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]
|
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.
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.
Economic wisdom from a rather surprising place:
Since 2007, 15 bridges have collapsed in China. Only three of them were more than 15 years old at the time of their collapse, according to a report by the Shandong Business Daily.
On Aug. 24, a 330-footlong approach ramp of Harbin’s Yangmingtan Bridge fell over, killing three and injuring five. The bridge had been in use less than a year and is the eighth bridge collapse in China this year. The Harbin administration has so far not openly addressed the case.
Zhao Wenjin, the lead commentator of Lanzhou Daily, commented on the incident, saying, “With each collapse, we need to reflect: why are we chasing GDP?”
According to a Jingyang Net report, Wang Yang, Party secretary of Guangdong Province, said at a provincial Party meeting in 2009: “Sometimes the GDP number looks good, but it didn’t really create wealth for society. It was, instead, a waste of society’s wealth.
“For example, building a bridge creates GDP. When the bridge collapses and is taken down, it creates another addition to the GDP. When the bridge is rebuilt, more GDP is created. As such, one bridge resulted in three additions to the GDP. But it was a tremendous waste of resources.”
Mainland media Chinese Business Daily said that sticks and pebbles were found in the concrete that made up the Yangmingtan Bridge, and the metal wires on the surface were also not tied together properly.
The headline above the article that the above paragraphs come from reads: Frequent Bridge Collapses Help Boost China’s GDP.
My thanks to Sean Corrigan of the Cobden Centre for sending out the multi-recipient email that told me about this story.
British politics is very boring compared to American politics just now, a fact reflected in the content of recent Samizdata postings. What is there to say about Britain now? They almost all agree, or pretend to agree. They are almost all mistaken. That about covers it. At least in the USA there is occasional debate about something resembling principles.
Perhaps principles are easier to observe from a distance, uncluttered by nearby clutter, rather as skyscrapers loom larger when viewed from a distance. But from where I sit, in Britain, part of the reason for this British political boringness is that Prime Minister Cameron has no apparent objective other than to remain Prime Minister Cameron. What he does at any given moment seems to be entirely the consequence of the various directions in which, and the varying force with which, he is being pulled, pushed, kicked, bribed or threatened. He himself never makes a decision, other than a decision about the combined effect upon him of these various forces.
I seem to recall reading, not long after the coalition government was formed, that Cameron may actually prefer coalition government to regular government. That way, interpreting and constantly rebalancing all those forces is his basic job.
But when those forces change, what Cameron does changes with them, and that can be slightly interesting. One such slightly interesting shift happened in the course of the recent cabinet reshuffle, in the form of the appointment of someone called Owen Paterson to be the government’s Environment Secretary. The interesting thing being that apparently Owen Paterson is not nearly as devoted to wind power as the Windies (so to speak) think that such a person ought to be. In general, Paterson lacks green enthusiasm, as Fraser Nelson explains.
Owen Paterson is far from a household name, but the significance of his appointment as Environment Secretary has not been lost on the green lobby groups. As far as they’re concerned, this is war. They are already denouncing him as a “prominent hater of wind turbines” and overall climate change sceptic.
Sounds like good news to me (rather as the news in this posting was), except actually what “climate change sceptics” are really sceptical about is not climate change but climate catastrophe.
So, why the change of public mood, and consequent slight Cameron shift? Well, part of it is that climate catastrophe scepticism is growing and growing. As I keep insisting, the key to all this is catastrophe. If the climate is just changing a bit, and if sea levels are about to rise a bit, then the obvious answer is for us to adapt, and let the market send us whatever signals it is inclined to. Only if climate catastrophe looms does it make any sense to shut down regular economics and switch the entire world over to emergency tyranny mode, of the sort that the people who set the climate catastrophe scam up in the first place yearn for. But more and more people now believe that there is no more reason now than at any other time in human history to expect climate catastrophe. In short, our side is (as it has been for several years now) winning the climate catastrophe argument (which is the bit of the argument that matters), big time.
The wider public, the sort of public (most of it) that is far more bothered about its fuel bills than by any arguments about longer term climate upheavals, is getting the news of this intellectual transformation not just in the form of an abatement of green propaganda, but also in more elusive ways, involving moral atmospherics.
Fraser Nelson again:
For more than a decade, environmental policy has been cursed with cross-party consensus because no one wanted to be seen to oppose so noble a cause.
It is precisely this air of green nobility that is now changing, as Cameron has surely noticed.
Thanks at first to the whistle blowing sceptics like Steve McIntyre, and then to the bloggers and journos who publicised such findings as McIntyre’s, like Andrew Montford, Christopher Booker and James Delingpole, and now to the big-time daily newspapers who have been joining in more recently with similar stories, “climate science” just doesn’t seem as noble as it used to. Frankly it is being presented as downright corrupt. These “scientists” don’t insist upon the truth of their opinions merely because they just do. They do this because this is how they now make their living. Their constant screeching about the venal motives of their opponents is pure projection, and is more and more being presented to the wider public as just that.
Meanwhile, on the back of the climate science scam, a new variety of green entrepreneur (one of them being David Cameron’s own father-in-law) has arisen. In the days of unchallenged green nobility, the people who thought along these lines both set up or participated in green businesses and sat on public bodies whose mission was to impose the very green schemes and regulations that these green businesses depended on for their profitability. Time was when this seemed okay. But not now. Suddenly, being the director of a wind farm company, and at the same time sitting on some government committee which does all it can to block other and more rational forms of energy doesn’t look quite as noble as once it did.
It’s not that the Windies have given up exerting any forces of their own. The point is that these people are now on the defensive. From the green point of view, the times they are a-changing, and when the times change, people like David Cameron change with them.
What Frank J. Fleming says here, to the effect that America has let President Obama down, is, I think, both very funny and nail-on-the-head accurate in describing the sort of man President Obama does indeed seem to be.
The other night I had dinner with a friend and I heard myself saying a couple of things about what might soon be happening in the US presidential election campaign.
First, I speculated that, any week or month now, the mainstream USA media might turn against Obama. All it will take is them deciding that he is going to lose and that nothing they can say will change that, and at that point they’ll stop publicly worshipping him and start reporting on what he says and does and on what people are making of it, almost like he was some kind of Republican or something. Their purpose will not be honesty. Their purpose will be to make the dishonesties they later unleash, upon President Romney in particular and upon the world in general, seem slightly more believable.
And when I got home, I found that something like this was already starting to happen.
Oh, they haven’t all given up on their guy yet, by no means. But they are surely starting to fret quite seriously that just shovelling out nothing but propaganda for him is making them look ever so slightly silly.
And the other thing I said was that if Obama himself decides that he is going to lose, no matter what he says (not least because of all the damn media people selling him out like so many rats running down a ship’s gangplank), he might, at some point between now and election day, say to hell with this, and give America a piece of his mind, rather than just smiling and taking it all on the chin.
He might say things like this, now only the mocking words of Frank J, only for real (here‘s the link to the second page of Frank J’s piece where this is to be found):
These past four years have just proven there is no reasoning with you hillbillies. Obama has given speech after speech after speech explaining things to you, but you never get it. Obama is a fragile flower you oafs keep trampling beneath your feet. You just babble things at him like, “You cain’t make peepul buy health inshuranse! It’s unconstitooshunal!” And then you whine about the national debt, when it’s none of your concern anyway – that’s the government’s business. What is it with you people questioning and ruining everything Obama is trying to do?
For “Obama” read “I”. Also, that “fragile flower” bit would have be changed to something more self-admiring. But otherwise, just like that.
As for my two guesses, the media turning against Obama, and Obama turning against the voters, well, I do admit that the first is a whole lot more likely than the second.
And both are matters of degree rather than absolutes. Some members of the mainstream USA media may change their grovellingly pro-Obama tune a bit, even as others carry right on singing the same old songs like it was 2008. And Obama will probably let his annoyance with the damn voters show a bit, just now and again, but then he’ll rein himself in. There is, after all, a whole big global ruling class out there, and Obama is going to carry on functioning within it just fine and very lucratively, provided he behaves himself reasonably well in the meantime. So a total Obama melt-down is probably too much to hope for. But I would love to hear him say at least some things along Frank J’s lines.
As might quite a few of Obama’s long-suffering supporters, who have surely been saying exactly these kinds of things amongst themselves, and to friendly reporters whose discretion the Obama campaign has, so far, been able to rely on.
I’m glad people are getting so much pleasure out of the Paralympics and I don’t wish to knock either the competitors or disabled people generally. But there’s a bubble of sanctimoniousness surrounding the event and its media coverage which definitely needed popping – and I salute Frankie Boyle for being fearless enough to do it. Brave outspoken souls like him are our final bulwark against the kind of cant and sanctimoniousness and sentimentality which first began to rot our national character in those grisly days after the death of Diana.
– James Delingpole
I was tempted to make this, by Peter Mandelson, today’s SQotD, but I might be misunderstood as agreeing with it. As it is, of course, I share the glee that Guido (to whom thanks) feels about it.
Mandelson:
The bigger question is how the domestic media market can be made economic and subject to any form of regulation in an era when, a click away, there is access to information that respects no national boundaries and the laws of no single national parliament or the basic standards of conventional journalism. It is hard to see how some of the best-known sources of quality English-language journalism – the Times, New York Times, the Guardian spring to mind – will ever make money again. We come to grips with the fact that the internet is giving public access to uncorroborated, undigested and unmediated news, all in the name of free speech, is becoming one of the defining issues of the 21st century.
Indeed it is.
And I love the idea of “information that respects no national boundaries”. In the old days information used to be far more respectful.
The world has become a pretty grim place of late. This Mandy moan cheered me up no end.
And he returns to find the state of the world slightly worse. Things were, of course, pretty bad to begin with, so that’s like Hell being slightly hotter.
The idea that all this monetary madness is only temporary, only to help us get out of the crisis, and that the central banks have an ‘exit strategy’ – a term that I have not heard or seen in any discussion of central bank policy since spring of 2011! – is getting less tenable by the day. There is no exit strategy. Not in the US, not in the UK, not in the Euro Zone.
Calling Mitt Romney. Don’t worry about losing. Worry about winning.
My favourite MP in Britain is Steven Baker, and he has a very interesting take on the Left. His attitude is not: “Wrong answers, you idiots!” It is: “Good question!” The question being, along the lines of: “What the hell is happening?!?!”, and Steve Baker’s answer being variations on the theme of Austrianism. Government-controlled money ruining us. Sort out the money, and take the financial bad news that will come with a return to monetary sanity. Then: progress! Tim Evans has a recent piece up at the Cobden Centre blog in which he adopts exactly this approach:
While such conclusions are wrong, they are at least borne of people starting to try and articulate the right question.
The comments on this are mostly full of scorn (most especially those from Paul Marks). Maybe good question, but bad answers, is their line.
Does it accomplish anything to try to insert Austrianism into mainstream British political debate in this way, on the back of a basically Leftist campaign of anti-capitalist scorn and outrage? My sense is: in Parliament, maybe. When trying to get a hearing on the BBC, definitely. Elsewhere, maybe not. I used to think this was a great tactic. Now, I’m genuinely unsure. Is it really possible to try to hijack someone else’s spiel like this? Well, the answer is: maybe it is possible. Like I say, I am genuinely unsure. Steve Baker and his Cobden centre supporters (I am one) have done lots of media spots, in which they have taken this line. Maybe the Cobden Centre narrative just awaits another bout of British financial turmoil to take centre stage in Britain.
Meanwhile, my eye was caught by a couple of passing remarks about similar arguments in the USA, both of which suggest that a similar tactic in the USA to that adopted by Steve Baker MP, over here, may already be working well, over there.
Exhibit one is from a piece about an economic model of the forthcoming Presidential election, which is almost entirely about the relative fortunes of Dems (very bad) and Repubs (very promising). But right at the end of the report there is this:
Bicker and Berry also did not factor in third party candidates, such as Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson, who Public Policy Polling, a Democratic-affiliated polling firm, has noted could significantly diminish Obama’s chances of winning New Mexico.
Note that. Here’s a libertarian taking votes from Obama. This must be another manifestation of that new and improved two-party system that Instapundit posted about recently.
And then this morning, I was struck by this comment, on this piece, which is about some Democrat supporting interlopers at the Republican convention, one of whom is a Ron Paul supporter. The commenter (comment number 8 by “stmarks” at 9.25pm on Aug 25 – forgive the comment-standard spelling and grammar) says, in among a lot of other stuff about conservatives and liberals, this about Ron Paul supporters:
… And I am convinced 90% of these Ronnies [Ron Paul worshipers] are ex-democrats who are too ashamed to admit so, but still hates GOP with a burning passion.
I freely admit that I may be reading far too much into two tiny snippets of comment. (I am posting this here in order to find out more about that.) But, what these snippets, snippets though they are, tell me is that Austrianist arguments (such as those of the Ron Paul camp most definitely are) are making headway in the USA, and are drawing people away from pro-government and anti-capitalist answers towards anti-government and pro-capitalist answers. Democrats, at least some Democrats, are morphing into Ron Paulites.
A generation of people who regard the Republicans as most emphatically part of the problem are staying anti-Republican, and accordingly pro-Democrat if that’s the only option they are offered. But if someone comes to them, as Ron Paul supporters did during the early stages of the Occupy Movement, saying: “You are right about the problem! The banks are indeed screwed! But let us tell you who screwed them and how to unscrew them. The government screwed the banks, and the way to unscrew the banks is to get the government out of the banking business” … well, that cuts some ice. “We believe this stuff because we believe it. We are only Republicans tactically, insofar as we can push them in our direction. To join us, you do not have to be a Republican.”
Learn more about the Paulist influence on the Republicans by looking at the comments on this recent posting by me here about the Tea Party.
So maybe Steve Baker’s approach is entirely right, and I am just being impatient.
LATER: See also this on the Tea Party, and of course: this on giving libertarianism a ‘left hook’.
LATER (via Guido): In Paul they trust ….
I just did a recorded interview (for the Cobden Centre) with Patrick Crozier, and experienced the mystery that is Doctor Theatre. This is when you are ill, but performing. For the duration of the performance, the illness goes into a state of voluntary liquidation. As soon as the performance ends, back comes the illness.
I still have the remnants of a cough. When talking at all volubly, I have to stop from time to time, to cough. Except that during this performance, I did not cough once. As soon as the official part of the conversation stopped, I coughed, and Patrick said: that’s the first time you coughed during this entire conversation.
I talked about all this happening before it happened, with another friend. I thought that might spook it. But no. It happened exactly as predicted.
As to whether the conversation I had with Patrick, without coughing, was any good and at all worth listening to, that’s another matter entirely.
The internet has a standing order from me to send me any news stories it has about 3D printing, and I am beginning to get a feel for how this story is playing out. (Maybe, what do I know?, etc.)
My first guess was that 3D printers are something like laser printers, which would accordingly soon enter all our homes, but I now think that’s wrong. 3D printing is not an enhancement of domesticity, or not yet. It is already, and has been for quite a few years, a technological development technique, and it is now morphing into a manufacturing technique, which is what most of the news stories are about. Here’s this new thing they are making with 3D printing! Wow!
But it’s “they” who are doing this. Only a minority of people reading or hearing these stories now want to get their hands on this kit themselves. If there is a parallel with personal computing, then 3D printing is still at the stage when mad techno-hippies were buying the first cheap (-ish) computers to play with in their dad’s garages, and learning how to program them, circa 1977(?). The only – although it was one hell of an “only” – killer app there was for those first small computers in those early days was if you wanted to learn how a computer worked.
Consider the following news story, from the Daily Mail. It seems that someone somewhere has worked out how to “print” a new kind of bikini, out of 3D nylon. Many may be excited by this story, such as women seeking nicer bikinis, and men needing a techno-excuse for drooling over the female bodies involved in advertising the bikinis, but while there may be a small stampede to the bikini shop to buy such new garments, this story will surely not cause any stampede to techno-stores to buy bikini-printers.
I wrote everything else in this posting before reading this piece by Ryan Whitwam, but he says pretty much what I say here. → Continue reading: 3D printing won’t be domesticated any time soon (but then again how it might)
I seem to recall someone (one of our commenters here?) saying that George Soros is the nearest thing in reality to a James Bond villain.
So I guess we now know which football team we here do not now support.
Well played Everton.
|
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.
|
