Samizdata

Alec Muffet, redoubtable trencherman that he is despite his dainty frame, pointed me at this splendiferous expression of the manifest superiority of western civilisation:

Multi-bird roasts, where different types of bird are stuffed inside a larger one, have become the thing to carve this year – and the more birds involved the better. One of the top-sellers is the Waitrose four-bird roast: guinea fowl, duck and turkey breast stuffed inside a goose. Demand has soared 50 per cent this year – even though each roast costs an eyewatering £200 [about $400 USD].

The surge in popularity may have something to do with TV chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s creation of a ten-bird roast on his show two years ago. He stuffed an 18lb turkey with a goose, duck, mallard, guinea fowl, chicken, pheasant, partridge, pigeon and woodcock – producing a remarkable Russian doll-like dish. But now his effort, inspired by recipes dating from Tudor times, has been dwarfed by a behemoth containing no fewer than 48 birds of 12 different species. This massive roast, the proud creation of Devon farmer Anne Petch, weighs almost four stone (more than most airlines’ baggage allowance), costs £665, and has enough meat to serve 125 people.

Magnificent! However after reading the comments attached to this Daily Mail article decrying the practice, I could see my enthusiasm was not shared by all. The best comment and a real contender for the Samizdata Pig’s Head on a Spike Award for Thigh Slapping Hilarity was:

See, it’s because of madness like this that the terrorists hate us
– Marcus, Northampton, UK

The man is either a sage-like wag of the very highest order or a deranged Imam in need of an extended holiday in a certain part of Cuba… and an honourable mention also goes out for:

These graceful animals were alive and living a short while ago. Go veggie this Cristmas and let more of gods creatures experience what you do …Life
– James Mills, Nottingham

Naturally I felt the need to leave one of my own, as indeed you might:

This year for Christmas we are having one of these wonderful multi-birds and I am very much looking forward to it. However after reading some of the comments here, next year we are going to eat a PETA activist stuffed inside a Greenpeace activist stuffed inside a Animal ‘Rights’ activist stuffed inside Gordon Brown’s voluminous carcass (with a non-‘Fair Trade’ apple stuffed into his mouth).

Merry Christmas and God Deliver Us All… from priggish activists of all stripes.

Yummy! Nom nom nom!

It always amazes me the number of businesses who use the Internet without really understanding how it has changed everything in business, not just the bits they find useful. The entire balance of power has been shifting towards information rich customers for years now and one of the things about this shift is that people’s tolerance for a company’s behaviour when things go wrong has also changed dramatically.

It has always been the case that when things go wrong, the single worst thing any company can do is to make a customer feel he is being ignored. In many ways, even a half-arsed press release is (just) better than none at all, but frankly the days when a press release drafted by a PR professional whose job it is to pretend everything is all right are long gone. That approach never worked, only now the fact the PR Emperor has no clothes (and in truth never did) is impossible to hide. Customers are going to tell each other just how much they hate you, if indeed they do, regardless of whether or not you participate in the discussion because companies can no longer frame the terms of the debate. This article is an example of that, in fact.

And so I was amused by a fairly trivial incident: a purchased a copy of the Epic/Microsoft games studio shooter Gears of War for the PC. Cool game. How do I know? Because I have repeatedly played the first two to ten minutes of the game before getting a wargame-g4wlive.exe crash to desktop. And judging from the number of screaming customers on the Epic forums, I am far from alone in experiencing this.

Now the truth is, games these days are bloody complex things and it is rare to get a major game released without some significant kinks, so far be it for me to criticise Epic for releasing a bugged game… it happens and is probably an inevitable fact of life.

Also I have no doubt that Epic has an army of coders working to fix the (many) issues that people have reported and most likely they will solve them all soon. Looking at their forums, both Epic and Microsoft developers posted early comments and that is exactly the correct approach. If people know for sure that someone is on the problem, it is amazing how much slack they will cut a company and in many cases, dealing frankly with the issue and frequently acknowledging there is a problem makes people empathise rather than criticise.

But after the initial surge of developer input, the forum started filling up with often highly irate and typically semi-literate gamers cursing and howling because they had become convinced that as the first attempts to patch the game had not helped a great many people, the companies had just banked their money and written the game off. In truth I think that is highly unlikely at this stage and it is an avoidable self-inflicted wound to have well paid programmers working to fix what may be a difficult problem but because your inept PR department does not make that clear on a daily basis, customers whose game is about as useful as a prismatic beermat are left incandescent with rage at being ignored (as they see it). Crazy corporate behaviour.

Interestingly, posts to the forum filled with F words and imprecations about the marital status of the developer’s mothers when they were born, seem to be generally left on the forum. I posted an invective-free article urging Epic to get themselves a new PR director and the post was taken down, which I must confess I find vastly amusing. So no prize for guessing which department is responsible for the Epic forums then.

First turn up volume as soundtrack is quite soft…

Lincoln Allison, a contributor to the excellent Social Affairs Unit blog has this rather amusing, if at times harsh, list of various people he thinks are not quite the greats they are cracked up to be. Revealing the conservative tilt of that blog, his candidates are:

Princess Diana, Che Guevara, Salman Rushdie, John Lennon, George Best and John Osborne.

Maybe I am getting soft and liberal (in the US sense) in my early middle age, but with the exception of Guevara, I rather like most of the above, or at least I do not get as exercised as some right-of-centre folk do. Diana? Well, she was annoying, or at least the hysteria over her death was, but I was saddened by her death, sorry for her sons and relations and would rather she was still with us.

Lennon? A bit of a nob as a person, maybe, but a brilliant musician – Revolver is one of my favourite albums.

Osborne – no real opinion, although I loved his personification of evil in Get Carter.

Then there is Rushdie: I just cannot agree with Allison; for all that I cannot be bothered to tackle his fiction, I admire his unbending stance on Islamic fanaticism and his no-compromise approach to free speech.

And then there is dear, dead George Best (I met him a few times). Allison makes the rather unusual approach of not actually attacking George Best’s drinking or womanising but attacks his skill as a footballer, claiming that Northern Irish players like Danny Blanchflower were greater as they achieved success with “lesser” teams (I am sure Spurs fans will be galled to hear that their lot was a lesser team in the 1960s than Manchester United. Spurs in fact won a sackload of trophies in that decade). He also says Best could not cope with Italian-style defenders. Well, he did not play against Italy much so how do we know and Best made mincemeat of the likes of top European sides Benfica and Real Madrid. His demolition of the former team at their home ground in 1966 – the year I was born – remains one of the highlights of 20th century football.

Badoo Mac…

Originally uploaded by ( ¯`’•.ღ!~ღ NauGHtyAh ღ~! ღ.•’´ ¯)



There is not much I can say about this, that is how loaded this picture is. Thought I would share… 🙂

In one of several articles supporting ‘universal’ (i.e. tax funded) health care in the United States in last weeks Economist magazine (the people who control it call it a ‘newspaper’ for tax reasons), the line “nobody denies” that the lack of a “universal health system” undermines “economic security” in the United States was used.

It was the words “nobody denies” that interested me. A very obvious obvious lie, as a great many people deny this, but I had heard this sort of lie somewhere before. In another article it was said that some Conservatives wished to “do nothing” about health care – good ‘conservatives’, like Mitt Romney, of course wished to go along with the demands supported by the Economist for ‘universal health care’ (see above).

In reality many American conservatives have long argued for less government subsides and regulations, what with government subsidies and regulations being the main reason that health care is expensive in the United States today. But the idea that anyone could want less statism was not even mentioned, let alone refuted – a ‘conservative’ (of the bad sort – i.e. someone who did not want more statism) was simply someone who wanted to “do nothing”.

I had seen that lie someone before as well. And then I remembered – these are the methods of John Stuart Mill.

In, for example, Principles of Political Economy (1848) whenever J.S. Mill comes out with a demand for more statism, whether it be for police, or for government supply of water or other things, he tends to say something like “nobody denies” that the government should provide X, Y, Z. It was a lie as Mill knew perfectly well at the time as many of his contemporaries did did indeed deny these things – but it was a useful lie in that it meant that he did not have to refute their arguments because he pretended that opponents of his statist views did not exist.

J.S. Mill did a similar thing with the theory of economic value. He did not refute the arguments of such writers as Richard Whately and Samuel Bailey who had largely discredited the labour theory of value in the English speaking world (it had never been the main theory of economic value in the no- English speaking world), he just defended the theory of his father James Mill and his friend David Ricardo by saying the labour theory of value was “settled”, no one denied it. Again a blatant lie – but a very effective one when dealing with young people whose first (and in many cases last) book on Political Economy would be J.S. Mill’s work.

As for ‘conservatives’, J.S. Mill was careful to avoid writing much about conservative minded people who had ideas to roll back the size and scope of government activity, such as Edmund Burke (although the word “conservative” was not used in Burke’s time, J.S. Mill knew of him via the Mill family and friends membership of the “Bowood Circle” a informal grouping of people who were sympathetic to some of the ideas of the French Revolution and hated Edmund Burke). It was much better to either write about poets like Coleridge, or to pretend that conservatives were just ‘stupid’ people, who wanted to ‘do nothing’.

J.S. Mill wrote and spoke like this because he was a utilitarian, i.e. he defined right and wrong in terms ‘good’ and ‘evil’, defining ‘good’ as nice consequences and ‘evil’ as nasty consequences. It is quite true that he did think in terms of “higher and lower” pleasures, but that “good” might not mean pleasant or that “right” might not mean “good” was not something he was willing to concede.

In short he was a man without an ethical basis for honour (I do not mean that as abuse – I mean it as statement of fact). To such a man such old sayings as “death before dishonour” are simply the ravings of mad people, and refusing to break faith even at the cost of one’s life is irrational. If to lie produced good consequences (with “good” being defined as the greatest happiness of the greatest number) then he lied. And his followers follow in this tradition – right to the writers in the Economist to day.

“We are proud to be associated with the founder of modern liberalism” is the sort of response I would expect from such folk (although no response at all would be more in their tradition). This shows the vast gulf between modern ‘liberals’ and conservative minded people. Although, almost needless to say, there are few such folk in the British Conservative party.