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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Considering that Taki, the Greek shipping magnate’s son, hard-right scribbler and socialite, owns a webzine, “Takimag”, in which a notorious recent article by John Derbyshire was published, I wondered whether the fellow was going to write about recent events about Derbyshire. You see, Derbyshire, who lives in the US and has written for various publications such as National Review, was recently fired by NR editor Rich Lowry after a storm of protest concerning Derbyshire’s comments about black people in Takimag.
But when I read Taki’s regular column in the Spectator a few days ago, it was all about Ernest Hemingway (and pretty good, too). No mention of the Derbyshire affair. Odd. Maybe the Spectator’s editor had warned the chap off, but he’s written some pretty fiery stuff before that got into print, so I am not sure. But of course, I had completely forgotten the one-and-only Rod Liddle:
“Derbyshire’s piece contained one or two points with which I do not agree, but I suspect that for the most part its advice was precisely the sort of thing which readers of the National Review have probably passed on to their children, anyway.”
Well, he may be right that that is what readers of that publication tell their children. Who knows, maybe they are all telling their youngsters things such as this:
“Before voting for a black politician, scrutinize his/her character much more carefully than you would a white.”
(10h) Do not act the Good Samaritan to blacks in apparent distress, e.g., on the highway.
(10i) If accosted by a strange black in the street, smile and say something polite but keep moving.
This also:
In that pool of forty million, there are nonetheless many intelligent and well-socialized blacks. (I’ll use IWSB as an ad hoc abbreviation.) You should consciously seek opportunities to make friends with IWSBs. In addition to the ordinary pleasures of friendship, you will gain an amulet against potentially career-destroying accusations of prejudice.
(14) Be aware, however, that there is an issue of supply and demand here. Demand comes from organizations and businesses keen to display racial propriety by employing IWSBs, especially in positions at the interface with the general public—corporate sales reps, TV news presenters, press officers for government agencies, etc.—with corresponding depletion in less visible positions. There is also strong private demand from middle- and upper-class whites for personal bonds with IWSBs, for reasons given in the previous paragraph and also (next paragraph) as status markers.
(15) Unfortunately the demand is greater than the supply, so IWSBs are something of a luxury good, like antique furniture or corporate jets: boasted of by upper-class whites and wealthy organizations, coveted by the less prosperous. To be an IWSB in present-day US society is a height of felicity rarely before attained by any group of human beings in history
It is worth reading the whole piece, if only to get the full, patronising, vileness of much of it; the tragedy is that there might be one or two things he says that actually make some sort of sense (there are issues concerning crime rates among different ethnic groups that need to be discussed, openly and without pandering to PCness). If this article was meant as satire, it failed. An argument I have seen in defence of the piece is that Derbyshire wrote it in response to another idea of what black parents are telling their children about white people. But even if that is true, do two wrongs make a right? I just cannot see how that is the case here.
But what I found particularly bad, from a libertarian perspective, about this item was that Derbyshire, working backwards from some highly debatable statistical assertions, then used them as a sort of rule of thumb test of how to treat a black man as an individual. And this is proof, in my view, of his racial collectivism.
As already has happened, a number of people, no doubt sympathising with these comments, have said they will cancel their NR subscriptions, etc, etc. This is a terrible blow of freedom of speech, etc, etc. It is not. NR would not be obliged to print this material, and as Lowry said in his announcement of the parting of the ways, he would not have done so. If an editor feels a writer is so incendiary that he no longer wants to be associated with such a person, then he or she is entitled to act on that view, however mistaken. That is part of the freedom to act on judgements that, ironically, Mr Derbyshire might claim to be defending, however hamfistedly, in his article. We live in the world of massively expanding internet-based news and views; I am sure that the British-born Mr Derbyshire will find outlets for his opinions.
Update: It seems another NR contributor has got the boot, by the name of Robert Weissberg. Crikey.
“Are you concerned about growing income inequality in America? Are you resentful of all that wealth concentrated in the 1 percent? I’ve got the perfect solution, a modest proposal that involves just a small adjustment in the Federal Reserve’s easy monetary policy. Best of all, it will mean that none of us have to work for a living anymore. For several years now, the Fed has been making money available to the financial sector at near-zero interest rates. Big banks and hedge funds, among others, have taken this cheap money and invested it in securities with high yields. This type of profit-making, called the “carry trade,” has been enormously profitable for them. So why not let everyone participate?”
Sheila Bair, Washington Post.
The article gets even better from here.
“The current rate of exchange is around $1.50 to the pound. When I tell my American friends that anyone earning the equivalent of $66,900 a year in Britain pays income tax at 40 per cent, they don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Any American politician who suggested such a thing would be vaporised before he could make his first TV advert. Even Mr Obama, the most Left-wing president in a generation, would think it outrageous. In fact, he said last week, in a keynote flog-the-rich speech, that no one earning less than $250,000 a year (the majority of Americans, as he put it) should have his taxes raised. He presumably would not adopt the Cameron-Clegg-Miliband definition of “the wealthy” to mean anybody earning a bit more than the average. Just as a matter of interest, he also stated last week that one exemption that he would not tamper with was the tax relief on charitable giving. Even for a Left-wing president, that would be going too far.”
– Janet Daley
“I’ve never been a fan of John Stuart Mill. Yes, he had a massive IQ and a dreadful Tiger Dad. But his thinking is shockingly muddled.”
Bryan Caplan.
Hmm. I haven’t read Mill for many years. Back when I was a student in the mid-80s, I read On Liberty, and like some people I was not entirely happy with the “harm principle” that Mill used in his formulation of a liberal order. And he was a bit flaky on economics, or at least there was enough ambiguity in there to presage the transformation into the “New Liberalism” of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries (ie, greater state involvement).
The Bleeding Heart Libertarians group blog think that Caplan is being unfair on Mill:
Mill’s view is clear: utility is the ultimate determinant of whether an act is (ethically) right or wrong. Given certain empirical assumptions, utility will be maximized overall by restricting the exercise of force over “human beings in the maturity of their faculties” to that which is required to prevent harm to others. Acting paternalistically towards children and incompetent adults is justified, for Mill, for to accord them the same range of liberty as competent adults would not (again, given certain empirical assumptions) maximize utility. To be sure, Mill’s views here are ripe for criticism, especially his (frankly appalling) claim that “barbarians” require a despotic government for their own good. (We might ask, for example, whether any acts can be completely self-regarding, and so harmless to others, and whether Mill’s empirical assumptions are correct.) But this isn’t “awful” philosophy by any means—and it doesn’t require any appeal to “fine and subtle distinctions” to be defended against this charge.
But what if we were to try to defend Mill by making such distinctions? Caplan charges that Mill “piles confusion on confusion” when he attempts this. Quoting Mill’s “I regard utility as the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions; but it must be utility in the largest sense, grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being” Caplan writes “But a man’s “own good, either physical or moral” surely includes his “utility in the largest sense.” And Mill says that’s ‘not a sufficient warrant’ for violating his liberty.”
But the error here is Caplan’s, not Mill’s. Caplan fails to recognize the difference between the interests of “a man”, and “man as a progressive being”—the former refers to an individual man, the latter to mankind as a whole. A man’s own good thus doesn’t include “utility in the largest sense”, and to think that it does is to commit a simple category mistake.
Interesting stuff. Regardless of such disputes, one thing I am certain of is that Mill was one of the greatest defenders of free speech.
A bit of a buzz has generated around the idea of Jonathan Haidt, with his notion that some people are born more “conservative” or “liberal” (in the US usage of those terms) than others, and that we can use genetics to explain, or partly explain, why people hold the views they do. It is easy to see why a lot of people might be wary about this sort of thing, as it might smack of determinism, but I think Haidt tries to be very careful to avoid falling down that particular rabbit hole:
“Innate does not mean “hard-wired” or unmalleable. To say that a trait or ability is innate just means it was “organized in advance of experience.” The genes guide the construction of the brain in the uterus, but that’s only the first draft, so to speak. The draft gets revised by childhood experiences. To understand the origins of ideology you have to take a developmental perspective, starting with the genes and ending with an adult voting for a particular candidate or joining a political protest. There are three major steps in the process.”
My own take on all this is that yes, it might well be very useful to know more about why we hold the views we do, act as we do, and so on. To know thyself is the beginning of understanding and all that. I am struck by this paradox: we are, as humans, a species that, unique among all others, has the desire to “look under the cover”, so to speak, to see how we got to be what we are and why we are the creatures we are, and then, hopefully, overcome whatever shortcomings and problems we find to become, well, hopefully better. In other words, we may not be a blank slate, but we are not prisoners of some sort of ruling, all-powerful genetic code, either. I sometimes worry that some people become beguiled by these new forms of Darwinism to such an extent that they forget that pesky, and awkward thing that we seem to have in us: volition, or Free Will.
Another point I’d make about Haidt’s idea is this: if it is true that people have certain traits like a predisposition to hold certain views because of their genes, how does he deal with those children who rebel against their parents’ views? I know of several libertarians, for instance, who clearly took against their parents’ hard socialist/other collectivist opinions. And in some cultures, children are more conservative than their parents out of rebellion – I am sure this is something that has happened among parts of the Muslim community in the UK, for example.
Anyway, food for thought. Here is a TED lecture by Haidt.
Further to my brief remarks yesterday on the UK government’s plans to intensify scrutiny of the internet (although it may be that the government is changing its tack), comes this piece of crap from Dan Hodges, a Labour Party supporter who writes approvingly of the Big Brother state. This man is beyond irony.
Take this as an example of his thinking:
“I don’t want less surveillance, I want more of the stuff. My idea of the perfect society is one where every street corner has a CCTV camera, everyone has a nice shiny ID card tucked in their wallet and no extremist can even think of logging onto a dodgy website without an SAS squad abseiling swiftly through their window.”
And of course this is his idea of the killer argument:
“For one thing, I have a relatively benign view of the state. There are some things it does much better than others, and I realise it’s high time it learnt to cut its coat to suit its cloth. But on balance I view the state as a force for good, rather than some giant, menacing monolith, and that’s especially true when it comes to stopping myself, my family and my friends getting blown up by crazed terrorists.”
“I have an equally benign, if unfashionable, view of our politicians and our security services. I’m not the greatest fan of either Theresa May or David Cameron, but if they say they need to have access to my emails in order to ensure the security of the nation, I’m inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. Just having a quick look, my last three were from Middlesex County Cricket Club, Woolworths and the editor of Total Politics magazine. And if the Home Secretary and the Prime Minister are really that bothered, they’re welcome to them.”
Ah, “only the innocent have anything to fear” argument. Mr Hodges is undisturbed by the thought of mistaken identities, or youthful radicalism catching up with anyone. No sir, ordinary good men and women of the UK can rest easy in the knowledge that their innocuous, dull messages to friends and business will not incur the suspicion of those men from GCHQ or wherever.
This sort of thing is mildly terrifying to the extent that it shows how trusting so many people are of the modern state and its apparatus. And there is simply no space in Mr Hodge’s mind, it appears, for any suspicion of how such intelligence might be misused. If the recent allegations of corruption by the UK police over the supply of data to bent journalists has taught us anything, it is that if we aggregate vast caches of data into one place, someone, somewhere, will be tempted to make wrongful use of it. It boggles the mind that Mr Hodges does not see this.
Mr Hodges also argues, not very convincingly, that recent some miscarriages of justice would not have happened had we British not been so precious about privacy:
“The civil libertarians, from both left and right, have been out in force this week. But if you look at any of the most prominent modern miscarriages of justice, they have resulted not from the state accumulating too much intelligence on its citizens, but too little. I wish, for example, the Metropolitan police Operation Kratos team had been able to access, in real time, more information about the true identity of Jean Charles de Menezes, before shooting him dead at Stockwell tube. Those wrongly incarcerated for the Guildford and Birmingham pub bombings spent decades in jail precisely because the police and intelligence services did not have sufficient information on the real perpetrators of those attacks, and buckled to public pressure to bang up the first Irishmen they could lay their hands on.”
Ah, yes, if only Britain had been completely festooned with CCTV and the rest in the early 70s and later, then all those folk banged up for killing people would have been free.
I would recommend Mr Hodges spends some time reading the thoughts of security expert Bruce Schneier before opining again about the “benign” nature of an all-encompassing surveillance state.
Having been very busy these last few days, I hadn’t had a lot of time to comment on the latest attempt by the UK government to tighten its surveillance powers over the internet and other forms of communication. Another article at the Daily Telegraph gives some flavour of what is at stake.
Any relief that the Cameron administration had decided to scrap proposed compulsory ID cards when it got into power have been short-lived. As predicted, once the first flush of some liberal optimism had faded, this government, like all of its peers, reverts to type. In fact, I am slightly surprised it has taken this long.
Oh, the joys of counterfactual history:
“Woodrow Wilson, by contrast, inserted the United States into World War I. That was a war that the United States could easily have avoided. Moreover, had the U.S. government avoided World War I, the treaty that ended the war would not likely have been so lopsided. The Versailles Treaty’s punitive terms on Germany, as Keynes predicted in 1919, helped set the stage for World War II. So it is reasonable to think that had the United States not entered World War I, there might not have been a World War II. Yet, despite his major blunder and more likely, because of his major blunder, which caused over 100,000 Americans to die in World War I, Wilson is often thought of as a great president.”
“The danger is that modern presidents understand these incentives. Those who want peace should take historians’ ratings of presidents seriously. Beyond that, we should stop celebrating, and try to persuade historians to stop celebrating, presidents who made unnecessary wars. One way to do so is to remember the unseen: the war that didn’t happen, the war that was avoided, and the peace and prosperity that resulted. If we applied this standard, then presidents Martin van Buren, John Tyler, Warren G. Harding, and Calvin Coolidge, to name four, would get a substantially higher rating than they are usually given.”
Thanks to EconLog for the link.
Of course – and this is going to get debate going – if the US had not entered WW1, how do we really know what would or would not have happened several years hence? What configuration of forces and political developments would have arisen? There is simply no way anyone can know for sure.
One of the things that any reasonably consistent defender of freedom realises is that freedom means the freedom to do or say stupid, offensive or silly things. (A key proviso, of course, being the freedom to do that so long as you are not imposing your views on others, such as by entering private property and spraying graffiti on the walls, or posting offensive comments on a privately run blog such as this in violation of the blog-owner’s house rules). The recent case of Liam Stacey, a young man jailed for up to 56 days for making offensive comments about the Bolton footballer, Fabrice Muamba, is a particularly bad case.
Mr Muamba is a black footballer who, over a week ago, suffered a heart attack during a football match. He had to be rushed to hospital and is in a critical condition, but it is hoped he will recover. His case has touched the hearts of even the most partisan supporters of the game; people from across the sport, not just in this country, have posted messages of support. Some might sneer that this is typical sentimental guff, but I disagree and it seems genuinely meant and rather a good reflection on a game that often gets its share of abuse.
Now this young student who used Twitter to make crass remarks is obviously an idiot. But it seems to me to be utterly nonsensical to suggest that he should be punished for it by the law. (We don’t have big enough jails to hold all the bigots in this country, let alone anywhere else). He has not, as far as I can tell, incited violence against Mr Muamba or his family and friends. If he had done that, then there might be more of a case.
And where exactly are we going to draw the line? Those internet users who post messages hoping for the death of Tony Blair, Margaret Thatcher or other political figures – are they going to be prosecuted? (I can think of a few people who might be in quite serious trouble on that score). Should the odious Baroness Tonge, whom I denounced for her anti-semitic remarks the other day, be slung in jail? (No). Should those who preach that non-believers in some god or other will burn in hell be put away? Should people who send jokes to friends and inadvertently offend someone be sent to jail? (I offended someone once many years ago this way and got carpeted by my then boss, to my shame). What about stand-up comedians like Frankie Boyle or Jimmy Carr who say nasty things, such as about the Queen, Scotsmen or children with Down’s Syndrome? I personally think these “jokes” are bloody awful but I certainly don’t think people should be sent to the slammer. Instead, we just make sure we don’t pay to watch these characters again.
Of course, in making the case for freedom of speech for yobs, idiots and bigots, it is important to be crystal clear that tolerance for such behaviour is not the same as approval of it. We tolerate that which we do not ourselves approve. There is no doubt that this rather ignorant and unpleasant young man has learned a painful lesson, but it would have been far better had this student learned the perils of making unpleasant comments not by going to jail – places which should be occupied by genuine criminals such as robbers and rapists – but by incurring the ridicule and contempt of those who rightly regard racism and bigotry with scorn.
Defending liberty, if it means anything, means defending the freedoms of those you might personally regard as repulsive. Being a libertarian sometimes demands that we take such a stand, however uncomfortable.
“The religious factions that are growing throughout our land are not using their religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to force government leaders into following their position 100 percent. If you disagree with these religious groups on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a loss of money or votes or both. I’m frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in ‘A,’ ‘B,’ ‘C’ and ‘D.’ Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me? And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of ‘conservatism.'”
– Barry Goldwater, as quoted by the blog, Unforeseen Contingencies. He is talking in relation to the absurd Rick Santorum. The Republican Party has, in my view, paid a high price for not heeding Goldwater on this issue. I sometimes wonder if a similar thing could ever happen in Britain with the Tories. I think it is, hopefully, unlikely, although the spirit of old puritanism does stalk the land in different guises, some of them not, on the face of it, remotely religious as traditionally understood.
“There is nothing original in the reflection that football has a frightening capacity to make shocking hypocrites of us all.”
So writes Matthew Norman, apropos the recent changing circumstances of a player who at one point was on the verge of being fired and shamed for refusing to play, and is now regarded as a great guy for his recent performances.
What all this tells us is that sports fans, like others who have a tribal loyalty to an institution, can convince themselves of contradictory views with ease. On the positive side, if sport allows people to channel their atavistic urges in a vaguely harmless way, all well and good. Alas, the absurdities of the situation do become quite irritating particularly in cases where a sportsman is a villain one minute for allegedly saying or doing something nasty, and is treated as a god the next for being able to, say, kick a ball accurately over 50 yards.
George Orwell, by the way, was very harsh on team sports, particularly when national alliegances were involved, but the same on a smaller scale applies to clubs within the same nation. Here is a quote:
I am always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates goodwill between the nations, and that if only
the common peoples of the world could meet one another at football or cricket, they would have no inclination to meet on the battlefield.
Set against all this, it has to be said that it is heartening to see what appears to be mostly genuine sympathy for a Bolton footballer who had a heart attack during a match a few days’ ago. He’s very lucky to be alive. I do wonder if one problem with football these days is that in the English Premiership particularly, it is played at a helter-skelter pace. If you look at a match of, say, 40 years ago when the likes of George Best or Jimmy Greaves were strutting their stuff, the game seemed to be a bit slower. Just a thought.
“To the nearest whole number, the percentage of the world’s energy that comes from wind turbines today is: zero. Despite the regressive subsidy (pushing pensioners into fuel poverty while improving the wine cellars of grand estates), despite tearing rural communities apart, killing jobs, despoiling views, erecting pylons, felling forests, killing bats and eagles, causing industrial accidents, clogging motorways, polluting lakes in Inner Mongolia with the toxic and radioactive tailings from refining neodymium, a ton of which is in the average turbine – despite all this, the total energy generated each day by wind has yet to reach half a per cent worldwide.”
– Matt Ridley
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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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