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]
|
Here is a photograph of a sculpture, which I recently chanced upon, in the part of the city that is London is known as the City of London:
The sculpture is called “Rush Hour”. It said so, on a sign in the ground in front of it. I also photographed the sign. This is a good habit for a photographer to get into. Cameras are not just for taking pictures. They are also for taking notes.
What struck me about this sculpture, as I looked at it and photoed it, was how depressed they all look, especially when compared with London’s sculpted warriors. The warriors depicted on war memorials had any number of agonies to contend with, yet they stick out their chests, jut out their chins, look the world proudly and defiantly in the eye and tough out whatever challenges and horrors they are obliged to endure. These office drudges, on the other hand, have given up. Their eyes point downwards, avoiding any contact with the world or with me and my eyes. They trudge forwards, following the person immediately in front. They do not look like people fighting a war, successfully. They look more like prisoners of war, in a war that their side is losing.
But, when I got home I checked out the website mentioned in the sign in the ground under the sculpture, the sign that I had photographed, and when I did, I got quite a shock. I was confronted by this:
These city commuters are facing the cares and stresses of their lives with a degree of stoical optimism, even heroism, that their cousins in my photograph conspicuously lacked. Urban drudgery may defeat lesser beings from foreign lands, but Britain can do it! We shall prevail! Final victory over financial services industrial monotony will be ours!
I actually had to study the above two photographs quite carefully before being entirely convinced that they are both of the same thing. Are there, I wondered, several versions of this sculpture, in different places? I slowly worked it out. These are the same statues, in each photograph. But the photo at the website was taken by someone crouching down, very low, and perhaps even lying on the ground (which means, for instance, that at least one of the figures at the back is entirely blocked from view). The figures are not on a pedestal, as both photographs make entirely clear. But this other photographer makes them look as if they are.
Particularly significant, as I say, is the matter of eye contact. In my photograph, the commuters dare not look at me. Instead they look downwards. This is why they look so defeated, so ashamed even. But in the website photo, they are looking straight at the camera, and although not happy exactly, they seem proud of what they are doing, and confident that they can face any challenges life presents them with.
The lighting is different, and that does make a difference. But mostly, the difference is in the angle of vision.
The point of this posting is not that the angle you see things from makes a difference. Most of us know this. My point is that, when it comes to the particular matter of human statues, it can make a very big difference, far bigger than I, at least, had realised, until I spent those minutes checking these two photos to be sure that they were of the same thing.
What, I wonder, might be the effect of photographing war memorial statues, statues that are on a pedestal, from a position of vertical equality, or even slight superiority? Suppose, while photographing the figures at the centre of the recently unveiled memorial to Bomber Command, that I had somehow raised myself up to their level, or even somewhat above that level. Might my photographs have looked different in their psychological atmosphere? Would the figures suddenly have seemed less heroic, less like the masters of their fate and more like the victims of it that many of them must surely have felt?
If so, it would appear that pedestals are an even more significant part of our civilisation than I had realised.
And none of them is Romney.
Now that Natalie, to whom deep thanks, has done the I-told-you-so posting that I feared I might have to do for myself, by linking to the piece I wrote last week in the privacy of my personal blog entitled Reasons to think Romney is going to win big, I thought I would follow up her posting and mine, by saying why I want Romney to win big.
First, I really want Obama to lose, big. A few years back, someone made up a quote about how America could survive another four years of Obama. It would be plenty tough enough, provided Obama himself was the only problem. But could America survive a longer term future in which it contains, decade after decade, all the people who re-elected Obama? That’s pretty much how I feel about Obama winning, this time around. An Obama victory would do quite a bit of harm. But worse, far worse, would be what it meant.
Second, if Obama loses, something bigger and more powerful and more important will lose with him, namely the USA’s Mainstream Media. The crowing of these people if Obama were to win would be unbearable. Their humiliation will be exquisite, when Romney, as I now believe he will, wins big.
But third, and by far my most important reason for wanting Romney to win big, is that an Obama win of any sort would be a horrible set-back for the Tea Party, given that the Tea Party has now thrown its considerable weight behind Romney. A big Romney win, on the other hand, will greatly strengthen the Tea Party, and I think that would be very, very good.
The more I learn about the Tea Party and their sayings and doing, the more I am proud of that posting I did here, well over a year ago now, which said that they are Good people with good ideas (a notion confirmed by the commenters responding to this later Tea Party posting I did). It seems that a great many Americans now agree with me. In my opinion this is, politically, just about the best thing that is now happening in the world.
 Early last week, in a favourite London haunt of mine, the second hand classical CD shop Gramex, its socialist owner (we are good pals despite our differences – and so we should be given how many classical CDs I’ve bought from him over the last three decades) announced that clearly nobody in their right mind would consider voting for Romney. I’d vote for Romney in a blink, I responded, instantly. And then I had one of those moments when you find out what you think by hearing what you say. I continued orating, still without skipping any beats. “I would vote for Romney because the Tea Party supports him. They say that the US government does too much, spends too much and borrows too much, and I entirely agree. I’d vote with them.” And I’m retro-editing that for fluency hardly at all. Those were pretty much my exact words. I continued, describing the Tea Party as a coalition between Goddists and Libertarians, with both sides setting divisive opinions aside (God and “social libertarianism”) and concentrating on their overlap, see above, and I’m totally for it. Yes, I actually said all this, out loud, in a London shop, with strangers present, some presumably (like most in the classical music tribe) of a deeply anti-Romney-ite persuasion. That’s how much I meant it!
I considered cutting the above paragraph, and finding a home for it at my personal blog. But I do not think it irrelevant to what I am saying here. There is more to what you think than merely being right about it. There is also the matter of how strongly you feel about it, and how comfortable you feel inflicting it upon strangers. Something tells me that many Americans have recently also turned this particular corner.
Anyway, back to what I think as opposed to how I think it.
Suppose that the Tea Party, in the course of its big confabulation amongst itself just after Romney had been nominated, had followed the Perry de Havilland line and decided that they were going to urge people not to vote for Romney, and instead to vote for, e.g., Gary Johnson, on the grounds that he would, unlike Romney, really cut US government spending. Or for some Goddist candidate of equal fiscal and financial clarity and rectitude, who likewise wasn’t going to win, but who likewise might cause Romney to lose or at least to give him a serious fright. Or suppose they had decided to urge everyone to vote for nobody at all. Suppose they had decided, in the words of de-Havillandist commenter “August” (on this) that …
It wouldn’t seem too much of a stretch to me to think Wall Street is running the whole show now. Obama got in because he’s a compliant tool, but now he’s up against one of the finance world’s own. They’ll lock down the private profit, public risk/losses model and keep making us pay for their mistakes until there isn’t anything left.
Suppose that, instead of electing Romney the Even More Compliant Tool, the Tea Party had decided to do everything they could to shaft him, and get Obama to win. And then, having demonstrated their power to break any candidate they did not like, they tried to arrange a candidate whom they did truly like, in 2016.
Well, I can’t vote for anyone in this, but I can blog my preferences, and maybe help to shift a few dozen American voters in my preferred direction. So, suppose the Tea Party had said: Don’t Vote Romney.
I would probably now be saying that also.
Not because I have a huge loathing of Romney, any more than I now have a huge liking for him. What I do have is a huge liking for the Tea Party. I want the Tea Party to win this election, big. I agree with what they decide. I want the Tea Party to emerge from this election as a Huge Fact about American politics, which any politician ignores at his peril.
For what it’s worth, I think the Tea Party made entirely the right decision to go all out for Romney, for reasons which I may or may not expand upon, some other time. But that’s not my point here.
As it is holiday season, this item – via Instapundit – got my attention. It is about why some kinds of travel guides tend to be mealy-mouthed about some of the countries they write about:
“There’s a formula to them: a pro forma acknowledgment of a lack of democracy and freedom followed by exercises in moral equivalence, various contorted attempts to contextualize authoritarianism or atrocities, and scorching attacks on the U.S. foreign policy that precipitated these defensive and desperate actions. Throughout, there is the consistent refrain that economic backwardness should be viewed as cultural authenticity, not to mention an admirable rejection of globalization and American hegemony. The hotel recommendations might be useful, but the guidebooks are clotted with historical revisionism, factual errors, and a toxic combination of Orientalism and pathological self-loathing.”
There is a related point, also. When I occasionally read of how a region or place is “unspoilt”, it often is just an aesthetic comment that area X or Y has not been buggered up by ugly buildings. Fair enough. Even the most ardent defender of laissez-faire does not have to like all the consequences of some buildings. But there is a danger that this can sometimes tip over into a dislike of building and human activity per se. To take one example: I love certain big cities precisely because they are “spoilt” by the energy and sometimes crazy creativity of the people who live in them and build them.
This is a long and detailed review of a gadget which might be more at home on a specialist tech blog than on Samizdata, but it serves also as a snapshot of the world of mobile electronics, a world that is perhaps less encumbered by regulation than is usual, which might explain the rate of improvement.
By far the most exciting developments in consumer electronics right now are in mobile devices, in particular smartphones. System-on-chip manufacturers such as Qualcomm and Nvidia are cutting prices and transistor sizes while increasing performance such that a new generation of devices with significantly improved capabilities comes along about every 18 months or so. A lot of learning is going on about what kinds of devices work best. The original iPhone had a 4-inch touch screen and only one button. Since then physical keyboards have somewhat gone out of fashion, tablets have appeared in various sizes, netbooks have disappeared, ultrabooks have appeared, and phones have got bigger, in contrast to a few years ago when everyone was trying to make them smaller. The point is that no-one really knows which kinds of devices fit in best with people’s lives and which do not. With formerly successful companies dying out, capitalism is mercilessly finding out.
No company is having more fun finding out than Asus. They pioneered the netbook — a small, cheap laptop — with their Eee PC. They combined the tablet with the netbook with their Transformer series of devices by making the screen detachable from the keyboard. And just recently they have taken this idea to a new extreme by sticking a smartphone inside the tablet. → Continue reading: Asus Padfone
Today I had an idea for a website that might be worth monetising. Nothing I could give up my day job for, but something that might bring in a few tens of pounds pocket money from Google Adsense. It would be fun; it might help fund my gadget habit. But:
Despite what you may have read somewhere on the Internet, any income earned from Google Adsense is taxable income. It makes no difference whether you earn £5 or £10,000 – this money must be declared to the Inland Revenue as income derived from self employment. Moreover, you must declare yourself as self employed as soon as you start work (this could be when you begin that new website or insert Google Adsense into a personal blog).
Says Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs:
If you’re self-employed on a temporary or part-time basis you must register for business taxes with HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) as soon as you start work. You’ll have to complete a Self Assessment tax return and are responsible for paying your own tax and National Insurance contributions on the income you earn.
Even if you don’t think you’ll earn enough to need to pay tax, you still need to complete a tax return.
Right now I pay my tax on Pay As You Earn, meaning my employer employs a department of people to do all the form filling. I like it that way. I have a very strong aversion to filling in official forms. When forced to do so my heart rate increases, I start to sweat, I hyperventilate, my writing hand cramps up, I have a stong urge to shout and throw things and people around me get nervous. This is partly indignation at being made to do something I do not want to do, partly the unease of spending time doing something that is not pleasant and not what I am skilled at (if I was good at organising paperwork and form filling I would have made different career choices), and partly irrational. And I can never find the damned supporting documents no matter how organised I have tried to be. I could elaborate yet further but thinking about it now is starting to induce symptoms so I must end this paragraph soon. The point is: the rewards would have to be very high to overcome this aversion, or I would have to make enough to pay someone else to do it for me.
A quick google suggests I am not the only one. Even for normal people, the cost, time and effort to fill in a tax return must be high enough to rule out all but the most serious of business ventures.
What is the cost to society of all the little side projects, hobbies and micro-businesses that do not get started because it is not worth the bureaucratic hassle?
Update: I found some tax examples graciously provided by HRMC. I particularly enjoyed the phrase “air of commerciality”. No grey areas here, then.
I probably should not do it to myself, but sometimes I can not help but wonder how a large group of seemingly intelligent people can be so wrong about so much. Charlie Stross has written about what might even be somewhat legitimate concerns about Amazon but as ever with him there is an infuriating wrongness floating on the surface and the comments amplify it.
But there is much to learn here about misconceptions about libertarians. Let me start with Charlie’s characterisation.
I’m not going to lecture you about Jeff Bezos either, although I do want to note that he came out of a hedge fund and he’s ostensibly a libertarian; these aspects of his background make me uneasy, because in my experience they tend to be found in conjunction with a social-darwinist ideology that has no time for social justice, compassion, or charity.
I am a libertarian. I notice that people suffer less when they are richer. I notice that greater freedom leads to greater wealth. My views are formed precisely out of a desire to see greater wellbeing and happiness in the world and this has been translated in the mind of someone who is ostensibly not a moron into a survival of the fittest race to discard those inferior to me to starvation and disease for my own personal benefit.
I need a new advertising agency.
I need to start being explicit about the end goals and work back from there, and always remind people about the goal at every opportunity. It needs to be the first and last thing I say in any debate with a non-libertarian: the aim is to reduce suffering. Now: how do we do that?
Then there is comment 100:
Perhaps you could point to a working libertarian utopia so I could understand how such a wonderful system works? Otherwise, it’s no more meaningful than those who complain that they problem with communism is it hasn’t been tried properly…
It has not been tried but one can notice without much effort that the places that look more like libertarian utopias, that is to say they have more freedom and smaller governments, tend to be richer than those that look less like libertarian utopias. Richer meaning that there is less starvation and suffering, let us not forget.
In comment 128 Charlie makes the closest thing yet to an interesting point when he accuses us of having a “fundamentally broken model of human behaviour”. It is a shame he does not say how the model is broken. The biggest problem I can think of with human nature is the tendency in many humans to want a leader or to want to boss others around. It really would be nice if these people could find each other without involving me. Which brings us to comment 473:
The thing is, libertarians really don’t just want to be left alone. You want to impose a libertarian society on us even though the overwhelming majority has made it abundantly clear that they have absolutely no desire for such a change.
If you want to go off on your own and build a libertarian country, go with our blessing. But leave us in peace. If you want to stay, accept that we do not want a libertarian society and let the matter drop.
Oh how much I would love to. Perhaps Jeff Bezos will finally succeed. Until then, good luck getting the International Community to allow it. With that option removed it is probably not worth pointing out to this commenter exactly who is imposing what upon whom. What is really going on is that this person thinks that a more libertarian society would lead to more starvation and disease and of course he does not want that imposed upon him. It is the same marketing problem again.
A post at Climate Lessons reminded my of my own childhood experiences of environmentalist indoctrination at school. It could have been any post – the whole blog is about how children are frightened and mislead by environmentalists in the classroom.
The topic is closer to home now that I have my own two-year-old son, and it cropped up sooner than I expected. Someone bought him a book about Noah’s Ark. It is perfectly charming: thick cardboard pages; bright colours; but on the last page:
Noah helped save the animals of the earth hundreds of years ago by building an ark. Now we must help to save them too — not from floods, but from human beings who are hunting them, and cutting down the forests where they live.
I mean, come on! It is a story book for toddlers. A silly story from the Bible I can handle, but children should not be worried about this nonsense.
At the turn of the nineties I was at secondary school putting up with some of this. Most of it came from geography class. Deforestation was the big one. An area the size of Wales was destroyed every so often, we were told. Apart from all the extinct animals, the rain forests were needed to turn the carbon dioxide into oxygen. They are the lungs of the planet. These days the rain forests still seem to be there and I am fairly sure that, carbon going round in a cycle, the rain forests are only the lungs of the rain forests. The plants that I (and the animals I eat) eat produce enough oxygen for me.
We also learnt about acid rain and the hole in the ozone layer. Both these problems seem to have gone away, arguably as a result of timely state intervention but more likely because the problems were not so bad in the first place and now they have been replaced by more urgent and dire concerns.
Assuming the BBC exam revision guide is a good proxy for what is taught in GCSE geography lessons in schools, acid rain and the ozone layer are gone from the curriculum. Deforestation is still there, and now we have to worry about climate change, pollution and (oh no!) globalisation. If you follow that last link you will learn about Thomas Malthus and Esther Boserup but not Norman Borlaug.
I remember another strange lesson: not geography; possibly personal social health and flim flam studies or whatever it was called. I can not imagine why but we were made to watch a video that included abattoir footage and there was a class discussion in which we were asked whether the video made us want to be vegetarians. Some of the girls became vegetarians on the spot. I wonder what their parents made of it.
GCSE Double Science was a mostly sensible affair involving the Carnot cycle and electrons apart from one odd day when a guest speaker came in to tell us that more oil was used in the last ten years than in the entire history of humanity before that. The lesson was that this was because oil use doubled every ten years (or whatever the number was). I recognise it now as the standard limits-to-growth spiel, but what was it doing in a fourth year science class? Some organisation must have bribed the school or something.
What harm did it do? Here I am after all, not believing a word of any of it. At the time I believed it, but I was more interested in tectonic plates, magnetic fields and playing Elite on my computer. Most of the rest of the class was only interested in who was snogging whom. We were bombarded with doom and gloom but it was boring and irrelevant.
But I bet a lot of it stayed there, in most of the rest of the class, deep down, in a way that causes them not to question it when they see it on the news. They are not interested: they think about it when they are forced to; they give money to charity when they want to look like nice people or feel good about themselves; they moan about the taxes and they forget about it and get on with their lives. They do not write to their MPs or vote and they do not rise up.
The premise of Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels sounds good. The Culture is a society with advanced AI and no scarcity and an inclination to liberate less advanced societies from their scarcity. So I am starting from the beginning with Consider Phlebas. I am reading the novel on my Kindle, which means that I get to see other users’ highlights. The following passage was highlighted by six users, unusual enough to make me wonder why. This might mean that six people thought “wow, man, that’s like, so profound”, or it might mean something else.
experience as well as common sense indicated that the most reliable method of avoiding self-extinction was not to equip oneself with the means to accomplish it in the first place.
It is a thought that occurs to a human member of the Culture, who is thought of as particularly insightful, when considering another society that went exctinct in a war involving fusion bombs, “delivered by transplanetary guided rocket”. Perhaps the people who highlighted it though it was clever commentary on nuclear proliferation or something like that.
The trouble is that the word “oneself” refers to billions of individuals. Where does that leave “common sense”?
What is interesting to me is the way that people fall for these sorts of rhetorical tricks. Perhaps we can turn it to our favour. After all, experience and common sense indicate that enslaving and stealing from oneself is not the way to get rich.
Stanley Fish is rightly getting a lot of heat in the internet for his brazen assertion that it is okay to adopt double standards in terms of the kind of language used to describe women so long as the person using such terms holds the “right” views and is, in some more general sense, on the side of the intellectual “good guys”.
David Henderson, over at EconBlog, has what I think is the most devastating take-down of this character, all the more devastating for doing so in measured tones. The associated comment thread is well worth reading also.
“Might is right”. For heaven’s sake.
As already mentioned here from time to time in recent weeks, I have been doing some tidying up. My place was a mess. More politely, it was suffering from severe infrastructure overload, which is that terrible condition that sets in when each new thing that comes in or gets done causes a wave of knock-on chaos out of all proportion to what ought to be its impact. To put this down, I make some space for it by moving this important item, on top of that important item, and then forget where it all is … you get the picture.
If you have never in your life suffered thus, that can only be because you have never done anything. Places where real stuff gets done frequently teeter on the edge of chaos. This is another Parkinson’s Law. I recall, in one of his books, contrasting pictures: of the Officers Mess (not a mess at all), and the Orderly Room (not orderly at all). The point being that it was in the latter place that all the work got done.
But there comes a time when consoling yourself with the thought of all those chaos-inducing accomplishments just doesn’t do it for you any more. You just have to stop – at the very least interrupt – everything else and turn back the tide, which is what I have forced myself recently to do. This has already the most serious tide resistance I have done since moving in here over two decades ago.
My problem was that although this task had become slowly more important, it had at no point become overwhemlingly urgent. So, how was I to motivate myself to get stuck into it? No externally imposed deadline loomed. No angry associates would punish me if I delayed. It was merely that if I delayed it yet longer, my life would work gradually less and less well.
If you are the sort of person who needs only to know that some task is important in order to start attacking it with enthusiasm, confident that you will conquer it, then this posting is probably not for you. If on the other hand you are like me, easily daunted and tempted hideously to postpone tasks which combine non-urgency, great importance (but only to you) and demoralising hugeness, then maybe skipping this might be an omission of significance. If the question “where do I start?” regularly recurs in your life, then read on. You might discover things of value. → Continue reading: Urgent and Important versus Easy – on tidying up my home – and on how to do libertarianism
As I commented on previously, David Cameron wants shareholders to vote on directors’ pay packages. Another problem with this occurs to me.
Right now I can value a company on its past performance and what I think its future performance will be, and part of this evaluation comes from my opinion of the decision-making abilities of the people in charge. If I know who they are, and am confident that they will hire the right people into the right positions, I might value the company more highly.
If shareholders make decisions I have the problem that the performance of the company depends on who the shareholders are, and I do not know who the other shareholders are.
In the specific case where shareholders can vote on directors’ pay, if we assume that the highest pay attracts the best performing directors, then the best performing companies will end up being the ones with the least left-wing shareholders.
The other day I had a pub conversation with a friend that went as rapidly from, “I favour reducing the size of the state” to “but poor people will starve” as any such conversation I’ve had before. There are certain things, such as roads, schools, health and welfare, that are so strongly connected in people’s minds to the state that intelligent thought about them is almost impossible. I wonder how this happens. It means that no shortcuts are possible. To be understood, you have to assume no shared knowledge with your interlocutor and start again from first principles. But this does not work well in a pub conversation or, for that matter, in a TV interview.
At one point I was told, “if you got your way, I would emigrate.” My friend was imagining a dystopian hell on Earth, which suggests, among other things, I had not properly made my motives understood. There is a tendency to assume that one’s political opponents want to enrich themselves at the expense of others. This may be a good assumption a lot of the time. When a socialist suggests taxing the rich to give to the poor, I might wonder how much he will cream off the top for himself. When I suggest that taxes should be reduced, it is obviously because I do not like paying tax and I am prepared to let poor people starve so that I can buy more gadgets. The universe is a zero-sum game: what else could I possibly mean?
So I need to spell out explicitly what it is that I want, because it turns out that it does not go without saying: everyone to be much richer, so that necessities and most luxuries are almost free; vastly increased life expectancy and improved health; less overall time spent on menial tasks and more time spent doing interesting things; in general more wealth, opportunities and happiness for all.
I know how to get there, too. A smaller state means faster economic growth. Nothing I want breaks the laws of physics, so the technology is just a matter of time and leaving people alone to get on with it.
What I want sounds to me like something that would sell. Maybe we should do what our opponents do and repeat it loudly, often and everywhere, and point out that anyone who opposes it is causing poor people to starve. It is the sort of approach that might work well in a pub conversation or, for that matter, in a TV interview.
|
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.
|
