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]

Samizdata quote of the day

Romney is no Thatcher – in truth, he’s far from it. It made sense for the unemployed back then to vote Thatcher because she offered an alternative to the headlong rush to destruction. Sadly, Romney may be correct – what sense would it make for today’s unemployed to vote for a marginally slower slide into the abyss?

– Samizdata commenter ‘the other rob’

Why people who are now unemployed and on the dole may still rationally vote Romney (despite him saying that they won’t)

Much is being made of Mitt Romney’s leaked comments to the effect that 47 per cent of America will never vote for him, because this 47 per cent depend on government hand-outs and he, Romney, has said he will cut these hand-outs.

Judging by what happened in Britain in the Thatcher years, Romney is (assuming I have it right what he said) wrong, about none of these people voting for him I mean. Here in Britain then, as in the USA now, unemployment was unprecedentedly high, and many assumed that nobody unemployed and drawing the dole would ever vote Thatcher. Yet quite a few such people did, and not just once either. They did it again and again.

Anti-Thatcherites said that this was false consciousness. These poor deluded, put-upon Conservative voters simply did not understand their own interests.

But what if such down-on-their-luck Conservative voters actually wanted jobs, even though they did not now have them? Many definitely did. What if they depended on government hand-outs, but hated this and longed for this demeaning arrangement to end? And what if, rather than blaming Thatcher for them having lost their old jobs, or even if they did blame Thatcher for them having lost their old jobs, they instead focussed on the future and regarded Thatcher as a better bet than the Labour alternative for them to get new and different jobs?

Even if all that any voter ever cares about is his or her own economic interests, and damn the country, for an unemployed person in the 1980s in Britain to vote Thatcher was at least a reasonable thing to do. It was not a self-evident case of someone not knowing what was best for them. Voting for the likes of Michael Foot or Neil Kinnock (Britain’s Obamas of those times, neither of whom ever made it to Prime Minister, thank God) might merely have made unemployment even worse, and jobs even harder to come by.

My point is not that such disagreement with the more usual opinion (if you’re unemployed vote left wing) of those times was definitely correct. I merely argue that such disagreement was a reasonable judgement to make, given that it was indeed a judgement call.

The same will apply to many Americans who depend on government hand-outs now, who will likewise vote for Romney rather than Obama, because they reckon Romney is more likely to get them back on their economic feet than Obama, and because back on their economic feet is where they really, really want to be.

And this will remain true, even though Romney has just (or so I have been reading) insulted these people by accusing them of being incapable of rational thought of the sort that I have just described, and of being incapable of voting other than for Obama, like so many sheep. At least Romney is showing hatred of the arrangements that they also hate, and which Obama might well make worse, and showing determination to change those arrangements. That might count for far more, in the eyes of an unemployed person who badly wants not to be unemployed, than those insults. So, he thinks I’m a sheep. So what? I know I’m not.

Thatcher herself never made the mistake of accusing unemployed Brits of being incapable of discerning what a brilliant Prime Minister she was, for them as for all others. From where she stood, only Labour voters were in the grip of false consciousness.

How many unemployed people will vote Romney? Rather more if Romney gives them further reason to vote for him, by saying something like: if you hate being dependent on the government, vote for me, and you’ve got a better chance of getting back into paid work than if you vote for the other fellow. → Continue reading: Why people who are now unemployed and on the dole may still rationally vote Romney (despite him saying that they won’t)

I might actually read Salman Rushdie’s latest book

I’ve just discovered, while reading a Guardian piece about and against censorship by Nick Cohen, that Salman Rushdie has just published an autobiographical work about what his life has been like for the last decade or so, while being subjected to the calculatedly frenzied threats of the Islamist hordes following the publication of The Satanic Verses.

I have never regretted for a single second purchasing my copy of The Satanic Verses, and I still have it. But like many others who voted thus with their wallets, I soon gave up with actually reading the thing.

Joseph Anton, on the other hand, looks like it might be quite a page turner. As a general rule I far prefer reading autobiographies by award-winning literary novelists to reading their award-winning literary novels. Whether I enjoy reading Joseph Anton or not, I won’t regret buying that either. Which I just did.

I have yet to discover why it is called Joseph Anton, but I’ll find out soon enough. And … I just did. While inserting that “page turner” link above, I found myself reading this:

Rushdie’s new memoir, Joseph Anton: A Memoir, takes its title from the name he used while in hiding – which was a combination of the first names of two of his favourite writers, Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov.

So there we are.

Bloody hell, I also just found out: 656 pages! That’s a lot of pages to be turning. Maybe just bits of it, eh?

Samizdata quote of the day

“After all these years of endlessly repeating the same tired tropes on the New York Times op-ed page, taking Maureen Dowd’s columns seriously requires a suspension of disbelief that is normally only needed to watch science fiction.”

Jonathan Tobin

Sustainable catastrophe

Incoming from Michael Jennings, in the form of a link to this:

sustainable.png

How many months do we still have to save the world from verbal catastrophe?

Samizdata quote of the day

And I have to say it’s a little unseemly for our government to officially take a position on a YouTube video, even one that sparked an international crisis. It’s even more unseemly that our government is taking the same position on that film as the people who just killed our ambassador in Benghazi.

– the indispensable Michael Totten

Bookmark this

This August researchers making a first analysis of data from the European Space Agency’s observation satellite CryoSat-2 were startled to find that the loss of sea ice – as measured both by depth, and by area – was far more dramatic than their own forecasts had predicted. The summer Arctic could be an open sea within a decade.

Guardian editorial, 17 September 2012

Despite having a belief in CAGW two-and-a-half letters to the left of most commenters on this blog, it told me something about my own beliefs that my first thought when I saw this was “why have they reverted to making their bets public, short term and easy to measure? I thought they had given that up after the Himalayan Glaciers fiasco.” Only later did it occur to me that “they” might be making this public prediction because they believed it.

ADDED LATER: 2022? No, 2016. Right or wrong, and I am inclined to think “wrong”, kudos to Professor Peter Wadhams for not hedging.

Discussion Point XXXIX

Putting your wishes aside – whatever they may be – what is likely to be the state of Islam ten years from now?

Samizdata quote of the day

Did you hear what John Major had to say yesterday? “The ‘green shoots‘ of economic recovery are on the way as ‘darkest moment’ passed” Oh my God, I guess we are closer to the brink than I thought.

– Perry de Havilland over a glass with some Samizdatistas.

Owen Paterson lays into wind farms

James Delingpole surely spoke for many in fearing that one Owen Paterson does not make a summer of sane energy policy. Nevertheless, as Bishop Hill notes, Paterson has been talking sense, to Farmer’s Weekly:

From my own direct constituency experience I don’t personally think that inland wind farms are effective at reducing carbon. I don’t even think they are effective at producing energy.

A BH commenter desribed that as:

… the kick in the groin that the wind energy sector has so long deserved.

I hope it hurts.

More from Delingpole, about one of the many creatures that the Paterson tendency is up against, here.

LATER from Christopher Booker:

What they could not have expected was Mr Davey’s response. He trenchantly dismissed their calls, restating his view that we urgently need a massive new investment in gas generation. Only after 2030 would this require the “carbon capture and storage” that, as Mr Davey has already admitted, is still an “unproven technology” (and is likely to remain so). So the first message of last week was that the once hugely influential Climate Change Committee in effect has been kicked into touch. In the name of keeping Britain’s economy running, the Government seems now determined to break its own law.

What makes all this even more significant, however, is that it is taking place against the background of a truly astonishing worldwide energy revolution. As can be seen from the website of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, country after country is now rushing to exploit the shale gas that, in the past four years, has more than halved gas prices in the US. China, Germany, France, Russia, South Africa and others all have immense reserves that promise to provide the world with cheap energy for centuries to come. And, here in Britain, determined moves are at last being made to reverse the Government’s grudging negativity towards our own vast shale gas reserves, led by our new Environment Secretary, Owen Paterson, who seems to be winning surprising support for his enthusiasm for shale gas from key officials in his own department and the Environment Agency, which has regulatory responsibility for this new industry.

After years when our energy policy was being dictated by green wishful thinking, by the likes of Lord Deben and by state-subsidised pressure groups such as Friends of the Earth (which first invented, then helped to draft, the Climate Change Act), reality is at long last breaking in. The green make-believe that has cast such a malign spell over our country for far too long is finally on the run. Truly, last week was history being made.

Those are the concluding paragraphs of a piece well worth reading in full. The times they are a-changing.

The need/want distinction doesn’t only apply to dresses

A favourite occasional source of LOLs for me is the Top Tips section at Viz Magazine. This morning I found one that makes a distinction that is more than merely humorous, I think:

HOUSEWIVES. Look in the dictionary to find the difference between the words ‘need’ and ‘want’ then carefully choose the right one to use when talking about buying new dresses.

‘Need’ suggests some kind of objective truth about what is, well, needed. It can thus be used to disguise the whimsical nature of a decision, as above.

It makes very good sense, when you are discussing some project which you both agree you want, to speak of this or that contributory item or procedure being accordingly needed.

The problem is that discussing ‘need’ can be an exercise in disguising or misrepresenting the degree to which we all want something which then means we also need this particular extra, by simply not engaging in that prior discussion.

Collectivists regularly use ‘need’ to disguise what they want, and want often for very dishonourable reasons.

Perhaps I am being naïve and starry-eyed (as I often am) in believing that the kind of argument which makes clear what I – and I hope you also? – want, as well as what that project will consequently need, is the one that will triumph in the long run, because the logic of what I am saying may be needed, to get what I want and think you should want also, is presented with greater honesty and completeness.

Unlimited and open-ended

Detlev Schlichter’s latest posting – Stimulus, to infinity and beyond – is up.

Beginning:

There was a beautiful symmetry to last week’s policy announcement by the Fed. Precisely a week after the ECB had pledged its commitment to unlimited purchases of Euro Zone government bonds, the Fed declared that its new round of debt monetization – ‘quantitative easing’ or QE3 – would be open-ended.
Unlimited, open-ended. The concept of stimulus has certainly evolved since the crisis started.

End:

This will end badly.

Nothing to add to that myself. Other than: do what I am about to do, which is to read the whole thing.