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 following article was written for us by Taylor Dinerman, a journalist whom we occasionally borrow from the WSJ. – Ed.
Last night, a sold out crowd at the Asia Society on Park Ave and 70th Street on Manhattan’s East Side came to hear Salman Rushdie, Sukutu Mehta and Mira Kamdar speak about the Attacks on Bombay. The obvious echoes of 9/11, and the large Indian and Jewish communities in New York ensured a big turnout.
While Kamdar, an unimaginative, left wing intellectual who had lost a cousin in the attack on the Oberoi hotel and Mehta, an Associate Professor of Journalism at NYU and the author of a book on Bombay, ‘Maximum City’ shared the stage, Salman Rushdie was obviously the main attraction. He did not let his audience down.
He began by rejecting, with utter disdain, the word ‘Mumbai’. He said it was nothing but the product of a politician’s grab for power. Indeed one of the themes of the evening was the inadequacy of the Indian state as compared to the nimbleness and effectiveness of the Indian private sector. This is ironic since the almost entirely liberal crowd seems to have no problem with President-elect Obama’s plan to vastly increase US state power and to do unspeakable things to the ‘capitalists’, car owners and other evildoers, in order to save the planet.
Rushdie and the others, sang (metaphorically) hymns of praise to the vibrant, diverse, inegalitarian, port city of Bombay, the place where India meets the world and which they all agreed was the heart of India’s economic miracle. Why capitalism, greed, economic freedom and cultural commercialism should be a self evident good thing in Bombay and not in America or Europe is one of those mysteries that defy rational explanation.
The panel agreed that by striking at Bombay the terrorists were attacking the freedom and the open spirit not only of the city but of today’s global civilization. Again, its is ironic that when George W, Bush and the neocons said the same thing about the attacks in the New York, they were hooted down by a crowd that claimed that the Islamists were only responding to western ‘injustice’.
It is to Rushdie’s credit that he rejected this explanation. He put down the Islamic terrorists and their ideology by misquoting M.L.Menken’s famous definition of puritanism . What Menken wrote was “At the bottom of Puritanism one always finds envy of the fellow who is having a better time in the world.” He then added “At the bottom of democracy one finds the same thing.”
Rushdie also unambiguously put the blame for the attack on Pakistan. The panel agreed India’s western neighbor was the source of the problem, a failing state, full of fury, and armed with nuclear weapons. Of course there were the inevitable claims that America’s relationship with Islamabad and especially the CIA’s support for the Afghan Mujahedin was somehow to blame.
Of course this meme fails to acknowledge that for the first twenty years of Indian independence the US tried desperately to make friends with New Delhi. Nehru, a socialist aristocrat, rejected offers of support from capitalist peasants like Truman and Eisenhower. He and his successors preferred to embrace the pro-Soviet Non-Aligned Movement. Pakistan’s elites were quite happy to embrace America, not just as a source of weapons and economic aide, but more important as a scapegoat they could blame for just about anything that went wrong with their country.
While Kamdar was ready to damn Bush at every occasion, she was also ready to threaten Pakistan with war if they did not repress the Islamic terrorists. She also mentioned that the US would have to somehow put the issue of its supply lines to Afghanistan onto the back burner while dealing with Islamabad. This problem has gotten a lot of attention lately, but when a US General pointed out that all of NATO’s fuel for its operations there comes from Central Asia the threat of a cut off seems to have lost its urgency.
In the end, one has to feel sorry for Rushdie. He must keep his up his standing as a man of the left, but he is too smart to swallow the kool-aid. So he is a hypocrite; not a big deal, hypocrisy is universal and anyone who is not at least to some degree is an obnoxious fool. He supported the Sandanistas when they repressed Nicaraguan free speech, but now celebrates the free media of India, not to mention his own right to write offensive novels.
The attack on Bombay was the sort of thing we have seen before, in the 1970’s and 1980’s Israel suffered from the same kind of terrorism and developed an efficient coastal protection system in response. India will too, eventually.
Terrorism is a contemptible form of warfare and the panel did not bother to refer to the attackers as anything other than cowards who went after ‘soft targets’. Rushdie stressed that they were incredibly coked up, snorting and shooting and snorting and shooting, all in the name of God.
Less than an hour ago I cited Dr. Arthur Kantrowitz’s work on Science Courts in a Samizdata discussion, and in one of those strange and in this case saddening cases of synchronicity, I have just received an email notification that he passed away on November 29 at the age of 95.
Dr. Kantrowitz was a true gentleman of Science and will be much missed by all who have ever crossed his path.
I am sure others will have much more to say about his long career in the hard sciences.
Here is an interesting list of the worst economic notions or economy-related stories in 2008, from a mostly US perspective. My personal favourite is the one about “killer tomatoes”.
(Hat tip: Andrew Ian Dodge).
A hat tip to Counting Cats for the report. Jeff Foust has the story here.
I have been waiting for this news, as have many others, for months. Peer review of the test results have shown no reason why the technology will not work, although Dr. Nebel is quick to point out that nothing in the results guarantees it either.
Now… onwards to the next set of tests!
Reason TV has a very fine lecture by Bjorn Lomberg on global warming available. Bjorn is one of the few people out there who represent a position similar to mine. Yes, it is happening; yes, there will be winners and losers… but it is not the end of the world.
He shows in case after case how governments are throwing away billions upon billions of dollars, pounds, and yen for ‘solutions’ which will have virtually no effect at all.
It is well worth watching.
A lot of people in the financial industry are trying to figure out the individual costs to them of the $50 billion Bernard Madoff hedge fund fraud. The allegation is that Mr Madoff operated a “Ponzi scheme” scam wherby hedge fund investors were paid money, not from the performance of the funds, but by money paid in by new clients. As soon as the inflows of new clients dried up – partly due to the credit crunch – the scam came to light.
As a result of this case, no doubt those who have been calling for much tighter regulation of financial markets will have yet another stick with which to hit the system, never mind that fraud is and should be prosecuted under the normal law of the land anyway. But what interests me, however, is that systems such as Social Security in the US or public sector pensions in the UK have been funded under what is, essentially, a Ponzi system, whereby retirees depend on future generations continuing to fund a system that is rapidly becoming broke. I do not see any stories about politicians, in different countries and different parties, facing indictment for scamming the electorate. Maybe, however, the ultimate problem is that in a Welfare state, the scam artists are us. We are all in on the heist.
I think I know best, too, of course. But what I know best is that the world is too complicated for me or anyone else to rule. Other people are generally better placed than I am to decide what is good for them. Even when they are not, nothing gives me in particular the right to impose my ideas.
Gordon Brown is one of the elect (not just the elected) who knows no such restraint.
The Prime Minister: The first point of recapitalisation was to save banks that would otherwise have collapsed. We not only saved the world— [Laughter . ]—saved the banks and led the way— [ Interruption. ] We not only saved the banks— [ Interruption. ]
Mr. Speaker: Order.
The Prime Minister: Not only did we work with other countries to save the world’s banking— [ Interruption. ] Not only did we work with other countries to save the world’s banking system, but not one depositor actually lost any money in Britain.* That is the first thing.
Having contented himself that he only saved world banking, Mr Brown has now set out to work on the rest of the job. He has started on a mission to create peace between Pakistan and India – two countries that have not had a war since 1971. Such is his supreme diplomatic tact that his approach after the Mumbai massacre is to visit the region in order to announce that “Three quarters of the most serious plots investigated by the British authorities have links to al-Qaeda in Pakistan.” A claim that is both occult (full in equal measure of secret authority and meaninglessness), and calculated to make people in India more hostile to Pakistan.
Maybe this is not a record breaking sprint to megalomania for a British Prime Minister. Perhaps it is that Mr Brown’s nostalgia for the 1970s knows no bounds. Having destroyed the British economy in order to become its saviour, he is trying the same trick on the global village.
*[This is a lie: I know personally several depositors who between them lost many millions in Britain when Mr Brown decided to expropriate the Icelandic banks. Even those among them whom the Treasury has made a vague promise to compensate have yet to see a penny, and have had the huge cost, which is unlikely to be refunded, of arranging indefinite bridging finance in near-impossible borrowing conditions.]
I love the Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle book, Lucifer’s Hammer, which is in my view the best “disaster book” every written.
What is your favourite disaster movie/book?
Check out this site for some superb photographs.
I was going to think of something profound to say about the news headlines, but every time I read the words “Gordon Brown” these days, a small part of me dies.
Following on from my post below objecting to compulsory purchase laws – with the sole exception of where such laws are needed for things like defence or to save life – here is a great blog and resource for those interested in these issues. It is written mainly about the US but much of its insights carry weight over in the UK and other Common Law nations, or for that matter, other countries too. Recommended.
Germany’s finance minister has gone on the record as saying that Britain’s rush into ever greater debt to try to halt a recession is foolish, even “depressing”.
Crikey. It makes me wonder whether Germany, mindful of what happened in the hyper-inflation of the 1920s, is worried that sooner or later, the vast amounts of money being hurled at the economies in the West, such as in Britain, will produce a sharp rise in inflation and that ever-higher borrowing will only prolong, but not halt, the current pain.
Anyway, this is bound to be seized upon by the Tories. It will be interesting to see if they do so.
Via Tom Palmer’s blog, here is an excellent picture summing up what I think of bailouts.
|
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.
|
