longer press other governments to back it over the next six months.
Yes, perhaps the French, rather than attempting to prevent some horrific “race to the bottom” on tax rates, should instead admit that tax competition, including that which comes from those dreadful offshore centres, is a good thing.
The comments ought to underscore just how serious are the consequences of creating an EU state and the benefits that exist from resisting that ambition.
Well, maybe I write these words in a spirit of optimism as the light pours through my window. Indulge me for a while.
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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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