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.
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The Guardian wished to host a debate on the question ‘Is there a gay gene?’
In the spirit of modern scientific enquiry, the experts to whom the newspaper turned in order to examine this question were Julie Bindel, a freelance journalist and political activist, and Paul Burston a journalist and author of the novel The Gay Divorcee.
I have little knowledge and no very strong opinion on the question. We will find out one day and I suspect the answer will be complex. No strong opinion, but I was gripped by their debate. Not because of their insights into genetics, obviously. Their examination of their own memories and feelings as gay people, though unable to provide an answer to the question of whether there is a gene for homsexuality, did at least provide two “survey responses”, so to speak, to the broad question of whether homosexuality is inborn or acquired, a question which might well be partly answerable by self examination by homosexuals. Correction, one survey response. Julie Bindel just said that people cannot remember being babies. I did not see the relevance of this.
She also seemed to resent any attempt to have the question she was there to debate researched by anyone who might actually be able to answer it, judging by the scare quotes she put around “cause” and “condition” in the second paragraph of her article. (‘And despite the obsession of some scientists to find a “cause” for our “condition”…‘) She felt all that was her gig, I suppose.
No, what really fascinated me about this debate was the the assumption shared by both that the way to determine what is true is to decide which hypothesis best advances their political goals. Even that was interpreted in a narrow, tactical sense, and in a shape determined by their opponents. Bindel writes,
So when people say “If being gay was a choice then why would we choose to live a life where oppression, violence and discrimination are inevitabilities?”, I say to them so is being a feminist in countries where sexism exists, but they still exist and persevere. It is about wanting to be part of creating a better world.
Some gay people might feel that finding a gay gene might diminish prevalent homophobia, but this is naive. Racism has not diminished because we know that blackness or whiteness is genetic.
Burston counters:
What concerns me is that, all too often, people who claim that homosexuality is a choice are the same people who stand in the way of lesbian and gay equality. If it’s a choice, they argue, then we only have ourselves to blame.
Proof by Aspiration. Disproof by Bad Company. Ms Bindel and Mr Burston may oppose each other, but both have understood the spirit of the age.
James Rummel of Chicagoboyz posted this sad but telling photo essay about what happened when a hobo moved into a shed next to a restaurant that had closed down.
Strictly speaking, I wouldn’t call this a tragedy of the commons, more a tragedy of the consequence of poorly enforced property rights. The events James Rummel describes could just as easily happen here; the recent changes in the law that made squatting in residential properties a criminal offence do not apply to commercial buildings. Of course squatters can be evicted by civil proceedings as before, but it is not an easy process.
I would guess that the sympathies of most Samizdata readers will be with the property owner – and so they should be. To be stuck with a deteriorating building that is costing you money every day that goes by is no joke. Quite soon, I would guess, a point of no return is passed beyond which it becomes uneconomical to even try to make the building attractive to a potential buyer or tenant, particularly if, as in this case, someone is actively subverting any attempt to do that. To rub salt in the wound, you can bet that all your nice well-meaning neighbours are tut-tutting at what a heartless slum landlord you are, leaving that fine building to decay. Large numbers of people apparently do believe that landlords let buildings decay for the fun of it. Here are some of them, in the comments to another Guardian article by the same Ally Fogg whose article about the man arrested for burning a poppy I was praising the other day.
However sympathy need not be a zero sum game. Sympathy for the landlord should not preclude sympathy for the homeless man. Many factors can make a man or woman homeless; drink, drugs, unemployment and shattered relationships among them. It is also possible, or even probable, that the hobo’s plight, as much as the landlord’s, was ultimately caused by official contempt for property rights. Henry Hazlitt’s “Economics in One Lesson” is more than half a century old now, but the lesson still hasn’t been learned.
It may reach a point where many landlords not only cease to make any profit but are faced with mounting and compulsory losses. They may find that they cannot even give their property away. They may actually abandon their property and disappear, so they cannot be held liable for taxes. When owners cease supplying heat and other basic services, the tenants are compelled to abandon their apartments. Wider and wider neighborhoods are reduced to slums. In recent years, in New York City, it has become a common sight to see whole blocks of abandoned apartments, with windows broken, or boarded up to prevent further havoc by vandals. Arson becomes more frequent, and the owners are suspected.
That passage was describing the effect of rent controls. Other restrictions on the property rights of landlords, such as ever-stricter demands as to maintenance and compulsory inspections, making it extremely difficult to evict a non-paying tenant, or forbidding tenancies with short notice periods even by mutual agreement, work a little more slowly but get to the same sorry result in the end. When the government penalises landlords it also penalises tenants and those who would like to be tenants but cannot find a place to rent.
I did not write what follows. It was sent to me by my regular correspondent, Niall Kilmartin. – NS
When I first started reading Edmund Burke, it was for the political wisdom his writings contained. Only many years later did I start to benefit from noticing that the Burke we know – the man proved a prophet by events and with an impressive legacy – differed from the Burke that the man himself knew: the man who was a lifelong target of slander; the one who, on each major issue of his life, gained only rare and partial victories after years or decades of seeing events tragically unfold as he had vainly foretold. Looking back, we see the man revered by both parties as the model of a statesman and thinker in the following century, the hero of Sir Winston Churchill in the century after. But Burke lived his life looking forwards:
– On America, an initial victory (repeal of the Stamp Act) was followed by over 15 years in the political wilderness and then by the second-best of US independence. (Burke was the very first member of parliament to say that Britain must recognise US independence, but his preferred solution when the crisis first arose in the mid-1760s was to preserve – by rarely using – a prerogative power of the British parliament that could one day be useful for such things as opposing slavery.)
– He vastly improved the lot of the inhabitants of India, but in Britain the first result of trying was massive electoral defeat, and his chosen means after that – the impeachment of Warren Hastings – took him 14 years of exhausting effort and ended in acquittal. Indians were much better off, but back in England the acquittal felt like failure.
– Three decades of seeking to improve the lot of Irish Catholics, latterly with successes, ended in the sudden disaster of Earl Fitzwilliam’s recall and the approach of the 1798 rebellion which he foresaw would fail (and had to hope would fail).
– The French revolutionaries’ conquest of England never looked so likely as at the time of his death in 1797. It was the equivalent of dying in September 1940 or November 1941.
It’s not surprising that late in his life he commented that the ill success of his efforts might seem to justify changing his opinions. But he added that “Until I gain other lights than those I have”, he would have to go on being true to his understanding.
Of course, the background to these thoughts is reflecting on the US election result. Reflecting on how much worse it was for Burke is consoling. Choosing to be truthful in politics often means choosing to be justified by long-term events not short-term elections.
Two weeks before, I’d have guessed a Romney victory with some confidence, but the night before the election, I realised – rather to my surprise – that I expected Obama to win. I took myself to task over these negative thoughts, but it made no difference: I still expected Obama to win. On Wednesday morning, I was glad that being British gave me some feeling of insulation from it (not that our own government has been anything to shout about for a long time – shout at, maybe), although I fear the ill consequences will not all be confined to the far side of the pond.
Burke was several times defeated politically – sometimes as a direct result of being honest – and later (usually much later) resurged simply because his opponents, through refusing to believe his warnings, walked into water over their heads and drowned, doing a lot of irreversible damage in the process. Even when this happened, he was not quickly respected. By the time it became really hard to avoid noticing that the French revolution was as unpleasant as Burke had predicted, all the enlightened people knew he was a longstanding prejudiced enemy of it, so “he loses credit for his foresight because he acted on it”, as Harvey Mansfield put it. Similarly, when ugly effects of Obama’s second term become impossible to ignore, people like you and me will get no credit from those to whom their occurrence is unexpected because we were against him “anyway”.
Even eight years is a shorter time than any of Burke’s epochs. If the euro dies in less than another four years, maybe we should think ourselves very lucky. In our health service, the ratio of administrators to doctors and nurses passed 100% much longer ago than four years or even eight, and the NHS is still a sacred cow. Perhaps US citizens should think themselves lucky that adverse effects of ObamaCare may show soon and be noticed.
Since Burke was admired by Churchill, here’s a Churchill quote: “Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.”
And a related Burke one: “The conduct of a losing party never appears right: at least, it never can possess the only infallible criterion of wisdom to vulgar judgments – success.”
Blogger Tony Newbery of Harmless Sky tried to use the Freedom of Information Act to get the BBC to reveal who were the people present at a certain seminar whose advice led the BBC to decide to adopt a pro-AGW stance. The BBC described this decisive seminar as being graced by ‘some of the best scientific experts’. Newbery had a suspicion that there were many fewer experts and many more activists than the BBC made out. One out of the few – and I think that means one out of the one – people present at the seminar with views outside the consensus, Richard D North, said as much. Presumably North either had kept no record of the exact attendance list or had an obligation to keep it confidential.
The BBC really did not want to say. Representing himself, up against the BBC’s six lawyers, Newbery, not surprisingly, lost his case at the Information Tribunal. The fact that one of the lay judges had strong views against “deniers” probably didn’t help.
Though he had started an appeal, the point became moot when Maurizio Morabito of Omnologos found the list anyway by clever use of the Wayback Machine.
Watts Up With That, Bishop Hill, and Guido all have posts. Summary: Newbery was right.
They’re all there; Greenpeace, the New Economics Foundation, the Gaian branch of the Church of England, someone from Greenpeace China, bods from Stop Climate Chaos and Tearfund, Jon Plowman, Head of Comedy…
What? Head of Comedy? Yes. One of the aims of this series of seminars was to “take this coverage [international affairs, including climate change] out of the box of news and current affairs, so that the lives of people in the rest of the world, and the issues which affect them, become a regular feature of a much wider range of BBC programmes, for example dramas and features.”
Note that even some of the sciency sounding names and job titles listed are not exactly the hardest of the hard. According to the comments at Bishop Hill among the list there is a Senior Lecturer from the OU focussing on environmentalism and politics, a Geography PhD with an interest in conservation and human rights and a lucky undergraduate from Harvard specialising in documentary film making.
Why it matters.
Fun fact: all the four big-name resignations from the BBC over the last few days (Peter Rippon, Steve Mitchell, Helen Boaden and George Enwistle) were present. Someone somewhere (I’ve lost the link, I’m afraid) mentioned the Private Eye occasional feature “Curse of Gnome”.
Balen Report next, then!
Despite its obvious potential for oppression, for the first twenty years or so of its existence the Malicious Communications Act 1988 did not seem to do much harm. At least, if it did, I did not read about it. If I am wrong on this, tell me, but on the few occasions that I heard about prosecutions under the Act they seemed to be cases like this one where a man sent out emails purporting to be from the Foreign & Commonwealth Office in the aftermath of the 2005 tsunami falsely telling people that their relatives had been killed. That is certainly fraud, and something like assault, and I would argue that it is not a freedom of speech issue. “Malicious communication” seems a fair description.
You are not safe just because a monster sleeps. Circa 2006 the government rediscovered the Act and decided to give it some exercise. In the period 2006-2010 the number of people against whom proceedings were launched followed this pattern: 182, 251, 329, 507, 694.
The latest? Here is a story from the BBC: ‘Canterbury man arrested over burning poppy image’. He is not a Muslim apparently, and it is another reflection of the decline of free speech that my assumption that the BBC’s unnamed “Canterbury man” was left unnamed to conceal him being a Muslim was a perfectly reasonable one. In fact Linford House, 19, is a non-Muslim, white rugger bugger.
There is a good article by Ally Fogg in the Guardian: Arrested for poppy burning? Beware the tyranny of decency.
This article by Richard Webster was published in the New Statesman on 19 February 1999. I found it via this comment by TomGamble to a Guardian article by Tariq Ali on the future of the BBC published yesterday. I am astonished that both this article and the 1999 BBC programme on child abuse it criticises have scarcely been mentioned in the present scandal, since most of the same people, events and institutions are being discussed now as were discussed then. Some quotes from Richard Webster’s article follow:
On Monday 25 January 1999, immediately after Newsnight, BBC2 broadcast a documentary, A Place of Safety, about sexual and physical abuse in children’s homes in North Wales. Many who saw it found it one of the most harrowing programmes about abuse they had ever watched.
…
What the BBC did not tell us was that Brian Roberts only made his allegation of sexual abuse after watching a television programme about Bryn Estyn in 1997. This programme, which dealt with the setting up of the North Wales Tribunal, had mentioned the conviction of Peter Howarth, the deputy head of Bryn Estyn, for sexually abusing adolescents in his care. (It did not mention that Howarth, now dead, always protested his innocence, or that some of his former colleagues still believe he was wrongly convicted.)
Roberts immediately contacted the tribunal and told them that he, too, had been sexually abused by Howarth. He then made a formal statement to this effect. At this stage it was pointed out to him that Howarth had not begun working at the school until November 1973, three years after he had left. Far from being sexually abused by Howarth, Roberts had never met him.
The next witnesses to appear on the programme were Keith and Tony Gregory. Tony described a regime where physical abuse was commonplace. He said: “You’d let it happen to you. You’d let the staff punch you in the face, or in the stomach, or throw things at you.” He went on to make even more serious claims, including that he had seen Peter Howarth sexually abusing one of the residents.
What the BBC did not tell us was that Tony Gregory had also given evidence to the North Wales Tribunal. One of the allegations he had made concerned a Mr Clutton who, he said, had thrown a leather football at his face so hard that it had almost broken his nose. During cross-examination it was pointed out that, although there had been a Mr Clutton on the staff of Bryn Estyn, he had left in 1974, three years before Tony Gregory had arrived.
The next witness to appear on the programme was Steven Messham. He said that on one occasion, when he had been in the sick-bay with blood pouring from his mouth, he had been buggered by Howarth as he lay in bed. He said that on another occasion he was asked to take a hamper of food to Howarth’s flat, where he was buggered by Howarth over the kitchen table.
What the BBC did not tell us was that Messham claims he was sexually abused by no less than 49 different people. He also says he has been physically abused by 26 people. In 1994 the Crown Prosecution Service declined to bring his allegations against Howarth to court. None of his allegations has ever resulted in a conviction. In 1995 one of his most serious sexual allegations was rejected by a jury after barristers argued that it was a transparent fabrication.
ADDED LATER: In fairness to Mr Messham, I would like to say that I have no doubt that he was abused when living at Bryn Estyn,and my impression is that he is not a deliberate fabricator as the late Mr Webster implied he was in this article. Unfortunately I don’t believe that Mr Messham can distinguish between true and false memories any more. My point in posting about this article is that the BBC’s recent failure in due diligence when reporting abuse claims by Mr Messham and other former residents of Bryn Estyn is the second time this has happened.
The media’s reckless haste to say that a senior Tory was a paedophile and its decade-long reluctance, until the Times broke ranks and the story, to report the grooming gangs of Pakistani descent that were operating in South Yorkshire both have the same root cause.
The BBC is like a drunk zig-zagging down the street, throwing up on the left because last time he threw up on the right.
It declined to run a Newsnight programme alleging that one of its own dead stars, Jimmy Savile, carried out multiple acts of child sexual abuse, on grounds of insufficient evidence. The evidence was sufficient for ITV, which broke the story.
Facing criticism for its timidity from all sides someone at the BBC had a really great idea about how to make amends… run a Newsnight programme alleging that someone else carried out multiple acts of child sexual abuse, and do it on near as dammit no attempt to gather evidence whatsoever. And this time pick someone still alive and able to sue because it’s more glorious that way. The makers of the programme seem to have thought that by not actually naming Alistair McAlpine in so many words they would be immune from the laws of libel. You would think that the training of journalists (the BBC’s is meant to be world class) would include the fact that any indirect statement capable of being understood by the average reader is by that very fact capable of bearing a defamatory imputation.
The left wing Guardian comes out better than most in this affair; it said on November 9th that this was a case of mistaken identity.
One can see the appeal of this story from the BBC’s point of view. Third, it would be a belated show of anti-paedo crusading zeal; second it would add weight to the BBC’s “everybody was at it in the 70s” defence of its record in allowing Savile to get away with his crimes for decades, despite persistent rumours and allegations; and first, oh, very much first, Lord McAlpine was a senior Tory from the Thatcher era. That made the story too good to check. Specifically, to good to waste time either with contacting Lord McAlpine, who might have mentioned if asked that he lived in the South of England during the period in which he was alleged to be regularly abusing boys in North Wales, or with showing a picture of Lord McAlpine to the man who claimed to have been abused by him, Steve Messham. Having now seen a picture, Mr Mesham has stated that Lord McAlpine was not the man whom he alleges abused him.
So now Entwistle’s gone. ITV would be looking good in comparison were it not for the efforts of Phillip “Paedofinder General” Schofield. Really, one would expect no better from the BBC’s top investigative team but what is the world coming to when you can’t even trust ex-children’s TV presenters to back up their allegations? While it is true that the internet has made it quicker to research a story, three minutes is even now not usually considered quite time enough.
The BBC and ITV have made what may turn out to be a very expensive mistake (and I doubt that the Guardian’s George Monbiot has slept well these last few nights), but it would be unfair to lambaste the media and let their audience off scot-free. Why do so many people seem to flip between denial and paranoia with no intervening pause for thought? What is it about the human mind that seems to prefer any extreme to the idea of judging each individual case on its individual facts?
They say that’s what Margaret Thatcher said, the day she fell. I was in the small crowd that watched as the car brought her back from the Commons to Downing Street, a self-conscious little crowd, split about fifty-fifty between sympathisers and opponents, the sort of crowd from which occasional shouts pop out like kittens nervously venturing forth from a cardboard box. I did not shout either to jeer or console; I was only there because at the time I worked in the Treasury building in the next street and wanted to see a little history being made.
It might cheer up any American readers saddened by the result of the recent US election to recall that the first shot in the fusillade that brought the Prime Minister down was this:
On 1 November 1990 Geoffrey Howe, the last remaining member of Thatcher’s original 1979 cabinet, resigned from his position as Deputy Prime Minister over her refusal to agree to a timetable for Britain to join the European single currency.
Howe thought he was making straight the path down which the forces of modernity would march, but he didn’t know the future any more than Thatcher did, or you, or I. I’ll tell you something, though, his political delusion on 1 November 1990 regarding the desirability of currency union looks a lot more foolish now than her personal delusion that she would still have the key to No.10 Downing Street a few weeks later.
That’s the trouble with the future. It won’t stay put.
Today we are hearing much (in tones of glee or despair) about how “a permanent Democratic majority” is emerging, an oligarchy dispensing patronage to fiefdoms of class and race that will only fall when the money runs out, and then with vast misery and perhaps bloodshed. Similar predictions are made for the UK and other developed countries. I do fear that, but a tempering memory, again from my Treasury days in the early nineties, is of seeing earnest policy papers written by Conservative MPs who worried that in order to preserve democracy it might be needful for the Conservative party to split into two, because it was obvious that Labour was never getting back in.
I cannot say quite what I am aiming to do in this post, other than possibly bore some harried souls into tranquility with my recollections des élections perdues and similar political ups and downs. Just saying, it’s a funny old world.
“The People have spoken, the bastards.”
– Attributed to Dick Tuck.
Goodness, who could have guessed that an official announcement telling people hit by a natural disaster to come and get oodles of free stuff, then telling the resulting crowd that their turn would not come for eight hours would cause any trouble?
A Cuomo-administration source blamed the mix up on the military.
“They told us. We simply conveyed the information provided by them,” the source said. “We had nothing to do with the execution. We didn’t select the sites. It wasn’t our trucks. It wasn’t our people. It’s not our fault.”
Cuomo’s office took the offer off its Web site later in the day.
Heaven preserve public order from its defenders. Still, one must admit that without the government and the military there would be anarchy on the streets.
At least the citizens were protected from ‘price gouging’.
A year ago today I posted Discussion Point XXXVI
What will happen to the Euro? I am not asking “what should happen”, but what will happen. Take this opportunity to put your predictions on the internet, and later be hailed as a true prophet or derided as a false one.
Come, take your bows, or your lumps, and predict anew. The fat lady has not yet sung.
You may have heard that the Yanks are having some sort of election.
You may have even heard that a minor celebrity called Lena Dunham made a political advertisement in support of the candidacy of Mr Obama. This production gave rise to hostile comment from Mr Romney’s supporters, which the Democrats claim was motivated by prudery but the Republicans claim was motivated by disquiet at Ms Dunham’s apparent assumption that the main hope of American maidens is to receive their lord’s seigneurial favour and be kept by him thereafter.
Admit it, though, the ad is funny. She has great comic timing, and the way she rattles out her spiel at speed while still managing to do recognizable parodies of the way people really talk shows she has all the observational skills one would expect from a talented scriptwriter. That is an aspect of the ad which has received less attention than it should. Ms Dunham’s particular gift is meant to be that she can write a script that reflects how women live today, on the understanding that ‘women’ means urban American women of her own class and race.
So Lena Dunham the great observer went out and observed this. Listen from 0:30 for the next five seconds:
It’s a fun game to say, “who are you voting for?” and they say, “I don’t want to tell you,” and you say, “No, who are you voting for?” and they go, “Guess.”
So even among the sort of people who Lena talks to there are enough Romney voters who don’t want to say so for her to find that coy response worth parodying? That could explain certain oddities in the polls.
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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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