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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At a time when the credit/money bubble financial institutions are in crises the Economist chooses to lead with a story on Mr Cameron – the leader of the British Conservative party. I can not claim to have read the story as I do not find Mr Cameron very interesting – at least compared to other matters. And, as I am British and have been an active member of the Conservative party since the end of the 1970’s, if he was of such great interest to anyone (other than his family and friends) it would be surely be me.
In case anyone makes the defence that the financial crises was not known at the time when the Economist went to press…
Well the absurd government created Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae had not lost 50% of their stock market value when the Economist went to press – but their problems were obvious, as were the problems of the compassionate lender to the poor (always run a mile from a company that says it is in business to help the poor) Indybank of California, the run on that enterprise was well under way.
The people at the Economist could have made some reasonable predictions about the general financial situation, but they did not – or at least did not lead with them. I will make the prediction now that the the gutless Bush Administration will not order the arrest of the corrupt Mr Johnson (the ex head of Fannie Mae and leading Democrat) as this would upset his friends, such as Senators Obama and Durbin and Congressman Barney Frank – and we must not upset these upstanding individuals…
…Any more than we must upset Speaker Nancy Pelosi by having a Presidential press conference asking people to telephone her to ask why she will not allow a vote in Congress on whether or not to allow more drilling for oil at a time of record fuel prices – although it is fine for Speaker Pelosi to have a press conference telling everyone to telephone the President Bush to blame him for high fuel prices.
Of course the Economist did have other stuff in it:
A brief look, thanks to the library, showed an article sneering at Governor Bobby Jindal (the upcoming Republican and someone the Economist shows signs of fearing) and another puff piece about the all wise Senator Obama – this one claiming that his cynical habit of saying anything to get elected (even, supposedly, reversing positions he has held all his life – well reversing them till after the election) is a good thing, and pointing to his economic advisers as the height of “sensibleness”.
No doubt they will prove about as sensible as the fanatical collectivist Paul Krugman – a man the Economist long favoured.
I could go on, for example examining their obituary of the late Senator Richard Helms and showing how the obituary shows the Economist writers do not understand the nature or effects of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but I will stop here.
Anyone who is still buying the Economist is beyond rational argument.
It may be disgustingly authoritarian, but it is risibly incompetent too. It appears the Home Office has just spent a very large amount of UK readers’ money making a vast online advertisement for NO2ID. We’d despaired of reaching ‘the youth’ ourselves, too expensive. I’m very glad they decided to do it for us.
With audience participation. Which embarrassingly for the Home Office shows ‘kids’ not to be quite the suckers they’d hoped. Enjoy.
I was intrigued by this:
American movies have forgotten how to portray heroism, while a large part of their disappearing audience still wants to see celluloid heroes. I mean real heroes, unqualified heroes, not those who have dominated American cinema over the past 30 years and who can be classified as one of three types: the whistle-blower hero, the victim hero, and the cartoon or superhero. The heroes of most of last year’s flopperoos belonged to one of the first two types, although, according to Scott, the only one that made any money, “The Kingdom,” starred “a team of superheroes” on the loose in Saudi Arabia. What kind of box office might have been done by a movie that offered up a real hero?
Up to a point. There is no doubt that much of what James Bowman says here is true. John Wayne-style movies just do not seem to get made any more, but I am not sure that heroism is dying out completely. I love the film, Apollo 13, for instance, for its realistic portrayal of the mental as well as physical heroism involved in getting the Apollo craft safely back to Earth after the craft suffered a massive loss of oxygen.
His point about “superheroes” is true: I thought the recent Iron Man film had some heroic as well as downright funny moments. As for other stuff, the last James Bond film, Casino Royale, while also not totally realistic, was a much grittier, tougher 007 film than recently, has at its core the fact that Bond is a hero who takes on the baddies.
The trouble is that heroism is often idealised, but I don’t have a problem with this if it involves “supermen” characters, like the last Batman film, which was pretty heroic, not to mention 300, the re-telling of the doings of ancient Greece. Outside of Hollywood, there are all those heroic Hong Kong action movies. Not to mention a film that was actually called Hero. Some of the Japanese anime films also are full of strong, uplifting moral themes.
So I do not think the cupboard is bare. But Bowman does make a good set of points about the lack of “real-life” hero films. I suspect that if there is a dearth of heroic figures on screen, some of it is down to how people, in their revulsion against war in general – a perfectly normal reaction – have taken against the military virtues. But as I hope some of the examples show, there is more to heroism than courage under fire.
Where I think there is a real problem, which the article does not really touch on, is the lack of any heroic characters in movies about business. I keep banging on about this, but it is a real pity that almost all businessmen and women are potrayed as morally sleazy or downright evil. A shame: I regard some entrepreneurs and their willingness to take big risks as heroes.
Quiz: name your top 5 most heroic films, of any genre.
I have spent twelve of the last sixteen years of my life living as a foreign citizen in the United Kingdom. I have spent this time on a mixture of student visas, the “UK ancestry” visa (which allows citizens of Commonwealth countries with a British grandparent to live and work in the UK) and for the last two and a half years as a permanent resident (or with “Indefinite Leave to Remain”, as the British immigration jargon has it). My immigration status has always been pretty uncontroversial, I have never been a drain on the resources of British taxpayers (quite the opposite, given the taxes I have paid). This has not stopped the Home Office from insisting that I jump through a whole variety of bureaucratic hoops, answer a large number of impertinent questions, and suffer an assortment of petty humiliations with a fair amount of regularity. The level of competence of the Home Office in administering all this has never been high – when I was studying at Cambridge, it was well understood that the usual way of renewing a student visa involved sending your passport to the Home Office, and then applying to your country’s embassy a few months later to replace a lost passport before making a quick trip to France to get your paperwork processed at the border on the way back – but in recent times (the start of which coincides quite closely with the Labour Party coming to power) the frequency with which hoops must be jumped has increased and the fees that must be paid to jump through each hoop have become ever higher.
However, last week, my need to deal with the Immigration and Nationality Directorate of the Home Office came to an end. At an in truth rather touching ceremony at Wandsworth Town Hall, I affirmed my allegiance to Queen Elizabeth the Second and was naturalised a British citizen. This does not affect my Australian citizenship, and I now have dual nationality. A couple of days later, I did what most new citizens do fairly quickly, and sent off an application for a British passport. The fee that is payable in this instance is not nearly as high as that payable when renewing an immigrant visa these days, but must none the less be paid. The passport application form came with another form on which I could fill out credit card details to pay the fee. The form stated that I could check the current fees on the website of a different section of the Home Office, the recently renamed Identity and Passport Service, or that I could alternately leave the amount blank on the form. The amount of the fee is not printed anywhere on either of the forms: this presumably makes it easier for the Home Office to increase the fees repeatedly without the trouble of reprinting forms. If I did this, the Home Office would charge the correct amount to my credit card and there would be no delays due to the possibility of my incorrectly sending the wrong amount. I therefore left this blank. On Tuesday, I noted that the approximate amount that I expected had been charged to my credit card, and I was set to receive my new passport within a couple of weeks.
However, yesterday I received a letter stating that my passport application could not be processed because I had not paid the correct fee, and this would not be done until I sent an additional £3. What apparently happened was that someone received my form, filled in an incorrect amount, and then somebody else noted that I had paid the incorrect amount and sent a letter to me demanding more money. If I had filled in the form with the correct amount in the first place, this would not apparently have happened. I was able to rectify this today by calling the enquiry line of the Identity and Passport Service, explaining the situation, and giving them my credit card details again so I could be charged the additional £3. My passport will hopefully still come in a couple of weeks, but it has been delayed by this and I have been inconvenienced. The enquiry line was an 0870 number, for which the charges are high and the called party receives a portion of the charge for the call, so I have paid a small amount of additional money for this, too.
This is all mildly amusing, but there is perhaps a moral. Theoretically, when I became a citizen, one thing I gained was the right not to suffer the petty humiliations and bureaucratic hassles and incompetence from the Home Office that a non-citizen goes through just to live here. I would personally argue that such humiliations and hassles are no more justified in the treatment of non-citizens than they are in the treatment of citizens, but the population as a whole does not generally seem to agree with me, and politicians seem to believe that there are electoral points to be gained in actually increasing and enforcing such hassles.
Or perhaps not. Perhaps this is just a demonstration of the nature of our government and our bureaucrats. It is not hard to see the ID card as little more than a way to extend the humiliations and hassles that non-citizens receive to the time after people become citizens, and to extend them to the native born as well. The Home Office body that will implement and enforce the ID card and associated database is of course the Identity and Passport Service. It is not terribly encouraging that my first interaction with this Service after becoming a citizen involved their making an error for which they blamed me, charged me, and inconvenienced me, even though I had done everything correctly. I suspect we should all get used to it.
One mechanism for ensuring the individual does take responsibility for his or her health is social stigma. For many a year we have been enjoined to cease stigmatising the morbidly obese, the terminally drunk and skagheads, because it really isn’t their fault — and as a result an important means of combating these social ills has been thrown away. Stigmatising has a point; it is not just fun to shout abuse at fat people, it is socially useful too.
– Rod Liddle, who talks some sense, although he is a bit of a yob himself.
Update: some people have asked if I support all of his argument. I do not. For a start, obesity is not something one can define precisely; secondly, it can add to the generally authortarian, bullying atmsophere in which we live if it is deemed acceptable to make all kinds of fun of the largely-built, or whatever. But Liddle is quite correct to locate the issue of personal responsibility and to get away from the victim-culture angle that is so often exploited by the medical profession and their political friends
Apparently, the humourless twerps who lead many of the world’s main industrial nations got a touch of the vapours over these parting remarks from the President as he left the G8 cant-fest in Japan:
The American leader, who has been condemned throughout his presidency for failing to tackle climate change, ended a private meeting with the words: “Goodbye from the world’s biggest polluter.”
He then punched the air while grinning widely, as the rest of those present including Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy looked on in shock.
Oh please. Mr Bush, who I imagine is fed up to the back teeth at the preening hypocrisy, moral posturing and downright dishonesty of the Green lobby, has clearly decided that the US is not going to be ashamed of being an industrial nation. The constant calls by various environmental groups for the US and other major states to slash CO2 emmissions by more than a half by tomorrrow afternoon or whatever are unworkable, and they know it. The massive cost of shifting energy sources to supposedly cleaner ones could help to tip parts of the world economy into recession or make the existing slowdown even worse; the push for biofuels, for example, is, arguably, hurting poor people in countries that are traditionally highly dependent on grains etc for basic foodstuffs.
In case any commenters ask, no, I am not a climate change denier, but I do seriously doubt whether a massive cut in carbon emissions over the timescale demanded by some is going to work without causing havoc.
No, I am glad Mr Bush gave his rival leaders the verbal equivalent of a kick in the nuts. More please.
The power of the American left (the “liberals” the “progressives” the “radicals” – call them what you will) is very great. About 9 out of 10 newspapers lean to the left in their editorials (and, to be blunt, in the rest of their content also – from news coverage to book and film reviews) and most television networks also lean to the left. Some more than others – but the general direction is plain.
This is perhaps the result of the “education system” – in which the “public” (i.e. government) schools are dominated by people with a leftist world view. They are saturated in this view of the world during their time at college and it is reflected in what they teach and how they teach it – and in the open political allegiances of their organizations. And would anyone like to deny that the vast majority of American universities are dominated by the left?
In Congress the Speaker of the House is someone, Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco, who would have been considered way to the left of the Democrat mainstream only a few years ago. And Speaker Pelosi has shown that the oft mentioned moderate “Blue Dog” Democrats are a busted flush – they are people who fall in line when the Speaker and her associates put the pressure on.
In the Senate, Harry Reid was once considered a moderate – but these days it is clear he is either on board with the left, or just a front man (a cardboard cutout) who does not prevent the control of the Senate by people like the senior Senator for Illinois.
But in spite of all of the above it is clear that the left is not satisfied – they demand total control of all aspects of life, totalitarianism.
This is made clear by such evidence as the effort by elements within the Californian courts to de facto ban home schooling (by demanding that parents have teaching training qualifications – indeed perhaps in every subject they teach) and that private schools only be allowed to hire people who have undergone a training process that the left control.
In other States (such as supposedly strongly conservative Tennessee) there are efforts to refuse to recognise the qualifications of children who did not go to approved schools – it seems that independent testing is not considered enough, indeed is the very thing that the left wish to avoid.
And at the Federal level there is a very strong movement to use all the agencies of the government (from the FCC to the IRS) to eliminate or castrate that minority of media outlets where the left do not already have the main influence.
All under nice sounding words of course – such as “the fairness doctrine”, or “freedom” and diversity”, but, under the Orwellian words, the intent is plain – no dissent will be tolerated. Either it will be declared “hate speech” or it will be declared “biased”. With an “unbiased” presentation of news and current affairs (and everything else – from music to sports) being a leftist one of course.
And with judges that a President Woods Fund Obama would appoint and who would be confirmed by a Democrat Senate, with a Republican minority brow beaten by “main stream media” that the left already control (who will declare that any opposition is “racist”), there will be no First Amendment problems (or any other constitutional problems) for any of the above.
The Bar in almost every State in under the control of the left (and I am not just talking about the ambulance chasing Trial Lawyers Association). Which is why States in which the lawyers have great influence in deciding who become judge, the courts are on the left. For example, Alaska is a very conservative State, but the courts are very much on the other side.
There will be no real resistance from the legal establishment against a leftist takeover of the Federal courts (to make them all like the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals) – there is no great love for things like the Second Amendment in this establishment.
“The internet Paul, the internet”.
The power of the left on the internet is actually very great – and not just in organizations like MoveOn (which claims three million activists), but in the internet companies themselves. Companies that most of us use (such as Google) have already shown which way they lean – whose world view they share.
And even if some (perhaps rather difficult to reach) conservative and libertarian websites remain – so what? Sorry, but a handful of websites with no broadcasters to work with are not going to defeat the left.
“But surely the rich in America will not allow the left to take over”.
This view shows the influence of the false doctrines of Marxism. The billionaires are not going to prevent anything – indeed they are often supporters of the left.
Billionaires like Warren Buffet may be more moderate than such men as George Soros, Peter Lewis and Marc Cuban – but they are still no more likely to come to the defence of talk radio than they are to oppose higher taxes (in fact they are often the loudest voices demanding higher taxes).
Indeed many of the billionaires in the United States resemble the baddies in Ian Fleming’s James Bond stories (super rich people in league with the Reds) more than they do the sustainers of the “intellectual superstructure of capitalism” of Marxist theory.
“But what about the big corporations”.
Such as General Electric?
The controllers of MSNBC and NBC (The distinction between the two has been breaking down for some time) can hardly be called enemies of the left.
I suspect that even nationalization would not really bother the top management at General Electric – they would not have to explain why the share value has done so badly over the last five years. Life would be so much less irritating without any real shareholders.
After all such de facto government owned entities (for all the claims that they are private) as Fannie Mae do not prevent top managers earning many millions of Dollars – ask Senator Woods Fund Obama’s friend Mr Johnson.
Of course ever more taxes, regulations and outright government control (from the oil refineries to insurance) makes no economic sense – but that has not stopped the left in the past and will not now.
“But why should non-Americans care what happens in the United States?”
Because the brutal truth is that neither Britain or any other part of the West can stand if America falls – there is not, and can not be, any Plan B.
Daniel Hannan has a short but pointed article about how the European Parliament does not hesitate to ignore its own rules if it means they can crush euro-sceptic dissent.
The European Parliament operates a corporatist system: in order to move amendments, propose debates or qualify for campaign finance, MEPs are required to join trans-national Groups. To incorporate such a Group, you need at least 20 Euro-MPs from five states. This means that, alongside the big Groups – the Christian Democrats, Liberals, Socialists, Communists and Greens – there is also a little bloc of Euro-sceptics called Independence and Democracy. There was also, briefly, a Euro-fascist alliance (erroneously termed “far Right”), which fell apart because its block-headed members couldn’t stand one another.
The new rules, drawn up by the Labour MEP (and touchy blogger) Richard Corbett, would raise the thresholds to 25 MEPs and seven states, making it harder for dissidents to register. What are they so scared of, these Euro-fanatics? After all, we sceptics represent no more than 50 or 60 MEPs out of 785. Why not treat us as an Official Opposition, thereby demonstrating their fair-mindedness and bestowing a measure of legitimacy on their institution? Because they can’t bring themselves to do it. They hate us too much.
Disgraceful but hardly surprising.
Sometimes the internet opens one’s eyes to whole new ways of seeing the world. A fabulous comment over on David Davis’s semi-blog (no permalink I could see, under “Sky News Debate with Tony McNulty”):
David Davis doesn’t want a real debate on the Orwellian State – he wants a controlled one that’s only on his terms with safe people like Tony Benn and Bob Geldof.
Pretty gruesome stuff happening. This is old news:
The ongoing Google/YouTube-Viacom litigation has now officially spilled over to users with a court order requiring Google to turn over massive amounts of user data to Viacom. If the data is actually released, the consequences could be far more serious than the 2006 AOL Search debacle.
But this not so. And happening via backdoor of telecoms regulation.
The Telecoms Package (Paquet Telecom) is a review of European telecoms law. […] buried within it, deep in the detail, are important legal changes that relate to enforcement of copyright. These changes are a threat to civil liberties and risk undermining the entire structure of Internet, jeopardising businesses and cultural diversity.
The bottom line is that changes to telecoms regulations are needed before EU member states can bring in the so-called “3 strikes” measures – also known as “graduated response” – of which France is leading the way, but other governments, notably the UK, are considering whether to follow. A swathe of amendments have been incorporated at the instigation of entertainment industry lobbying. These amendments are aimed at bringing an end to free downloading. They also bring with them the risk of an unchecked corporate censorship of the Internet, with a host of unanswered questions relating to the legal oversight and administration.
The Telecoms Package is currently in the committee stages of the European Parliament, with a plenary vote due on 1st or 2nd September. This does not leave much time for public debate, and it reminds me of the rushed passage of the data retention directive (see Data Retention on this site). It is, if you like, regulation by stealth.
These two items have in common the attempt to undermine the infrastructure of the net/web by controlling those who provide or maintain it. Not good.
On that miraculous Saturday, therefore, when the Vulcan took to the skies again – there was perhaps only one regret – that the bomb bay was not filled with ordnance, with the destination Brussels via Westminster.
– EU Referendum. The author had been to watch the magnificent example of Cold War aviation take to the skies once more. Here’s a link to a site about this splendid aircraft.
Oh my God! Jeanette Winterson has written a science fiction novel, The Stone Gods, as a speculation. Nor has she taken the marketing escape of disguising her presence by the addition of the cunning initial. There she is, in plain sight, unadorned, investing the enterprise with the gravitas of her literary reputation. As Ursula K Le Guin remarks, Winterson commits genre.
The story appears to involve a parable of our own world, allowing Winterson to derive her own dystopia from Orwell’s tradition of extrapolation. Unleavened by reality or experience, the future is a hell of advertising and reality television. Did she read Pohl and Kornbluth? Whilst Winterson’s themes of abandoned childhood and the nature of adoption inform much of her fiction, this departure allows us to see how literati react to the symbols of ecological disaster and despair.
The banal title invokes the destruction of Easter Island as symbol for the future of this Island Earth. What limits the visions of the future that mainstream writers depict as a simplistic outlier. The acceptable vision of the future is the resource crisis, the one that swamps our media daily, and forms the backdrop of Winterson’s love story.
The choice of future does not negate the quality of the story, and Winterson serves up a provocative narrative. Yet, does her painted future display a certain narrowness. The degrading and deserving darkness that many prophecy as the outcome of the civilisation they revile is easier to write than the complex and enriched society that few foretell and fewer understand.
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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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