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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In the aftermath of electoral defeat, a Labour MP and former minister wrote:
“The new Conservative Government is showing itself the most ideological and reactionary right-wing government that Europe has seen in two decades … Its commitment to lower public spending and its ideology of laissez-faire will mean more poverty, more inequality, a meaner social sector and a worse environment.”
As things turned out, once in power the Conservatives preferred “pragmatism” to an ideology of laissez-faire, and the commitment to lower public spending displayed about the same level of commitment as Ming the Merciless did in his marriage vows to Dale Arden:
PRIEST: Do you, Ming the Merciless, Ruler of the Universe, take this Earthling, Dale Arden Lower Public Spending, to be your Empress of the hour?
MING: Of the hour, yes.
PRIEST: Do you promise to use her as you will?
MING: Certainly!
PRIEST: Not to blast her into space?
(Pointed silence from Ming)
PRIEST (hurriedly): ….Until such time as you grow weary of her?
MING: I do.
The election concerned was, of course, that of 2010 1990 1979 1970 and the writer was Anthony Crosland, MP. He concluded:
“Perhaps it did not need this lecture to demonstrate that our basic social democratic aims remain as urgent as they have ever been. If proof were needed, Mr Heath has provided it.”
– Anthony Crosland in A Social Democratic Britain, Fabian Tract 404, based on a lecture given in November 1970. (Price 3s / 15p.)
I do not entirely share Perry’s view that between Ruling Lizards Group A and Ruling Lizards Group B there is no difference worth a damn. By gum, though, when you think that Edward Heath was once seriously feared as a rampaging warrior of laissez faire, there is no difference worth much.
(I have updated the item with comments below after the Post-Libertarianism blog responded).
I suppose it is inevitable that people who are unconvinced by a supposedly strong “consensus” in favour of CAGW are going to be branded as conspiracy theorists, putting them into the same category as 9/11 Truthers, Holocaust revisionists, and sundry other people of varying levels of delusion, looniness or nastiness. (There is even a person – anonymous and writing for the “Post-Libertarianism” blog, claiming to be a bit of a supporter of libertarianism who says he is appalled at how so many libertarians are skeptics. This blogger seems to write in a permanent state of rage.)
At the Adam Smith Institute blog, Chris Snowdon makes this point about the value, or otherwise, of surveys of opinions about such matters:
“That being said, it would come as no great surprise if free marketeers were more likely to be sceptical of climate change than left-wingers since many of the most prominent global warming advocates are on the left and many of the proposed solutions involve encroachments on economic or social liberties. There is, therefore, a greater motivation for them to seek out alternative hypotheses. Conversely, one might conclude that socialists are more likely to embrace the issue than right-wingers, and for the same reason, but since the study did not use a control group, we have no way of knowing if free marketeers are over-represented in the sceptic camp or if the numbers are what you would expect from a random sample of the population.”
“The (considerably weaker) relationship between climate change scepticism and conspiratorial thinking is more interesting and it made me wonder whether the study also found a link between free market beliefs and conspiracy theories. The researchers do not say—although they must have the data—and I would be surprised if such a link exists. One striking aspect of David Aaronovich’s excellent book Voodoo Histories is how many conspiracy theories are of the left. The two biggest conspiracy theories of the last century—the JFK assassination and the 9/11 ‘inside job’—surely do not correlate with free market beliefs. More likely, they correlate with the politics of Oliver Stone and Michael Moore, both of whom have managed to keep their careers on track despite publicly promoting some quite outrageous drivel.”
“I dare say that free market views would also not correlate with the belief that the invasion of Iraq was a ‘war for oil’ with Halliburton pulling the strings, or that Hilda Murrell, John Lennon, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy and David Kelly were murdered by the government, or that the 2000 US presidential election was rigged, or that the government blew up New Orleans’ levees during Hurricane Katrina, or, for that matter, that anyone who is sceptical about climate change is funded by the fossil fuel industry.”
On the subject of why people believe in conspiracies, Michael Shermer is usually very good on the subject. His demolition of Holocaust deniers is brilliant as an example of historiography and painstaking analysis.
Update: The blogger at Post-Libertarianism responded. He/she seems rather bemused by Samizdata and where we are coming from. I should have thought that the “who are we” segment on the top right hand corner of the homepage should provide a decent outline. Samizdata isn’t a sort of “hardcore” libertarian blog, by the way – there have, for example, been distinct differences of view by commentators about matters such as the 2003 Coalition overthrow of Saddam. Anyway, the blogger has elaborated on where he/she stands on the approach to CAGW. He/she argues that the word “skeptic” is inappropriate to describe people who, allegedly, are in total denial about whether any Man-made global warming of a potentially damaging nature is occurring. Fair enough. Personally, I think people who don’t sign up to the full CAGW point of view come in different flavours: some – like me, are skeptics because of how issues such as the “hockey stick” prediction have not only failed to materialise, but because some of the most prominent scientists involved seem to have a cavalier approach to evidence and criticism, as evidence by the University of East Anglia leaked emails issue, and other behaviours as recently chronicled by James Delingpole.
There is also no doubt, as Post-Libertarianism can see, that while it is perfect possible for a person to be concerned about CAGW and be a libertarian, favouring non-state measures to adapt to CAGW or prevent it, there is no doubt that in general, most people who are pressing the CAGW case are statists of various types, and are arguing for taxes, regulations and other coercive state measures to deal with it. There is, in other words, a natural inclination on the part of libertarians to treat CAGW as a version of a moral panic of the sort that have been used in the past to justify intrusive government actions down the centuries. The same applies to views about race, for example. While it is possible that some people who are interested in race and IQ might have benign intentions and wish to push the boundaries of knowledge and protect freedom, in my experience – and that of many others – most people who discuss such matters are often racial collectivists who are happy to use the power of the state to bring about outcomes they consider desirable.
One final point. Post-Libertarianism objects to my description of him as “a bit of a supporter of libertarianism”. Well, the writer says in this post: “My idea of post-libertarianism is that of a sane, philosophical, scholarly anarcho-capitalist libertarianism that has disengaged itself from the maniacs, sociopaths, and garden-variety crackpots of LRC, LvMI, ARI, LP, FEE, and other errorist organizations (except for ARI, which is a full-fledged terrorist organization).”
Well, leave aside whether all of the organisations mentioned deserve to be so described. The fact is that this person does, by his/her own words, appear to be a libertarian of sorts. I’d be interested to know who the author of that blog actually is. If you are going to throw rocks from the position of anonymity, it looks a bit slimy unless there are good, work-based or other professional reasons for doing so.
Another Update: Post-Libertarianism – I am now convinced the author is a he (you can just tell somehow) – is a regular charmer:
“As for your whining about my anonymity: if there is a need for you to know who I am, then please describe and explain that need. I don’t give a damn who you are; why should you give a damn who I am?”
Let me spell it out for him: unless there is a clear need for work reasons (some firms make it almost impossible for people to blog under their real names) it is surely best to say who you are, or, if you have a pen-name, develop it over a period of time so that one has a sort of track record (this is what I have done.) For a start, it encourages a basic level of civility. Also, if you are in the business of making harsh attacks on people about their academic qualifications (as PL does about some of the people involved at, say, George Mason University), or otherwise attacking the intelligence, objectivity or bias of people such as the late Thomas Szasz – as PL does – then it perhaps aids the credibility of such attacks if the attacker can explain who he or she is, what their own academic and professional qualifications are, and so on. This is not “whining”; rather, it is a call for a basic amount of civility and accountability. Of course, this person is free to continue blogging away anonymously. But I happen to think that this will hamper his efforts to clean up libertarianism effectively.
Anyway, enough of this. I actually like – mostly – what this person is trying to do.
I just did a recorded interview (for the Cobden Centre) with Patrick Crozier, and experienced the mystery that is Doctor Theatre. This is when you are ill, but performing. For the duration of the performance, the illness goes into a state of voluntary liquidation. As soon as the performance ends, back comes the illness.
I still have the remnants of a cough. When talking at all volubly, I have to stop from time to time, to cough. Except that during this performance, I did not cough once. As soon as the official part of the conversation stopped, I coughed, and Patrick said: that’s the first time you coughed during this entire conversation.
I talked about all this happening before it happened, with another friend. I thought that might spook it. But no. It happened exactly as predicted.
As to whether the conversation I had with Patrick, without coughing, was any good and at all worth listening to, that’s another matter entirely.
Here:
Beijing Olympics officials approached the 2008 Games as an opportunity to host the world’s biggest sporting event, not to create infrastructure of permanent importance. Now Beijing is left with a post-Olympics landscape that better suits the taste of ruin porn aficionados than urban development officials. Its a story that should serve as a warning not only to London but future cities that have their sights set on investing billions into new infrastructure for a two-and-a-half week event.
I do wish people would be less free with that word “invest”, when what they actually mean is “spend”. But you can’t blame this particular guy, for our entire Keynes-soaked culture is saturated with such confusion. The modern Olympics are a gigantic exercise in digging huge Keynesian holes, running about in them, and then filling them in.
Ruin porn pictures follow.
I’m actually a tad more optimistic about London’s Olympic “infrastructure”. Our Olympic clutter will cost us many arms and many legs, for little immediate benefit or longer term benefit. And presumably, in the short run, our Olympic leftovers will suffer some disrepair and delapidation. But most of it is in a part of not-outer London that will be simply too valuable to be left to rot indefinitely. Also, our media will sneer too much if what now appears to be happening in China were to happen here. In China, media sneering is, I presume, less of a problem.
My guess is that the Dome is more of a guide to what will happen to London’s Olympic stuff. There was much faffing about in the immediate aftermath of the Millenium, but eventually, a meaningful use was found for it. Likewise, London Olympic remains will either be used or done away with and built over.
Meanwhile here are a couple more Olympic snaps I took recently. Both are of the Olympic rings now hanging from Tower Bridge. First, before they were swung down into place:
And second, after:
For further fun, you can enjoy a recent Chinese homage to Tower Bridge. It’s twice as good as the original, because it has twice the original number of towers!
You have probably read of the North Koreans shamelessly ripping off a suite of Disney characters in one of their infamous stage shows.
Why all the pageantry? OK, it’s North Korea, silly question. But why now? Well, it may have something to do with the young leader Kim Jong-un being freed from Dad’s shackles and finally being able to get his leg over recently married (not to Fatty Kim, as the Chinese call him) new mother and former popstar, Hyon Son-wol.
But she’s an interesting one, is Madame Comrade Hyon. An accomplished musician in her own right, she has a string of hits as long as your bayonette, such as Footsteps of Soldiers, I Love Pyongyang, She Is A Discharged Soldier, and We Are The Troops Of The Party. Real toe-tapping stuff. However, her star rose highest when she embraced her fans in the countryside with the 2005 chart-topper Excellent Horse-Like Lady.
Something lost in translation, or a manifestation of the severe shortage of tractors?
Update: by popular demand, Youtube clips provided. No translations, sorry. And I am unable to verify whether the clips match the actual songs, not being versed in Korean.
Further update: call that pop music?? This is pop music. (And no I don’t expect you to sit through that atrocious K-Pop; just trying to make a point…) That being said, it is worth noting how freaking massive K-Pop is throughout Asia, a market of 2 billion+.
Comparing the vigour of South Korean K-pop with its nothern counterpart as churned out by the likes of Kim Jong-un’s latest squeeze reminds me of this well-known photo. God bless capitalism!
Do not grip fireworks with your buttocks.
– The final entry in David Thompson’s most recent batch of Friday Ephemera, with a link to the video that will convince you of the wisdom of this advice, in the unlikely event that you are not convinced of this already.
If the ten day London weather forecast is anything to go by, and I think it is, yesterday was the last day of nice weather that London will see for quite a while, again. So yesterday, thus forewarned, I made a point of going out and about in London, photoing. (Longer range weather forecasts are an entirely different matter.) Sure enough, the weather was excellent, except at the end when it started clouding over.
And one of the more diverting things I observed and photoed was this, on London Bridge:
Yes, it’s a Pedibus. Even though Transport Blog is now in a state of permanent repose, I acquired the habit of photoing any strange form of transport I observed, so that I could feature it there, in among all the droning on about rail privatisation, and the habit of taking weird transport photos whenever the chance arose stuck. Also, the above photo is yet another in my now vast collection of people taking photos.
Although, I really should have videoed it to do it justice.
The people actually powering that particular Pedibus look suspiciously young, attractive, healthy and gender-balanced to me. I suspect they are promoting the thing, rather than actually paying to use it. (Peddling it as well as pedalling it, you might say. (See first two comments.))
But I reckon that if that is mere promotion, it ought to work. The Pedibus, it seems to me, unites a number of modern obsessions all into one activity, obsessions such as:
– Sitting at a table with friends, shouting nonsense.
– Showing off by doing something very weird in public.
– Drinking alcohol.
– Pedophilia, i.e. taking exercise by sitting on some sort of pedalling device, perhaps a bicycle of some sort but often just a thing with only pedals.
– Greenery. You can imagine yourself not having not such a big carbon footprint as you might have, while doing this.
I also think that it may appeal to all those who favour pedalling but who are reluctant simply to be pedalled around by someone else, because that seems just too Third Worldish, and who are reluctant to pedal around London alone because it seems too scary.
Best of all, because (although you can’t see him in my picture) there is a person at the front steering, you get to do, sort of, drunk driving. Perhaps Londoners will rename this contraption the Pub Crawler, because it would be ideal for that.
Even bester, it would seem that you don’t have to wear a helmet, which will surely rile all the cyclists, either because the cyclists wish they didn’t have to wear helmets, or because they think everyone else doing anything at all similar to them (walking along the pavement for example) should also be compelled by law to wear helmets.
Bestest of all, the Pedibus annoys the hell out of pompous git licensed taxi drivers.
Next, Pedibus racing. I googled those two words to see if that was already happening. Apparently not, but I did learn that “pedibus” is the Latin for something or other to do with ancient Roman chariot racing. Although I couldn’t be bothered to work out what.
I love London.
I came across the nine-year-old girl blogging about her school dinners a few weeks ago. Now the local council have banned her from taking photos of her meals because they did not like the attention she generated. I think this amounts to a freedom of speech violation because the school canteen is not private property, it is controlled by the state. The council has annoyed the Internet; The Streisand effect looms over them.
News can travel fast these days, but this particular bit of news took its time reaching me. It started in Covent Garden, then went to Oddity Central, then to here, in Canada, and from there to here, which is based somewhere (I think) in a southern state of the USA, where I read it, I being about two pleasant little walks away from Covent Garden. And now it is here:
Icecreamists of Covent Garden, London has created the Vice Lolly, a sacrilegious gun-shaped frozen treat made from holy water from a sacred spring in Lourdes, France, 80% alcohol absinthe and sugar.
According to this, this gun is still perfectly legal here in Britain. Nevertheless, my first thought was (hence that link): isn’t there some kind of law here against replica guns? Call it the chilling effect.
Would you prefer me to be more serious about guns in Britain? Not tonight thank you. The subject is too depressing.
There are a some ideas that are useful when thinking about markets. People act rationally; they act in their own best interests; they follow incentives; their preferences are revealed by their actions; and so on. This leads to such things as arbitrage, which the rationalist Harry Potter has figured out.
So not only is the wizarding economy almost completely decoupled from the Muggle economy, no one here has ever heard of arbitrage. The larger Muggle economy had a fluctuating trading range of gold to silver, so every time the Muggle gold-to-silver ratio got more than 5% away from the weight of seventeen Sickles to one Galleon, either gold or silver should have drained from the wizarding economy until it became impossible to maintain the exchange rate. Bring in a ton of silver, change to Sickles (and pay 5%), change the Sickles for Galleons, take the gold to the Muggle world, exchange it for more silver than you started with, and repeat.
Today I ordered a new HTC One S for my wife. For £15.50 per month over two years we get the handset for “free”, and various voice, SMS and data services. That means that we pay £372. But by buying via a cashback site site such as Quidco we get £30 back — this is commission that would otherwise have gone to some middleman. So we are paying £342 for the handset and the service.
The cheapest I can find the handset online on its own is £350; more typically it costs £400. For equivalent voice, SMS and data services I would pay at least £8.50 per month.
Arbitrage does seem to be happening. On eBay there are people selling phones that have been removed from their original packaging to be unlocked. Someone has taken out a contract with free handset and is then selling the handset without the service for more than they paid for the handset plus the service.
There are other oddities. My wife is an Orange customer. The deal we wanted is available on both T-Mobile and Orange, in both cases only to new customers. One can not simply arrange a new deal with one’s existing supplier because then it is impossible to keep the same phone number. One can “upgrade”, but by doing this the best deals are not available. The only rational thing for a customer to do is switch network operators every two years. My wife switched to T-Mobile. If she had been a T-Mobile customer she would have switched to Orange; nothing else would be any different.
The only way that this makes sense is if most customers do not understand it. The strategy must be to lure new customers with cheap deals and then charge them ever more by confusing them into staying loyal. And it must work, because otherwise this state of affairs would not be stable. People act rationally all right, but they are often acting on limited information.
The rather obvious lesson is that it pays to have more knowledge than the next man.
Incidentally, while it is not strictly relevant because my story could be true of any network operators in the UK, both Orange and T-Mobile are owned by the same parent company, EverythingEverywhere.
“Don’t vote Green until they drop the anti-science zealotry”, says Tom Chivers of the Telegraph.
Well, obviously. The first three words would have sufficed. It is not that I disagree in the slightest with the thrust of Mr Chivers’ article – he rightly condemns a Green Party plan, now apparently dropped, to have some sort of mass vandalism party directed against an experimental crop of GM wheat. Ironically, but not surprisingly, the point of the experiment was to try and produce a type of wheat less reliant on pesticides. That the Greens are Luddites should surprise no one. It did surprise me that it surprised Mr Chivers. How does one get to be assistant comment editor of the Telegraph? I would have thought that the knowledge of political affairs required to qualify for that post would disqualify one from being able to write, other than as a joke, the following:
I actually like the Green Party. My dad used to be, and may still be, a member. They’re well-meaning and many of them share my taste for unkempt beards. I think I put Jenny Jones as my first choice in the London mayoral elections.
But the trouble is that they’re scientifically illiterate and have what seems to be a fear of technological process.
In other news, Queen Anne’s dead.
Mr Chivers shared his Platonic cave with Mr George Monbiot of the Guardian. He has recently noticed that Noam Chomsky and John Pilger are quite happy to flirt with genocide denial so long as the deniers oppose the United States.
One of the little pleasures of my life is looking back through old photo-archives and finding pictures that particularly amuse, in ways that I did register when taking them (otherwise I would not have taken them), but then forgot about.
So this morning, for instance, while looking through some pictures I took earlier in the month of the remarkable (because so remarkably ugly) Baynard House, I came across this picture:
Yes, it is ugly, isn’t it? But what interested me when I took that photo was also all those Men in Orange. What were they up to? What struck me at the time, and I distinctly remember this feeling now, was what an alarmingly large number of Men In Orange there were. It was like they were making an action movie and about to be slaughtered by James Bond or by a James Bond imitator, or perhaps even plotting an urban atrocity of some sort themselves, for real. None of the photos I took of these many, many Men In Orange quite captures the scary oddity of them, congregated in such an alarmingly large number. The above snap was only the least unsuccessful from this point of view.
So it was that, when I encountered this sign on the side of Baynard House a few moments later, I was amused, and not wholly surprised:
Click to make that more legible.
What the Men In Orange are doing is some major rearranging of Blackfriars tube station. Blackfriars Station as a whole, including an overground railway station that straddles the Thames on Blackfriars Bridge, is being entirely reconstructed, and the underground bit with it. (I show a couple more shots of the overground aspect of all this activity here.) Merely the London Underground (LU) aspect of this is a big job, which requires the attentions of Men In Orange in large numbers.
The above snaps were taken when I was on my way to One New Change. The process of writing about One New Change caused me to forget my strange encounter with the Men In Orange, until prompted to remember the experience this morning, thanks to the magic of digital photography and the infinitely capacious hard drives that computers have in them nowadays.
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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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