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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That is what she is, it seems. A member of the House of Lords, Jenny Tonge has arguably now gone so crazy that the police might get involved, although as a libertarian, I defend freedom of speech absolutely, so I think any criminal prosecution would be wrong, just as I defend the right of a political party to eject her, shame her and put her head on a metaphorical spike outside the Tower of London.
Breaking: She has now resigned the Liberal Democrat whip. It is extraordinary she has been allowed to hang on for so long.
As Nick Cohen has written:
“The Israeli-Palestinian conflict explains the shabbiness of Lib Dem thought as it explains so many other shabby arguments circulating in Europe. Its leaders ought to know that the only moral position to take is to support a two-state solution in which a free and democratic Palestine lives alongside Israel with borders that approximate the dividing lines of 1967. In theory, everyone except far-leftists, Islamists and neo-Nazis knows this. In practice, Lib Dem opinion has been seized by a reactionary version of radical chic in which murder is celebrated and racism dignified.”
And later on, he writes this crushing paragraph:
“As it is impossible to write about Jews in the present climate and expect to have a sensible debate, let me replace them with blacks. Suppose a leading Lib Dem peer had said that black people were by their nature mentally inferior to whites. Would you expect liberal society to be satisfied if Clegg did not expel her from the party and screamed and shouted about his honour instead? I suspect most people would demand that he proved he knew the meaning of the word by taking action. Suppose the same Liberal peer were to go on to bring up the most poisonous myth of white supremacy and say that young black men were touring the cities looking for white women to rape. In those circumstances liberal society would consider it outrageous if Lord Wallace were to dismiss complaints by saying, “The reason why we resist expelling her from the party is that we do sadly find the current Zanu-PF party very intolerant of all criticism.”
The woman is a piece of delusional scum. There’s no need to be polite. Sorry if this offends anyone.
It is richly ironic that a party with the name “liberal” in it contains such a character. Guido has more on the background.
“I think it’s an interesting reflection on politics today when the choice in a major election is between a drunken, possibly alcoholic, philanderer and a philanderer. I’ve nothing at all against booze, excessive consumption of such, extra-marital legovers nor even illegitimate children. All add enormously to the gaiety and variety of life and no society with even the slightest claim to being liberal or free would say different. But it is an interesting insight into the characters of those who rise to the top in politics, isn’t it?”
– Tim Worstall.
Well, if you explore the history of the 18th Century and 19th, for example, you will find political figures who were drunks, wife-beaters, adulterers, duellists (Andrew Jackson, the US president, fought several, as did British political figures such as Fox, Castlereagh and Canning); indolent fools, frauds and con-artists. Plus ca change……
Here is a pretty good article in the Telegraph, by Nancy Soderberg (who she?), arguing that taxpayers of the UK should not be giving money to Argentina. It is a country that, with hardly a shred of legal or other justification, wishes to claim back territories (the Falkland Islands) that it unsuccessfully attempted to capture 30 years ago by force of arms:
“Argentina, after all, is acting with scant regard for the international community. Over the past decade it has pursued a deliberate strategy of playing games with financial markets. Its default on £51 billion of debt in 2001 turned it into a financial pariah, a status that was not enhanced by two subsequent unilateral debt restructurings. To this day, Argentina remains shut out of the world’s capital markets. To make matters worse, it also nationalised private pension funds, thereby providing itself with a captive domestic market into which it could sell its debt.”
“The government has since been sued by creditors around the world as they try to force Argentina to honour its obligations. In the Southern District Court of New York alone, there have been more than 170 bondholder lawsuits, resulting in more than 100 judgments. Today, Argentina still owes more than £15 billion in old debts ranging from Paris Club loans, to bondholders, and to foreign investors holding arbitral awards from the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID). In each case, Argentina has refused to play by the rules. It has demanded a Paris Club restructuring without the mandatory IMF monitoring, it has ignored New York court judgments, and it has insisted, in blatant disregard of its treaty obligations under ICSID, that arbitral awards be brought to Argentina for “approval” by its own courts.”
Argentina is refusing to let UK-registered vessels enter any of its ports, and has also sought to enlist other Latin American countries in putting the squeeze on the UK. Now of course some of this can be dismissed as “sabre-rattling”, and no doubt, in their quieter moments, many Argentine people who have endured a variety of useless or vicious governments will think that the latest antics of their government are absurd. But it is clear that bullies need to be confronted eventually. The UK government should terminate any aid to Argentina without delay. Indeed, it should terminate aid, full stop, to any country, democratic or otherwise.
One of the things that stuck in my mind when reading the late Christopher Hitchens’ brilliant “Hitch 22” memoirs was his description of how he felt about the Thatcher administration in confronting the military junta of Argentina in 1982. I think it was Hitchens’ first realisation that his youthful leftism meant he had to take sides with some pretty stupid people, and that he began a long, slow reappraisal of some of his ideas. As the Falklanders no doubt asked themselves in 1982, do we really want to be taken over by this lot?
Of course, it is all about ooooiiilllll!
For a bit of background, here is a reasonably fair account of the history of the Falkland Islands, which have been attached to the UK since the 1830s, an era when Argentina had only begun to exist as an independent nation in its own right.
“Back in Britain, the Mail on Sunday ran an interesting feature this weekend about a different example of what certainly sounded like a health and safety overreaction. It told the tale of a man who drowned in a shallow boating pond in his local park, after suffering an epileptic seizure while feeding swans. A passer-by (a woman who was in charge of a small child so did not dare enter the pond) called the emergency services. But the first firemen to show up announced that they only had Level One training, for ankle-deep water, and needed to wait for a specialist team with Level Two training for chest-deep water. By the time that team arrived, the man had been floating in the pond for 37 minutes. While waiting for that specialist help, the same firemen also strongly urged a policeman not to attempt a rescue in the pond, even refusing to lend the policeman a life-vest. Then the policeman’s control room told him not to enter the water, as the victim had been in the pond so long that it was a body retrieval mission, not a rescue.”
Writes a columnist in The Economist.
Then there is this:
“It is tempting to conclude that Britain has fallen into a serious problem with regulation, red tape and crippling risk-aversion.”
You think so? In fairness, the column is pretty good and it even goes on to wonder whether there is something seriously wrong with the UK national character. I tend to be a bit wary about such broad generalisations, though.
“But is not the consternation these classes feel a just punishment? Have they themselves not set the baneful example of the attitude of mind of which they now complain? Have they not always had their eyes fixed on favors from the state? Have they ever failed to bestow any privilege, great or small, on industry, banking, mining, landed property, the arts, and even their means of relaxation and amusement, like dancing and music – everything, indeed, except on the toil of the people and the work of their hands? Have they not endlessly multiplied public services in order to increase, at the people’s expense, their means of livelihood: and is there today the father of a family among them who is not taking steps to assure his son a government job? Have they ever voluntarily taken a single step to correct the admitted inequities of taxation? Have they not for a long time exploited their electoral privileges? And now they are amazed and distressed that the people follow in the same direction! But when the spirit of mendicancy has prevailed for so long among the rich, how can we expect it not to have penetrated to the less privileged classes?”
Frederic Bastiat, quoted over at Bleeding Heart Libertarians. I also liked this following paragraph:
It’s is a terrific substantive and rhetorical point that I think has largely been overlooked in the contemporary libertarian commentary on Occupy Wall Street, yet Bastiat had it 160 years ago, and with style and panache. Bastiat may not have made any real contributions to economic theory, but no one in the history of economics has been a better economic rhetorician than he was. He knew how to take ideas and put them in a form that was persuasive and memorable. It is a skill more economists could use as we continue to try to push back during a time when bad ideas we thought were dead are reappearing, zombie-like, across the landscape.
Bastiat is also described in this piece as a “Ninja”. Nice!
We are often told, even by so-called “left libertarians” who claim to be in favour of markets but not corporatism, that modern corporations, with their evil limited liability protections, favours from the state and so on, can roll over a democratic government and shaft the general public. Up to a point, Lord Copper. In fact, the situation is far more complicated. Some firms seem remarkably weak when confronted with some pressures, which makes me wonder why Hollywood movies still insist on portraying corporate executives as flinty-eyed, heartless bastards on the take. (The irony is, of course, that some of the most ruthless corporations are in the film business).
As evidence, Brendan O’Neill has this excellent piece in the Telegraph about Tesco’s, workfare, and the influence of the “Twitterati”:
“What could be worse than the government’s workfare programme?”, almost every columnist in the land is currently asking. I can think of one thing worse: the awesome and terrifying power of the commentariat and its slavish groupies amongst the Twitterati to strike down initiatives like workfare and almost any other government project that they don’t like. That’s the real story here. Forget the historically illiterate wailing about young people being forced into “slave labour” or the idea that getting yoof to work in return for money is the Worst Thing Ever. The ins and outs of workfare itself pale into insignificance when compared with the new power of tiny cliques of cut-off people to override public opinion and reshape modern Britain.
The speed with which first Tesco, that supposedly arrogant monolith of the high street, and then others withdrew from the workfare scheme was alarming. It was a testament both to the sheepishness of modern corporations (remember this next time someone starts banging on about “free-market fundamentalism”) and to the authority of the therapeutic, suspicious-of-wealth, pro-state, anti-big-business sections of the well-fed media classes, who can now put powerful institutions on the spot simply by penning a few ill-thought-through articles with the word “SLAVE” in them.
One possible quibble: has this not been the case for decades, even centuries? Consider that the opinion-forming classes have tended to be concentrated in the London area, have tended to have an influence out of all proportion to their numbers? This is hardly new. What has changed, clearly, is that in the age of the internet, the speed with which this class can make its voice heard accelerates.
I always thought it was a bit optimistic to imagine that blogging, the internet and so on would massively shift the balance of forces in terms of who gets to influence debate in a country like the UK. The mainstream media still carries big influence, especially television. And our political class, drawn as it is from a relatively shallow pool of talent, is as susceptible to the influence of such opinions as it ever was. However, what I think has changed for the better is that more of us, such as O’Neill and so on, can attack the conventional wisdom through the medium of the internet rather than hope that our letters get printed in some corner of a newspaper.
There is also more of what we might call a “swarm effect” these days with certain issues; I think the internet definitely magnifies this phenomenon. Another consequence is that memory of certain events gets ever shorter as the news cycle spins faster and faster. The Singularity is near!!!.
Update: Guido Fawkes has a delicious twist on this whole business about “workfare” – it involves the Guardian.
A vast amount of data at US-based intelligence and research organisation, Stratfor, has been stolen by the group styling itself “Anonymous”. As reported today, WikiLeaks has, or is in the process of, publishing millions of emails written by persons at that organisation over a 7-year period.
And Stratfor’s CEO, George Friedman, has resigned. Er, no he hasn’t – it was a fake story, apparently. Curiouser and curiouser.
“I like hearing when companies pay the price for lax security, but in the case of Stratfor, proving that someone’s security is weak by spilling everyone’s details is like peeing your pants to prove your parents aren’t supervising you. It might feel good and warm at first, but you ultimately end up being the loser.”
So writes a person called Michael Lee. His article focuses on Anonymous’ actions. He continues:
“Stratfor is one of the latest companies allegedly targeted by Anonymous. The breach, which began to make headlines on Christmas day in the US, resulted in the loss of 200GB worth of data and ultimately the publication of its customers’ emails, credit card numbers, and corresponding verification numbers and addresses.”
And this:
“The hackers wanted to release the credit card details because they belonged to “rich and powerful oppressors”. But even the author behind the release stated that of the 860,000, just 50,000 email accounts were from military or government domains. How many of those 50,000 were even responsible for oppressing anyone? And even if all 50,000 were, was it really worth ruining the privacy of 810,000 other likely innocent bystanders?”
Publishing the details of housands of credit card details, addresses and other important information has nothing to do with holding the rich and powerful to account. And in any event, being rich is not, in and of itself, a legitimate reason for a bunch of hackers to claim that wholesale theft of data is somehow in the “public interest”.
Now WikiLeaks, run by Julian Assange, is involved. As some regulars might know, unlike some other Samizdata contributors, I consider WikiLeaks, and those who aid and abet its publication of such private data, to be near-criminal in its recklessness. It has put journalists’ sources in jeopardy, or it least is careless about them in some cases, which is hardly grounds for celebration by anyone who takes freedom of expression seriously. This story from Africa is particularly troubling.
This item by the BBC shows how WikiLeaks does not give a damn about the damage it does so long as it can claim to be striking a blow against organisations it dislikes:
“Here we have a private intelligence firm, relying on informants from the US government, foreign intelligence agencies with questionable reputations and journalists,” Wikileaks founder Julian Assange told Reuters news agency. “What is of grave concern is that the targets of this scrutiny are, among others, activist organisations fighting for a just cause.”
Well it may be that the final sentence has some basis in truth, but as Assange surely knows, a lot of journalists get sources inside large organisations for their stories, be they government civil servants or company types. An investigative journalist looking into corporate or government activities could not operate without such contacts, even in a world where Freedom of Information legislation operates. And there is a real risk that serious sources will be blown and their careers ruined by indiscriminate publication of such vast amounts of information. The key word here is “indiscriminate” – there is no sign of any attempt to filter, let alone consider how some of this data could fall into the wrong hands and cause harm to innocents.
In case anyone brings up the matter, the leak of such a vast number of emails, and hacking of data about hundreds of thousands of credit card details, is hardly the same as say, the discovery of emails at the University of East Anglia that confirmed suspicions that AGW alarmists were playing fast and loose with the evidence. In that case, a Freedom of Information Act request was used to find out about the emails. In other words, a proper process was insisted upon. And I am not aware that global warming skeptics have tried to hack Al Gore’s bank account details.
And now it appears, in an update, that some pranksters are trying to claim that a person has resigned from his job when he hasn’t. This is all getting very juvenile.
“He writes as though his prose has been fed through Google translate. Twice. Alas, discerning his meaning remains possible when it would plainly be better for him if it were not. He is not in Kissinger’s class. But he is still youngish and so there is time yet for his prose to develop a thicker crust of unintelligibility that would be a fitting match for his statesmanlike grandeur and all the rest of that sort of thing.”
Allan Massie.
The Google remark is particularly good. That must hurt. What an utter buffoon Mr Penn is. And humourless, as the creators of Team America: World Police discovered.
“Romney is right about the futility of many current policies, but being offended by irrationality is insufficient. Santorum is right to be alarmed by many cultural trends but implies that religion must be the nexus between politics and cultural reform. Romney is not attracting people who want rationality leavened by romance. Santorum is repelling people who want politics unmediated by theology. Neither Romney nor Santorum looks like a formidable candidate for November.”
– George Will
A few weeks ago I went to see The Iron Lady, a film based on the life – so we are led to believe – of Margaret Thatcher. I have been slack at writing up my thoughts about it, and there have been a number of good reviews already, with one of the best coming from an old Thatcher friend and confidant, John O’Sullivan, who now writes over at National Review. His thoughts chime very closely with mine, particularly on what I thought was the least convincing aspect of the film, namely, its portrayal of Denis Thatcher:
“If “Denis” is not Denis, then, who is he? As a hallucination produced by her mind/imagination/conscience, he is presumably a reflection of the inmost “feelings” that, as she boldly tells her doctor, she distrusts (preferring “thoughts”). But has anybody heard Mrs. Thatcher express the “feelings” relayed through “Denis,” either today or before she began to suffer the ravages of age? None of her friends or former colleagues can remember her doing so. Nor do they ring true as typically “her.” And that being the case, “Denis” is really a ventriloquist’s dummy for the scriptwriter and director.”
Some of the criticisms of the film that I have read seem to miss the point, and I note that O’Sullivan shares my view. For instance, he does not mock the film for not giving us a lot more background detail on the issues that shaped Mrs Thatcher’s time in office, such as the trades union struggles, inflation, economic sclerosis, the Cold War, the euro, and so on. Of course, a filmmaker can paint in subtle, Monet-style dabs rather than try and impose a massive history lesson. I don’t blame the producers and directors for not going in for a lot of detail.
Of course, I get the feeling that some of the younger generation, or those from far afield, who had not read up much about the Thatcher administration, might find some of the details a bit confusing. For instance, if so many of the senior Tories were such patrician snobs, how come she won the leadership against, say, the late Willie Whitelaw or Ian Gilmour? The reason, as O’Sullivan explains, is that the rank and file of the Tories, and many MPs, admired her and were more in tune with her brand of politics. But it makes for better drama to show this Lincolnshire lass, with her hats and elocution-lesson accent, surrounded by a sea of gibbering Etonians.
In general, though, I still found the film to be absorbing, and with clear sympathy for its subject, if not for all of the things that happened under Margaret Thatcher’s government. Meryl Streep’s performance is extraordinary as an example of an actress at the height of her powers. It is downright eerie at times.
As a final point, there is the legitimate concern that it is wrong to make such a film about a person suffering from such ill-health when its subject is still alive. Those who make that argument have a point. I respect, for example, the decision of Charles Moore, official biographer of Margaret Thatcher, not to publish his book until she has stepped off this mortal coil. But then Mr Moore is a High Tory gentleman. People who make films, by and large, are not.
The other day I wrote a slightly lighthearted short item about the use of drones (in this case, by civilians). But it is clear that the use of these things, such as by the Coalition forces in the Middle East, for example, or by other agencies of states and private entities, raises a number of important ethical, military and related points. Over at the Cato Institute, there is an interesting collection of articles on this matter, which I recommend if you have the time to go through them.
An issue that bothers me, although it is not clear what the solution is, is when terrorist forces get their hands on such things and put WMDs in them. We cannot just assume that this is the stuff of Hollywood movies – the threat must be plausible in the not-so-distant future and I imagine and hope that our own defence forces are thinking about what to do about it. Another serious worry is that if we can send thousands of remotely controlled aircraft or sea vessels and destroy targets without putting our own humans in danger, that might encourage governments to get increasingly arrogant and reckless in the projection of force. (Think of how British forces thought they could easily control most of Africa via the Maxim gun, only to find how this technology would eventually be thrown at them in the First World War).
And this book, Wired For War, is an eye-popping tour around the use of modern technology and how it will effect warfare, including issues surrounding non-state actors. But remember, before getting nightmares, that the impact of this new tech will not, in terms of its impact, be necessarily any more severe than say the development of the muzzle-loading gun, the ironclad warship or the helicopter. And principles of self defence and the need to stand up to bullies while having the humility to realise the limits of state action, are unchanged.
“We have become keener on being individuals, or at most small tribes in our communities. When we are asked directly about which class we belong to, we reply politely, but wearily, and play the game for old times’ sake. The whole thing is now a bit of a charade. Snobbery still exists, but it is comical or pathetic and no longer has a cutting edge. I would argue that we are now a nation of cultures rather than a nation of classes. If we look at the passion with which people describe what they do in their leisure time, you have a truer picture of our society today. That’s where the energy is; that’s who we are now.”
– Melvyn Bragg.
For the benefit of non-Brits, I should point out that Bragg is one of those fixtures of the UK media/culture scene who has been around since forever on TV programmes such as the South Bank Show; he was a pal of some of the New Labour types in the 90s and Noughties; he has been a novelist, TV personality and part of the “Great and Good” who play a role in the state-backed arts world. Definitely not a Samizdata sort of guy, although he does say some perceptive things in the article I link to here.
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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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