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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The MD-11, a derivative of the DC-10, first flew in revenue service a mere 20 years ago, making it just middle-aged by aircraft standards. However, KLM’s birds are included on this list because they’re the only three-engined jets currently operating in scheduled transoceanic passenger service — with the exception of an occasional Qantas A380.
This delightfully catty witticism nicely rounded off an interesting Wired presentation: Fly Away on These 10 Classic Airliners
I always thought the A380 a hideous gargoyle of a plane. And Qantas is a pretty rubbish airline these days. So have at ’em both, I say.
(H/t: Instapundit)
I like this, from Claire Berlinski:
My Muslim Brotherhood threads gave rise to a bit of confusion about which book I was talking about. Obviously, I made a mistake in assuming that everyone on Ricochet was reading every word I write, 24 hours a day. Now that I think about it, that’s more than a bit silly and self-involved. A beginner’s mistake, really. Sorry, I’m learning on the job. On the bright side, I’m not the President of the United States.
Nice writing. I read on, and learned about Ms Berlinski’s take on what I now believe to be the biggest debate in the world about how to see off Islam, namely: is “Islam” the enemy, or something more like “Islamism”?
I think that, difficult though this truth is to face, the enemy is Islam, the thing itself, and that all Muslims, simply by calling themselves Muslims, give aid and comfort to the enemy, Islam. “Good Muslims” must be persuaded to stop being Muslims at all, and to leave, in large numbers. Only when large numbers do start leaving, in numbers so large and so public that the very momentum of history itself starts to drain out of Islam, will the civilised world start to get on top of this problem.
But Claire Berlinski thinks differently:
McCarthy’s entirely correct that Islamism is mainstream, rooted in Muslim scripture and favored by many prominent Islamic commentators. No one who knows anything about the subject would disagree.
But there is also significant dissent from this view in the Islamic world. Those who dissent from it are our friends and allies. Why on earth should we pronounce categorically, say, that “In Islam, homosexuality and adultery are capital offenses,” if there are practicing Muslims who think otherwise? Are we truly saying that we’re more qualified to interpret the Koran and all of its associated scholarship than Muslims who have come to another conclusion? Why would we shoot ourselves in the foot this way?
Indeed. And there were a lot of Communists who significantly dissented from actually existing Communism. But still they helped actually existing Communism, big time, not least by supplying a veneer of apparent civilisation to spread upon this totally ghastly creed. They also spent much time moaning about civilisation itself, for also not being Communist in their preferred, virtuous way. Do I say that I had – and that I have – a better grasp of what Communism really meant than these dissenters from the Communist orthodoxy? Damn right. I did and I do.
The one big thing that “practicing Muslims” must do if they are on the side of civilisation and against Islam, is to damn well stop with their practicing, and – if straight atheism is too strong for them, too cold and too true – to find a civilised way of gratifying their religious impulses instead of the barbaric one that is Islam.
I have been reading and enjoying Matt Ridley’s recently published book, The Rational Optimist, which shoots down a number of doomsterish ideas with great aplomb. For instance, he zaps the idea that we somehow reduce our “carbon footprint” by not importing foodstuffs from overseas. The international division of labour, he argues, is good for the planet, not harmful to it. The book is crammed with data to back up such points.
Ridley also has a blog based on the book, and it is worth bookmarking, in my view. Whatever his shortcomings as the former head of failed UK lender Northern Rock, Ridley is a fine writer and debunker of fashionable nonsense. More power to him.
Culture is very important. That is why the government should never be allowed to have a role in it.
– NickM
Having been a bit ill and it having been very cold recently by London standards, certainly in November or December, I have been consoling myself by paying more attention than I otherwise might have done to the Ashes, aka the series of five day cricket matches that happens every couple of years or so between England and Australia.
My main feeling about the Ashes just now is that there is an amazing contrast between the score, which now stands at nothing-nothing (as in: nobody has won any of these games yet), and the way many of the commentators are talking. England are great, on top of their game, firing on all cylinders, well organised, etc. etc. Australia are rubbish, a nation in crisis, woe woe woe. You’d think Australia had already been beaten five nothing, like England were last time they came calling. Yes, England saved the first game well, and yes, England are now on top in the second game. But a combination of rain and good Australian batting on a good batting pitch could well leave it nothing-nothing as the third game begins, and who knows what might then happen? Momentum in sport is a funny thing. One team can dominate, and then something (often just a bit of blind luck) can go against them and suddenly a savage negative feedback loop of failure, recrimination at earlier missed opportunities and general frustration can strike them down, along with the agony consequent on them having been too complacent, and now knowing it. Meanwhile their seemingly doomed opponents can bounce back, gripped by an equal-and-opposite positive feedback loop of surging confidence and astonished nothing-to-lose optimism. An almost absurdly one-sided contest can suddenly mutate into a real old dogfight that either team could win. This can happen. This could happen. England have not yet won anything in this series.
But, in opposition to point number one, the England team seem thoroughly to understand all of the above. Everything they have been saying in interviews that I’ve seen, especially in the ones involving their admirably level-headed captain Andrew Strauss, has been along the lines of: we’ve a lot of tough cricket ahead, so far it’s nothing-nothing, Australia will play better, and … well, see my previous paragraph. If I thought the England team didn’t get what might happen if, to coin a phrase, they were to take their eyes off the ball, then I’d now be full of dread. As it is, I agree with my Australian fellow cricket-nut and fellow-Samizdatista Michael Jennings that England are indeed now favourites to win this thing. Fingers crossed. Success in sport can indeed be almost automatic, but only for teams which assume that winning is never automatic and can only happen if they give it their all.
To switch subjects from a mere game to the somewhat more serious matter of the state of the world, of the USA in particular, one of the things that most impresses me about the USA’s Tea Party movement is that they too seem to have exactly this attitude to the tasks they now face. Everything I hear from these people in interviews and blog postings says something very similar to the sentiment I now attribute to the England cricket team. So far, they now say, all we’ve done is elect a few politicians. We have many years of tough politics ahead of us if we are actually to accomplish anything. Don’t, they keep on telling themselves, echoing one of their most significant leaders (who would surely deny that accusation), get cocky. It is this very lack of any assumption on their part that they will automatically have any real world consequences that now most makes me believe that the Tea Party will have real world consequences.
So, am I saying that life is like a game of cricket? I suppose I am. Sometimes, it is.
I mean there’s enormous pressures to harmonize freedom of speech legislation and transparency legislation around the world – within the EU, between China and the United States. Which way is it going to go? It’s hard to see.
– Julian Assange
You can’t blame them. It would go to anybody’s head.
You can, in a way, blame Frederick Lindemann, the first (and last) Viscount Cherwell.
Apart from the facts that he more or less founded Oxford physics and so got a laboratory named after him and was some sort of scientific adviser to Churchill, most of what I know about Lindemann I learned today, from this site, aimed at children in secondary schools, and Wikipedia.
Lindemann ought to be more famous. He developed the first theory of how to recover when an aeroplane goes into a spin, and learned to fly so that he could repeatedly and dangerously put it to the test on his own aircraft. Umpteen pilots owe him their lives. Umpteen Germans owe him their deaths: his hatred of Nazism was “almost pathological” and – well, let Wikipedia give you the flavour:
When Churchill became Prime Minister, he appointed Lindemann as the British government’s leading scientific adviser … Lindemann established a special statistical branch, known as ‘S-Branch’, within the government, constituted from subject specialists, and reporting directly to Churchill. This branch distilled thousands of sources of data into succinct charts and figures, so that the status of the nation’s food supplies (for example) could be instantly evaluated. Lindemann’s statistical branch often caused tensions between government departments, but because it allowed Churchill to make quick decisions based on accurate data which directly affected the war effort, its importance should not be underestimated … In 1940, Lindemann supported the experimental department MD1. He worked on hollow charge weapons, the sticky bomb and other new weapons … “In his appointment as Personal Assistant to the Prime Minister no field of activity was closed to him. He was as obstinate as a mule, and unwilling to admit that there was any problem under the sun which he was not qualified to solve. He would write a memorandum on high strategy one day, and a thesis on egg production on the next” … Following the Air Ministry Area bombing directive on 12 February 1942, Lindemann presented the dehousing paper to Churchill on 30 March 1942, which advocated area bombardment of German cities to break the spirit of the people … Lindemann also played a key part in the battle of the beams, championing countermeasures to the Germans use of radio navigation to increase the precision of their bombing campaigns.
Lindemann’s achievements in science, though distinguished, have been surpassed by those of other scientists. But never before or since has a single scientist, in his role as a scientist, been so close to the seat of power. He was like a Grand Vizier of old. His name may not be that famous, even among scientists, but his role in the Great Drama has become a folk memory; a fantasy.
In the 1950s Isaac Asimov, writing under the pseudonym Paul French, produced an enjoyable series of science fiction novels for teenagers featuring David “Lucky” Starr, Space Ranger. (In which occurs the first known appearance of the lightsaber trope. I didn’t know that.) Like the Lone Ranger, Lucky has a faithful sidekick. Like James Bond – whose career began at about the same time – Lucky has gadgets. And backup. On Lucky’s wrist there is a tattoo which is invisible until Lucky exerts his will, triggering some chemicals or hormones or something, which makes the tattoo become visible. Then they sit up, take notice, and hasten to do what he says, because the tattoo reveals that he is a member – indeed, the youngest ever member – of the Council of Science.
The Council of Science!
Quoting Wikipedia again:
In a later novel in the series, Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus, the Council of Science is described this way: “In these days, when science really permeated all human society and culture, scientists could no longer restrict themselves to their laboratories. It was for that reason that the Council of Science had been born. Originally it was intended only as an advisory body to help the government on matters of galactic importance, where only trained scientists could have sufficient information to make intelligent decisions. More and more it had become a crime-fighting agency, a counterespionage system. Into its own hands it was drawing more and more of the threads of government.”
And just for a while a year or two back it all looked like coming true. Lindemann’s heirs back in the saddle again. Maybe not the tattoos, but the Scientist taking the President’s calls, speaking with grave wisdom to the frightened assemblies and governments of mankind.
You can’t really blame them, can you? For remembering their time of glory and feeling just a smidgeon of pleasure that those days were here again?
From the story quoted by Brian in the post below this one:
Scientists have called for Second World War-style rationing in rich countries to bring down carbon emissions, as world leaders meet in Cancun for the latest round of talks on climate change.
The Telegraph is weird. It has Booker and Delingpole raining curses down upon the whole climate science watermelon scam. But elsewhere on its plantation it has someone or something called “mytelegraph” saying things like this:
Scientists have called for Second World War-style rationing in rich countries to bring down carbon emissions, as world leaders meet in Cancun for the latest round of talks on climate change.
Do you agree that rationing is the best solution? Should governments be investing more in green technologies? Is there any point in agreeing carbon limits if some countries opt out?
What should leaders be trying to agree?
My thanks to “bravo” (who commented on Delingpole’s latest posting) for alerting me to this absurdity, and for in particular recommending that we all look at the comments on it.
Such as this:
They should agree how lucky they are to have such a fine old time on taxpayer money, then go home and get real jobs.
Or this:
Not to meet again?
To throw in the towel?
To admit they’ve being rumbled and now the greatest scientific scam of all time is collapsing faster than anyone could have predicted?
Or this:
Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
Those being a few of the shorter ones. Many are longer. Many are far more abusive.
There is not one comment among the fifty odd that have so far accumulated that make suggestions of the sort that “mytelegraph” seems to have wanted.
On this particular matter at least, the best are now full of passionate intensity, while the worst now lack all conviction. It’s all over bar the defunding. In other words it is not all over by any means. It will take decades for the world to recover from this scam and clean up all the mess it has caused. But totally winning the mere argument is a necessary and excellent start.
It seems almost unbelievably crass that attempts to take down Julian Assange should revolve around such a patently obvious ploy as concocting ‘sexual assault‘ charges against him.
It reminds me of some other oh so obvious black bag operations, i.e. the patently absurd planted media articles to link Saddam (a secular socialist) to Al Qaeda (Islamists) in the run up to the allied attack on Iraq.
I have grave misgiving about Wikileaks releasing operational military information but the fact the governments of the world are all baying for his blood and starting to cooperate with operations to discredit him speaks volumes about the damage he has done to the leviathan state everywhere… as was always his intention…and for that Assange has already assured himself a very special place in history. I suspect people will be talking about him long after the current crop of political leaders have been consigned to the mundane sections of historical record.
Rand Simberg has a nice article at Pajamas Media today on a topic which he and I and others have been harping on for many months: Republican socialists. The Utah delegation is one of the worst in this regard. To them, NASA is simply a State Jobs Program. It keeps the re-election funds coming in and whether they actually make anything useful or not does not really matter.
A NASA official once privately corrected me when I insisted I they would be forced to build a heavy lift vehicle (HLV), “We’ll spend money on it…”
There lies the problem. There is arguably no real point in an HLV at this time. There is most certainly no need for one with ATK multi-segment rocket boosters (SRB’s) of the sort which accomplished the self-disassembly of the space shuttle Challenger in January 1986. I admit, that is a cheap shot, but I think it is an accurate one. Yes, SRB’s give a lot of thrust at start up. Yes they are stable for long term storage. Yes they are a great way to deliver munitions to faraway places. And NO, they are not a good way to build affordable access to space.
The only player in the commercial space game that is using anything like a solid rocket is Virgin Galactic, and their engine is a hybrid, not the same thing at all. Hybrids have solid fuel but use a liquid oxidizer. This allows throttling in real time. More importantly, if necessary, they can be turned OFF. The big ATK SRB engines can only be shut down by blowing off the end caps, and that has rather extreme aerodynamic braking effects.
The Utah delegation wants a new generation of white elephant built at the tax payers expense. They are not at all pleased with the idea that a new generation of commercially minded people are building spaceships which will bring their party to an end.
PS: If you have questions, I will meet you in the comment room as time allows and may well invite a few of my rocket designer friends if needed.
What follows was not written by me but by a friend of mine, Niall Kilmartin. As will be apparent, he has known me since university. – NS
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At the end of a recent post about lefties making laws for us because they think we’re like them, Brian Micklethwait asks what similar errors we make. I think I can answer with examples from his own post.
First, he talks of gun control freaks – people so violent that if they had guns to hand during temper tantrums, they’d murder – and suggests that these people want guns banned because they think we’re the same as them. Here he does have a specific, documented, public-domain example of a gun-control advocate with a domestic violence history. But let me offer a rival example.
In the week I first met Natalie Solent, she was sitting in the Oxford University D&D club chatting to two friends of mine whom she’d just met. An accident occurred outside and my friends went to help – thus incidentally establishing their bona fides as caring people to her. That situation resolved, they sat down again and – as my friends have a tendency to do, for some reason – began talking about guns. Natalie then was in some ways not Natalie as we now know her. As she told me later, if that accident hadn’t happened, she would have written them off in the unthinking way of many British people: “They like guns, guns are for killing people, so they must like the idea of killing people; I’ll not pursue their acquaintance.”
Natalie, as she then was, is far more representative of how left-wingers think than Brian’s example. No doubt Brian’s example is useful in debate: “We’re not the only violent ones. In fact, we’re not specially violent. In fact, if we can look at some among our opponents for a moment… “. But as regards political fundamentals, that argument is so like the left’s tactics, that it’s fair to use it only when debating with them. My friends’ reaction to the accident persuaded Natalie to change her mind a little. You would have got nowhere with her by saying, “You only think that because you’re so violent yourself”. It would be very like some accusations against the Tea Party: propaganda failures because it is so obvious to Tea Partiers and their friends that they are not true.
Brian’s next illustration is even worse, because he has no public domain example, just speculation about some guy who thinks homosexuality will destroy civilization if tolerated because it would destroy his mental equilibrium if he tolerated it. In a world of seven thousand million (is it?) human beings, this guy may well exist. But in my (far from complete) knowledge of the Anglosphere public domain, past and present, I cannot offhand come up with an example. I can however think of counter-examples.
Before we meet them, however, let’s meet a counter-argument. Turn the argument about homophobes being repressed homosexuals around and assert that homosexuals are really repressed gynophobes or androphobes. Here I can think of public domain examples. Women staff at Bletchley Park said that if a woman so much as spoke to Alan Turing when he was not expecting it, he would visibly shrink into himself in alarm. When the gynophobia is in itself so clear, it’s a fair diagnosis that the homoerotic symptoms are mere side-effects.
Now look instead at, for example, Noel Coward. If I were willing to argue like a leftie, I could diagnose gynophobia. Think of his joke about the queen of Tonga at the coronation. As the enormous queen and diminutive ambassador from Pakistan passed in their shared carriage, someone asked him who that was with Queen Salote: “Oh, I think that’s her lunch.” Think of the plot of Blythe Spirit: the two women make the man’s life hell quarrelling over him and eventually kill him. A clear diagnosis of gynophobia? Or a clear diagnosis of comic genius? Certainly, if Noel Coward was terrified of women, he handled it very much better than Alan Turing – unless you claim his homosexuality shows his bad handling of it, but then we’re into circular reasoning.
In short, a hand-count of examples of people who are or may be assuming that laws should be written to deal with people like themselves does not a true-for-all-cases proof make. Arguing with some supporter of Canada’s current laws against hate speech, I’d think it very fair to push Brian’s argument. But with anyone more reasonable, I would not pretend to know things I don’t know.
But as I said, I can offer counter-examples as well as counter-arguments. Many decades ago, my mother was raised, in humble circumstances, in a very straitlaced small Scottish town, attending the local school, but when she was 13 years old, she knew plenty about homosexuality – because she had a classical education. And there was nothing unusual about this level of classical knowledge even among ordinary people: many of you will know the In Parenthesis anecdote about the WWI Welsh private assigned to latrine duty who defended the utility of his task with the words “Don’t you know the army of Artaxerxes was utterly destroyed for lack of sanitation?” (I love this anecdote because it’s so easy to say “for lack of sanitation” in an appropriately-Welsh accent.)
My mother, aged 13, imagined that homosexuality was one of those things, like polytheism, human sacrifice and slavery, that had been common in the past but had died out under the beneficent influence of Christianity. Not that anyone told her that – it was a 13-year old’s way of understanding what she was taught in the light of where and when she lived. (My mother aged 16 had become aware that “died out” was putting it too strongly.) Until half a century ago there were many people like her – people who were not taught to respect Socrates because he was homosexual, any more than they were taught to respect him because he owned slaves, or worshipped Zeus and Athena. Although they saw homosexuality as a perversion, they were taught to respect Socrates, and to see Athens killing him as a tragedy – not as good riddance to a nasty pervert. They knew exactly what they believed, but they were also taught to know intimately and respect a culture, and people in that culture, who had very different values from theirs.
Now imagine presenting to these past people – who would certainly fail the Haringey council “anti-homophobia” test or similar – the idea that they believed what they did because they thought tolerated homosexuality would destroy civilization. They would have thought of two responses.
– They would have thought of Sparta, where the idea that homosexuality destroyed a civilization is a possible thesis. The Spartans made homosexuality obligatory for their military training, and (uniquely amongst Greeks), had a positive, rather than just contemptuously tolerant, view of female homosexuality. The Spartans suffered a 90% decline in their citizen body during the classical period; eventually it destroyed the old Sparta. The Spartans had customs – marriage-by-capture, willingness to let visiting nobles sleep with their wives – which it’s easy to explain by saying that their homosexuality was easier to learn in their teens than unlearn when it was time to procreate. So yes, if it is promoted enough, our ancestors would have argued, homosexuality can indeed destroy a civilization.
– But they would have set this level high, because they would also have thought of Athens. In Athens, philosophers taught that men who desired other men showed better taste than men who desired those inferior creatures, women. (And so women who desired women showed bad taste, but then women were inferior, so they would sometimes show bad taste – no need to get in a tiz about it.) Athens did not suffer a decline in its citizen body. If Athens destroyed itself – as one can argue it did – it was for other reasons. Just as with teenage-Natalie and guns above, so for our ancestors – and, today, for those who reject political correctness – Brian’s explanation is simply an irrelevance.
These I think show ways in which we can avoid the vulgarities of left-wing argumentative methods. When you’re forced to debate with such people, it may be fair to use their own tactics of pick the (unrepresentative) example or even invent the hypothetical (irrelevant) example. With anyone fairer, understand what they believe and the reasons why they do.
So much for Brian’s post. One last reflection: writing this raised a question for me – and gave me my answer. People who defend Canada’s anti-free-speech laws say they must because the alternative is the laws of the past. I’m sure that’s just another of the lies the left uses to keep us in line. But suppose (God forbid!) they forced me to believe it? Suppose I had to choose between evils: between Canada’s laws today and the laws of my mother’s youth? Actual sex acts are by their nature private. Free speech is by its nature public – more effectively subject to law. In his first letter on the French revolution, Burke lists requirements for liberty: “… a simple citizen may decently express his sentiments upon public affairs … even though against a predominant and fashionable opinion…”. So I have my answer.
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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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