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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As I type, the American magician David Blaine is suspended in a perspex box above the River Thames in London in which state he intends to remain for a period of forty-four days with water but no food. For the life of me I cannot see what ‘magic’ is involved in this process but I will concede some moderate appreciation of his will to endure.
Rather less appreciate is the seemingly endless procession of London low-life who have taken it into their heads to try to sabotage him:
Protesters today tried to attack the cage holding illusionist David Blaine next to the Thames.
In a dramatic raid just before 5am a man scaled a scaffold support tower which is connected to Blaine’s perspex cage. Two accomplices had diverted security guards. The protester then tried to cut through the cable supplying water to the illusionist who is in the 10th day of his 44-day endurance challenge.
Excuse me, but protestors? What, precisely, are they supposed to be protesting about? Has David Blaine been oppressing the Palestinians? Did he invade Iraq? Has he contributed to starvation in Africa? Is he lining his pockets from ‘unfair trade’?
I submit that the term ‘anti-social thugs’ is far more accurate and appropriate.
There is an awful lot of this kind of thing appearing in the mainstream British press right now and I cannot help but wonder if it isn’t a faint echo of the ‘root causes’ mentality: the tendency to ameliorate malevolence by ascribing to its perpetrators the implication they are driven by some sort of legitimate grievance. Hence, their actions can be both explained and excused.
Whilst there stands no comparison whatsoever with Mr.Blaine’s bone-headed tormentors, I am quite convinced that if Adolf Hitler and his cronies were on the march today the press in this country would insist on referring to them as ‘German militants’. Likewise, Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge would be described as ‘peace activists’.
The Volokh Conspiracy highlights the jailing of an antiques dealer “for conspiring to receive antiquities claimed by a foreign government, in this case Egypt.”
This has been an earthquake of sorts for the American trade in antiquities, it is an open secret that most of the material is assembled against various foreign laws. Previously the American law was applied only to thefts from museums, churches, private homes, and the like, now for the first time it is being applied to thefts from archaeological sites. Dealers suddenly wonder whether they can stay in business. Observers wonder what is the difference between licit and illicit antiquities dealers, given how much of the material comes from sites.
Although the Volokh Conspirator agonizes over this issue in seeking a proper libertarian solution to the problems posed by the antiquities trade, it seems to me that the solution is quite simple in principle, and that the problem is entirely a creation of overweening governments.
As with any other item, an antiquity is properly on the market if the seller has proper title to it. For an old vase recovered from an archaeological site, the answer to who has title is (or should be) quite simple. The vase belongs to the archaeologist (or other person) who found it, unless it was found on private land, in which case it belongs to the landowner. The vase is, essentially, lost/abandoned/mislaid property in the sense that no one knows who the original (or last) owner was and/or no one can trace their living descendants. Under the common law, such property discovered anywhere other than private land belonged to the finder as against anyone but the true owner, meaning in an archeological context that the antiquities belong to the archaeologist, unless the dig was on private land, in which case it belongs to the owner.
The “problem” posed by the antiquities trade is entirely a creation of overweening governments, which have asserted a wholly unjustified ownership interest in all antiquities discovered within their borders. If one disregards this claim (as the American courts apparently did until this most recent case), then in principle it becomes possible to construct a valid chain of title for antiquities, and thus possible for the trade in these items to go forward on the same basis as every other line of business.
One wonders how other countries, especially the French (as I understand Paris is the center of gravity of the arts and antiquities trade), deal with this issue.
Given its provenance (and prominence) as a marxist tool, class analysis is something which both conservatives and classical liberals tend to ignore. To the extent that people whose politics fall within those groupings understand it at all, they respond to the mere mention of the term with an understandable degree of horror.
But that’s a shame because the examination of class interests can be a very useful means for analysing problems and even discovering possible solutions. I believe it can every bit as useful for individualists as it has been for collectivists.
In his latest Telegraph editorial, George Trefgarne, wields a bit of class analysis in formidable fashion:
I can’t help thinking we need an English Poujade, to speak up for the little person and take on our own Left-Bankers. You know the type. Self-satisfied and pleased with themselves, they are the new Establishment who have deposed the old, traditional elite.
It is they, rather than your stereotypical Tory squires, who thrive in such institutions as universities, the Church, Whitehall and the BBC. Only the Armed Forces seem to be holding out against them. They are hung-up about class, contemptuous of tradition and love petty gestures such as refusing to curtsy to the Queen or abolishing the Lord Chancellor because he wears tights.
If you question their beliefs, they will express disdain, mock you for being old-fashioned, suggest you are immoral or dim, and – their trump card – racist. But the truth is they are, for the most part, members of the government salariat, who live off taxpayers’ money.
It sounds as if Mr.Trefgarne may have read about the Enemy Class. If he hasn’t, he should. In any event he has made a worthy stab at identifying a potential counter-class:
But the real economic pain is being shouldered by the generation I like to call the Baby Busters – those in their twenties and thirties who are the children of the Baby Boomers born after the war.
Unlike some previous generations, Baby Busters find it easy to get a job. But they are an assetless group, groaning with debts. Baby Busters graduate from university with thousands of pounds of loans to pay off; they cannot afford to get on to the housing ladder as prices have soared to their highest ever level (when measured as a multiple of incomes); they are not saving for a pension because the stakeholder wheezes that the Government invented for them are a flop; and they are not earning enough to progress in life.
The ‘busters’ are groaning under the weight of supporting a monstrously overgrown state; the result of their parents endless demands for interventions and government largesse.
Everywhere, their opportunities are restricted by the growth of government, bureaucracy and rising taxation. Yet no political party seems to care about the Baby Busters. They are a rabble, waiting for a rouser.
We’re trying, Mr.Trefgarne, we’re trying.
The Financial Times has long dined out on its reputation as an institution steeped in sound economic principles combined with dispassionate and admirably non-partisan reportage.
The truth is that, for the last few years, that reliable old standard of fiscal soundness has been an amplifier of third-way, interventionist euro-mummery and the kind of kumbaya hand-wringing that most of us more normally associate with the Guardian. Sad yes, but predictably concordant with the miasmic and corrosive spirit of our age.
However, I detect a change afoot and not for the good. If this preposterously fawnographic article on Noam Chomsky is anything to by, then maybe the FT is about to pack up its wagon and head on out into the wild, barren scrubland of drooling lefty-lunacy:
Noam Chomsky pokes fun at President George W. Bush’s “original vision” of a Palestinian state, and the audience chuckles. He talks of Ronald Reagan as “our cowboy leader” and they guffaw. He reminds them that the Reagan administration once described Nicaragua as a grave military threat and they practically roll in the aisles.”
The he tells them the one about two gay guys who go into a bar and they double-up in spasms of choking hysteria. Noam Chomsky: the comic’s comic.
The collective sniggering makes everyone feel at one, and the US’s dissident-in-chief is not above being clubbish.
Nor is he above being childish. In fact, he makes a handsome living out of it.
On this warm evening in a suburban Boston church, they are looking to their unofficial leader for a renewed sense of purpose.
They’ll be looking for a very long time. → Continue reading: From pink to red
Britain is hot today. Scorching. It’s hot, it’s sticky, it’s steamy and, for the Guardian that means….it’s Kyoto time:
Evidence increasingly points to a weather system shaped more and more not by nature but by humanity. The pattern of industrial development of modern day society appears to be producing too much pollution for the world to cope with. The effects will irrevocably remake the climate for the worse.
And we all know who to blame for this, don’t we? Yes we jolly well do.
On gaining office, the Bush administration, with its roots in oil and big business, withdrew unilaterally from the biggest international commitment to cut greenhouse gas emissions – the Kyoto protocol. To gain some scale of how reckless this act of political vandalism was consider this: if US states were independent nations they would comprise 25 of the top 60 nations that emit greenhouse gases – Texas’s emissions alone exceed France’s.
The Guardian runs this same editorial rant about once a fortnight regardless of whether it’s hot, cold, tipping down or a white-out. In the summer, though, they just turn the volume up. They probably call it a social conscience. I reckon it’s a bad case of sunstroke.
Adriana sez: “Statism is enough to drive a girl to drink”.
Granny sez: “Don’t you have some flavour other that ‘samizdata.net flavour’?”
But what do you think the captions be?
Far be from me to try to tell HMG how to run their nationalised industries, but if I was ever to be charged with such a thankless task, I would not go about it like this:
Fitness tests for police recruits are being made easier in an attempt to increase the number of women officers, the Home Office has announced.
Recruits’ speed and agility will no longer be put to the test as this is where most of the women have been failing.
Tests of strength and endurance will be made easier and the speed and distances recruits have to run will be halved.
This may actually be a blessing. As we watch the apparatus of a police state growing around us we can take some comfort that the police may get set on us for all the wrong reasons but at least we will be able to run away from them.
Yesterday I came across an interesting op-ed piece by Adam Nicolson of The Daily Telegraph in which he bemoans the decline of the art of conversation.
It has started happening to me all the time. I say something, probably going on too long, never happy to use one word where a hundred would do, but trying to persuade someone to see it all in a different way, to see it, let’s be honest, my way, and at the end of this long spiely speech that I give them, they say, “Yeah, whatever,” and turn off on to the thing that, as far as they’re concerned, really counts.
And then he really lays in to “whatever”:
“Whatever” wafts a contemptuous and disdainful hand in the direction of everything he has had to say. As a saying, and an attitude, it goes beyond the confrontational. A few years ago, more aggressively but at least more engagedly, someone who felt equally sceptical might have replied “So what?” in the same circumstances.
He tracks down the culprit – the origin of this degenerate phenomenon lies with modern marketing:
What is the source of this new, casual, bypassing contempt and impatience? At least one of its origins, I think, is the appallingly degenerate language of modern marketing. We are swimming in a soup of the near-meaningless. On a plane the other day, I was given a box full of unguents called “Origins In Flight Comfort Kit”. “For those who don’t know about Origins,” the leaflet began, “it’s all about caring for yourself in different ways. Choices. Alternatives. New Experiences. Finding unusual answers to every-day problems.” Among which were lip-grease, skin-cream, a water spray for your face and then “brush your teeth with Rembrandt Whitening Toothpaste for a healthy, brighter smile”.
The sentimentality and cynicism, inflated into a puffball of what hopes to pass for charm, that make up the modern language of salesmanship has made us all impatient with blather. It has created “whatever” as a reaction to the over-elaborated or overstated, because ingrained in us now is a recognition that the marketing surface is not to be trusted.
[…]
If the “whatever” phenomenon signals the approaching death of the marketing culture, it is likely to bring other things down in its train. “Whatever” loves only the minimal. It will have no time for the enriched or the inherently complex. “Whatever” thinks that everything should be reduced to essentials, which is a recipe for crudity and philistinism…Poetry, for one, can’t really survive in a whateverised world. To be or not to be, that is the question. Whatever. Is this a dagger I see before me? Whatever. The rest is silence. Whatever.
Bravo! I agree wholeheartedly. I agree so much that I have quoted the piece almost in its entirety. The language of marketing is ludicrous and preposterous at best, crude and insulting to its audience at worst. My impression is that many companies are now stuck with costly marketing techniques, simply of out fear that if they do not spend a fortune on glossy brochures, flash animated websites, extortionately priced logo designs and re-designs, expensive advertising etc, they will not be taken seriously. Marketing as we know it may still be around not because people actually believe that such marketing works but because everyone does it as a token sign of a Serious Business.
One thing I always hated about Big Companies was their increasingly disconnected and uniform marketing. When The Cluetrain Manifesto come along a few years ago, I breathed a sigh of relief. A breeze of fresh air, a tornado of common sense, it unveiled the Emperor’s naked and bloated body underneath the threadbare designer clothes.
I am not holding my breath waiting for the end of marketing but I do hope that more and more businesses will see it for what it is and stop throwing money at the advertising industry and insulting their customers and employees with its meaningless marketingspeak.
Not even for a fleeting moment do I believe that President Bush and his cabinet need me to jump their defence. Indeed, jumping to the defence of any politician is not an activity that generally sits well with me.
However, I am prepared to set aside my customary reluctance in the case of George Bush but only because he seems to have become an Aunt Sally for every loud-mouthed class-war agitator who is looking to make a name for themselves with the woolly-hatted, mushy-brained, stapled-face brigade.
A case in point is the current (and I am so ashamed to have to type these words) Mayor of London, Mr.Ken Livingstone. Livingstone is veteran political shape-shifter who has spent the last thirty or so years hitching himself to every po-mo leftist bandwagon that rolled into town and maybe even invented a few of his own. Having been shoved back under his rock by the Thatcher government of the eighties, wily old Ken has since re-invented himself as a cuddly ‘man of the people’; an image that he has assiduously cultivated as a base from which to launch a political resurrection.
Thanks to his favourable media coverage and a severe outbreak of Memory Deficit Disorder (a condition endemic to this country) ‘Ken Il Sung’ managed to get himself elected to this high-profile office that enables him to regale the world with what I suppose he regards as his words of wisdom:
Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, was widely condemned yesterday after comparing George Bush to Saddam Hussein.
Oh well, I suppose it makes a change from comparing George Bush to Hitler.
The Left-winger described the American President as a “coward” who was at the head of a “venal and corrupt administration”.
Anyone who accepted large sums of cash from Colonel Qaddafi in order to set up a trotskyite newspaper has got some nerve calling other people ‘venal and corrupt’.
Addressing an audience of schoolchildren…
I don’t suppose adults would want to listen to all his tiresome bollocks.
“This really is a completely unsupportable government and I look forward to it being overthrown as much as I looked forward to Saddam Hussein being overthrown.”
Yes, which is why ‘cuddly’ Ken was at the head of every ‘Stop the War’ march.
Mr Livingstone is used to courting controversy. Shortly before being elected mayor he appeared to endorse anti-capitalists rioters when he said: “Every year the international financial system kills more people than World War Two. But at least Hitler was mad.”
But, Ken, Hitler’s views on the ‘international financial system’ were remarkably close to your own. What are you trying to tell us?
Yesterday he played down his latest remarks, saying that he had made the same point at an anti-war rally in February and that no one took much notice.
No doubt because they were all stunned to hear that you wanted Saddam Hussein ‘overthrown’. You did tell them that back in February, Ken?
Asked about the row, Ari Fleischer, Mr Bush’s spokesman, said: “I’ve never heard of the guy.”
The perfect response. Ken Livingstone: the nobody’s nobody.
I have only just noticed a really quite interesting and lengthy essay by Bill Whittle on Eject! Eject! Eject! called Victory:
This nation has been for many decades under direct and coordinated attack by fanatics whose failure to gain respect and attention through the force of their arguments have turned their level of rhetoric to such a shrill and hysterical pitch that years of it have seemingly driven some of them quite insane — insane to the degree that they cannot see that acid baths, state rapists, children’s prisons and daily torture and execution are not mere rhetorical flourishes — roughly equivalent to hanging chads and bulldozed Dixie Chicks CD’s — but a desperate and ever-present reality.
They did everything in their power to deny this reality, these Champions of Compassion, and Not In Their Name did these daily horrors come to an end. That is what six decades of freedom, security, tolerance and prosperity will do to some people: isolate them from the brutal reality of horror and torture to the degree that “evil” must be accompanied by sneer quotes and the motives of 300 million free and decent people are suspect while those of a small cabal of psychopathic mass murderers are not.
Whilst I think it is not a ‘coordinated’ attack and should be more realistically described as widespread but unsynchronized petulance, the toxic nature of these attitudes are no the less real for their lack of coherent direction. Bill’s essay is a lengthy but thought provoking read. Check it out.
If you want something cultural to read, I recommend postings numbers one and two of Nikos Salingaros week, over at 2Blowhards.
The postings are interesting. But even better, in my opinion, are some of the comments. I’ve posted tangential comments of my own about the “New Urbanism”, briefly on Transport Blog, and at somewhat greater length at my Education Blog. Meanwhile here are bits from two of my favourite of the Blowhard/Salingaros comments, so far.
First, here is “Tom”, replying to something Michael Blowhard had said about suburbs:
You are so right about the zoning, transportation department, fire department rules ossified since the 50’s creating inevitable horrible suburbia. I have done work in suburban areas and the results are completely predetermined by setbacks, maximum lot coverage areas, single use zoning, minimum parking space numbers and transportation department road standards. This is where the problems with modern architecture really are – a socialist/utopian attitude towards city planning. Even in many areas where they object strongly to this kind of thing, the solutions are always increased regulation – appearance reviews, stricter zoning, etc which just makes the problem worse. The reason all suburbs in america look the same is because there are two (i believe) companies that publish model codes for towns that they just buy off the shelf. The role of new urbanism should be fighting these standards.
→ Continue reading: Comments on Salingaros
Okay, enough about Iraq. Something even more unpleasant – the sheer din experienced these days while shopping. I am not talking about the noise caused by the clack of shoes on a floor, or the natural bustle of a busy marketplace. This is all part of the deal and can often create a buzz which is almost pleasant. No – and I sense this is my old age creeping in – what gets on my nerves is the loud pop music din which seems to be a standard feature of shops these days.
Example. At lunchtime today your humble scribe went to a shop in central London to get a new mobile phone. Okay, the staff were no more surly, badly dressed or inarticulate than most, but that was not the problem. The problem was that it was if I had strayed into a particularly bad nightclub by mistake. I could hardly hear myself think as I went through the options of a mobile phone deal. Craziness.
My grouches besides, what motivates the owners of shops to blast out music like this? Is there some philosophy which has worked through the shopping world in the UK – I cannot vouch for other nations – which says that the more loud music we have, the more we will buy? I don’t honestly know about that, but for me, the sheer loudness of some of the music played these days often encourages me to leave a building as soon as possible. I guess I am not the only person to feel this way. Maybe some shrewd shopping entrepreneur could steal a march on his rivals by setting up calm, music-free shops.
If anyone reading this actually works in the retail business and can explain the current fashion for piping loud music in shops, your comments would be most welcome.
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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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