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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“By now many will have seen the news stories reporting how an animal rights group sent up a small drone with cameras attached to take video of a group of hunters out on a pigeon shoot. The hunters responded to the drone by shooting it down.”
Classic. The author of this item, Kenneth Anderson, goes on to consider some of the legal issues posed by the use of drones not just by the military and law enforcement bodies, but private civilians.
I want one. And you can buy them on the internet. One such drone gets checked out by Technology Review.
“Nothing more poignantly reflects the collapse of the great global warming scare than the decision of the Chicago Carbon Exchange, the largest in the world, to stop trading in “carbon” – buying and selling the right of businesses to continue emitting CO2. A few years back, when the climate scare was still at its height, and it seemed the world might agree the Copenhagen Treaty and the US Congress might pass a “cap and trade” bill, it was claimed that the Chicago Exchange would be at the centre of a global market worth $10 trillion a year, and that “carbon” would be among the most valuable commodities on earth, worth more per ton than most metals. Today, after the collapse of Copenhagen and the cap and trade bill, the carbon price, at five cents a ton, is as low as it can get without being worthless.”
– Christopher Booker
A retired businessman by the name of Christopher Tappin is to be extradited to the US for allegedly trying to sell batteries for Iranian missiles. Serious stuff, you might agree. But as I read in a long Times (of London) article on Saturday (behind a paywall and no, I am not writing it all out), one of the most disturbing features of this man’s indictment in absentia is that no attempt has been made to establish, in the UK, any sort of prima facie case that he might be guilty. Instead, a grand jury in the US has ruled, apparently, that he is suspected of being involved in something dodgy. As a result, he faces two choices: admit guilt and face a short, but nevertheless, tough prison term in the US and have a criminal record for the rest of his life, or, plead not guilty and take his chances in the US legal system and face a 35-year jail term, as well as bankrupt himself in trying to get legal representation.
Even worse than the abuse of due process involved (the man apparently was not even aware of the grand jury ruling) is that the UK government, despite some alarm being raised by MPs, seems quite happy to transfer British citizens to the US in this way without any significant legal safeguards. This is all of a piece with how, as I have written before, the US is also bullying other countries in the name of halting tax evasion by forcing foreign financial institutions to undertake all kinds of onerous compliance checks to ensure that all American clients are accounted for. What makes such issues so sensitive is that this appears to be a one-way street: far more Britons, it seems, are getting packed off to the US for various alleged offences than is the case with Americans being extradited to stand trial in the UK.
It is a good feature of friendly relations between countries that there should be mutual recognition of important principles. And the cavalier treatment of certain principles of due process of law in the extradition case of this Mr Tappin character is a sign that the extradition treaty of 2003 between the US and UK is not working as intended, is oppressive, and should be scrapped or significantly reformed without delay. There may not be many votes in this issue, but it is important.
A lot of articles have been written on this subject. Here is a good item in the Daily Telegraph back in 2009.
“The late Douglas Adams once said that any technology that exists when you are born is a normal part of the world; anything invented before you turn 35 is exciting and creative; and anything invented after you turn 35 is against the natural order of things . It’s not a new development: Socrates warned against learning to write, saying it would “create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories”.
– Tom Chivers, knocking down some lazy assumptions about video games, an issue that sometimes comes up as a target by today’s puritans.
The subject gives me an excuse to re-recommend this book by Gerard Jones, now a few years’ old, that argues that a lot of video games, including violent ones, are a healthy thing for children to play.
Via Bryan Caplan at EconLog:
“It’s only human,” you cry in defense of any depravity, reaching the stage of self-abasement where you seek to make the concept “human” mean the weakling, the fool, the rotter, the liar, the failure, the coward, the fraud, and to exile from the human race the hero, the thinker, the producer, the inventor, the strong, the purposeful, the pure–as if “to feel” were human, but to think were not, as if to fail were human, but to succeed were not, as if corruption were human, but virtue were not–as if the premise of death were proper to man, but the premise of life were not.”
He’s quoting the John Galt speech out of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. I agree with Caplan that that is a great quote. And she was right: if we say “it’s only human” when we refer to someone being an asshole, or forgetful, or inconsiderate, or loses their temper, or some such, shouldn’t we also say “it’s only human” when a person is thoughtful, considerate, productive, courageous and adventurous”?
On a slightly different tack, though, I think people often use the “I am only human” when, as the use of the word “only” implies, we are talking about the limits, and inevitable fallibility of we creatures. But then again, it is precisely because of our limits and partial knowledge, that it is all the more admirable, and worthy of note, when we imperfect creatures do the right thing, do things well, and show excellent character.
“Each example of information technology starts out with early-adoption versions that do not work very well and that are unaffordable except by the elite. Subsequently the technology works a bit better and becomes merely expensive. Then it works quite well and becomes inexpensive. Finally it works extremely well and is almost free. The cell phone, for example, is somewhere between the last two stages. Consider that a decade ago if a character in a movie took out a portable telephone, this was an indication that this person must be very wealthy, powerful, or both. Yet there are societies around the world in which the majority of the population were farming with their hands two decades ago and now have thriving information-based economies with widespread use of cell phones (for example, Asian societies, including rural areas of China).”
Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near, page 469.
I like this point about agriculture at the end. A few years ago, my father, a retired farmer, showed me a satellite photograph that had been taken of our family farm, and provided by his agronomist consultant, showing which parts of a field needed more fertiliser, had better soil conditions and drainage, and so on. In two generations, the Suffolk farm had gone from a process where it took the whole of late July to late September, with 20 people, to get in the harvest, to just two guys using a massive John Deere combine harvester, some big trucks to carry the grain, and a state-of-the-art grain store with drying, filtering and cleaning equipment. And we just take it for granted that this level of technological change has happened, and is possible. So we should perhaps not be so despondent about the future.
There are all kinds of useful links on the Web to such satellite links of farmland, as well as other categories for business and scientific use. Here is the ResMap site, for instance. The Economist has a short item on the agricultural uses of space technology.
“As someone known for writing defenses of chain stores and explaining Plano, Texas, to puzzled pundits, I agree that way too many smart people, particularly on the coasts, are quick to condemn middle-American culture without understanding why people value one or another aspect of it. But they were even worse in 1963.”
– Virginia Postrel, writing a review of Charles Murray’s latest book. In a nutshell, she skewers his central thesis that America is so much more fractured than in the past. That rather depends on what the chronological starting point is.
Murray is most famous, or depending on your point of view, infamous, for his role as co-author of The Bell Curve. More recently, I waded through his tome, Human Accomplishment, which uses various metrics to measure the fecundity of Western civilisation in particular. He’s certainly not afraid of the gods of political correctness.
‘“Quantitative Easing is a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich,” he says, “It floods banks with money, which they use to pay themselves bonuses. The banks have money, and assets, so they can borrow easily. The poor guy, who is unemployed and can’t borrow, is not going to benefit from it.” The QE process pushes asset prices up, he says, which is great for those who own stocks, shares and expensive houses. “But the state is subsidising the rich. It is the top 1 per cent who benefit from Quantitative Easing, not the 99 per cent.”’
– Nassim Taleb, quoted on the Spectator’s Coffee House blog.
Tim Sandefur makes some good points on why surveillance cameras are not necessarily “Orwellian”, by pointing out that if it is intrusive to have a camera in a public street, why do people not complain if a police officer or some other official of the State is patrolling up and down? However, where I think the debate gets a bit tangled is that for many people, while CCTV is good at recording crimes, it records the incidents after they have taken place. It is less clear if these cameras have a deterrent effect in the same way that police patrols might do. CCTV did not, as far as I can tell, appreciably affect the pattern of the London mayhem of last August. Local authorities and other bodies may claim that CCTV really does cut crime, but I am not sure how reliable such statements really are. In the area where I live – Pimlico – there were a number of street robberies on women and the area has its share of CCTV (which is not surprising as the area is full of politicians, such as former defence ministers, in one case).
In summary, CCTV might not be as Big Brother as some fear, but the real problem is that it is only of limited use in deterring thugs.
Separately, I hardly ever read articles thinking through the implications of last August’s disgraceful looting, violence and mayhem. How easy we forget.
This is an astonishingly foolish idea by David Cameron, and I hope firms tell him to get lost. Forcing firms to set a quota on how many women can sit on boards may go over well with those who demand equality in some superficial way, but this is bound to cause concerns, as with any quota system set by the State, that merit will in some cases take second place to the Gods of gender equality. Apart from anything else, what the hell is the UK government – and one that has supposed to have “conservatives” in it, doing telling private firms how they should compose their management structure?
Alas, this is an administration that has been trying to fix the pay levels of private business, so it would be a natural, logical step for it to further interfere in business. Of course, David “the useless” Cameron knows all about running a business, doesn’t he? He’s had a rich experience in creating firms, running them and creating wealth. Forgive my sarcasm, but it is difficult not to take such a tone when contemplating such daftness.
Now, there may be reasons why women, for one reason or another, are under-represented on boardroom committees. It may have escaped Mr Cameron’s attention, but even in a complete free market without any distortions, women, given certain biological issues about, you know, having children, might be less willing or able, other things being equal, to get to the point where sitting on a boardroom was something they did to the same degree as men. Of course, there may also be prejudices to work against, but in a competitive marketplace, if firms are turning their backs on women out of bigotry, then more enlightened ones would surely get a clear competitive advantage by choosing people on merit, and if that means more women, all well and good. But to assume that unless half of all boardroom slots are filled by women that there has been conscious discrimination and this needs to be reversed by law, is absurd and oppressive. We have already seen the counterproductive effects of “affirmative action” (ie, discrimination) on racial grounds in the US over matters such as admission to university.
This government is proving, in some ways, to be even worse than the last one. No wonder that people now believe that we have one of the most anti-business governments for years, as is the view of Allister Heath at CityAM.
There has been plenty of commentary about concerning Charles Dickens, as it is the 200th year of his birth. Here is an entry, written back in 2006 at The Freeman, about him, which looks pretty interesting, and some of the comments (not all of which are very praiseworthy) are worth reading.
I never really quite got into reading Dickens. At school, I had to study such books as Oliver Twist and David Copperfield, but the books were studied in such a way that my teacher – very much a man of the Left – was so keen to use Dickens as an examplar of socialist fury that I was turned off. I can, of course, admire one of Dickens’ trademarks – his ability to give crazy names to his characters.
Writers such as George Orwell, GK Chesterton and the late Christopher Hitchens have written memorably about Dickens. In fact, an essay on Dickens was the last thing that the Hitch ever wrote.
I am not really sure, though, whether it is right to claim that Dickens was a man of the Left, or at least not in the terms that contemporary writers might assume. He lacked, as far as I could tell, a clear-cut system of political philosophy. Dickens was certainly a hater of what he would have called “Manchester Liberalism”, and his prose certainly helped build up that picture of the Industrial Revolution, with its ugly factories and images of downtrodden workers, that is very much how people often view the tumultuous changes in 19th Century Britain. There is, as is often the case with such people, a bit of a reactionary streak in him, too. For me, when I do come across his writings or see plays or films based on his books, there is a strong theme of sentimentality, which has tended to put me off, it has to be said. But maybe I should dust off one of his novels and see if I can see what many others have seen. At least he’s not quite as exhausting to read as Tolstoy.
At a very pleasant party in a snowy London, on Saturday evening, I got chatting to a Greek man who has been living in the UK since 1985 and as I suppose was inevitable, the subject of Greece’s financial disaster came up. He and I agreed that the policymakers and various others who deceived their country into the euro should be put into jail. But then again, one of the problems of modern democracy is that far too many voters actually want to be deceived that 2+2 = 5, that it is possible to spend more than one earns, etc. When a whole country becomes locked into living a lie, as tends to happen when a large chunk of the electorate hopes to live off another chunk, honesty is a loser strategy for a politician. Had a Greek politician said in the years immediately prior to the euro’s launch that Greece was unlikely, ahead of the Universe suffering heat death, to ever qualify for euro membership, such a person would be damned.
So it is certainly true that some of the political class (and I include central bankers in that classification) deserve to be locked up for their lies. But remember, they lied because the punishments for telling lies about economics and finance have been non-existent in many countries for a long time. I think one of the last politicians who made a point of telling the unvarnished truth to voters was Margaret Thatcher, and at the time, she was regarded as evil and “uncaring”. Another fairly honest politician was the late Sir Keith Joseph, who was dubbed the “the mad monk” for his pains.
This book by Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter, I think has obvious relevance to how a whole country can seek refuge from hard facts, as Greece seems to be doing. For a more impressionistic, sad-but-amusing tale of Greece and other countries’ financial blowups, Boomerang by Michael Lewis is an excellent page-turner. The chapter on Greece features some property speculator monks. Yes, monks.
Oh, I will get around to writing that “Iron Lady” review when I have the time.
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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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