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]
|
Avant-Garde French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, has finally been deconstructed:
Jacques Derrida, one of France’s most famous philosophers, has died at the age of 74.
Though to say that he has “died” is to, perhaps, impose a structural context defined by the ontology of Western metaphysics. In the grammatic, linguistic and rhetorical senses he has merely desedimented, dismantled and decomposed. Indeed, this is a grand narrative undoing in the egological, methodological and general sense, as opposed to a mere critique in the idiomatic or Kantian sense.
Er…or something.
Alert readers will have noted that I often write here about education. What happens is that I dash off a piece for my Education Blog, and then say to myself: this will just about do for Samizdata. And since I now find writing adequately for Samizdata harder than for my private blogs, and since Samizdata has many more readers, here is another such piece which I hope will suffice for here, provoked by an essay I am in the middle of reading, by Paul Graham. (Thank you Arts & Letters Daily, a daily resource without which I could not now do.) The first few paragraphs of this esssay grabbed my attention, and I am now about half way through it.
In that previous reaction to Graham’s essay, I made much of the idea of an essay being “persuasive”.
I am right, and wrong, says Paul Graham. Yes, a lot of education is rooted in legal education, but, he says, too much. An essay, he says, is not – or should not be – lawyering:
Defending a position may be a necessary evil in a legal dispute, but it’s not the best way to get at the truth, as I think lawyers would be the first to admit. It’s not just that you miss subtleties this way. The real problem is that you can’t change the question.
And yet this principle is built into the very structure of the things they teach you to write in high school. The topic sentence is your thesis, chosen in advance, the supporting paragraphs the blows you strike in the conflict, and the conclusion – uh, what is the conclusion? I was never sure about that in high school. It seemed as if we were just supposed to restate what we said in the first paragraph, but in different enough words that no one could tell. Why bother? But when you understand the origins of this sort of “essay”, you can see where the conclusion comes from. It’s the concluding remarks to the jury.
As I often find myself saying, to justify my enthusiasm for argument: my dad was a trial lawyer, and so were both my grandfathers. My family’s basic activity when dining, when we weren’t eating or listening to classical music on the Third Programme or Family Fun Chat on the Home Service, was arguing. And if no one was disagreeing with a dominant consensus, someone would, just for the fun of it. “Defending a position” is, I think, a pretty good way to get at the truth, provided more than one position is being defended, which is exactly what is happening when a jury is involved. The adversarial principle is, I would say, a whole hell of a lot better than a “necessary evil”.
Think only of the clash of conclusions – of, in Dan Rather’s words, “political agendas” – that recently got the truth of the Rather documents fracas out into the light of day in the space of a few hours. → Continue reading: On how legal traditions shape teaching traditions
An acquaintance sent me a link to an article about the future of Europe and asked me for my opinions in response. As someone with a reputation for having an opinion (usually a fairly inflammatory one) about everything, I find myself untypically, and perhaps rather annoyingly, equivocal. But this is entirely due to the fact that I am unsure whether or not this kind of thing can or should be taken seriously:
How quickly is Europe being Islamized? So quickly that even historian Bernard Lewis, who has continued throughout his honor-laden career to be strangely disingenuous about certain realities of Islamic radicalism and terrorism, told the German newspaper Die Welt forthrightly that “Europe will be Islamic by the end of the century.”
Or maybe sooner.
I have heard such sweeping assessments before, courtesy (mostly) of some of the more intemperate conservative blogs and websites. But is there any substance to the claim?
On the face of it, it appears both alarmist and far-fetched. Just taking the EU countries alone, I believe that there are, at most, some 20 million Muslim people out of a total population in the region of 470 million. Less than 5%.
But, let us suppose that some profound demographic shifts over the next few decades result in Muslims outnumbering non-Muslims. Does it automatically follow that Europe will then be ‘Islamic’? And, if so, what type of Islamic? Are we talking about the arid, monochromatic, repressive Saudi ‘Wahabbi’ version or the more secular and easy-going Turkish variety? Or could it be some newly-manifest and unique ‘European’ version of Islam?
Also, and given much of Europe’s descent into post-modernist torpor, would any of these scenarios (assuming they came to pass) necessarily be a bad thing?
So many questions with no answers. Or no satisfactory answers at any rate. My own inclination is to regard the article with a high degree of skepticism. Human affairs are sufficiently fluid to make predictions about the next week seem foolhardy, let alone the next century. However, it is worth bearing in mind that North Africa (the Maghreb) was once as European as France or Italy is now and that fully two-thirds of what was once the Roman Empire is now a part of the Islamic world.
But the past is not necessarily a guide to the future, so that just leaves me back where I started. In short, I just do not know and I am hesitant to venture any sort of opinion more definite than that.
Gibraltar remains a British colony to the overwhelming relief of its 27,833 inhabitants. Yet they are well aware that the reason Geoff Hoon, Britain’s dismal defence minister, yesterday attended the 300th anniversary of Britain’s capture of The Rock has little to do with any great enthusiasm for the people on The Rock or a deep commitment for retaining Gibraltar, but rather a disinclination to ‘make nice’ with Spain due to its policies regarding Islamic terrorism and Iraq.
In fact members of both the ‘tranzi left’ and ‘paleo right’ see Gibraltar as a weird anachronism and despite those groups fetishising their minor differences, both have a shared collectivist meta-context and think nothing of what the inhabitants of The Rock wish for themselves.
If the Gibraltarians were wise, they would let it be known that they are prepared to go all the way and exercise a ‘dooms day’ option of Unilateral Declaration of Independence if the political class in Britain ever decide to ‘give’ Gibraltar away: the battalion sized Gibraltar Regiment should simply take up arms with whoever will rally to the red and white flag, and man their border with bayonets fixed. Of course it is unlikely a militia army in Gibraltar could hold off a serious military move by Spain, though success against the odds is not without precedent, but would Spain actually be prepared to fight for 27,833 people who simply do not want to be Spanish?
I realise that is indeed what the Spanish state is doing in the Basque parts of Spain but this is a rather different proposition and unlike in the Basque country, there is no friendly constituency in Gibraltar who sees Spanish sovereignty as in any way tolerable. A Spanish takeover would be nothing less that a colonial occupation of an unwilling population.
People have to be prepared to literally fight for the things they value and if the people of Gibraltar made it clear that in the final analysis they would be willing to do exactly that, perhaps the chattering classes in both Spain and Islington Britain would stop thinking those people’s fate is something that can be lightly signed away by people in a ministry building in London or Madrid.
One of Spain’s top banks, Santander, is making a bid to buy the British banking firm Abbey plc, the mortgage lending firm which used to be a building society (what Americans would know as a Savings and Loan).
I do not have much to say about the specifics of the deal. It is all a part of the merger, acquision and disposal process which is a healthy part of capitalism and the efficient allocation of scarce capital. Maybe the shareholders of either firm have strong views on the matter but I do not. However, what is interesting to me is what this deal says about Spain’s development as an economic power.
Spain is one of the success stories of the past few years. When I went to the glorious city of Barcelona last year I was struck by how prosperous and dynamic the place was. I hear and read similar impressions from other sources. Much of this has to do with the determination of Spanish entrepreneurs to throw off the shackles of former failed socialist policies and embrace a more liberal economic culture, which former centre-right premier Aznar helped spawn. Let us hope the new socialist government elected earlier this year in rather shameful circumstances after the Madrid bombings does not mess it up.
It would be a grave error to infer too much from the acquisitive activities of a Spanish bank in Britain. But I get the feeling that this grand old nation is flexing its economic muscles again, and who knows, making a distinct improvement to the quality of Britain’s economy while getting richer as well. Good. It feels appropriate somehow. There are hundreds of thousands of British expatriates living in Spain so it perhaps fitting that Spain’s biggest companies are trying to get a piece of the action in the UK.
(As an aside, I would like to know what the Spanish-based blog Iberian Notes makes of this).
There are many myths about Sweden and they go back a long time.
For example, in the 1930’s various supporters of the ‘Middle Way’ (such as the future Conservative party leader Harold Macmillian) suggested that if Britain followed a policy of greater statism, Britain would be more prosperous – and they pointed at Sweden as an example of greater statism. Such folk did not tend to stress such things as Swedish levels of taxation being about half British levels at the time.
Sweden’s great success was avoiding both world wars (and the capital consumption these wars involved), but this is not often talked about (the record of Sweden, in relation to Germany, in the 1930’s and during WWII is especially not something people like to talk about).
Of course these days Sweden does indeed have very high taxes (although I doubt they really are the “highest in the world”, as is often claimed – after all the stats for levels of taxation in many nations in the world are fantasy as they do not include the endless bribes one must pay and extortion one is subject to in these countries).
However, at least in recent years the Swedish government has at least managed to control its (very high) levels of government welfare-state spending (unlike the United States – see the Cato Institute for the Bush Administration’s latest lies about the cost of the Medicare extension), and whilst not as well off as Americans (“Sweden most prosperous nation in the world” is an absurd myth one still finds being talked of from time to time) the Swedish people are not doing too badly.
Apart from the control of government spending (yes it is still very high – but at least it’s growth has been controlled in recent years so government spending as a percentage of GDP has fallen – although, I repeat, it is still very high) which has led to a balanced budget, Sweden has also followed a policy of one of the lowest money supply growth rates in the world.
Now why is this? Fiscal and monetary conservatism is hardly what Sweden is supposed to be about – this is supposed to be a nation that has long worshipped the doctrines of Lord Keynes.
However, a theory does occur to me. The Swedish government has long wished to get the nation to join the European Union’s system of money (the “Euro”). How would the people of Sweden be convinced to vote to join the EU currency?
According to the doctrines of Lord Keynes (at least as they are popularly understood) if a government follows a policy of balanced budget and tight control of the money supply then (at least at some points of the “economic cycle”) such lines of policy will produce recession.
Could the intention of the government of Sweden have been to produce recession and get people to vote for the Euro as a possible “way out”? In short could the rising levels of GDP and industrial output in Sweden be not just unintentional, but the opposite of what the government wanted?
Everyone is aware by this time that al Qaeda’s attack on Madrid led to the election of the candidate who promised immediate withdrawal of Spanish forces from the coalition in Iraq. The Spanish electorate are acting like the child who, after getting knocked down by a schoolyard bully, cowers in the hope said bully will stop hitting them and just go away.
Based on this thought, I was going to do a cute ‘appropriate’ modification of the Spanish flag.
To my chagrin, I have discovered the Spanish flag already has a yellow stripe down the middle.
The forthcoming Olympic Games which are to be held in the birthplace of this event, Greece, promise to cause a few headaches. In particular, security services around the world must be wondering what level of risk is being run in holding an event relatively close to the Middle East, and in which lots of Americans, Brits, Israelis and other parts of Dubya’s great Zionist/Halliburton conspiracy are taking part.
So while I was chatting to a work colleague about Greeks’ own views of the situation, I came across a corker of a quote from an unnamed Olympic official:
Greece hasn’t hit the panic button yet. That is because it hasn’t even installed the necessary wiring.
Brilliant.
Just who are these people going around saying that a decadent, post-historic, senescent Europe is no longer capable of galvanising in response to dangerous threats?
Nothing could be further from the truth:
Jelly mini-cup sweets have been banned by the European Commission because of a risk of children choking.
The sweets are packaged in plastic cups and designed to be swallowed in one.
The commission said they were a risk because of their “consistency, shape and form” and that warnings alone were not enough to protect children.
Though I do think that diplomacy and negotiation should have been tried before embarking on such unilateralist and aggressive actions.
The claim is being made (by various people) that the founder of the IKEA company, Ingvar Kamprad, is now the richest man in the world (supposedly Mr Kamprad has overtaken Mr Gates).
In the British media (both electronic and print) Mr Kamprad is described as ‘Swedish’. Now he may well still be a citizen of Sweden, but Mr Kamprad has been a resident of Lausanne, Switzerland since 1976.
Sweden is not doing badly economically at the moment, but I do find it interesting that the taxes of Sweden mean that its most successful businessman is unable to live there.
Fifteen suspected Islamic extremists linked to the Casablanca bombings of 16 May 2003 have been arrested this morning, according to the Europe 1 radio station which broke the news.
The bomb attacks last year killed 45 people, including 3 French citizens.
The arrests were made by the DST (French equivalent of MI5) and the RAID (elite Police unit) in two Paris suburbs, Aulay-sous-Bois and Mantes-la-Jolie. They come as Queen Elizabeth II makes an official visit to Paris, to coincide with the centenary of the ‘Entente Cordiale’ between the United Kingdom and France.
Over the week-end French police made a number of arrests of Basque ETA terrorists, including Felix Ignacio Esparza Luri, alias “Navarro”, at Saint-Paul-lès-Dax in the Landes département.
One of the very many arguments in which I was embroiled while I was a student in the 1980’s involved one of my house-mates who steadfastly held that the government should pay students a handsome monthly salary in return for all the hard studying they did. Now this was at a time when, in fact, the government did pay most students an annual grant which covered the costs of their education and left them with a bit of spending money to boot.
But that was not enough for my protagonist. As far as he was concerned this was ‘mere crumbs’; a demeaning insult from a skinflint Tory government. No, students were so precious and valuable that they deserved an ‘executive’ style pay package so that they would not be subjected to the indignities of having to buy second-hand clothes from charity shops. → Continue reading: “Down with Reality”
|
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.
|
