My lack of current knowledge on the area means I felt no need to weigh in, but it seems astonishing how little reportage there is regarding what’s been happening in Bangladesh for the last few weeks, very much a side issue it seems.
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According to Tim Stanley (Daily Telegraph, 12 August): “District Judge Francis Rafferty said that anybody present at a riot can be remanded in custody, even if they were only a `curious observer’. This leaves me (a journalist by training) wondering whether this means that, for example, someone such as Brendan Westbridge would be in trouble in being present at the scene such as this, if only as a “curious observer” who chose to share his observations on social media, a blog, etc. In the US, we have seen the case of the remarkably brave Andy Ngo, who covered the actions in places such as Seattle and Portland of Antifa, for example. He covered events that the MSM was less willing to cover, for various reasons. The term “curious observer” is frighteningly ambiguous. For a start, what about the intent of the observer and the purpose of such action? Does this mean that a person who is walking nearby and goes towards a scene of commotion out of curiosity or concern for his neighbourhood counts as a “curious observer” as far as this judge is concerned? Does this mean that the instruction “nothing to see here, please move along” takes on added menace? Does it mean having eyes and ears is now potentially a criminal offence? Suppose there were to be a disorderly and riotous gathering of, say, pro-Hamas demonstrators in a street, holding up placards calling for the extinction of the state of Israel (“from the river to the sea” etc). Imagine, say, you are a Jew, and understandably worried for your safety. Are you therefore a “curious observer” if you want to see what sorts of signs people are carrying, their emblems, what they are shouting? All very curious, if you ask me. This leads me to speculate that we are moving towards the licencing of the media by the State in the UK. The only way not to be bracketed as a “curious observer” as far as this dimwit of a judge is concerned would, presumably, to have a badge and lanyard stating you are “press”, or a jacket of the sort they have in the police and FBI in the US, maybe (and therefore, a target for yobs who hate journalists.) Reporters would end up like official war correspondents in combat zones, forced to wear a garment with the word “press” on it and accompanied by the military or police. And lest anyone thinks this is a narrowly Left-wing concern, I am sure there are supposedly more conservative politicians who would not be averse to such controls. Here is an outline of the main political parties said about media regulation before the 4 July election. Not one of the parties came close to a full-throated defence, with no ifs or buts, about press freedom (subject only to the constraints of the Common Law such as libel, etc). Reading this a few years ago, people might have assumed this was all satire, craziness, signs of the writer getting unduly hot and bothered. Yet here we are, more than a month into the administration of Sir Keir Starmers, on 35% of votes cast and on a 60% turnout, which is low by historical standards. On the basis of this loveless landslide, much mischief is being built. As he showed by his enthusiasm for lockdowns a few years ago, Sir Keir’s happy place, psychologically and politically, is authortarianism. The idea of how the bottom-up, volantaristic forces drive a healthy society is a closed book to the prime minister. For Sir Keir, and many of his colleagues, they are always “seeing like a state”. The sadness is that in this regard, Sir Keir and is colleagues are far from alone. Update: I cannot resist not putting up this splendid answer by Andrew Neil, former Sunday Times editor, TV presenter – and my former boss – to the idiotic question from an MP about what the State should do for the media. Play this, and enjoy. August 12th, 2024 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Professor Richard Dawkins FRS FRSL sent this tweet at 8:01 AM · Aug 10, 2024:
For the second time in two posts, I find myself saying, “Thank God for Elon Musk”. Professor Dawkins very much would not say this. That’s fine. Those interested can debate on Musk’s platform whether God exists or whether boxers with one X- and one Y-chromosome should fight boxers with two X-chromosomes. For now, until Commissioner Mark Rowley of the Metropolitan Police has Musk extradited. Update: Dawkins’ Facebook page is back. Facebook says it was a technical problem. August 10th, 2024 | 43 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is a fairly interesting article in Unherd about the current disturbances in UK, but the missing elephant in the room, a very large Halal elephant, is that after Oct 7th 2023, UK streets have been choked with large numbers of marches by Islamic folk & their secular green-haired Gays-For-Gaza supporters, deeply invested in a war in which UK has little to no geopolitical stake. These marches drove British Jews off streets as genocidal slogans were chanted in Arabic (من المية للمية / فلسطين عربية) & the flags of proscribed organisations were flown times beyond counting a few feet away from lines of indifferent policemen, over and over and over again. Contrast that with the heavy handed treatment of the small sporadic counter-protests which flew Union flags or (gasp) Cross of St. George, things that only cause dyspepsia to those infused with high-status Guardian reading opinions. However, the war in Ukraine, where the UK geopolitical interest is manifest to anyone not a fan of Putin & Imperial Russia’s Z-fascism, did not produce constant street level responses beyond some shouting at the Russian Embassy in Kensington Palace Gardens. Why? It’s not a divisive issue, so Ukraine’s supporters didn’t really feel the need to. Few in UK want to see Europe to be destabilised by allowing Russia to once again bordering with Romania & Slovakia with interior supply lines. So, Ukraine’s fight for survival has not induced British Ukrainians to run for office in Westminster or (more bizarrely) local councils based entirely on their views about a foreign war & appealing to a sectarian/ethnic vote. Yet that is exactly what has happened since Oct 7th on the issue of Gaza. To understand the pent-up resentment without looking at that is to miss a huge element of how we ended up where we are. The Labour Government (nor indeed the entirely pointless Tories) do not even understand the problem let alone have a solution, well, other than to just dial up the repression against online words and to dish out more riot gear to hammer some gammon. Instead of actually thinking about this, we saw assorted MPs & various worthies muttering darkly about the “EDL”, an organisation that doesn’t even exist anymore, making this a bit like when Royalists dug up Oliver Cromwell after the Restoration to “execute” him post-mortem. August 10th, 2024 | 40 comments - (Comments are closed)
“You know who else should be on trial for the UK’s far-right riots? Elon Musk”, writes Jonathan Freedland, who used to be a liberal, in the Guardian, a newspaper whose very name was once universally understood to mean “Guardian of our Liberties”. Mr Freedland writes,
Freedland then accurately describes the way that pogroms throughout history have started:
So Mr Freedland describes a phenomenon that has recurred throughout history, citing an example that occurred 862 years before Twitter existed. He observes that this phenomenon has taken place yet again, but with the blessed difference that this time (when Twitter was present) no one was killed – and concludes that Twitter made it worse. That does not make sense. Not only did the Norwich pogrom that Mr Freedland cites happen before the coming of Twitter, it happened almost exactly three centuries before the coming of Gutenberg’s printing press, with its terrifying ability to spread unvetted commentary right across Europe in mere weeks. “And that spreading now takes seconds”, frets Mr Freedland, but on these islands at least, the correlation between the speed of propagation of information and the frequency and severity of race riots and pogroms has been negative. As has been the correlation between these things and the freedom of the press. Why? August 10th, 2024 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
Fraser Nelson, in the Daily Telegraph today, drops some truth bombs, in the form of educational attainment data, into the analysis of the mayhem in the UK this week:
Nelson goes on to ponder reasons for this dispararity, a problem particularly for boys, rather than girls. This is a fact that also throws a wrench in the argument about how girls suffer from a “patriarchy” in terms of education. That seems to be long gone. The teaching profession appears to be largely dominated by women today. Richard Reeves, the British academic now working in the US, recently published an excellent book on the topic. And he’s on the liberal-left, which meant he was quite brave in pushing back at a few narratives. Nelson:
The problem, of course, is that the Prime Minister and his colleagues are so stuck with conventional narratives that making that leap may be beyond them. But they should perhaps reflect, that having been elected to a landslide by just 35% of the electorate on a low turnout, and mainly because of anger at the Tories rather than anything for socialism, that if Labour does not make some credible moves, it is toast in a few years’ time. August 9th, 2024 | 50 comments - (Comments are closed)
Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs) controlled more than $11.8 trillion in 2023, beating hedge funds and private equity firms combined, up from $1 trillion in 2000. State-owned enterprises (SOEs) had assets worth $45 trillion in 2020, the equivalent of half of global gross domestic product, up from $13 trillion in 2000. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development calculates that half of the world’s 10 biggest companies and 132 of its 500 biggest are SOEs. The state is not only back. It has burrowed into the heart of the capitalist economy — running companies (often across borders) and shaping capital markets.” – Adrian Wooldridge, Bloomberg ($) I would argue that this issue is as big, or more serious, than the usual complaint that boards of large, mostly listed, companies have gone “woke”. Because as we have seen, as interest rates have risen to curb inflation, some of this wokery has gone into retreat. But sovereign wealth funds are a different kettle of fish. With a few exceptions (Norway), nearly all the countries operating SWFs are commodity-rich autocracies, such as those of the Gulf, of varying levels of opacity. As Wooldridge says, this creates a big problem because the healthy “creative destruction” of free market capitalism cannot so easily work its brutal, if necessary, magic. Recently, there was an attempt – since thwarted, as far as I can tell – by an Abu Dhabi-backed fund to buy the Telegraph Group, owner of titles including the Spectator and the Daily Telegraph. That caused a political storm. But many other acquisitions, such as of ports, sports clubs and infrastructure, go on and are routine. A question I have is whether the current Labour government, full of managerialist/statist types with no feel for entrepreneurship and the healthy ups and downs of capitalism, will be tempted to do something similar, although the UK, unlike the oil-rich potentates of the Gulf, is short of funds. But even so, the Starmer government might be tempted, maybe in concert with other countries, to try and get into the state capitalism act. It is probably already doing so. The question is whether any of the opposition parties have the fortitude and discipline to mount a coherent takedown of all this, and perhaps join it with a similar assault on the growing spread of the “administrative state”. In many ways, the rise of this state, and SWFs, are part the same, troubling trend. August 9th, 2024 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
The following article comes from Paul Marks, regular commenter here. Thomas Paine (author of Common Sense, The Age of Reason, and others) is someone who, at one point, would have been as familiar to an American or Briton of decent reading as, say, the Founders, or a character such as Davy Crockett or Daniel Boone. Paine’s books were read as avidly as any social media post today, and were arguably far more influential and profound. Paine was immensely influential in his time. But he had serious flaws in his views, as Paul Marks argues, and was foolish in the extreme about the French Revolution and where it might lead. He ended up nearly losing his life in France. I can recommend this book by Yuval Levin, comparing and contrasting Edmund Burke (who supported the American colonists in their bid for independence), and Paine. See also this book about the Founding by Timothy Sandefur, which readers might enjoy. And one more is America’s Revolutionary Mind, by C Bradley Thompson. Of course, this sort of topic might appear “arcane” to some, but at a time when the Founding, and the the origins of the greatest free nation on earth, are sometimes questioned and even attacked, it is never a waste of time to re-visit the territory and learn new lessons. Anyway, over to the “Sage of Kettering”: Thomas “Tom” Paine is mocked for holding that it was wrong for monarchies to have fiat money (rather than gold and silver coin), and high taxes and lots of government spending – but just fine for democratically elected governments to-do-the-same-things. His position was indeed absurd – but what was the source of his specific economic position that high taxes, specifically high land taxes, should fund lots of benefits, education for the poor, old age pensions, money for the poor generally – and-so-on? Well Adam Smith implied there was something special about land taxation – and David Ricardo and Henry George developed this idea long after the death of Mr Paine – and the idea was not fully refuted till the American economist Frank Fetter just over a century ago, although experience in Ireland in the 1840s where the British government tried to run the Poor Law welfare schemes by a land tax, assuming that this would just hurt “the landowners”, should have discredited the idea that taxing land is somehow special – in Ireland the economy totally collapsed and between a quarter and a third of the population either died or fled the country. But there is more to all this than just taking a few, false, hints from Adam Smith and running wild with them. As far back as John Locke there was a mixing (by slight of hand) of individual consent and majority consent. Gough (Oriel Oxford about 70 years ago now) showed in his book on Locke that medieval thinkers understood the difference between majority consent and individual consent – and that Locke, in his “Two Treatises on Government” mixed them up – in order to imply that a government is not coercive if it has majority support, that you as an individual are not being coerced, no matter what government does to you, if you had a vote – if only one vote out of millions (a doctrine that makes no sense – but a doctrine that both Mr Paine and Rousseau before him, later ran wild with). Nor is it just the political side – there is also an element of economic thinking that Mr Paine may (perhaps) have taken from John Locke. Locke held, contrary to Hugo Grotius (the Dutch theologian and legal thinker) and other theologians and legal thinkers, that God gave land (the world) to humanity in-common – rather than land being unowned till claimed (the Roman or Common Law position). As Locke held (by his interpretation of the Book of Genesis in the Bible – thinkers such as Hugo Grotius held to a very different interpretation) that the land was originally given to humans in-common, he held that private ownership had to be “justified” – either by “as much and as good left for others” (clearly impossible with a rising population) or by some sort of payment to meet the “Lockian Proviso” – see how Mr Paine might get the idea of a land tax and various benefits funded by it, from this position of John Locke? Although, yes, Thomas Paine rejected Christianity – and it was from his interpretation of Christianity (opposed by many other Christian thinkers) that Locke got his ideas, in this area, from. John Locke even held that if a ship’s captain with a cargo of food refused to sell it in a port where there starving people, seeking a better price at another port, the captain was “guilty of murder” – seemingly oblivious to the fact that this would (given there have always been hungry people in some part of the world) bid the price of food down to zero, bankrupting not just the captain – but also the farmers. It is also just legally wrong – as the captain may (may) be a very morally bad person (lacking in the virtue of charity – mercy), but he is NOT “guilty of murder” as any lawyer (of either English Common Law or Roman Law) could have told Mr Locke. So, in all this, if (if) ideas are developed in a certain way it is quite possible to go from John Locke (supposedly the founder of English liberalism) to the Collectivism of Thomas Paine or even Rousseau – and of the French Revolution rather than individual private property based American Revolution. This is one of the reasons why American Founding Fathers such as Roger Sherman and John Adams were so opposed to Thomas Paine. August 8th, 2024 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
Over the seas and far away, President Milei of Argentina has abolished a government function, that of INADI, the purpose of which was easily comprehensible from its name in Spanish, the Instituto Nacional contra la Discriminación, la Xenofobia y el Racismo the newspaper La Nación has this report, and I quote. ” ‘We have dissolved the INADI. An ideological entity of partisan political use. We are dismissing the staff and are taking back the premises. Our management will focus on shrinking the State and closing unnecessary organs. We do not believe in the utopia of the efficient State. We will be doing more, much more.’, wrote the Ministry of Justice.” Looks like he means what he says. On one YT video (in Spanish) I saw a comment to the effect of ‘If there isn’t a government Department for Breathing, will we all be asphyxiated?’.
August 7th, 2024 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
This article by Tom Slater is worth reading in full, but I wanted to post these words in particular because they get to the heart, as I see it, of the current mayhem on the streets of certain British towns:
Here is an excellent overview of the situation by Helen Dale.
I also think that some, if not all, of the evil consequences of identity politics and the rest must be traced back to academia and what passes for intellectual activity. This situation has been brewing for years. There are a number of excellent studies about all this, but I think Cynical Theories, by James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose, is as good a place to start as ever. Unpicking all this is going to take a great deal of work. Yes, reducing net immigration, particularly from certain parts of the world, is part of it, if only to give more time for those newly arrived (legally) on these shores to be assimilated. Restricting immigration is only part of it, even if I accept that my views on it are a good deal more libertarian than others on this blog. But far more work is also needed, in my view, to push back against the idea of turning everyone into members of a tribe. Tribalism, along with emotionalism, is the curse of our age. To that point, I also recommend this short book by Objectivist writer Nikos Sotirakopoulos, whose commentaries I follow. And one way to start changing is not play the game, as so many in the MSM and political world do, of assuming that everyone has to be addressed as part of a “community”, with their self-appointed leaders. A person living legally in the UK is a British citizen, period. No need for hyphens, community tags, whatsoever. If you see newscasters, journalists, MPs or others engaging in this, call them out. Write to them (politely) to point this all out. And we need to kill an entitlement culture, which I suspect is widespread among the wider public, if not more so, than those who have just legally arrived on these shores. The Welfare State – at least its modern manifestation – has played a part in creating an underclass of people who are prey to the temptations of violence and easy (usually wrong) solutions. In this regard I think of two books, written some while ago, that are worth re-visiting: Mind The Gap, by Ferdinand Mount (journalist and former policy advisor to Margaret Thatcher) and Life at the Bottom, by Theodore Dalrymple, aka Anthony Daniels. August 6th, 2024 | 46 comments - (Comments are closed)
I get the daily posts from the Law & Liberty blog, and this struck me as interesting, because of the preamble:
The author of the article, David P Goldman, goes on to explain the problem. As the article is free to access, I won’t reproduce other paragraphs here apart from the two final ones:
This seems right to me. I think AI is going to produce marvels, but I don’t see it removing the need for boldness, risk-taking and ability that all great businessmen have to “look around corners”. To ome extent I am a techno-optimist, as the likes of Marc Andreessen, the US venture capitalist, is. But I am not, I hope, Panglossian, or the opposite of a perma-doomster, either. It is also interesting to consider how governments, for example, might seize the idea that AI makes it possible to co-ordinate human activity in ways that eliminate all that pesky free market exchange and messy entrepreneurship. This line of thinking resembles the view of certain science fiction writers who tried to imagine a post-scarcity world. (Science fiction often contains lots of economics, as this article by Rick Liebling shows.) Eliminate the idea of scarcity, so the argument runs, and then the underlying foundation of economics – “the study of scarce resources that have alternative uses” – falls away. It is easy to see the utopian attractions if you like to mould humanity to your will. I mean, what could go wrong? Eliminate scarcity, then who needs enforceable property rights and rules about “mine and thine”? In a post-scarcity world, where will the sense of urgency come – the sense of adventure, that drives great businessmen to create and innovate to push back against such scarcity? (This is also the fear that some might have of universal basic income – creating a world of indolent trustafarians who, like a couch potato, suffer muscle loss and mental decline because they don’t have to work or struggle to build anything.) Karl Marx dreamed of a post-scarcity world – that seems the logical end-point of his communist utopia, to the extent he fleshed it out at all. (The irony being that his ideas helped inspire some of the greatest Man-made famines and loss of life in recorded history, in part because of the failure to understand the importance of property, prices and incentives.) I am sure that some of this post-scarcity thinking might be encouraged by AI. But then again, AI uses a lot of electricity, and even without the distractions of Net Zero (no laughing in the class, people), producing the power necessary for modern high-potency computing requires a lot of stuff. And mention of science fiction reminds me of the “There Ain’t No Such Thing As a Free Lunch” that came from Robert A Heinlein, and later taken up by Professor Milton Friedman. August 5th, 2024 | 39 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Economics without price theory is knowledge without wisdom. Any economist can analyze data to estimate how many lives you’d save by requiring car seats for toddlers on airplanes. It takes a price theorist to ask how many lives you’d lose when the resulting increase in airfares prompts families to drive—which is far more dangerous—instead of fly. Price theory breeds wiser policymakers and wiser voters. If we fail to teach it, that’s a tragedy.” August 4th, 2024 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
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