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 US motor industry seems about to fail. Credit insurers are now withdrawing their support as the firms burn through cash, with faltering sales and outstretched hand for charity. But, with their size, their number of jobs and their Main Street history, these car firms have been deemed too important to fail.
If the Democrats do decide to rescue the US car industry via a bail-out, they will rationalise and reorder. Perhaps they will even wish to intervene as to which models and which research should be undertaken. Think of the opportunity for renewables…renewing jobs, renewing pork, renewing votes. By the end of this process, it is doubtful if there will be any US car industry at all. Congress will have undertaken a wonderful role in clearing out the undergrowth for more efficient rivals and Detroit will go the way of Morris, Austin and the Triumph marques.
Haringey had a beautiful paper trail of how they failed to protect this baby.
– Eileen Munro, London School of Economics, as paraphrased by Simon Jenkins.
Jonathan Ross has not followed his own advice. His new book is entitled “Why do I say these things”. How apt!
Perhaps he should employ a chimpanzee as a personal censor. Especially when his foolishness focused upon a member of the satanic sluts. I would not dare to cross them.
Recessions can be the tool of ‘creative destruction’, if governments get out of the way and do not prevent the next wave of entrepreneurial experimentation by ‘softening’ the impact of the recession and distorting the efficient allocation of capital. Gordon Brown, take note: companies and governments have to fail. George Gilder, always an enthusiastic prophet, writes of the coming possibilities in Forbes. He identifies four areas that the financial wizardry of venture capitalism can nurture: ‘cloud computing’, graphics processing, nanotech engineering and energy saving construction materials. Gilder is useful for identifying waves of start-ups and linking them to wider technological change.
A great line is where Moore’s law is referenced as insufficient for our needs:
This vast expansion of the scale of computing across the network, however, renders Moore’s Law doublings inadequate to meet the need for speed. A key answer is the movement of optical technologies to chips themselves by such companies as Luxtera, a venture startup in Carlsbad, Calif., technologies based on Caltech advances that link fiber directly to chips. Azul Systems of Mountain View is pioneering a combination of Java-based parallel processing with virtualization software to produce multitrillion-bit-per-second performance in data centers.
A contentious but thrilling point if we wished to measure the proximity of a singularity event. As a useful summary of tech developments, Gilder is hard to beat. Nanotech filters allow pure water to be sucked up from a fetid puddle and new construction materials allow towers to be lighter and stronger and more radical. Hopeflly we can welcome new radical architecture: wierd, wonderfu to live in and wandering off the set of last century’s sci-fi cityscapes.
*One has to look elsewhere for exciting biotech, Gilder’s blind spot here.
The polls have not been kind to the dominant media narrative. Taking lessons from their coverage of Obamamania, the fourth estate puffed up and justified the representation of Brown as a political superhero, straddling the globe whilst other leaders squabbled like pygmies beneath his legs. I am not sure where the source of this hagiographic support stemmed from, but the source in part, is Brown as a personification of the nation.
The appearance of undertaking such a role allowed an orgy of headlines about how Britain as Brown saved the credit crunch. That the mainstream media grasps this story is a testament to their insecurity. It is narrative of a nation in decline: febrile, brittle, with reporters suspending critical judgement. Once the real events start to seep out, it is clear that three weeks of Broonmedia, following the distortions of blanket conference coverage, have not stirred the polls beyond some decline in the Tory lead. Perhaps the media confused Obama and Brown.
If the media are now more prone to herd behaviour due to the narrow bases of their recruitment and education, this represents a further step change in their retreat from their audiences. When they hear the same message bleating from their television, radio and newspapers, people will turn to other sources and other traditions to explain their situation.
Don’t be gloomy because innovation loves a crisis. Jonathan Schwartz of Sun emailed his company pointing out that now was the time to go on the offensive. The necessities enforced by the credit crunch will be the mother of invention. To save money, companies will be forced to automate, innovate and think about how they sell in order to make that profit. Less capital means fewer customers means greater competition.
You’re not going to hear from any of our customers, “let’s stop buying technology and hire more people to do the work.” They’re going to default to the opposite – automating work, and finding answers and opportunities with technology, not headcount. And in that process lies an opportunity for Sun – to engage with customers in driving down cost, driving up utilization, and driving the changes that yield immediate and long term benefit. The right question for every customer you meet is – “how can I help?” I assure you, they’ll have ideas for us. And we have no shortage of ideas for them. Personally, I’m reaching out to customers and partners just to check in and offer help – I’d recommend you do the same.
At the end of the day, the public debates may not really matter. They are there for politicians and economists to weave a myth of control and pretend that they steer our lives, using our money to justify their drivel.
It is the private debates amongst companies, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs that really matter. With less money to go around, there is a strong incentive to accelerate change and adopt business models that profit from the information revolution rather than kick against it. As an example, the mainstream media may enter its death rattle as consumers shift towards online business, because it is cheaper, better and quicker.
The downside is that a general downturn may cause research programmes which do not have an immediate or predictable return to falter, as sources of capital dry up. Therefore, the immediate consequences of this crisis could be an acceleration of information technology permeating everyday lives but a longer curve for the development of nanotechnology, stem cell research, robotics and other technologies.
I am a sovereign wealth fund. This is a position that I never expected to be in. I and every other British taxpayer.
I have been told that this was necessary or indescribable consequences entailing the destruction of my life and welfare would have followed. This hypothesis was not tested, due to the supposed costs, and, therefore, I became a sovereign wealth fund.
This sovereign wealth fund is not like other sovereign wealth funds, in that the Chairman is one Gordon Brown and the money that he uses to purchase whatever assets he likes is mine. This does not give me confidence, and I suspect the wealth in the fund will decline in value. This is what Gordon Brown does.
There will be a shareholders meeting in 2010. I think we need to vote for a return of all assets to the shareholders. Voting for these managers certainly has not worked and the alternative consultancy offers more of the same.
The Left are becoming desperate in their attempts to scaremonger and scapegoat the Big Crunch.
Gordon Brown’s stewardship of the Treasury over the past decade is now under scrutiny. He followed Alan Greenspan, worshipper at the feet of Ayn Rand, a free marketeer whose extreme and influential libertarianism let markets rip, kept interest rates too low and failed to regulate the banks’ wild lending. Britain, says the OECD, is in a worse position to weather the storm than most due to its dependence on an uncontrolled property boom. Many – including this paper – warned often of the madness of letting prices rise by £50 a day with a mortgage-based debt bonanza. Slashing capital gains tax, on the advice of private equity leaders who had Brown’s ear, set off a huge expansion in borrowing to snap up public companies. The buy-to-let market was allowed full rein, too, inflaming house prices. The Treasury heeded no warnings about the culture of 125% mortgages.
We must hang objectivists, ban ‘We The Living’ and jail all libertarians. Immediately. Or perhaps Polly Toynbee is wrong.
Rand must be laughing in her grave.
Freedom of movement is a simple principle and some countries are more attractive than others. Britain may have some 77 million by 2060, overtaking Germany as the most populous country in Europe . A happy result as this adds more energy to our mongrellous mix. Get rid of the welfare state and we may attract even more economic migrants, even more entrepreneurs and get even richer faster.
Still, good news brings out the illiberal. We have the Tories aping Labour, adding stasis to their statist hungers, with a po-faced limit on all immigration.
The Conservatives are demanding an annual limit on immigration, to take “into account its impact on the public service infrastructure” as well as a broader policy “to tackle other issues like family breakdown” and ageing.
The prize for chumpdom extends to greenery: with their wistful carry trade of ecocide and dreaming spires, with cyclists trading organic marrows between villages of happy farmers:
Rosamund McDougall, policy director at the Optimum Population Trust, has called “for stabilisation and gradual decrease to five million fewer people in Britain by 2050”.
“This population growth is absolutely unsustainable, in environmental terms, energy terms and food production. It will make life for British citizens significantly worse,” she said.
“Even if we comprehensively greened our lifestyles, the UK could only support 27 million people – less than half its present population – from its own resources.”
The green response to freedom of movement is illiberal restriction cast in a PC lexicon:
OPT supports immigration. We want to go on doing our share of protecting persecuted refugees as well as welcoming additional skills and cultures to our already rich mix of people. The problem is how many? Since we believe that our population density is now too great for our resources, we think that a just solution is to balance immigration with emigration to help reverse population growth. As around 350,000 people leave our shores each year, we suggest limiting immigration to similar numbers, to produce a neutral effect on our population growth. More asylum seekers could be accommodated if there is a corresponding reduction in the number of economic migrants.
This fundamental divide between liberals and greens has not been grasped by the general populace. If the greens are unable to attain the carrying capacity of the United Kingdom by voluntary means, where will they go in their quest for sustainability?
Lynne Doucet, talking at the Edinburgh International Television Conference, gave a speech on the complexities of reporting in Afghanistan. She lamented that she was unable to convey the complexities of the conflict or the perspective of the Taliban factions. Whilst some may view this as a criticism of television reporting in general, snippets of her speech show the quest for impartiality. Let us consider what she says within that framework.
Doucet wishes to show the motives and perceptions of the Afghan population, yet uses the term Taliban rather than Afghan: her true target is those who resist, not those who support:
“What’s lacking in the coverage of the Afghans is the sense of the humanity of the Afghans.
“In the Prince Harry coverage for example, there were all these people out there you never really saw them.
“You knew that the bombs were dropping in that direction and the guns pointing in that direction but you never got a sense of how Afghans are as a people.”
In further detail, she notes the factionalism of the Taliban, yet does not move beyond her original goal of giving the opponents a voice or conveying their ‘humanity’. Doucet understands that part of her moral mission is to explain the complexities of the conflict, but her method is to give the mic to the other side.
Her impartiality is already flawed by her admission that journalists in Afghanistan support the troops through coverage of the Prince Harry mission:
Canadian-born Doucet said: “It probably did bring a lot of people to think about Afghanistan who normally wouldn’t ordinarily think about Afghanistan. If the Prince Harry story can bring more people to think about Afghanistan then that’s a good thing.
“There was a lost opportunity. There was hardly any mention of Afghans, even of Afghanistan … (just a) sense of ‘I went to a country far away’.
But she added: “Viewing figures went up, Prince Harry got a hero’s welcome and recruitment for the British Army went up so an objective was achieved. Did that mean people knew more about why Britain was there? I don’t think so.
Doucet wishes to be the gatekeeper for explaining the conflict: living up to her perceived concept of impartiality by maintaining a position of neutrality and providing access to all parties fighting in Afghanistan. But her freedom to report is bounded by the protection that the Western forces provide: the Taliban would neither respect her as a woman or as a non-Muslim. Without this understanding of her own limited freedom of movement, she is unable to provide a rounded understanding of the limits to reporting in Afghanistan.
Journalists find that they are unable to report voices where values are incommensurable and their own position is at risk, since they are viewed as the enemy. Underneath all the verbiage, Doucet’s unspoken lament is that the Taliban consider her the enemy too, when all she wishes to do is understand them. Poor lamb.
The conduct of the British Army and the Ministry of Defence begins to crumble under the information leaked from the United States and Iraq. Unwilling to deal with the problems of security in Basra (and the potential damage of soldiers forced to patrol with inadequate equipment), British forces on the ground are alleged to have sought an accommodation with the Mahdi army militias in Basra and forsaken the city. They left the citizens of Basra at the mercy of fundamentalist thugs, whose torture and murder of innocent civilians was publicised in the following months.
The motives behind this accommodation are unclear. Justificatory references to success with the IRA and domesticating paramilitaries in a political process are evasive arguments for the accommodation. Equipment shortages are left unmentioned. More astonishing is the role of Des Browne, Secretary of State for Defence, whose permission was required before any British soldier could enter Basra. Whilst the Iraqi Army and US support staff put down the militias, the British authorities waited an unconscionable six days before they were willing to allow soldiers to enter the city. This was partially caused by the commander, Major-General Barney White-Spunner, who was away on a skiing holiday. This may be unfortunate timing but it does not lessen the air of ineptitude and scuttle that surrounds this whole affair.
The Guardian publicised the Ministry of Defence’s rebuttal from unnamed officials, who stated that the Iraqi Prime Minister, Al-Maliki, used the Basra campaign to shore up his credibility at the expense of co-operation with the British. They did concede that they had come to an accommodation with the militias and that,
British defence officials today denied reports that a secret deal between Britain and the Shia militia the Mahdi army prevented UK forces from taking part in a major offensive in Basra earlier this year.
Under the terms of last year’s accommodation, UK troops released suspected members of the militia in return for militia leaders ending their attacks.
Maliki was determined to weed out rebel units of the Mahdi army and criminal gangs. Local Iraqi forces and British troops had failed to do this, annoying the US and the Baghdad government, British officials now concede.
The level of political control that Labour politicians hold over individual deployments is difficult to gauge. Yet the delay and dithering over Basra, smells more of the Brown stuff than Browne’s sauce.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and D. H. Lawrence’s own explanation, the “Propos”, do reveal how the consumptive both embraced and escaped his country. Lawrence encapsulated a rootless contempt for his background and his people, the coalmining communities of the midlands. His last novel, rewritten three times, rails against the perceived deadened inauthenticity of English life; the mannered abstraction of a scientific worldview denying the consummate union of man and wife in a real marriage. Thus, science, technology, capitalism and money are unified into a system that saps and destroys what it means to be human.
This is not a particularly old or unusual message. Nevertheless, Lawrence weaves and reinterprets conservative themes in modernist frames. Authenticity will invigorate marriage and the nation of England. To view this focus as a conservative strand within Lawrence’s writing is to surrender to political constraints, when the author restructured his sense of alienation against his country. The consumptive’s exile pours out through the novel, as he tries to explain why using obscenities as norms becomes a marker for an honest world of sexual union, recreating an England worth living in for the author (though it does lend the novel an air of pomposity and ambitious challenges for bad sex writers to the present day).
How sad that exile and censorship obliterated our understanding of a state of the nation novel that set out an ideal of England, standing foursquare in a wider artistic tradition that speaks with more urgency today.
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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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