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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One of my lesser vices is that I take a certain childish delight in unexpectedly arriving at a party when all the other guests think I am on a different continent, or unexpectedly posting to Samizdata from Maputo. In truth, I am thinking that the “blogging from unexpected places” technique is getting a little tired. In addition, it often leads to my getting messages three days later from people who I might have wanted to meet, saying that if they had known I was in town they might have liked to have bought me a drink or shown me some interesting part of town I was not aware of. Therefore, let me do something a little different.
I will be in Paris from the 6th to the 10th of April – the Easter weekend from Friday morning to Monday evening. Does anybody want to get together for a Samizdata drinks session, or perhaps we could go out for dinner? The evening of Saturday April 7 might be good for it.
Secondly, does anybody know of a bar or pub in Paris that is showing the matches of the cricket World Cup live? In particular, I would like to watch at least some of the Australia v England game this is being played on April 8, Easter Sunday. Help on this matter would be appreciated.
In the “really long term planning” stakes, I will be in Singapore on Thursday December 20. If anyone wants to do an Asian Samizdata dinner that evening, that would also be a splendid thing.
And of course I shall be in many other places at various times in between.
I have been keeping an eye on the French Presidential race, if only because it is high time perhaps that that great, sometimes infuriating country had the sort of leader who might unleash the entrepreneurial energies that do exist. (Entrepreneur being of course a French word). We like the witty French economics writer Bastiat at this blog and it would be lovely to think that some of his classical liberal spirit might return to that country.
Alas, Nicolas Sarkozy, the Gaullist candidate, has already signalled that he is as hostile to capitalism as any Sartre-reading socialist:
Nicolas Sarkozy will push for a European tax on “speculative movements” by financial groups, such as hedge funds, if he wins this year’s French presidential elections.
The centre-right candidate to replace Jacques Chirac said in comments published by Wednesday’s Les Echos, the Financial Times’s sister newspaper, that he aimed to “raise moral standards and improve security in financial capitalism”.
Hedge funds, which are investment pools usually registered in sunny Caribbean islands, have become a bugbear for protectionist-minded politicians, who fear the ability of these folk to quickly move in and out of a company’s stock, a currency or bond to make a profit. Hedge funds typically amplify the size of the market positions they take by what is called leverage – borrowing to you and me – and from time to time their bets go badly wrong, as happened during the Russian debt default crisis 9 years ago. On the whole, though, hedge funds make markets more liquid and efficient by increasing the number of buyers and sellers in a market and their arbitrage skills remove inefficiencies in how assets get priced. They also, on a more venal level, generate enormous revenues for financial centres like London and Wall Street. They often put pressure on underperforming company boards to raise their act, which is hardly a bad thing. Like private equity buyout funds, however, hedge funds sound mysterious and a bit dodgy; they prefer to operate in secret and their PR is often awful. For most people, a hedge fund manager is a guy with a slicked haircut shouting into a telephone.
The French business culture, despite a few improvements, is overwhelmingly dirigiste, and can ill afford to give the finger to some of the sharpest financial talents around. If Sarkozy wants to market himself as a sort of French proto-Thatcherite, this seems hardly the way to go about it. Bashing speculators is the oldest and one of the grubbiest tricks in the political book. It plays on public ignorance about economics, it plays on envy at great wealth, and panders to the out-dated idea that wealth is only real if you can hit it with a hammer or or dig it out of the ground. Sarkozy should do his underperforming republic a favour and read some Bastiat instead.
I missed this the other day… The French government, the same people who gave aid and comfort the the instigators of the Rwanda genocide, and have done everything they could to thwart the arrests of mass murderous Serbian war criminals in Bosnia, have decided to ‘honour’ one of their own. They have awarded the Legion D’Honneur, France’s highest award, to Harold Pinter, that well know playwright, man of letters, literary colossus and apologists for mass murdering national socialist Slobodan Milosevic and mass murdering national socialist Saddam Hussain.
Vermin, one and all.
The French involvement in the Rwandan genocide in 1994 has been something about which the chattering classes have been largely indifferent, much to the annoyance of many Rwandans. The Rwandan government recently unceremoniously threw out the French embassy, and any French institutions with links to the French state, after a court in France issued arrest warrants against several leading Rwandans (including the president) for assassinating former President Habyarimana, whose death was the event that sparked the genocidal murder of 800,000 Tutsi. That was rather like France in 1956 calling for the arrest of the few surviving conspirators behind the (sadly failed) plot to assassinate Adolph Hitler in 1944.
I cannot escape the suspicion that if somehow, however tangentially, the USA was involved then articles about Rwanda would be a far more common thing in the media. That said, I have no doubt that someone, somewhere has concocted a conspiracy theory that it was the CIA, rather than France, who was backing the Bad Guys in 1994, supplying the Interahamwe with machetes from a secret Halliburton machete factory in somewhere in Texas.
An unsavoury developement of Le Web 3 in Paris, a conference about and for bloggers organised for the third time by Loic Le Meur of Six Apart. I have always considered Loic as one of the clued up people in this area and I will give him the benefit of the doubt as to what really happened. Politicians are a toxic breed. Dealings with them tend to backfire and so I’ll wait to hear his side of the story. Jackie has more on this. Following a link from her post, I came across a comment that captures one of the fundamental differences between the Anglosphere and ze Europe.
The very notion that liberty can be restricted by rules and STILL be called liberty is very difficult for English or American people. Actually, I don’t really know about the notion of liberty in the UK, but I do know that the Americans tend to define it as the absence of constraint (especially from the State… constraint from the dominant Opinion is still quite strong and widely accepted).
Now for the French side: liberty is defined as the ability to do what you want INSIDE of a collectively defined set of rules. See Rousseau on that matter.
I’m not pretending that any of these view is better than the other. But I think it helps why a Frenchman can say that liberty should be bound without (French) people gazing at him like he was a madman.
There is now a very high chance that Eurotunnel, the Anglo-French consortium operating the Channel Tunnel rail-link between London and the continent, could be liquidated by this September, having failed to reach a key agreement earlier this week with creditors. The saga of how the operator would persuade a group of banks to let it restructure a huge pile of debt has been chugging along for months. Now there is a real risk that this marvel of civil engineering could be known as one of the biggest transport commercial flops in history. The free-marketeer in me says well, the venture was never based on fully commercial grounds in the first place. The folks concerned probably no doubt rightly thought that if the project was a flop, then the fortunate taxpayers of Europe would pick up the tab, just as they did with that other venture of high-tech wonder and dubious economics, Concorde. The romantic in me would be very sad to see this wonder of rail come to an end. I have used the Eurotunnel service several times, both for work and for short breaks to France in recent years. Every time I have marvelled at the smoothness of the service, only occasionally marred by delays in the English side of the operation, or by the odd rude French ticket inspector.
It certainly beats messing around in airport lounges, that is for sure.
Not only is Jacques Chirac, no matter what he thinks and says, NOT funding a French ‘Google killer,’ he “doesn’t even know what a mouse is”. And that comes directly from a guy who is a partner in the French non-‘Google killer’. Search expert John Battelle interviewed the guy, Francois Bourdoncle, and writes:
So what is [Chirac] funding? Well, according to Bourdoncle, there will be no single Quaero site. Instead, Quaero is a program, a long term effort to spur various European competitors toward creating better search related technologies. Participants will share R&D, for example, as well as become each other’s customers. In other words, this is a government funded attempt at pulling together a keiretsu of sorts.
Not exactly a European Google killer, I commented. Nope, Bourdoncle responded, and attempting to do that would be a pretty stupid move. I couldn’t agree more. Sounds to me, I thought to myself, that Quaero is simply a way for huge companies like Thompson to insure a steady flow of dollars from its government, and if using the Big Google Is Going to Kill European Culture meme helps along the way, so be it. Before I could even mention that idea, Bourdoncle addressed it head on, saying he was sure folks might see it that way, and he was not one to say if it was true or not. “I’m not really sure what (Thompson’s) strategy is,” he said. “They don’t tell me that.” Sounds like the keiretsu is shaping up nicely, no?
Jacques Chirac is, in typically sophisticated French fashion, subtly inferring that French culture reigns supreme amongst the illuminati of high civilisation:
When M Seillière, who is an English-educated steel baron, started a presentation to all 25 EU leaders, President Chirac interrupted to ask why he was speaking in English. M Seillière explained: “I’m going to speak in English because that is the language of business”.
Without saying another word, President Chirac, who lived in the US as a student and speaks fluent English, walked out, followed by his Foreign, Finance and Europe ministers, leaving the 24 other European leaders stunned. They returned only after M Seilière had finished speaking.
I suppose it is always a positive when the children leave the room. Then the grown-ups can talk.
(Hat tip RWDB – J.F. Beck)
I have always found group names quite interesting, such as a ‘crash’ of rhinos, ‘school’ of fish, a ‘gaggle’ of geese, a ‘stupidity’ of politicians, a ‘conspiracy’ of lawyers, etc… but what is a collection of French students to be called? Perhaps an ‘unreasonableness‘? Or would it be a ‘perversity’? Or maybe a ‘delusion’ of French students?
Three hundred thousand of them were protesting and/or rioting because of attempts to change the laws that make no business in their right mind want to hire them in the first place. This is because if they turn out to be indolent layabouts, a company is still not allowed to fire them. So, as unemployment approaches 10% in France (or quite a bit higher according to some), demonstrating that something is just a tad wrong with the ways things work in France, these clever chappies want to motivate employers to continue to not hire people. Outstanding.
Erik and Arthur Wneir from No Pasaran took on several thousand Muslim protesters and only the intervention of French police prevented a repeat of the Battle of Tours.
More seriously, watch the video to see the characteristic Muslim reaction to people daring to state an opinion different to theirs.
Today is the anniversary of the execution of French monarch Louis XVI. If my reading of history is correct, the matter did not end terribly well for France. Not that most Frenchmen would want the Bourbons back, however.
Of course there is a huge body of historical literature on the rights and wrongs of the French Revolution, which in many ways created the model for totalitarianism in Soviet Russia, China and elsewhere. That the Bourbon monarchy was a corrupt institution and that the ordinary folk of France suffered under an oppressive system is not in much doubt, mind. I cannot help but think, however, that the violent overthrow of the monarchy and what followed was, in net terms, a disaster for Europe and sowed the seeds of much eventual trouble.
I recommend this book by Simon Schama and this item, which pinpoints the violent events in France as an example of “totalitarian democracy” and the dangers of folk who claim to have an unique insight into some fictitious entity called the General Will.
Jacques Chirac has suddenly come out with a statement (French version here) that not only is France prepared to use nuclear weapons “against any state which launched a terrorist attack against it”, their nuclear forces had been “configured for such an event”.
As clearly this is a direct threat to nuke Iran, I can only wonder what the hell is going on here? Makes me wonder what exactly do they know in the Quai d’Orsay that they are not sharing with the rest of us.
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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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