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It’s conceivable, although I promise nothing, that I may do some of this “live blogging” thing, come the early hours of tomorrow morning. It depends on my mood at the time, and on such things as computer availability, dongle workability and so forth and so on.
Somehow I doubt that Perry de Havilland will be hanging on every result. And oh look, he just said it again, see immediately below!
So, if none of us here manage it, but if you nevertheless hunger for this kind of thing, how about paying attention this this guy?
If I can keep my eyes open I intend to stay up most of the night and blog about the incoming results.
In particular (and at risk of sounding disturbingly anal) I intend to monitor the fate of those candidates who voted for and against the smoking ban. (Yes, really.)
I shall be looking out for some preferred candidates including Philip Davies, Greg Knight, Robert Halfon, Annesley Abercorn (Conservative), Kate Hoey (Labour), Lembit Opik (Lib Dem), Nigel Farage (UKIP), Martin Cullip (Libertarian), Old Holborn (Independent) and one or two others.
I shall also be passing comment on the election coverage, much of which will be viewed through the bottom of a glass, darkly.
Well, if it’s your kind of thing, he says he’s going to start around 10 pm. Maybe Perry might even want to give it a glance. He and Simon Clark of Taking Liberties, who wrote the words quoted above and to whom thanks for the email alerting me to this, do seem to be on the same wavelength.
Last night I dined at chateau Perry, and in connection with nothing in particular I found myself asking the above question. Can you, I asked my hosts, think of a worse decision? Both in its consequences for the people who made the decision, and morally, in terms of its consequences for the people it was inflicted upon? I mean, this lunatic policy might well be in the process of taking out an entire civilisation. Thanks to this insanity, to quote the cliché (because dramatic and very quotable and likely to be all too true) about China that has been doing the rounds for a year or two now, they’ll get old before they get rich, a soundbite which was launched by this publication.
And they are still bashing ahead with this policy, as I serendipitously discovered when I got home last night and was browsing through an internet site called Weird Asia News. Mostly this site features weird headlines concerning weird stories like: Papuan Police Recruits with an Enlarged Penis Denied Job; and: Britons Suffer Chemical Burns From Chinese Sofas, which I suppose I ought to care about more than I do what with me having bought a sofa myself not that long ago; and: South Koreans Revolutionize iPhone Market with Sausage Meat Stylus, the last one being a lot less interesting than it sounds. But in among such drollery is to be found this report, entitled Thousands Sterilized In China Population Crackdown, about how they are even now, still – well, as of last month anyway – enforcing this exercise in national suicide.
A 20-day campaign was begun on 7 April to sterilize 9,559 adults in Puning county, which with a population of 2.24 million is the most populous area of Guangdong Province. On 12 April local officials said they had already achieved about half their goal.
Doctors have been working 20 hour days to complete the massive round of surgeries. Local officials are so determined to reach their target they have been detaining relatives of those who resist the operation, potentially in violation of Chinese law.
Some 1,300 people are being held in cramped conditions around the county and forced to listen to lectures about the one-child policy while their relatives refuse to submit to the surgery.
At Perry’s, conversation later ensued about why they unleashed this madness. What were they thinking? What are they still thinking?
My guess was that this began as a classic communist response to shortages. Communism always causes shortages. Faced with their shortages, the Chinese Communists figured that if they could only reduce the number of people suffering from these shortages, the shortages would go away. If that’s right, then, as Perry said, this was another of those Fixed Quantity fallacies in action. Also a classic case of a doomed attempt at economic calculation under Socialism.
My further guess now is that this has become a pissing contest between the Chinese government and the Chinese people, with the government now being too bloody stubborn to back down. If they give up on this policy now, that will suggest either (a) that it was wrong for them to have persisted with this for so long, and maybe even wrong for them to have done it at all; or else (b) that they no longer have the power – the balls, you might say – to enforce such arrangements.
I have heard it suggested that it is simply that the Chinese government fears the Chinese people and wants to thin the numbers down. When this policy got started, the Chinese government was much more completely in charge than it is said to be now. But if that is the thinking, why impose a policy that results in millions of sex-starved men wandering around? That’s not going to keep the peace.
I seldom read the Independent, but today the blogosphere lead me to this story, about an Indy journalist, Jerome Taylor, who got beaten up for the crime of investigating electoral fraud in East London.
I also learned something that I did not know, about the art of being beaten up:
As their fists and feet slammed into me, all I could think about was some advice a friend had given me. She’s a paramedic and has dealt with countless victims of assault. “Whatever you do don’t get knocked to the ground,” she once said. “Blows on the floor are much more dangerous.” …
I never knew that, but it makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? Punched in the face is not good, but you really don’t want to be kicked in the kidneys. Presumably Taylor managed to remain standing. It reminds me of an old Elton John song that I have always quite liked.
Luckily for Taylor, he was saved from further punishment by a nearby onlooker who intervened, which was enough for the beaters-up to go away, two of them “into the candidate’s house”.
Good bit of journalism, that last bit. Your face is a mess, but you still clock the vital fact about your attackers. I hope (a) that Jerome Taylor’s career prospects improve as a result of his ordeal, and (b) that both the barbarians who did this and the barbaric puppeteers they were doing it for live more miserable and complicated and dysfunctional lives from now on.
Raedwald, the blogger who lead me to this story, says that it was “naivety or foolishness ” that got Taylor into this fracas. Maybe so, but that strikes me as a bit harsh under the circumstances. Isn’t trying to learn the truth about things, sometimes naively and foolishly, going where people who already know it all are too wise to venture, what journalism is all about?
Also, was that Good Samaritan onlooker who chased away the villains also perhaps being rather naïve and rather foolish? Again, maybe yes, but it’s a good thing he did what he did.
The $146 billion bailout package approved this weekend for Greece is advertised as a move to “stop the worst crisis in the [euro]’s 11-year history,” but it is having exactly the opposite effect.
…
So you have politicians defying the will of the voters to pour more water into a leaky bucket; transnational economic planners destroying a currency in order to save it; markets responding to those actions with predictable horror; and the few recipients of all the largesse too dumb to say “Thank you.” This is apparently what EU stability looks like.
– The start and the finish (I recommend the stuff in between as well) of a piece by Tim Cavanaugh about the Greek Bailout
The non-mainstream anti-Obama media in the USA have been describing this Gulf of Mexico oil spill as, potentially, Obama’s Katrina. President Obama has, they say, been too slow in responding.
I dissent. Not about the reality of it all. Maybe Obama has indeed responded too slowly. About that, I don’t know. I would only say that just because he has been taking his time about making big speeches about it doesn’t mean he hasn’t kept abreast of it.
No, my dissent concerns the political significance of all this. I think this disaster could be the making of the Obama presidency, in much the same way that the Oklahoma bomb rescued President Clinton at a time when he was staring the ignominy of a one-term presidency in the face. As I said in this posting here, and as others have explained in greater detail, the Oklahoma bombing enabled Clinton to completely change the political narrative in the USA and to put the Republicans on the back foot – which was why no seriously good Republican candidate was even willing to stand against Clinton when Clinton was trying to get re-elected and why the bloke they did pick made such a confused mess of his campaign.
I think this oil spill could be about to do the same kind of thing for President Obama. → Continue reading: Why the Gulf of Mexico oil spill could be a double catastrophe
Regular Times columist Matthew Parris writes eloquently, if with somewhat sweeping generalisation, about how “we” do not want to hear the truth. “We” do not want change. “We” want things to carry on as they are. “We” want to stay as well off as “we” are, and will snarl and rage at any politician who dares to even hint otherwise. He has a point. Whichever combination of politicians turn out to have lumbered themselves with the grim task of running the next British government will have to cut, cut and cut. So, what should they cut?
Let me prove that Matthew Parris’s generalisations don’t entirely apply to me by suggesting a reduction in some at least of the fluid that I personally now suck from the governmental tit. How about abolishing these?
That thing gives me, at no charge whatever, the run of the entire London Underground network, plus all buses in the same approximate area, plus, if I understand things correctly, free travel on local buses throughout the UK.
I wouldn’t like losing all that, not one bit. But I acknowledge that cuts like this will have to happen, if only to soften the blows a little for others who are being told that they must suffer far worse. Like losing their entire jobs for instance.
Can you, esteemed commenter, suggest other cuts, that you personally would be quite badly hurt by, but which you nevertheless think would be a good thing to do? Or, at least, a cut or cuts that would wound you personally, maybe far worse that losing my “Freedom Pass” would wound me, but which you would find it very hard to argue against? Maybe you have an entire job that you can’t defend and are now ready to admit that you wouldn’t have in a better governed country.
I wonder how Matthew Parris would answer this question.
Or Guy Herbert, whose posting immediately below I had not read when I posted this.
Instapundit compares President Obama to Apple, saying, in connection with recent rather belligerent rhetoric from Obama, and similarly belligerent conduct by Apple regarding the alleged stealing of their latest iPhone before they had themselves unveiled it, this:
Like Apple, Obama’s strength is mostly in the image department …
That may be right on the money about Obama. Don’t know for sure. Don’t live there. But I definitely think it’s wrong about Apple. For me, Apple’s stellar “image” is based on an underlying reality of product quality, not on how nicely Apple supposedly behaves, or did behave until this recent atrocity.
A lady friend of mine has the earlier version of the iPhone, which she adores. Talks about it like it’s her perfect boyfriend, and looks at it like its a new and really good baby she just had. When she first got it, she could hardly stop gazing at it, and kept not listening to anything I was saying, instead wanting to demonstrate how fabulously it worked and how great it was for tracking emails and recognising pop songs and taking snaps and the rest of it, like she was a fat old geek with no life. Shame about the battery life, she says. But of course they are fixing that in the new version.
And then there’s my beautiful Apple keyboard, which a few months ago I purchased and attached to my clunky old PC because every PC keyboard I have ever owned or seen or heard of is total shite, either about a mile across with a completely useless accountancy section adding even more mileage to its width or, if a sane size, doomed to instant disintegration and requiring baby fingers to use even half accurately and so flimsy that if you type like an adult with your adult fingers it slides across your desk like a big insect. Also, on all the PC keyboards I have ever owned a few of the damn letters soon became invisible, and I had to buy new stick-on letters from Rymans. Contemptible.
My new Apple keyboard is the total opposite of all such shiteness. It is the keyboard I am happily typing on right this minute, and it is well on the way to convincing me that my next entire computer should be Apple as well.
Quality like this is not “image”, of the sort based on merely incidental nice behaviour. I suppose you could argue that what happens on the front of an iPhone is “image”, in the sense of legible lettering, clever pointiness and so forth. But that’s image of the kind that is central to the quality of the product. And my keyboard is solid, beautiful reality, at its most solid and most beautiful. (Make of that what you will.) → Continue reading: Apple’s strength is that it now makes great products – not that it behaves nicely
Gordon is cyanide on the doorstep.
– Rachel Sylvester gets lucky quoting a Labour candidate in what used to be a safe Labour seat, just before Gordon Brown calls a core Labour voter a bigot. I reckon he’s cyanide everywhere.
Hardly a day seems to go by nowadays without somebody with approximately the same kind of political attitude as me scratching his head, publicly, in writing, about President Obama’s bafflingly sensible space policy, which sticks out like a healthy thumb in an otherwise horribly mutilated hand of policies.
Critics are disturbed by the large and unprecedented role Mr. Obama sees for the private sector in space exploration. For a president who is often accused of being a socialist, he has more faith in the ingenuity of the private sector than his detractors do.
Maybe so. But how could someone so opposed to free market notions here on earth be so keen on them in space? I would like to offer a version of President Obama which maybe makes sense of this puzzle. What follows is sort of a joke. I certainly hope that readers of it will be entertained. But I also think it might be true. → Continue reading: On the unintended consequences of President Obama
Ian Dale writes that the internet and all that is having very little effect on this general election. I’m sure we can all see what he means. The politicians strut about emitting their parallel universe proclamations, while the rest of us stolidly refuse to be impressed as we sit about wondering just which big party and big party leader we loathe and despise the least, so that we can humiliate most of them, instead of what we would really like to do.
But in another sense, a negative sense, I think that the internet is already having a very profound effect on this campaign. Put it like this. The good thing about blogs and facebook and twitter and all that is that we can speak our minds. We tell it not necessarily like it is exactly, but how we truly reckon it is at the time or writing. The big cheese politicians? Like I say: parallel universe of staged dishonesty.
Trying to combine doing regular politics with joining in the New Media hubbub means either being ignored as a useless bore, or getting into trouble, for saying something honest and eloquent but verboten. The two just don’t mix. Remember that scene in that great regular politics movie The Candidate, starring Robert Redford, where the Redford character tries telling the truth (as he happens to see it) at a campaign event. His handler just tells him to do up his trouser buttons, grow up, and campaign properly, i.e. go back to emitting the correct barrages of staged dishonesty. As far as the old pro regular politician is concerned, telling it like it is, like you are blogging or twittering or something, is just waving your willy about like a stupid little kid. Honesty didn’t work then for regular politicians, and it doesn’t work now.
But the difference is that the rest of us can now do honesty, and consume honesty. We now have honesty. For several years now we’ve been waving our willies about and having a ball. It’s just that the regular politicians can’t join in without making asses of themselves.
So, one: rise of the New Media. And, two: a general election in which almost nobody looks like they’re going to be happy. None of the politicians, with the possible exception of The Clegg, and none of the voters. Nobody is going to “seal the deal”. It used to be that someone did. Now, we seem to hate them all.
No effect? I think not. I know exactly what Iain Dale means. The New Media aren’t contributing anything positive to regular politics. The New Media aren’t helping regular politicians to canvass, get out the vote, assemble people to mass meetings and get them all excited about their preferred version of regular politics. The New Media aren’t helping to spread barrages of lies, and then cheering like lunatics. They (we) are merely standing at the back muttering to each other that it’s all lies. But just because the New Media are doing nothing positive for regular politics doesn’t mean they’re having no effect on regular politics.
Iain Dale is nearly there when he describes the internet this time around as “the dog that didn’t bark”. But the fact that the dog isn’t barking is highly significant, as Sherlock Holmes himself pointed out in the original story. The New Media dog, from where Iain Dale stands, is doing nothing, and that is what is so interesting.
One of the most striking political developments of my lifetime has been the rise of opinion polls. Now that we are into an election campaign, rival polling enterprises announce results concerning the relative strengths of the various political parties, major and minor, and the relative popularity and performing skills of their leaders, seem to be announced every day and sometimes, when something dramatic like an election debate has just happened, every hour, and become the object of obsessive analysis by the kind of people who like thus to obsess.
The contrast with general elections of an earlier epoch, such as the one in 1945, when the election result, a massive Labour victory and a humiliating defeat for Prime Minister Winston Churchill before the war that made his reputation had even been concluded, came as an enormous surprise to vast numbers of people, not least to the amazed and delighted mass membership of the Labour Party. The Conservatives were gobsmacked. Were there opinion polls then, telling anyone who would listen about this landslide before it happened? My understanding is: not. The only poll that happened then, certainly the only one whose results were widely discussed, was the election itself. Now, opinion polls don’t just happen before elections; they happen all the time.
So what has this change, from pretty much no opinion polls to wall-to-wall hour-by-hour opinion polls done to politics? I am sure that commenters will be able to suggest all kinds of effects that have not occurred to me, but I can certainly think of a few political trends that have at the very least been reinforced by the relentless rise of opinion polling. → Continue reading: On the impact of opinion polls
Every day – and I can’t remember when or why it started but it did – I get emails featuring James Taranto’s “Best of the Web” writings for the Wall Street Journal. Often I agree, insofar as I know enough to agree. But yesterday’s email was extremely odd. In it, Taranto quotes a certain Simon Moloy, writing at something called MediaMatters, who earlier in the week had accused Taranto of having said something racist, in this. Maloy wrote thus:
The implication of Taranto’s theory is that African-Americans aren’t sophisticated or observant or intelligent enough to know real racism when they see it, and are thus continuously duped en masse into voting for Democrats. It couldn’t be the case that black voters actually care about issues and have real reasons for voting Democratic, they’re just puppets who are motivated by racial sentiments that Democrats prey upon.
Now I don’t know how reasonable this complaint against Taranto is, which Taranto himself quotes in his reply, the one in yesterday’s email. To know about that, I would have to know a lot more about the USA than, having never even been there, I know now. But this I do know. Maloy was not himself saying that black voters are “just puppets”. When Maloy used this phrase, he was saying, rightly or wrongly, that that was what Taranto said. Any observer of this spat, with only Taranto’s reply to this critic to hand, can see that, because Taranto himself included the above quote. Taranto then accuses Maloy of believing this sock puppet thing himself. And Taranto calls him a racist. Says Taranto:
MediaMutters’ suggestion that black voters are “just puppets” is racist and repugnant.
It would be, if the suggestion had actually been suggested. But clearly, it was not.
I can think of nothing polite to say to defend Taranto on this, other than perhaps that the balance of his mind was disturbed by being called a racist himself. He seems to be combining illogicality (a clear misreading of something he actually quotes) and tactical stupidity (supplying all the evidence of his obvious misreading to even the most casual of readers) to a truly amazing degree. What was he thinking?
Don’t misunderstand me. I hate what the current clutch of Democrat politicians appear, from this side of the Atlantic, to be doing to the USA and its economy, and I hate what else they seem to want to do to the USA even more. I too wish that black people in the USA were more reluctant to support such disastrously statist policies, which I think will harm them along with everyone else except the posh people in charge of them. I rejoice when I hear that black people are participating in Tea Parties and arguing that the scope of the US Federal Government should be reduced.
But because of that I want to see arguments against the statist tendency that carry some weight. This latest counter-argument of Taranto’s, if you can call it that, can only expose Taranto to ridicule and contempt. Indeed, I presume that it already has. Were I a Democrat, I would trumpet Taranto’s foolishness as loudly as I could. No wonder Democrats like to call their opponents racists, if this is the kind of thing they can get them to say in reply.
I’m also not impressed that Instapundit (whom I admire greatly) recycles Taranto’s accusation for all the world as if it made perfect sense. I guess that’s the price you pay for Instapundit managing to link to so much, so often. Every so often he gets things wrong too.
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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.
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