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]
|
Who’s the coolest? Terry Deary, the author of “Horrible Histories” or Lars the Emo Kid?
Deary: “Attack the elite. Overturn the hierarchy.”
Lars: “I’ve got so much passion in my body that I just wanna … kill you!”
Deary: “I started challenging authority at school, really, and just kind of never stopped.”
Lars: “I’m just so complicated that you’d never understand me.”
Deary: “It’s why I’m dangerous; inculcating rebel ideas into the minds of innocent young people using humour.”
Lars: “I got the cops called in on me last week because I walked outside with a gun and professed my love to a flower.”
Thanks for doing Horrible Histories, Mr Deary. As I said in 2005, when my then eight year old son asked me “Who is your favourite Habsburg?”, I knew that was £200 we could afford after all. He literally read those magazines to pieces; we still have them in their free cardboard holders, and the best-loved issues are reduced to stacks of flaky individual sheets of paper, like illustrated filo pastry.
Furthermore, Mr Deary, I have a lot of sympathy with your views on education and its ruination by twonks in government, or would if I thought you meant them, though could I just add that it is not without the bounds of human variety for trigonometry, chemistry or French to turn out to be “the skills you are going to need.” Now please stop being such a poseur. You are not Han Solo. Lars is cooler than you.
North Wales Police have issued a (probably illegal) “dispersal order” banning unaccompanied teenagers from Bangor in the evenings. They say it is not a blanket ban. The words of the order say it is.
Ellie May O’Hagan opposes it because it makes teenagers feel bad, and because it would have made her feel bad when she was a teenager:
For the 13-year-old me, a curfew would have meant more isolation, more casting adrift, a stronger sense that the town in which I lived didn’t really care about my place in it. I might have felt frustrated that a lack of youth services forced me on to the street, and then that my presence there automatically made me deviant. Then I might have decided not to care about a city that didn’t care about me.
Keith Towler, the Children’s Commissioner for Wales opposes it because it makes people have bad feelings towards teenagers:
“It demonises under 16s, isolates them from their communities, alienates them from police and spreads the misconception all young people are troublemakers.”
There is talk of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission opposing it because it is discrimination. At least they won’t have far to toddle. The EHRC has an office in Bangor.
I am glad all these worthies and unworthies oppose the curfew. It needs opposing. But it saddens me that nobody opposes it on the grounds of how dare they. How dare they stop people who have committed no crime from walking or standing in the public street? In the case of a shopping centre or a nightclub I vehemently support the right of the proprietors to exclude whomsoever they wish. I also support, if more cautiously, the right of small areas to set local rules and covenants as to whether alcohol is permitted, rules about noise and similar constraints. But North Wales Police have exactly as much a right to expel teenagers from a public space as North Wales teenagers have a right to expel the police.
Bob Neill MP, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for the Department for Communities and Local Government, has written to all local authority leaders.
Yes, I know, be still my beating heart, a post about local government. I will try to keep it brief and malicious, like Bob Neill’s letter.
Remember how John Prescott’s Standards Board for England curbed freedom of speech for local councillors under the guise of “standards”?
Remember how its supposedly reformed local sucessors demanded that councillors “show respect and consideration for others”? This meant, for example, that John Dixon, a Cardiff councillor visiting London who tweeted while passing the Scientologist church in Tottenham Court Road that he just hurried past “in case the stupid rubs off” was reported to the local Standards Board. He was cleared, but as so often, and as the Scientologist who reported him knew very well, the process is the punishment.
Well, the local Standards Boards have in their turn been abolished and new rules come in tomorrow. I have not studied them in detail and am slightly less likely to do so than to gnaw off my own legs. They will probably go bad in their turn. The new rules, not my legs. But just for today, I find myself happy about this part of Bob Neill’s letter:
However, given the importance that the new arrangements are, and are clearly perceived to be, a wholly fresh start we are minded to make further provision so that any former member of a standards committee appointed under the transitional arrangements as an independent person can hold that office only until 30 June 2013.
So we bid farewell today to some quangocrats. And just for once the revolving door that smoothly glides in front of such people as it leads them from one sinecure to the next has stuck.
No, I don’t mean the US Supreme Court. The lads were doing their best. If they got a bit obsessed on the question of whether Obamacare was constitutional rather than whether it was a bad idea, you can’t really blame them. Obsessing on constitutionality is what they are paid for.
The court that is pre-eminent among the “many, many things in this so-termed civilization of ours which would be mightily improved by a once over lightly of the Hiroshima treatment”, as Robert Heinlein once put it, is Doncaster Crown Court, particularly when presided over by Judge Jacqueline Davies. It was she (styled ‘Her honour Judge Jacqueline Davies'”) who in November 2010 found against Paul Chambers in his appeal against conviction for “menace” for jokingly saying on Twitter that he was going to blow up an airport if it did not reopen quickly enough after being closed by snow. He did not say this to anyone at the airport, I remind you, he said it to the internet friend he was flying to meet. Then some security loser decided to reenact the story about the old woman who rings up the police to say her neighbour is standing naked at his window. If you recall, the cop asks sympathetically whether she is very shaken up. “Dreadfullly,” she says, “I was so shocked when I saw it, I nearly fell right off the stepladder.” Only this time the police thought the joke would end better with an arrest.
Supported by, among many others, the comedians Stephen Fry and Al Murray – good for them – Paul Chambers has appealed again and a High Court hearing was held yesterday. Judgement has been reserved for a later date. Now it is our turn on this side of the pond to get tense about a judicial decision affecting liberty.
Just warning you guys….
You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m going to be sure. From orbit.
How rightly horrified people would be if a prime minister were to publicly “name and shame” someone for sexual behaviour that he, the prime minister, found “morally repugnant” but which was not illegal. For the first couple of decades after its decriminalisation in 1967 homosexuality would have fallen in that category in the opinion of most British adults. Adultery still does fall into that category. I am pretty sure Cameron claims to find adultery morally repugnant, so let us hear his reasons for not making public denunciations of all the adulterous celebs out there in the same way that he has denounced Jimmy Carr for tax avoidance. And if it is right for him to denounce adulterous celebrities he should also denounce adulterous cabinet ministers and Tory donors, of course. If he would recoil from this course (and to be fair, he probably would) then he ought to be able to understand what is wrong with the man given the highest power in the land publicly denouncing as immoral the legal financial behaviour of a named individual.
The Times‘s behaviour in this affair has been disgusting, too. By all means write features denouncing tax avoidance – personally I think tax avoidance is morally neutral at worst, and more often good, but I recognise that opinions differ – and I would say that using already-public sources such as company accounts to expose the behaviour of individuals to public hostility is within the rights of a free press even when my sympathies are with the person exposed. One citizen slagging off another citizen is a very different thing from the prime minister slagging off a citizen. But the witchunting smirk of the Times‘s coverage makes me sick. Celebrity exposés for the people who think they are above celebrity exposés. And the witchunting howl of the Guardian‘s coverage as its writers scrambled like hyenas for the scraps left over from the Times‘s kill make me even more sick. These are the same people who were so high-minded about the press intrusions into privacy cited at the Levenson enquiry.
The original meaning of “bully” in the phrase bully pulpit was merely “wonderful”, i.e. that high office gave the holder a wonderful high platform from which he could reach a wide audience with his sermons. Nonetheless I have little doubt that from long before the time President Theodore Roosevelt first coined the term the bully pulpit has been used for bullying in the modern sense. The very fact that a prime minister or president potentially has the power to do harm to a private individual ought to clamp shut the leader’s mouth. No such scruples stopped Tony Blair from joining in the mob that got Glenn Hoddle fired from his job as England football manager for his religious beliefs, but then Cameron always has said he was the heir to Blair.
Decent silence ought to be kept by the great even more firmly in the case of a private citizen’s tax matters than in sexual matters or matters of belief, because a modern democratic state has largely ceased to employ mutaween or inquisitors (“diversity advisors” aside), but it does employ an army of tax collectors, and the prime minister or president is at the head of that army. A responsible ruler would be horrified by the thought that a careless word against an individual might well cause servile tax officials to attempt to win the ruler’s favour by focussing on that individual.
From Media Law by Geoffrey Robertson, Q.C. and Andrew Nicol, Q.C., I quote:
The arcane offence of scandalum magnatum was created by a statute of 1275 designed to protect “the great men of the realm” against discomfiture from stories that might arouse the people against them. The purpose of criminal libel was to prevent loss of confidence in government. It was, essentially, a public order offence, and since true stories were more likely to result in breaches of the peace, it spawned the aphorism “The greater the truth, the greater the libel.” Overtly political prosecutions were brought in its name, against the likes of John Wilkes, Tom Paine and the Dean of St Asaph. Truth is not a defence, unless the defendant can convince a jury that publication is for the public benefit. The burden of proof lies on the defendant, who may be convicted even though he or she honestly believed, on reasonable grounds, that what was published was true and a matter of public interest.
Some of our readers are learned in the law of the land. I appeal to you, find a way to bring a prosecution against divers great men of the realm, to whit David William Donald Cameron and Daniel Grian Alexander. Should not the law apply equally to great and small? Find grounds to bring suit against Cameron and Alexander for their criminal libel against James Anthony Patrick Carr, against whom said Cameron and Alexander, abusing their office, did arouse the fury of the mob despite Carr having broken no law.
D-MYST was formed by young people in the city who were concerned that they were being targeted by tobacco companies in their favourite films. They launched a campaign called ‘Toxic Movies’, to put the spotlight on the issue, and have gained international publicity for their cause.
D-MYST members say that taking smoking out of youth-rated movies is not about censorship – but is about asking film-makers to think again before they make films which young people can see, which contain smoking.
– the SmokeFree Liverpool “youth group”, D-MYST (Direct Movement by the Youth SmokeFree Team).
Inspiring is it not, the young people spontaneously coming together in their milk bars and discothèques to defend the innocence of their favourite films that they love to watch of a Saturday morning? Perhaps one could even make a film aimed at the “youth market”, as I believe it is called, depicting the kids’ plucky struggle, interspersed by lively songs and numbers from some popular beat combo. It would show how they damn darn well went out there and got funding from a Quasi Autonomous Non Governmental Organisation called SmokeFree Liverpool who in turn got funding from an NHS Primary Care Trust who in turn got funding from the Department of Health who in turn got funding from the taxpayer.
A nasty, cynical man called Christopher Snowdon wrote a report called Sock Puppets that said “D-MYST is the very model of an astroturf group”, and that the story of it being formed by the youth of Liverpool was “slightly implausible”. Wrong-O. It is very implausible indeed. However it did lead me to the wonderful ABC Minors Song, which goes:
We are the boys and girls well known as
Minors of the ABC
And every Saturday all line up
To see the films we like and shout aloud with glee
We like to laugh and have our sing-song
Such a happy crowd are we
We’re all pals together
We’re Minors of the ABC.
I bet that crazy D-MYST gang would love it as a theme song!
Who do you hope wins the election in Greece today?
As a starting point for discussion, I thought the headline of this Guardian article “A Syriza victory will mark the beginning of the end of Greece’s tragedy” might well turn out to be true if Syriza do win, albeit not in the way the left wing authors expect.
It did not fit easily into my previous post but another example of a person afflicted by “… a desire to maintain the delusion that the world would heed your message if only it were allowed to hear it” is Peter Gleick, who despite having his own blog at Forbes Magazine and turning down star billing to debate his opponents at the Heartland Institute face to face persisted in his belief that they were managing to “prevent this debate”.
Incidentally, the Undebated One has been reinstated at the Pacific Institute, I see from a report in the Guardian. You will rejoice to hear that
The Pacific Institute indicated in the statement that it had found no evidence for Heartland’s charges that Gleick had forged one of several documents he released last February.
To my suprise Suzanne Goldenberg, the author of the report who until now has appeared besotted with Gleick now sounds almost like one of those cynical reporters one used to read about:
But the Institute offered no further information on the findings of the investigation, or any evidence to support the claim of having conducted a fully independent investigation. It gave no further explanation for its decision to reject Heartland’s charges that Gleick had faked a document.
Ms Goldenberg then continued to veer from side to side in the article. After Old Suzanne wrote about a Heartland plan to “spread misinformation in schools about climate change” (making no reference to the fact that the most damaging quotes on that score came from a document that she has hinted a minute ago was fake), New Suzanne lets slip, I think deliberately, that:
… when Heartland promoted the climate conference by taking out a billboard comparing believers in climate change to psychopaths like the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, a run in donors, which had been relatively modest immediately after Gleick’s exposé, spiked dramatically. Two board members resigned, almost all of those based in its Washington DC office quit, and a number of Heartland allies publicly chided the organisation
The words in bold represent a change. Until recently the Guardian line was that Gleick’s exposé had been, shall we say, misguided, but had struck a mighty blow against Heartland.
I do not think I quite qualify as an ally, but I was and am a strong supporter of the Institute in its efforts to get the truth out of Gleick, and was also one of the chiders after the Unabomber poster came out, though as you will see if you read that post and its comments many here disagree. My impression is that Ms Goldenberg and others with similar views turned with relief from defending Gleick to talking about the Kaczynski poster. Without a confession or an adverse verdict in a court of law they will never admit that Gleick lied. However I suspect the penny has dropped that their public credulity regarding an obviously fishy story, and the public excuses they made for Gleick’s admitted dishonest tactics, let alone his unadmitted ones, sent the message to the public that they may also be credulous and tolerant of dishonesty when it comes to climate science.
Declare free trade unilaterally, says Tim Worstall in the Telegraph. Good and true are his words, but since you all know that already, allow me to draw your attention to an exchange you may not have seen in the comments that manages to be both entertaining and at the same time slightly sad.
“davidaslindsay” wrote:
A perfect illustration of how there is nothing more anti-conservative than capitalism.
The Cold War is long gone, so there is no remaining need for Tories to be corralled out of fear into voting for Conservatives and other such Liberal parties
Imagine, just imagine, if a site not unlike this one in structure, if in nothing else, were to give a platform to people who recognised that there was no patriotism without economic patriotism, set within a broader appreciation of the rural, the provincial, the socially conservative, and the classically (and Classically) Christian, with the consequent pronounced aversion to global capitalism, to American hegemony, to obeisant Zionism, to wars to make the world anew, to wars generally, and so on.
Just imagine such a voice in the debate. Just imagine it. Even if only for one moment, just imagine it.
“TimWorstall” replied
David, this is a blog.
You have a blog. Thus there already is a blog which reflects such views.
Very democratic place, the internet.
What is both funny and sad about David Lindsay’s cri de coeur is that he does not just have a personal blog but has, or had in 2009, a slot in the Telegraph, a privilege that most bloggers would give their best stripy pyjamas to obtain. Lindsay’s cry of “Just imagine such a voice in the debate. Just imagine it. Even if only for one moment, just imagine it” makes him sound like a combination of Galileo facing the Inquisition and Captain Kirk trying to get the Fabrini to believe they are on a generation ship in For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky. Yet he scarcely had to stretch his imagination to conceive of a voice exactly like his being given a platform even beyond the one offered by davidaslindsay.blogspot.com. All he had to do was remember as far back as 2009.
What is the appeal of believing that you are silenced when you are given a megaphone?
Some of it is persecution envy, or to be more accurate, envy of the chance to be heroic. Mr Lindsay is of the nostalgic Right and appears to me to suffer a little from this condition but the phenomenon is most common and strong on the nostalgic Left. How they do hate being the rich, safe, privileged ones. How they love to reminisce about standing up to Thatcher, or at a pinch, their resistance during the grim Bush years. How they would have loved to have been a Freedom Rider. They would have been heroes, honest.
Some of it is a desire to maintain the delusion that the world would heed your message if only it were allowed to hear it. This thought hurts much less than the thought that the world has had ample opportunity to hear your message and heeds it not. Before you laugh at Mr Lindsay – or being realistic, slightly after – remember that (a) in so far as this is a delusion it is one he shares with us (have we not blogs? Seen the libertarian sentiments of the populace lately?) and (b) the belief that the people are being stopped from hearing minority voices by a semi-conscious conspiracy of the mainstream media is only just now ceasing to be true.
We do not quite match the faithfulness in delusion of those communists who have announced the imminence of world revolution every year for close on a century, but many of the bloggers whose writing I love most – Instapundit, Brian Micklethwait, me – have announced the imminent death of the gatekeeper every year for close on a decade. Yet there the decrepit old bastard is each new morning, bleary eyed, swaying on his feet, pretending not to know about the people who slipped past him while he was drunk and incapable the night before – but still manning his old rotten gate most of the time and just damn refusing to die.
Mind you, we were not exactly wrong about the old boy’s morbidity, just premature. He’ll turn up his toes eventually and the patient messengers of every suppressed creed with break through and be heard in all the land, only we’ll be heard most gladly because we are in the right. I hope. I think.
…Was invented by me today while we ate our supper with the patio doors wide open to admit the glorious sunshine. Unfortunately we also admitted an insanely persistent fly. Somebody really needs to miniaturise yet further a quadrotor, equip it with a little vacuum cleaner sucky mouth and an incinerator inside, fix it up to a remote control system with a joystick and send it out like a tiny hawk to swoop upon the critters and suck them to their fiery doom, preferably with a satisfying actinic flash and a buzz like the noise a lightsabre makes in Star Wars. As a by- product, the chemicals harvested from the flies’ little frazzled bodies could power the “predator drone”, as I think I might call it, unless that name is taken.
This would not be an efficient means of killing flies, nor even of using quadrotors to kill flies. To do that you would have to give the quadrotors echolocation and probably rejig them as Von Neumann machines. Inevitably they would start to evolve independently and develop a taste for human flesh, so perhaps we should stick with having a human at the controls. In future years, when the cry of tally-ho is a familiar refrain at every barbecue and picnic, raise a glass to me and send me some money.
Only it would not actually be a blood sport. Insects do not have blood, they have something called hemolymph sloshing about inside them instead. Not ichor, that was Greek gods and other sundry immortals. Hunting Greek gods with quadrotors doesn’t work, ‘cos they’re immortal.
|
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.
|
