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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Football: is the bubble about to fade and die?, asks Jim Thomas. No Jim Thomas, it is not. It may be about to burst. But bubbles don’t fade. Further figures of speech surge forward. “Damp squib”, “Macbeth levels of scheming”, “weathering the storm”, “walking towards the precipice”, “belt tightening”. Mix and mismatch at will.
Aside from this linguistic oddity, this short piece is quite interesting, listing some of the financial grief now afflicting various English soccer clubs. Thomas singles out Arsenal and Aston Villa for praise. Apparently, they have not been spending loads of money recently, hence their ability to weather the storm, avoid the precipice, etc.
“In short, sterling is in the toilet, our pensions have been slaughtered, cash savings yield almost nothing, the country is up to its neck in unprecedented debt, the banking system is awash with funny money, our gold reserves were sold off at rock-bottom prices, and Britain’s dole queue is considerably longer than before Crash Gordon began cooking the books. Apart from that, it’s not too bad.”
Jeff Randall.
Even now, after thinking through all the various words written about the plodding disaster of a man that Brown is, it is shocking to contemplate the damage he has done and continues to do, as he heads towards oblivion.
Read about it here. Victorious Afghan Hamid Hassan blogs about it here:
After the match, I had to go to do a post-match media conference and they all wanted to know how it felt to beat USA, but the opposition didn’t matter to me. I was just happy to win another cricket match.
I love getting the chance to play against different countries and this was the first time we had ever played USA in an international match. I could never have dreamed when I was young, that I would one day play them in a cricket game.
I am a big fan of American television and movies and my favourite film is Rocky – I vividly remember watching it when I was growing up – and one of my heroes is Sylvester Stallone.
I think that there is a similarity in the story of Rocky and the Afghanistan cricket team – we both started at the bottom and gradually made our way up the rankings. …
Gradually? I thought Rocky did it with one fight.
Seriously though, it’s fun to see a guy so gripped by the American ideal of the common man excelling, and as a result … defeating America.
The way Hamid Hassan writes about Rocky and Silvester Stallone and so on makes me also think of this piece, about how the imminent decline into relative insignificance of the USA is once again being oversold, in which Joshua Kurlantzick says:
Most important, the United States is a champion of an idea that has global appeal, and Asia is not.
Although my part of the blogosphere is very anti-Obama just now, what with Obama seemingly hell-bent on ruining the USA’s economy, the rise of Obama to being President of the USA must look like a very similar kind of story to Rocky, if you are someone like Hamid Hassan.
At my personal blog, I like to write about skyscrapers. Basically, my attitude is: skyscrapers are good.
A particularly choice one is being erected in London just now, the so-called Shard, despite fears all round that the economic meltdown would demand that it be aborted. And of course I have recently also been taking note of that huge tower they’ve just opened in Dubai. I recently did a posting saying that maybe Dubai is not such a daft place as many are now saying. Maybe all those towers actually make some sense, basing my very tentative optimism on a photograph which included not just the towers but their surroundings.
But Michael Jennings, who has actually been to Dubai (on account of him having been everywhere), recently emailed me to suggest that the Dubai-is-daft tendency is probably right:
Dubai is just about the oddest place I have ever been to. I failed to go up the tallest building in the world because something went wrong and they closed it (a story in itself I would guess). The structure of the whole place is completely wrong though. It is as if someone has taken the most impressive looking bits of all the cities of the world – built new versions two or three times the size in the desert, and then attempted to weld them together into a city, but without any idea whether such things can or should fit together, and if they can, how to make it work. Virtually all the low level structure of a city is missing, and the overall question is simply who is supposed to be doing business in this place? I don’t get it at all. However, given the many tens or hundreds of very large structures half built in Dubai (the number of which rather boggles the mind) a few Arab bankers exposure to one little shard in London must be the least of their worries.
 More of my speculations on the links between our “little shard” and the towers of Dubai here. But, as that posting says at the end, Michael was wrong about them building the Shard. He said they’d scrap it. Actually he went further than that and said that if they built it, he’d eat his laptop. So maybe he’s also wrong about Dubai being daft. I’m sure some of our commentariat, like Michael and unlike me, have been there. What did they make of the place?
Michael tells me that he intends to write again at greater length about Dubai, and also that he is not wrong about it.
When I was in Vietnam last week, I caught up with fellow Australian expatriate Samizdatista James Waterton. James presently works teaching English in Vietnam to people preparing to attend Australian universities, and prior to moving to Hanoi lived in Beijing for several years. During this time he wrote for us about both Chinese, other Asian, and Australian affairs. Really good anonymous stuff on China was occasionally known to appear on this blog during this period, also.
After James guided me to a number of fine culinary establishments (as one would expect from one of the world’s great authorities on soy sauce) and gave me a tour of the main sights of Hanoi from the back of his motorbike, the two of us sat down in a cafe on the second floor of a building mysteriously shaped like a ship in central Hanoi, where we recorded a conversation about what was on our minds. This included our experiences as expatriates and our opinions on economic growth in Asia in general and China and Vietnam in particular, the outlook for the Chinese nation and economy, the differences between the the authoritarian habits of the Chinese and Vietnamese governments, ways in which people in poor countries now in some ways have greater and easier access to modern technology than do people in rich countries, and (surprisingly related to this) the correct etiquette for visiting the embalmed body of Ho Chi Minh.
There is a little bit of background noise in this recording, much of which is the honking of motorcycle horns and other street noise coming from outside the cafe. I think the conversation is quite easy to follow despite this, so I shall just refer to this as “ambience that adds to the listening experience”. Enjoy.
Update: The link pointing to the post on soy sauce was incorrect. This is now fixed.
“Climategate is like the finest single malt whisky – 30-years matured, complex and multi-layered, distilled to a fiery concentration, and every drop of the cask to be savoured in small, delicious, damn-the-prohibitionist sips.”
– From regular Samizdata commenter, Pa Annoyed, writing about this recent post of Brian Micklethwait.
This is an amazing example of one those archetypal political processes, which happens when a regime that still commands the present nevertheless manages to lose all control of the future:
One of the most fascinating aspects of the current phase of the Iranian revolution is that many of those arrested knew it was coming, had the opportunity to hide, but chose to go to jail. They viewed their arrest as a badge of honor, and (not to make light of the horrors of Iranian jails) perhaps even a good career move. They expect the regime to fall, and they are building up credits for the next government.
Recently a posting of mine here about an SD card was honoured by a re-run in the comments of the Four Yorkshiremen sketch, where they take it in turns to boast with ever greater ferocity about the awfulness of their childhoods, or in this case about the vast expense and extreme non-capaciousness of their very first hard discs. You mean you had a hard disc? – We dreamed of having a hard disc, etc.
Soon, Iran will be entertained with similar jokery, in which Four Iranian Ex-Oppositionists indulge in similarly competitive boasting about their hellish sufferings under the previous regime, thereby justifying their subsequent social and political elevation.
Sadly, they may not need to exaggerate.
Friday’s debate at the RI turned into a soggy mess of a love-in, but it held no comfort for alarmists. The very limited point of discussion was “Has Global Warming increased the toll of disasters?” Audience members repeatedly asked where the points of difference among the three speakers lay, and they were certainly hard to see. Everyone seemed to agree that the answer to the discussion question was a clear and resounding “there is no evidence for that whatever.”
The speakers were Roger Pielke Jr, of the University of Colorado, Robert Muir-Wood of the consultancy Risk Management Solutions, and Bob Ward, of the Grantham Research Institute at the LSE. The meeting was chaired by the amiable James Randerson of the Guardian (standing in for David Shukman of the BBC). He polled the audience beforehand on whether we believed that global warming had indeed increased the toll of disasters, a question that had apparently been dumped on him by someone else. After a hilarious quarter of an hour of having the question taken apart by stroppy audience members, who wanted to know whether by answering it they were committed to belief in warming, he finally had to force a vote. Most were don’t-knows. At the end of the discussion, when the same vote was taken, many of the don’t-knows had switched to the ‘no increasing cost’ position; they could not really do anything else, on the evidence presented. → Continue reading: Non-rumble at the RI
Are you bored with Climategate? And bored with me writing about it, again and again? Yesterday, fellow Samizdatista Michael Jennings told me he is. I understand the feeling, and would be interested to hear if any of our commentariat shares it, but as for me, I can’t leave this thing alone. I mean, this is now the biggest single battle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness, and the forces of darkness are now in definite, headlong, ignominious retreat. I for one do not feel inclined to stop shouting about that any time soon.
However, I do agree that things are now moving on, and that is what this posting is about.
I will start by saying that AGW, as an acronym, is incomplete. We should really have been talking, throughout the Climategate campaign, not about “AGW” only, but about ICAGW. As in: Immediate and Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming. And a good way to describe the current state of the debate is that we are now witnessing the removal of the I from that acronym. → Continue reading: Climategate and the retreat from Immediate
Pure genius.
By the way, here is an old post I did about a superb spoof on 1970s education programmes, which convey a similar sort of feel to some of those old Cold War public information items.
Tory MP Douglas Carswell, who is one of the relatively few good guys in that party, in my view, has this blog post about a recent proposal on how to make the banking system more robust, as made by the “Austrian”-leaning organisation, the Cobden Centre. I am not entirely sure about the use of the word “democratise” here in relation to banking; however, I guess this is how Mr Carswell is trying to popularise the basic idea of making banking more solid.
Truth be told, if your average citizen really reflected on what a controlled fiction fractional reserve banking really is, his or her hair would turn white in seconds.
Thanks to my old Libertarian Alliance mate, Tim Evans, for the pointer.
“Churchill, who was prone to the black dog of depression, went to bed on the night of the 5th of June 1944 with a heavy heart. Gloomily he told his wife, Clementine, that by the time they awoke in the morning many tens of thousands of young men he had sent across the Channel might lie dead on the beaches of Normandy. In Alanbrooke’s diaries (he was the finest of the WWII diarists) it is clear how heavily he felt the weight of responsibility throughout his time as a commander in France in 1940, and subsequently as CIGS. Yet neither Alanbrooke nor Churchill felt the need to go in front of the cameras and explain how troubled they were by all the pressure. Even long afterwards it wouldn’t have occurred to either for a split second that this would be a good idea or remotely appropriate.”
– Iain Martin, commenting on the recent performance of Mr Blair’s former spinmeister on the TV. He makes a good point, I think.
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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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