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]
|
Jim Henley has kicked off a fair old discussion buzz on the blogs in asking the question: do animals have rights? My short answer right away is they do not as the term rights only makes sense applied to humans because humans, being actually or potentially rational creatures, need freedom to exercise that rational faculty, which is not automatic, and hence doctrines of rights have evolved. Humans, by their nature, need liberty to survive and flourish because of how our minds work. Dogs and bunny rabbits do not.
Well, that is what I have thought for a long time. But the fuzzy bits that you get with these sort of broad claims have started to bother me. A dog, for example, does not have a ‘volitional consciousness’ in the same way that a human being does, but the dog can respond to signals and its environment; it may not be able to form complex plans, but it can change its behaviour ever so slightly. So a dog needs an element of freedom to survive, too. So if rights are necessary for the furtherance of life, then perhaps they also apply to some other sentient creatures besides we humans. I still think the answer is no, since rights also entail the capacity to respect the rights of others: a vicious dog is not bothered about such things, let alone a white shark or even – may Perry forgive me – a hippo.
And then of course, if we start to cut off the application of rights for any creature that does not fully fit the Aristotelian concept of a ‘rational animal’, where does that leave the mentally handicapped, or very young babies that have not yet formed a rational capacity? I think the in the former case, we regard the handicapped as having lost or never acquired something that humans normally would have, but our sheer sense of solidarity and compassion for the frail means we treat the handicapped with respect and care and rightly so. But of course we do not allow severely handicapped people to perform potentially dangerous jobs and in practice, such people tend to be placed under pretty serious constraints about what they can do. The same goes for very young children, or aged people suffering from mental deterioration to do with age.
But I must admit that our attitudes towards animals are strange at times. I do not shoot or hunt animals for ‘sport’ – if it was sport, they would be able to shoot back – and I despise factory farming, think people who are cruel to animals deserve to have their gonads removed, and think that cruelty to other species diminishes us as human beings. But the problem is, I really, really feel in the mood for a big cheeseburger.
Tibor Machan, the libertarian philosopher – and thoroughly nice chap – gives the standard classical liberal argument for why animal rights do not exist. I strongly urge commenters to take a look at the links on Jim Henley’s post I have linked to above.
I love the Chrysler Building in New York, while the magnificent V&A in London, St Paul’s Cathedral, the gorgeous French chateau of Chenonceu come very close in my list. I also have a soft spot for the city centre of Montpellier in France, if that counts.
What are your favourites?
(One commenter, I see, has chosen Britain’s Sizewell B power station for its uncompromising purpose. I like the sentiment but am not all that wowed by the design. Here is a photograph of it).
The Bourne Ultimatum is a crackerjack of a high-adrenalin, fast-paced film. I must admit that I am slightly allergic to Matt Damon but he delivers the goods in this third instalment of the Jason Bourne series. James Bond he ain’t: no tuxedos, no rapier one-line putdowns, no Russian Smersh agents called Tanya and definitely no Aston Martins with ejector seats but for excitement, it ranks highly. I was slightly irritated by the constantly jerky film shifts – the director is obviously trying to show how realistic and gritty the whole thing is, and I am not entirely convinced that the CIA’s technology is as snazzy as in the film. But these are quibbles.
I expected to see a few cliches in this film, and we were not entirely disappointed. Yes, the CIA is portrayed as riddled with mad, bad people, but on the other hand, justice is done, the bad folk get brought to book eventually, and the film does not imply, as far as I can tell, that the threats to the US are somehow made up or are the figments of imagination. If anything, the message is that overzealous security agencies can easily convince themselves that it is okay to violate the boundaries of the law to do what is necessary. No one is above the law.
I also smiled wryly at the way the film showed how many CCTV cameras there are in Britain. The scene at Waterloo Station, for example, was excellently done, and horribly believable.
Let’s see if we can spot the flaky reasoning in this letter to The Times (of London), as prompted by a good(ish) article by Daniel Finkelstein today:
Writing as a parent and as one who stands to inherit a large sum, a far better way to reduce inter-generational inequality would be to set inheritance tax at 100% over a comparatively high threshold (e.g. £500K). Then the older generation would have a strong incentive to sell their large, expensive homes – increasing supply and making property more affordable for the young – and spend the money, boosting the economy, employment and wages. It would also have the benefit of forcing the children of the rich to make their own way in the world – they have enough advantages in life anyway.
First, the writer assumes as a matter of course that “inter-generational inequality” – however defined – is of itself a bad thing, a thing to be prevented by limits on any wealth bequeathed above a certain level. For this writer, he/she assumes that no person should have, in this case, an amount higher than say, £500,000. But why on earth should the state rule that people should be banned from receiving, as a gift, more than whatever some egalitarian thinks is the “right” amount? So the inheritor may not “deserve” it in some sense but so what? If a person does not deserve to inherit £1m, neither do his fellow citizens deserve to have that wealth evenly divided up among themselves, either. I think it was FA Hayek who pointed out that in talking of deserve, we talk of deserve in the eyes of someone else, like a father, boss or God who decides that Johnathan Pearce or AN Other “deserve” to receive X or Y out of the multitudes. But dumb luck in inheriting money or good looks or a high IQ is just that: luck. Luck is neither undeserved or deserved. Through aeons of time, we have evolved into human beings with things like opposable thumbs and relatively large brains. We did not “deserve” those, either, so does this mean we should hold ourselves back to benefit our less fortunate creatures?
→ Continue reading: The fallacies behind inheritance tax
People worried that Britain’s supposedly overcrowded, damp island will soon burst at the seams from rising population levels should always remember that although immigration has been high lately, so has the exodus of many people. Of course, if you are bothered about underlying trend, it is not exactly cause for celebration that so many Britons, especially if they are young and talented, want to get out of here as quickly as possible. To say that this thought has not occured to the Samizdata crew would be an understatement. (Although one might debate whether yours truly is young or even talented).
In the 1960s, there was talk about a “brain drain” from high-tax Britain. The situation is a little different now: I think the reason(s) for leaving are as much about the regulatory climate, the bloody awful weather, crime, the general ugliness and boorishness of Britain, and the better perceived better chances of raising a family. I am not saying that all these reasons are valid: countries like Australia or the US have their own problems and having been to the States regularly, I find it bizarre that that country is held up as a beacon of freedom sometimes, if only because some states like California seem hellbent on copying the worst regulatory excesses of Europe. But such caveats aside, this exodus ought to be an issue for Gordon Brown and the opposition to think about. If such large numbers of people want to leave, it is sending out a message.
I am not a musician, but if I were a guitarist, I might fancy one of these. I like the one with the teeth.
(Via Gizmondo).
As a counterweight to the doomongers out there, this is a spendid talk on global economic and population trends that one hopes reaches a wide audience. Something pleasant for a Sunday. The video runs for about 20 minutes or so, if my memory serves. It is always refreshing to come across an academic who is not only thought-provoking but also very funny.
Obituary of Bill Deedes, newspaper editor, reporter, humanitarian campaigner and soldier.
Rest in peace.
Ruth Lea (thanks to Perry for pointing this out to me) has what is a pretty good analysis of the upcoming regulatory juggernaut to hit the City out of Brussels. I won’t expand much further other than to say that without the City, the UK economy would be a shadow of what it is now. Of course, in the short run, the UK government has been content to let financiers make their big bucks because it pulls in so much taxable revenue. More fundamentally, however, London’s position as a great finance capital on the planet is not secure; while regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley have driven some US businesses to the UK, Brussels-generated laws could hamper the UK and drive that business outside the EU, although natural inertia and the benefits of London’s accumulated legal and financial expertise are strong assets. Never forget the Swiss. The weather is okay, the trains work, the Swiss mountains are great for skiing in the winter and although I am happily married, I have always rather admired their women. If you are a 30-something banker with no ties, London is not necessarily superior.
Of course, if the Scottish nationalists were not such lefties, they’d be playing the Adam Smith card and campaign to turn Edinburgh into a sort of tartan low-tax paradise, and take a leaf out of the Irish book on how to revive an economy (no, the Irish economy is not all about EU grants, in case anyone brings that one up).
Well, the Fed has cut the cost of borrowing to avert what many see as a financial crisis. There are several ways to view this move, I guess. One view, as expressed here, is that central banks created the current asset price bubble and appetite for dubious credit products like collateralised debt obligations – bundles of bonds and loans – by cheap interest rates. Central banks caused this state of affairs, so they should let hedge funds and other institutions go bankrupt as part of the natural, if painful Darwinian process of the market. It sounds harsh, but a few casualties, while not much fun for the immediate investors, are a useful warning about how investments can go awry.
On the other hand, the fall in stock market prices since late July has been so fast that it threatens to cause a wider, systemic economic problem, and the rate cut was justified.
I take the former view, by and large. The underlying state of the UK economy, for example, is reasonable, if not great (thanks to the taxes and regulations of our current prime minister, Gordon Brown). But corporate earnings have been strong, consumer spending is okay – it has weakened a bit but hardly fallen off a cliff – and the cost of equities, when set against expected corporate earnings, are pretty cheap by long term standards. (The FTSE 100 index is priced on a multiple of about 12 times earnings, the cheapest since the early 1990s). The Fed, by cutting rates in this way, is more or less saying that stock market bears cannot make money, that the only way to bet is for stocks to rise. This ultimately creates a serious moral hazard by encouraging risky borrowing and lending behaviour.
I think we’ll regret what the Fed did today. Whoever said August was dull?
I did not want to write about this at the time when the article came out, since I thought why should I give any more publicity to the fascist – that is surely an accurate description – Neil Clark than he already got. But having thought things through and seen some commentary, such as by Stephen Pollard, I decided to give my two pence on the matter.
Clark is clearly fascinated by and attracted to, tyrants. He has defend Milosovic, for example, with a gusto that goes beyond whatever reasonable doubts one might have about who were the bad guys in the Balkan conflict. He has now argued that Iraqi interpreters trying to seek asylum should be left to their often violent fates. I wonder how he would have felt about the German interpreters who worked with the Allied armed forces in the latter stages of WW2, for instance? Clark is a truly strange beast. It is hard to think of him as “left-wing”, still less “progressive” in any coherent sense whatever. He is a socialist in his attachment to state central planning and hatred of capitalism, but then that was a trait of the far right (but then again, do the words left and right in this political sense make any sense whatever?). The unifying trait of this character is a love of violent leaders, so long as they are against Britain and the evil US. Paul Johnson, in his book Intellectuals, demonstrates how often men who like to paint themselves as being on the side of the little guy are attracted to violence. I sometimes wonder whether Clark falls into the same trap. If I were a Christian, I’d pray for his soul.
There is a lovely piece in the Telegraph today about Elvis Presley, who died 30 years ago (Christ I feel old as I type those words). A lot of people get very snooty about the Tennessee lad but I do not. I like most of his early material, am not quite so keen on the Vegas year stuff and have not much interest in reading about his later years. But that he had an amazing voice, charisma and impact on the world of music can only be denied by people who have spent the last few years living on Mars.
For nearly a year, I lived at the flat of the late Chris Tame, whom I very much miss both as a friend and intellectual influence. Chris was a massive Elvis fan. His house in Bloomsbury would be either vibrating to the music of the King or some surf guitar dude like Dick Dale (no deep classical music was allowed). Chris was an atheist and no believer in the afterlife, but I bet that if there is one, he is up there, rockin’ to the music of his hero.
Not everyone shares my generally favourable view, such as Tim Luckhurst in the Guardian. He repeats the old, politically-correct crud that Elvis only was important because he “stole” blues from black people, etc. Oh please.
And if I can make a sort of cultural-political “point” here, let’s not forget that Elvis is probably loathed by the sort of people that any self-respecting advocate of the pursuit of happiness would be glad to be loathed by: religious fundamentalists and nanny staters of various persuasions.
|
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.
|
