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]
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“The key insight driving the environmental movement historically was that complex natural systems must be treated with respect. Crude interventions, however well-intentioned, can make things worse. Removing an apex predator can change a whole ecosystem. A flood-control dam that eliminates natural wetlands can make floods more dangerous. Attuned to the costs of unanticipated consequences, environmentalists urged caution and restraint by policy makers and advocated letting nature take its course.”
“Today’s green activists have largely forgotten these truths. The consequences are visible all around, and the payback has only begun. Ham-fisted, poorly thought-out green policies, too often designed by self-interested renewable-energy lobbyists, will exact economic and political costs even as their effects on emissions continue to disappoint. The most likely result, sadly, is that the political temperature over climate interventions will keep rising even as green climate policies fall short.”
– Walter Russell Mead, Wall Street Journal ($). When I read these paragraphs, I was reminded of the F.A. Hayek publication, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism. For what we have here is a conceit that the top-down approach can be brought to bear on containing CO2 emissions and forcing billions to adopt new energy sources, by force if necessary. What this approach misses is how rules can be gamed. For another part of WRM’s article is that Western policy is, intentionally or otherwise, transferring manufacturing power on a gigantic scale to China, and to a regime that doesn’t really give a brass farthing for climate, human welfare or liberty.
What a time to be alive.
My wife is a fellow – she finds it useful to work there occasionally and attend events – at the Royal Society of Arts. I know Anton Howes, the RSA’s in-house historian (his writings on the Industrial Revolution are excellent, and he’s known to groups like the Adam Smith Institute).
(Here is Anton’s substack
In issue three, 2023, in what the RSA calls “The Planet Issue” of its quarterly magazine, are articles asserting how serious the climate “emergency” is, and in one article, (the print edition, I cannot find the web version, which makes me wonder why not) it has a piece by Tom Hardy, entitled “Tropes of Deception”.
Hardy is a member of Extinction Rebellion and co-founded of MP Watch, a constituency network “monitoring climate denial in parliament and MPs’ commitment to net zero”.
Hardy’s RSA article refers to the Global Warming Policy Foundation (involving the likes of Benny Peiser and Conservative MP Steve Baker, among others) and other supposedly nefarious “Tufton Street” organisations. As Hardy writes: “Their agenda: to deny the scientific reality of climate change at the behest of those vested interests whose bottom line requires a repudiation of net zero and renewable energy technology.” (So that’s a “no” for nuclear power then, or an endorsement?)
In what I think is the most unpleasant part of the article, Hardy refers to the “Editor’s Code of Practice” of the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPOS) and refers to what the GWPF does, and how its reports are used by journalists. Hardy also writes about “cherry picking details from authentic research”. (Coming from a deep Green, this claim of cherry picking is a bit rich, given some Greens have admitted to mistaken alarmism.) Hardy suggests that IPSO would, if he had his way, drop the hammer on journalists quoting alarmist sceptic organisations without, at least, lots of disclaimers.
The whole piece, which includes swipes at the Daily Telegraph’s business journalist Ben Marlow, and the writer Matt Ridley, finishes with the line that IPSO must be “empowered” and be “free of political interference” (translation: the wrong kind of interference, as he defines it) and be a “priority of the next government”. (How very reassuring.) Hardy does not state what this might mean precisely, but one might reasonably infer that he wants to squash the ability of journalists to source anything other than alarmist content around human-caused global warming, or face some sort of consequence to their careers and publications.
What’s striking is Hardy assumes the case around a climate emergency is beyond any scientific doubt, that debate is over, that any attempt to challenge alarmism must be squashed, including by using so-called guardians of press “independence” to punish journalists that are naughty or foolish enough to cite sources such as the GWPF. This is a religious mindset, of the very worst kind. And it is being laid out in the elegant surroundings of the Royal Society of Arts.
I suppose there are several things that might have prompted Hardy to take this line, and for someone at the RSA to be complacent enough to print him. Hardy’s possibly worried that the deep Greens are losing public support. Hardy’s right to be concerned. For starters, as has occurred over the anger at London mayor Khan’s extension of the ULEZ rules on cars, regulations in the name of Net Zero are causing real political anger. The antics of Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil, Greta Thunberg and others are also riling a population that has had enough with relentless nagging, taxes and rules. This isn’t just a UK issue. Look at Dutch farmers, for example.
There’s also the transparent bias that is alienating important parts of the electorate: if we get a hot summer, then the UN, for example, talks about “global boiling”, but goes mute when a snowstorm halts windmills in Texas, for example. The public aren’t stupid, and they can see the imbalance.
There’s also the whole COVID-19 aftermath and its impact on those claiming to follow “The science” (the definite article is a red flag). That episode has weakened trust in official organisations’ pronouncements on science, particularly given the dishonesty about masks, and the attempts – which eventually ended – to halt questions about China’s culpability and the role of a lab In Wuhan.
There are several points the GWPF might want to comment on, given the attacks on it in the pages of a body as supposedly prestigious, and “royal”, as the RSA. (I note, as above, that a web version of this article is unavailable.) First, the RSA is clearly all in for climate change alarmism; it is publishing incendiary and bullying material from hardline ideologues that use disruption of ordinary people’s lives to make a case; ER has shut down the publication of a newspaper it does not like; the RSA has, in this specific edition of the RSA magazine, not provided any opportunity for a different point of view to be aired. Where, for example, are the references to the views of Michael Shellenberger, Bjorn Lomborg, Roger Pielke, Alex Epstein, former Obama advisor Steven Koonin, and many more? I guess they’re all evil and just in it for the money.
Samizdata regulars are, I know, unsurprised by all this. The RSA has, like English Heritage, the British Museum (assuming it has anything left in it), the British Library, and countless other supposed bastions of education and learning, been given the Gramsci treatment (the “long march through the institutions”). There may be people who continue to enjoy the place, with its lovely 18th century architecture, agreeable surroundings and networking parties over a glass of bubbly. Alas, champagne appears one of the few compensations from a body that appears intent on foisting shrill agendas. It may still do some good, which is why people such as Anton Howes can work there, but one has to plough through a lot of crap to find it.
There are many reasons why, as a radical classical liberal chap, I focus a lot of my attention on this issue. Because what the likes of ER want is to suppress, even kill, human flourishing. They are prepared to call for coercion; they applaud the disruption of people’s lives, and have shown an utter contempt for a free press. They’re bullies, and are beginning to realise that people are fighting back.
“Banks have been put on the front line of defense against financial crime. That makes sense because they have the personal data and handle the money, but it takes a lot of work to check out clients’ sources of income and business relationships. To speed up the process and limit costs, banks have turned to third-party data firms and automated systems. The bureaucracy has been industrialized. It could be throwing up too many false positives, but it almost certainly is making it hard for individuals who get wrongly classified as risky to overturn those results. Once you’re in a database that is replicated and resold many times over, it can be an endless task to get yourself scrubbed from it. Politicians have made the most noise and got the regulator’s attention, but it seems likely to be others suffering bureaucratic nightmares. The FCA’s own data shows one in 10 British Muslims don’t have access to banking, compared with 2% of all UK adults. Regulators should look not only at banks’ policies for applying the rules, but also examine their systems for performing the job.”
– Paul J Davies, columnist at Bloomberg ($). He makes excellent points about how banks, using tech services to keep on top of potential money launderers, have allowed their systems to run amok. The analogy here is the “no fly lists” that countries have for people suspected of terrorism, etc. If you get on these lists, and haven’t done anything wrong (such as if your name comes up as a “false positive”) it is a hellish job to get off them.
“At least a few people seem finally to be catching on that the basic idea behind “homelessness” advocacy is to exploit an issue that brings forth great human empathy to generate vast taxpayer funds and then to not solve the problem. The spending continues and increases without limit. There is way too much money — for advocates — in `homelessness’ for the problem ever to get solved, or even to decrease materially.”
– Francis Menton. The same could be said of a number of other problems, either real or imagined.
…”once again the reintroduction of National Service is being mooted by think tanks, this time as a thinly veiled mechanism for enslaving the young. Leave aside the point that, far from bolstering conservative values, the diversity commissars of the Civil Service would turn it into the `national woke service’ from day one. Conscriptin is just about defensive as a way to maintain a military reserve; as a way to extract free labour for the state, it’s morally reprehensible. It’s also economically insane. The public sector is staggeringly unproductive. Labour that is unpaid is labour that is asking to be used in the most inefficient way possible, on jobs that would never be done if the work cost the minimum wage.”
– Sam Ashworth-Hayes, Daily Telegraph (£). This is probably one of the best take-downs of the whole “put ’em in the Army and sort out the kids” trope that I have come across in a while.
“We often read critics of either ideological stripe bemoan the lack of originality in our art, our music, and most certainly, our movies. Old franchises suffer from Woke narratives smuggled into stories that should never have been revived. Nostalgia is the only thing that motivates moviegoers now because we really have no new stories to tell. We’re only entertained by ‘content creators’, influencers, and the next series to watch on Netflix, Hulu, Apple Plus, Paramount, Max, and Amazon Prime. But the Woke left and the TradCon right both suffer from the same affliction — a lack of imagination. That lack of imagination was caused by the death of allegory, metaphor, hyperbole, parable, myth, sarcasm, poetry, and the woodcraft to express it — all replaced by an autistic literalism needed to protect the egos of lazy, mediocre minds.”
– Rollo Tomassi, a US-based writer and podcaster who talks about issues such as intersexual dynamics.
…“some stories stand out. The one that confuses me is the call for Britain to trial some form of ‘universal basic income.’ What exactly do people think we’ve been doing for the past two years?”
– Sam Ashworth Hayes, in the Daily Telegraph (£).
“What strikes you when reading about any number of NHS scandals since then isn’t so much the systemic failures, it’s the instances of individual cruelty to patients. Bereaved parents repeatedly told the Ockenden report about a lack of compassion from staff and some even said they were told they were responsible for their own child’s death. All of this amounts to a sense that the health services continually privileges the institution over the needs of patients at the most vulnerable times of their lives. When you consider how utterly inhumane that is, it becomes easier to understand how the NHS could contain a monster like Letby.” (See here for details on the Ockenden saga.)
– Alys Denby, Editor, CapX, in a weekly letter to subscribers of that platform. Denby writes about Lucy Letby, a nurse convicted last week of murdering a number of babies in a NHS hospital.
Monsters can flourish in certain institutions, and it strikes me that those that are treated as near-sacred institutions provide cover for them. The NHS needs to be nuked from high orbit for various reasons, and these scandals surely add to the list.
“Arms contractors get lumped in with tobacco, oil, alcohol and other so-called `sin stocks’ that are regarded as a threat to society. Yet, Ukraine’s predicament has shown that the biggest threat to Western freedom is Putin himself and without the West’s support for Kyiv, Russia may have been able to continue its imperial march beyond Ukrainian territory, further into Europe. City minister Andrew Griffith and defence procurement minister James Cartilidge have warned perfectly reasonably that the UK’s long-term security is being put at risk by the Square Mile’s growing aversion to defence stocks.”
– Ben Marlow, Daily Telegraph (£)
“Really, think about this: A 4.6 billion-year-old planet with an 8000-mile diameter, with a molten core (heat, etc.), with an atmosphere that is only 50 miles/240,000ft thick (being rather generous), that orbits a star only 93 million miles away with 330,000 times the earth’s mass and that emits enough radiation to burn your naked ass in 30 minutes, is having its weather unalterably changed over the course of the next 5/10/15 years (whatever it is now) by the presence of a weak greenhouse gas, CO2, that happens to now be at its lowest level in damn near the entire history of the planet — a history punctuated by global glaciations while that weak greenhouse gas was far higher than it is now — and that also happens to be the basis of plant life (and therefore atmospheric oxygen), a gas whose greenhouse effect is dwarfed by that of water vapor (on a planet with a surface area that consists of 70% water), and that geologically is currently in an interglacial period. The models that generated this political bullshit have predicted nothing correctly — not sea level change, polar ice cover, or weather.”
– Mark Rippetoe. Mr Rippetoe is a strength training coach, based in Wichita Falls, Texas, and a pioneering figure in what is called barbell weight training. (Full disclosure: I use his methods and have got results.) Here he is in full Texan “growl” mode here. He’s also, in my view, very funny and a real character. We need more like him.
“One of the few sensible things Noam Chomsky ever said was that if you want to understand the world, read the New York Times backwards; that is, start at the end of the story and read up.”
– Steven F Hayward, making this comment in a long and damning critique of “climate crisis” viewpoints and suppressors of dissent.
(Thanks to Instapundit for the pointer.)
Anyone who gloated about the “de-banking” of Nigel Farage over his account will now realise, or they should have anyway, that the sword is double-edged:
Monzo initially refused to tell Ms Miller why her “True and Fair” party account would be closed in September. After the BBC contacted the bank about the case, it said it did not allow political party accounts and had made a mistake in allowing it to be opened. Monzo said it recognised the experience would have been “frustrating for the customer and we’re sorry for that”.
It is too easy to roll the eyes, and say “karma is a bitch”. What appears to be the case is that, as discussed in my post here, and in the comments, we just don’t have a fully free market banking system in the UK and much of the world today. The next time you read some idiot going on about “unbridled capitalism” or “neoliberalism”, point this out to them.
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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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