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.
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Iain Martin at the Telegraph has made point worth quoting at some length, particularly as readers from outside the UK may be not be able to read the entire article. He writes,
For weeks, print journalists of all kinds – from tabloids to broadsheet – have been trying to explain that the press cannot be free if the state, or parliament, wields power over it. At times it has been as though we are talking a different language from parts of the rest of the population, such has been the bafflement. What could there possibly be to worry about if politicians – even at one remove, through a quango they appoint – essentially authorise, underpin or license press regulation? It would be “independent”, wouldn’t it? Politicians and their increasingly large staffs of spinners, strategists and assorted hangers-on would not dream of using this as a chance to apply pressure, bully, cajole or generally lord it any more than they already do over journalists trying to write uncomfortable stories that involve said politicians.
Step forward Joanna Hindley, Mrs Miller’s special adviser, who has unwittingly just performed the press and her country a great act of service by the way she dealt with a Daily Telegraph reporter who was making perfectly fair enquiries about the rather eye-boggling expenses of the Culture Secretary.
As the Telegraph reports:
“When a reporter approached Mrs Miller’s office last Thursday, her special adviser, Joanna Hindley, pointed out that the Editor of The Telegraph was involved in meetings with the Prime Minister and the Culture Secretary over implementing the recommendations made by Lord Justice Leveson.
“Maria has obviously been having quite a lot of editors’ meetings around Leveson at the moment. So I am just going to kind of flag up that connection for you to think about,” said Miss Hindley.
Miss Hindley also said the reporter should discuss the issue with “people a little higher up your organisation”.
Incoming from Simon Gibbs of Libertarian Home, flagging up a video he has recently put up at YouTube. It is a report of a UK Uncut demo, which includes interviews with UK Uncut people, and some arguments against their arguments.
To me, the most important thing about this is that a libertarian has taken a video camera out there and actually done some reporting. And some editing. And he has put the resulting video out there for us all to look at and listen to. (It lasts just six minutes.)
I strongly agree with Gibbs that listening carefully to the arguments of people like those who speak for UK Uncut is worthwhile. The idea that, because the minds of people saying things we don’t agree with are mostly made up and unalterable, arguing with them is pointless, is just plain wrong. Others listen to these arguments. If counter-arguments are put, this will have consequences. Insofar as we libertarians disagree with these UK Uncut arguments, our own arguments will get sharper, as arguments always do when you actually listen to what you are arguing against.
Here, for instance, is what Gibbs said later, in his LH retro-report (where the video can also be viewed):
The main problem I have, and what the video focuses on, is that the numbers don’t stack up. Their avoidance loopholes would save 15% of the deficit if they were closed, but it would take 115% cuts, relative to the deficit, to pay off the accumulated debt in 37 years. Thirty seven years of services being trimmed will not work, I appreciate why they fear that, but what we really need is radical pro-growth policies and alternative sources of funding wherever it can be done. Democracy has failed to run its bank account properly. We need to bail it out, pay off the debt, and cut the responsibilities which we entrust to its institutions.
The video itself might have been (even) better, in that Gibbs might have put that point rather more eloquently to the people he was talking to than he actually did. But such nitpicking misses what is crucial here, which is that there are times when the important thing is just to start doing it. How many libertarian videos did you stick up on YouTube last week? More than zero? That’s infinity percent more than most of us have managed. Sometimes load/fire/take aim is the way to go. Simon Gibbs has now loaded and fired. His aim, pretty good to start with, will go from good to even better. As a piece of reportage, about what UK Uncut demos are like, this video is already excellent.
In all the ways that truly matter this is a terrific piece of work, and I really hope Gibbs keeps at it.
Libel actions. They’re things that only really, really rich people can indulge in aren’t they? At least, they are nowadays. But what about a hundred years ago? Here’s an example involving a building surveyor suing an architect.
Now, reading the article, it doesn’t sound as if the surveyor is exactly loaded. Yet he brings his case and (amazingly) wins it. By the way, the damages are about £10,000 in today’s money if you convert to and from gold.
This is not an uncommon occurrence. Another example I found a few months ago was a small school bringing a case against a disgruntled parent. And I have spotted others. These are cases of not particularly well-heeled people – although, to be fair, not exactly poor people either – finding no great difficulty in suing for libel.
Two questions. One, have I got my facts right? Two, if I have, what has changed?
As of this Thursday, Samizdata will temporarily stop updating and on Friday, it will go off-line completely for… a while.
We wil be back at some point over the weekend with the New Improved Version.
Roosevelt’s claim that we can judge the social conscience of the government by how it collects taxes is true in a way he could not have imagined. Contrary to FDR and Justice Holmes, taxes are neither a price (in the voluntary-transaction sense) nor club dues. On the contrary, they are exactions by threat of violence. Some social conscience! How ironic that organized society and civilization itself are said to depend on the government’s threatening peaceful people if they fail to surrender their property as demanded by politicians who presumptuously and self-servingly claim to “represent” all the people.
Far from some enlightened institution, taxation began when conquerors realized that formal and continuing appropriation of a subject population’s wealth was preferable to hit-and-run pillaging. For this to work, however, the rulers needed to convince the peasants that the regime would protect them from predators in return for their regular remittances. That’s right: It was a protection racket, from which the racketeers and their cronies profited handsomely.
– Sheldon Richman
Protected Rights is the money accumulated from ‘contracting out’. It is also known as
‘contracting out of SERPS’, a ‘rebate pension’ or an ‘Appropriate Personal Pension (APP)’,
and may contain an element of National Insurance contribution by means of a rebate into
your APP. Until 2012 Protected Rights benefits will have to be kept separate from non
Protected Rights within your fund.
That is just one paragraph from a guide to filling in a form related to my pension. I do not want this stuff filling up the hard disk in my head. I want to free up space for important things like the plot of the Lord of the Rings fan fiction I am reading or the details of Climategate or even some mathematics or the rules to Magic: The Gathering.
But no, the great game of Nomic that officialdom plays goes on, and the boring stuff requires ever more attention.
Burton Roll Out ‘Arthur Scargill Clothing Line’ Inspired By Trade Unionist Leader.
Seen via what I intially thought was a first-class joke article in the Guardian. But the only joke in the piece is Aditya Chakrabortty’s gullibility regarding TUC “research”, for, verily, Burton menswear really is offering the discerning customer a ‘vintage-inspired fashion-aware range’, designed by Liam Hodges
…to include casual and formal design, woven and jersey, and knit, ‘accessible to the everyday guy’.
Hodges’ winning designs take inspiration from the miners’ strikes of the 1980s and took into account production practicalities – from factory capacities to UK-sourced yarns.
…
“I was reading lots about the miners and watching documentaries. What I’ve created draws on classic garments from that era, updating them with modern jackets,’ Hodges said.
The next step for the brand simply must be haircare.
Incoming from Alex Singleton:
I know you’ve described Noam Chomsky as “a monster” before now, so I thought you might be interested in a review that I have written of his book Manufacturing Consent.
Singleton’s review is entitled “Manufacturing Consent by Chomsky and Herman isn’t just wrong: it is ludicrous”. Chomsky argues that multinational corporations have it all their own way in the mainstream media. Singleton argues otherwise:
As Herb Schmertz, former VP at Mobil Oil, put it in a 1986 book: “[Many people are] under the false impression that the wealthier the organization, the more seriously its views are taken. I wish that were true! If anyone still believes that old canard, I invite them to spend a month working for a major oil company during the next fuel shortage.”
Indeed.
Having worked in the media himself, Alex Singleton now earns his living advising organisations, big and small, about how to handle the media. So, if you run a wealthy organisation, and you are facing some sort of crisis and consequently are liable to get a media beating, why not give Singleton a call? Maybe he could manufacture some consent for you.
Is insomnia the big disease of the twenty first century? Famously, markets are now open for business twenty four hours a day, and have been for several decade. Someone somewhere always to buy or to sell, and has the electronic trickery to do it.
Goddaughter 2: One of her teenage bizarrenesses was doing social media – gossipping as we used to call it – until 5am, while still starting school on time. The word is she’s over this now, thank goodness. But, it wasn’t just her. She was gossipping with fellow teenage insomniacs.
Me: My sleep during the winters is now deranged by cricket matches all over the world, most of it played in my night time. (I have recently learned how to watch such cricket, at no monetary cost, on my computer. I’d rather not say how.) Last night, I woke up at 3.30am, to watch England beat India in Kolkata. I also got to bed last night, again, at 5am.
Everyone: Just able to live, virtually, all around the clock. And it’s a positive feedback loop, a network effect. The more people are doing things all around the clock, the more excitements there are everywhere, all around the clock, and the more sleep patterns everywhere are deranged.
In former centuries, without the ability to communicate cheaply and interestingly with places where it was broad daylight, there was, at night, a lot less to do. Other than the obvious. The obvious has always caused insomnia, for those who can’t get enough of it. Now all the fun you can have with your clothes on (or not, it doesn’t matter) has joined the obvious. As culture (including politics) goes ever more global, there are ever more inducements to keep paying attention to your particular thing, as the small hours get bigger.
The other big techno-trend I think I see now is computerised mobility. For my generation, the two big technological dramas were the arrival of television and the arrival of computers and the internet. But perhaps historians will see those two dramas as just the one. People stopped going out, and instead stayed at home, staring at electronic screens and listening to electronic boxes. The first upheaval did indeed culminate in television, having been preceded by radio and gramophones, because all of that stuff kept people at home, as did the early internet. The second upheaval was all these toys becoming mobile. Looking at things this way, the Sony Walkman becomes more significant than the first personal computers. The first computers made the telly a bit more intelligent and a bit more fun, but you still stayed at home and got fat and lazy. The Walkman got people up off their fat arses and out and about again. And now the iThings and their non-Apple progeny are making the Get Out More life even more attractive, to the point where you can do all your work on the move.
Mobile technology is all still a bit clunky, I think. All those wires and headphones and little thingies to put in your pocket somewhere. Which is why I think the development of computerised glasses – or spectacles (merging the two meanings of that word into one again) – may prove to be so significant. And in the age of total surveillance and universal face recognition, great big non-see-through glasses are going to become very popular, even if they merely look like head-held TVs. (Clever spectacles will of course make photographing other people, literally in a blink, even easier and even harder to spot.)
I have the feeling that somehow or another techno-induced insomnia and techno-mobility are pretty closely connected. One rather obvious connection is that people who take exercise sleep better. But there are surely many other connections.
Here’s one. There is a class of semi-mobile technology which I find invaluable for getting to sleep. A problem for insomniacs is that whereas they (we) can doze off in front of the telly with ease, once in bed, the combination of the effort involved in actually getting to bed, and then the silence, can be hideously arousing. Silence now being an oddity, it keeps many of us awake. (This may be why I write better when no music is playing.) Two tricks I have learned for getting to sleep are (a) watching dvds on my little portable telly, and then (b) playing music very quietly beside the bed. I soon get drousy, and the slight effort involved in putting aside the telly and swtching on the music, or just switching the telly over to music, is not enough to seriously wake me up.
So anyway (I have only recently noticed that “anyway” means “I am about to disconnect from you, for no obvious reason other than that I just am”), blah blah blah. Discuss. Or, I have bored you so completely that you will now go to sleep.
“And when the Brits initially kept their distance, Led Zeppelin grabbed America from the opening chord.”
– Barack Obama.
So, is it true that the people responsible for launching the careers of The Beatles, The Who, The Kinks, The Small Faces, Pink Floyd and Jimi Hendrix kept their distance from Led Zeppelin? The only test I can think of is to see how well their records performed in the charts. In this, Wikipedia is your friend. And it shows that all of Led Zeppelin’s studio albums did at least as well in the UK as in the US and that Led Zep I (the one with that opening chord) did better.
The tale of Climategate and its aftermath is not an edifying one. As we look back over the ten years of this story, the impression we get is a wave of dishonesty, a public sector that will spin and lie, and mislead and lie, and distort and lie, and lie again. If one lie fails then another lie is issued and if that fails then they simply lie again.
– Andrew Montford, Hiding the Decline: A History of the Climategate Affair, p307. Having chronicled in painstaking detail official attempts to save face and hide the truth, Bishop Hill (as he is otherwise known) finally loses his temper.
Last night, before going to sleep, I switched on the radio commentary for the India England cricket match now in progress in Kolkata, so that, in the event that I did the opposite of dozing off (dozing on?) I would keep up with England’s currrently very satisfactory progress in that game. With luck, tonight and tomorrow night, England will bowl out India cheaply in their second innings and England will go 2-1 up in the four game series. Find out if that happens by looking, e.g., here.
So far so sporty. But this morning, waking up at tea time, so to speak, I found myself listening, not to England’s batsmen batting and India’s bowlers bowling, but to this broadcast (that link switches it on straight away which you might not like – maybe going here would be more convenient – details down a bit on the left) done by the BBC’s long-time cricket commentator Jonathan Agnew. This broadcast was about a charitable enterprise in Kolkata which rescues street children, gives them somewhere unscary and unprecarious and unchanging to live, and which then educates them.
This broadcast lasts a mere fifteen minutes, otherwise it would have gone on longer than the tea interval. The enterprise it reports on is called Future Hope.
Learning about Future Hope is the sort of process that causes people with opinions about how the world should be organised to say: “and this just goes to show how right I have always been about …”. To me, what comes through is how morally uncorrupted these children were when first rescued, it having been precisely their moral excellence that got the attention of the man, a chap called Tim Grandage, who started Future Hope, in order to rescue some of these children from their terrible physical deprivations and torments. The children who have grown up in the care of Future Hope sound, in this broadcast anyway, like the very definition of the “deserving poor”.
This being a Test Match Special broadcast, you would expect cricket to figure in the story, and it does, although for a long time rugger seems to have been a bigger deal than cricket for Future Hope. Is Grandage a rugger enthusiast, I wonder? Indeed he is. Ever since it started, Future Hope has used sport to physically improve, to socialise and to excite its charges, and generally to give them positive and amusing things to think, and thereby helping to take their minds off past miseries. But India being India, Future Hope also wants to develop its cricket. The England Cricket Team have got involved, and they recently spent a day at Future Hope, as the broadcast describes. England’s formidable new captain, Alastair Cook, opened their new cricket coaching operation for them. Good for him.
This is the first time I have ever heard about Future Hope, and I have no idea if it really is as good a thing as Jonathan Agnew and the Future Hope people he talked to made it sound. These days, you can’t help but be slightly concerned about such a phenomenon. But it did sound like a very good thing indeed. And I want to believe that if there were any doubts about its excellence, the England cricket team would not have gone anywhere near it.
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