No Truce With Kings

This was posted yesterday, November 28^th

Why The Spectator will take no part in state licensing of the press

Lord Justice Leveson reports at 1.30pm tomorrow and David Cameron has blocked out 90 minutes in parliament to respond. The big question is this: will he introduce state licensing of the media? A group of 42 Tory MPs wants him to, and No.10 apparently thinks they will rebel if he doesn’t. But this would mean revoking Britain’s 317-year history of press freedom, and give Parliament power to set the parameters under which the press operates. If the state seeks to compel publications to join the government scheme, then they face a choice: sign up, or defy the new law. In tomorrow’s Spectator, we make our choice.

We say in our leading article that we would happily sign up to any new form of self-regulation which the industry proposes, no matter how onerous. But we would have no part in any regulatory structure mandated by the state. That is to say: we would not attend its meetings, pay its fines nor heed its menaces. To do so would simply betray everything that The Spectator has stood for since 1828.

I would say that we thought long and hard about this, but it wasn’t a tough decision. For anyone who works at The Spectator, it’s a no-brainer

Via Samizdata.net

One for the Marines I know: Happy anniversary, gentlemen.

And if you’re thinking of that quote often attributed to George Orwell, you’re reading my mind.

The first third or so of a post at AlarmingNews.com:

34 glorious, American years

(Every year on July 20th, I celebrate the day my mother and I arrived in America. […])

In 1977, the year I was born and the year my father and many other Jews left the Soviet Union (my mother and I left in 1978, my grandmother and great-aunt left in 1976), the Soviet propaganda machine began circulating a rumor. It went, roughly: life in America is so terrible that the old people eat cat food.

This was… perplexing.

People didn’t quite get it: they have food specifically made for cats in America? What a country!

A lot of things about America remained beyond their comprehension.

A week after my father arrived in New York, he and a friend were walking around Manhattan in pure wonder. They got to midtown and stood in front of Bloomingdale’s watching well-dressed people come in and out. They discussed it amongst themselves that they would obviously have to show evidence that they had money, or proof of income, or some other paperwork to get inside. Surely this store for the wealthy wouldn’t just let them in. They watched and watched but didn’t see people getting stopped. They walked slowly through the doors and found no one gave them a second look.

Via Q & O

A few months ago, I read Escape from Camp 14, the story of Shin Dong-hyuk that was written by Blaine Harden. Shin claims he was born and raised in a North Korean labor camp and later escaped from it.

Harden notes that not all of Shin’s story can be verified (naturally). All of the parts about Shin’s life in North Korea depend on his truthfulness. But the story jibes with news I’ve read about North Korea in recent years and so I took it at face value. It’s a damned ugly face.

To me, the most amazing thing about this book is that places like Camp 14 still exist and are still guarded by sadists. Where do all these monsters come from? Is sadism a trait that any of us will learn, when we’re in those circumstances?

If so, the obvious implications are (a) Choose your political system wisely and as a corollary (b) Avoid Communism at all costs.

But the worst of the sadism is what places like Camp 14 do to the children born in them, as Shin was. Part of the book describes Shin’s emotional maturation after he arrives in the U.S. and starts to learn that his first duties are not to The State, they’re to his family and his friends.

I find these thoughts fairly depressing. The barbarism just goes on and on, century after century.

Update July 21st. ’12: I came across an interesting piece of speculative fiction in Gardner Dozois’ 29^th annual collection of science fiction stories. It’s a short story called "A Militant Peace", written by David Klecha and Tobias S. Buckell. You can read the entire thing here. (It won’t take long.)

The story describes the non-violent liberation of North Korea by UN troops, funded by a consortium of businesses. Curious, eh? It has a couple of interesting premises to support the plot.

I doubt they’d ever be feasible but it is a speculation, after all. Nonetheless, I liked the story and especially the idea of freeing North Korea.

I also ran across a post at Richard Fernandez’ Belmont Club blog titled The Story of Oh.

The BBC tells the melancholy story of Oh Kil-nam, a South Korean man who, convinced by his Marxist education that North Korea was a worker’s paradise, decided to defect there with his wife and two children in 1986. Oh, who had just completed his PhD in Germany in Marxist economics and who “had been active in left-wing groups” had no reason to doubt the beckoning invitation of North Korean officials who promised him free health care and a government job, like certain other people you may know.

He chose poorly.

Aged and broken, Oh now concludes that his “life was ruined by his decision to defect to North Korea. Seventy years old, he still does not know the fate of his wife and daughters – either dead or imprisoned in a labour camp.” His wife, who lacked the benefit of a European education, suspected something was amiss from the first. She was aghast when he told her of his plan to defect.

Update January 28th. ’13:

According to legend Winston Churchill said, "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried." That came to mind when I came across this news item at Instapundit.

People Aren’t Smart Enough for Democracy to Flourish, Scientists Say

The democratic process relies on the assumption that citizens (the majority of them, at least) can recognize the best political candidate, or best policy idea, when they see it. But a growing body of research has revealed an unfortunate aspect of the human psyche that would seem to disprove this notion, and imply instead that democratic elections produce mediocre leadership and policies.

The research, led by David Dunning, a psychologist at Cornell University, shows that incompetent people are inherently unable to judge the competence of other people, or the quality of those people’s ideas. For example, if people lack expertise on tax reform, it is very difficult for them to identify the candidates who are actual experts. They simply lack the mental tools needed to make meaningful judgments. […]

Now there’s a fairly gloomy – but actually somewhat intuitive – take on electorates. Trying to get a mass of people to act sensibly is like herding cats (depicted so well in this EDS ad).

So I was interested to see that the article concluded with this.

Nagel concluded that democracies rarely or never elect the best leaders. Their advantage over dictatorships or other forms of government is merely that they “effectively prevent lower-than-average candidates from becoming leaders.”

I think that "mere" advantage is actually quite a feature and it confirms Churchill’s opinion.

Now I’m wondering how he felt, being an elected leader in such a system.

Matt Ridley gave this talk at TED in 2010. I thought it was fascinating; and, judging from their applause, his audience at the talk did as well.

His latest book is The Rational Optimist.

I thoroughly enjoy Don Boudreaux’ letters to editors. Can he vent or what?

Money line: "I’m downright repulsed by the media’s habit of mistaking a person’s celebrity for expertise, popularity for acumen, and visibility for enlightenment."

Here’s an interesting video marking the Institute for Justice‘s 20^th anniversary.

I enjoy reading Boudreax’ & Russ Roberts’ blog, Cafe Hayek. In this clip, Boudreax gives the basis for the outlook he so consistently espouses there. (His letters to editors are great.)

Via Libertarianims.org

The Cato Institute has launched at new site at that URL. In its own words:

Libertarianism.org is a resource on the theory and history of liberty, broadly construed. Libertarianism takes many forms and the blogs, essays, and videos here explore them all.

Here’s their "60 Second Introduction".

And David Boaz delivers an Introduction to Libertarian Thought in a 20-minute video on the Introduction page.

It looks interesting and will bear watching & reading, I think.

There’s lots of good stuff in this opinion piece by Penn Jillette, especially for those who had trouble with Epistemology 101.

I’ve always thought that people shouldn’t be embarrassed to admit ignorance. I’d much rather hear that you don’t know than to hear some face-saving claim to knowledge that you don’t have. I’m reminded of the aphorism, "It isn’t what we don’t know that gives us trouble, it’s what we know that ain’t so."

Here’s a snippet from Jillette’s op-ed.

My friend Richard Feynman said, “I don’t know.” I heard him say it several times. He said it just like Harold, the mentally handicapped dishwasher I worked with when I was a young man making minimum wage at Famous Bill’s Restaurant in Greenfield, Massachusetts.

“I don’t know” is not an apology. There’s no shame. It’s a simple statement of fact. When Richard Feynman didn’t know, he often worked harder than anyone else to find out, but while he didn’t know, he said, “I don’t know.”

When I found Jillette’s piece linked in a Samizdata post, this was ‘graph it quoted.

It’s amazing to me how many people think that voting to have the government give poor people money is compassion. Helping poor and suffering people is compassion. Voting for our government to use guns to give money to help poor and suffering people is immoral self-righteous bullying laziness.

This is an old piece; it’s from 2006. But I found it very entertaining, since I’ve often wondered exactly what it is that people learn at business management schools.

The Management Myth

Most of management theory is inane, writes our correspondent, the founder of a consulting firm. If you want to succeed in business, don’t get an M.B.A. Study philosophy instead

By Matthew Stewart

During the seven years that I worked as a management consultant, I spent a lot of time trying to look older than I was. I became pretty good at furrowing my brow and putting on somber expressions. Those who saw through my disguise assumed I made up for my youth with a fabulous education in management. They were wrong about that. I don’t have an M.B.A. I have a doctoral degree in philosophy—nineteenth-century German philosophy, to be precise. Before I took a job telling managers of large corporations things that they arguably should have known already, my work experience was limited to part-time gigs tutoring surly undergraduates in the ways of Hegel and Nietzsche and to a handful of summer jobs, mostly in the less appetizing ends of the fast-food industry.

The strange thing about my utter lack of education in management was that it didn’t seem to matter. As a principal and founding partner of a consulting firm that eventually grew to 600 employees, I interviewed, hired, and worked alongside hundreds of business-school graduates, and the impression I formed of the M.B.A. experience was that it involved taking two years out of your life and going deeply into debt, all for the sake of learning how to keep a straight face while using phrases like “out-of-the-box thinking,” “win-win situation,” and “core competencies.” When it came to picking teammates, I generally held out higher hopes for those individuals who had used their university years to learn about something other than business administration.

Plus I’d like to keep a link to it handy for times when I need to refute some particular example of MBA-style nonsense.

This presentation by Hans Rosling about his mother’s magic washing macine makes a lot of good points. He’s the same fellow who did the great 200 countries over 200 years visualization show last fall on BBC 4.

While watching, I was struck by memories of my grandmother Ida. She cooked and baked with a wood-fired stove practically all her life. She heated her wash water – for dishes, clothes and baths – on that stove too. I can recall chopping kindling for her stove and for her fireplaces (no central heat either) during our annual visits to her house.

I didn’t chop a lot of kindling but I chopped all I ever wanted to.

Grandmother had electricity. It lighted her house and it pumped the water from her cistern into her kitchen, which was the only indoor plumbing she had.

She had a washing machine, but it was an older, “tub type” that only agitated clothes. You still had to pull the clothes out and run them through a hand-cranked wringer to remove the water before hanging them to dry. But it was still better than using a washboard.

And she lived until the middle of the 1980s. It hasn’t been that long ago.

A friend of mine sent me a link to the The Khan Academy. This is a free society at work. It’s the kind of ‘social surplus’ I’ve mentioned before – the kind that always seems so rare in centrally-planned societies.

The Khan Academy is a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) with the mission of providing a world-class education to anyone, anywhere. Despite being the work of one man, Salman Khan, this 1600+ video library is the most-used educational video resource as measured by YouTube video views per day and unique users per month. We are complementing this ever-growing library with user-paced exercises–developed as an open source project–allowing the Khan Academy to become the free classroom for the World.