Jay Zilber looks at a burning issue.
Several blogs today have mentioned a certain former president of Megaserbia Jugoslavija; and that reminded me of Private Eye’s log of the twenty-two last chances in 1991-99.
Oh dear. Tony Adragna frets about tax havens:
. . . not all activity in tax havens is questionable, but when the activity has as its primary purpose the avoidance of taxation, then we run afoul of the letter and spirit of the tax code.
I wonder how Adragna feels about emigration, which so often is nothing more than avoidance of the laws at home.
Rich Hailey asks whether “becoming a libertarian [is] a good way to meet chicks.” I gotta say no, at least not in San Francisco. (Although, come to think of it, the last time I got lucky was with someone who gave me a ride home from a California LP convention.)
Try becoming an Anachronist.
acb relays an article about anachronisms of typeface in movies. I remembered my glee in spotting Palatino (1950) in a tv episode of Poirot (Thirties), and post-1918 Russian handwriting described as “very old . . . hard to read” in Lovejoy.
it’s a dog-trade-with-dog world
Peter Hollo cites an interview with Richard Dawkins, at an address which has unfortunately gone bad since January 15. Hollo writes:
. . . you can read Dawkins distancing himself from a kind of Thatcherite, “Darwinian”, dog-eat-dog world of the survival of the fittest (which would equate to the extreme laissez-faire capitalist position).
Apples and oranges. ‘Survival of the fittest’ (or, as Ayn Rand would have it, ‘of the fit’) applies in any system; what varies is the meaning of fit. In a world dominated by the ethic of trade, fit means uniquely or efficiently satisfying the desires of others. In a world dominated by so-called Social Darwinism or bureaucratic egalitarianism, fit means playing the rulers’ game.
(‘Social Darwinism’ is a misnomer because its eugenist adherents fancy themselves wiser than slow clumsy Nature in identifying the unfit. Dawkins and Gould are both humbler than that – as is a good libertarian.)
About 1985 I read an essay entitled ‘The Danger of Equality’ by somebody named Gorer. To summarize his dimly-remembered thesis: In a complex society with many kinds of institutions, there are many modes of status-seeking – owning the biggest boat, having one’s daughter presented at the royal court – which are generally harmless; whereas under regimes which seek to abolish all that in the name of equality, like France the USSR, the only road for social-climbers is the quest for power over others, which is corrosive all around.
Compared with how I as a student imagined it, my life has been an abject failure (but don’t get me started on depression); and yet, most of the time, I have been quite comfortable doing low-level work for small firms. (Family kept the wolf of Reality from my door during a couple of years.) In a less chaotic, less dog-eat-dog world, my allergy to conformist authority might well have killed me by now.
The soft leftist I once was might retort: “In a truly egalitarian world you wouldn’t be forced to conform.” See Bellamy’s Looking Backward, or the ‘hate speech’ codes. Would-be social engineers too often mistake the normative for the predictive, or, as linguists would say, the prescriptive for the descriptive.