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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If you don’t believe me, read the comments to this, this, this, or this or… do your own search of the archives for more. Note which comments get hundreds of recommendations, and which few or none.
OK, online comments are susceptible to being gamed in various ways. Do not look for statistically representative samples there. Still, if that is what the Guardian is like, just imagine what the Mail is like. (Upon inspection, slightly less angry, although it is difficult to judge.)
It did not used to be like this.
Within a few weeks of moving to my present home seventeen years ago someone mentioned that gypsies – or travellers, people made no distinction then and I will not now delve into the distinctions between Roma, Sinti, or English and Irish travellers – were camped on a nearby field. My neighbours then were a little dubious but not that bothered. I, being new, was more interested in hearing about the gypsies than the people telling me were in telling me. Nowadays? Instant, intense suspicion.
A decade back I hardly ever read about travellers or gypsies in the papers. Nowadays – well, looking at the links above, the Guardian mentioned them on February 5th, January 30th and January 21st.
Was the change in the gypsies themselves? Partly. “Welfare” has continued its steady work of ruin. I read a very fine article in the Telegraph about a decade ago which I cannot now find. It described with sadness rather than hostility how, although gypsies had lived half outside the law since time immemorial, there had at one time been countervailing incentives to build relationships of trust with settled people. The gypsies had regular circuits and seasonal work. They needed pitches, employment and customers. They needed people to remember them from last time as good workers and fair dealers. Welfare has eroded that, and their former means of making a living have gone the way of the cart horse and the tin bucket. Nor is the difficulty just that technology has moved on, it is also that the bureaucratic net of form-filling and taxes has tightened so that the casual jobs they once could do within the law must now be done outside it. As in the drugs trade, in illegal trade in labour where there can be no redress for swindling on either side, such swindling is commonplace.
But I really don’t think it is the gypsies themselves who have changed so much. What has changed in the last few years is that they have become a state-protected group. God help them. State protection is better than state persecution as cancer is better than a knife in the ribs. The scapegoat of the Bible was symbolically loaded with the sins of the people and driven out to starve in the wilderness. The anti-scapegoat of our times is symbolically bedecked with the conspicuous virtue and tolerance of the elite. Someone is set to feed it scraps so that it stays near to the common people, that their lack of virtue and tolerance may be made clear to them.
Some years ago a group of gypsies or travellers broke in and spent some time on land belonging to some people I know. They did damage, most as an accidental side effect of having broken in and lived there, and some for the hell of it, as far as anyone could tell. When hearing about this from several speakers, I noticed an interesting thing. The voices telling of the damage done and what it would cost to repair were annoyed but resigned. The real venom came into their voices when they described the police response, or rather the lack of it. The cops had hummed and hawed and then intimated that ejecting the trespassers was all too much of a political hot potato. If you want to poison a human soul with racial hatred, just do that. Tell him that the laws that burden him do not apply to them. The author of the first Guardian article to which I linked pretends in hope that we still romanticise gypsies; he cites modern authors of gypsy memoirs and George Borrow’s Lavengro and other works (here’s a fascinating snippet from Borrow on gypsy names). The commenters are not interested. What they want to talk about is planning permission: how come they need it and travellers do not. And what enemy of the gypsies could have done them as much harm as whoever thought up this?
(NB – new Special Bonus Thoughts were added to this post the morning after it was written. Scroll down.)
This will end in tears, says Bishop Hill.
Your trouble, bish, is that you are too nice. I think it’s going to be hilarious. Tough on the kiddies, maybe, but having to stand next to daddy while he does the embarrassing thing will make a man of a munchkin faster than you can say “no pressure”:
Time to Fight Back: How We Can Take on Those Who Are Sabotaging Our Response to the Climate Crisis
My partners in this effort will include the group Kids vs Global Warming, whose iMatter march aims to put a million kids in the streets on Mother’s Day to demand that our leaders address climate change as if our children’s future matters; Grist, America’s leading environmental news website; The Nation; and other organizations still to be determined.
On the ground in Washington I will be joined by local young people—activist members of Generation Hot. Our plan is to confront the climate cranks face to face, on camera, and call them to account for the dangers they have set in motion.
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Our initiative, Confront the Climate Cranks, will do just that: confront the cranks on camera and accompanied by some of the children they have put in danger. We will video all of our confrontations and then quickly make them available to the public—by posting them on YouTube and sharing them with mainstream and alternative media and the social networks of our partner organizations.
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And by conveying our message through children and parents, we can reach the ordinary Americans whose support is essential to overcoming the power of money and insider status in Washington. We hope you’ll join us.
ADDED LATER: I had some more serious thoughts overnight. Here they are. The way it is meant to work, Mark Hertsgaard’s strategy, is this: the Concerned Green Parent can attack all the more fiercely because of the presence of the kid as symbol of threatened innocence, while for the Evil Denier the presence of the child means that he or she must be very restrained in hitting back, for fear of (a) hurting the poor kid’s feelings by saying what you actually think of his daddy, and (b) being filmed doing so. Metaphorically this strategy is like firing your missiles from a school. Metaphorically, I said; it is only words – but, like firing your missiles from a school, it is an unconscious compliment to your enemies: it demonstrates your trust in them to behave well even when you do not.
In practice, however, the Hertsgaard strategy will backfire. It will backfire so painfully and so predictably that I doubt it will happen more than once, if at all. For one thing, audiences react badly to blatant emotional blackmail. If the world were just, that backblast would hit only the parent who is willing to use his or her own offspring as a combined shield and stage prop and then put the results on the internet, but the world is not just. Go onto YouTube and find some innocuous clip of a sweet little boy or girl playing the violin or something. Even then, when the subject is utterly uncontroversial, among all the nice comments saying “awww, cute” you will still find a few mean ones. How much meaner they will be when the subject is highly controversial. Not a pleasant thing for the kid to find when googling his or her own name ten years later.
That is why the ethical course is to pour scorn on this idea before it is put into practice, so it never is. We – and by “we” I mean all those who oppose green fanaticism, including anti-fanatics who do believe in climate change – do lose a potential propaganda victory thereby. Price you pay for being the good guys. At least we can enjoy directing an invigorating burst of ridicule at Mr Hertsgaard now.
ONE LAST THOUGHT AND THEN I REALLY WILL GET ME COAT: I was thinking of little kids in the two paragraphs above. The case is slightly different for older children, the clear-eyed, firm-jawed young activists of “Kids vs Global Warming” and its “partnering organizations” as mentioned in Mr Hertsgaard’s article, given that they are of an age to know what game they are participating in if they come along to one of these doorstepping sessions, and usually to know damn well that the people they waylay will hesitate to verbally strike back with full force. One does have to hold back a little for the sake of their tender young pysches – but a measured dose of ridicule for them, alongside their parents, will do them good in the end.
“Will the courts protect charities?” wails the Guardian.
Good heavens, thought I, what is this villainous threat to the Cats’ Protection League and the Distressed Gentlefolk’s Aid Association that requires the courts to protect them? And how can it be that the ability or desire of the courts to protect charities, repositories of all that is best and sweetest in this land of Albion, is even in doubt?
Trembling, I read on…
Will the courts protect charities
Yes, we already had that bit in the headline –
against cuts?
Huh? What difference do government cuts make to the cats and the gentlefolk?
Late last Friday afternoon a judge quashed a drastic programme of local authority grant reductions. This would have lopped a £10m slice from a budget which funds around 400 London-based charities and community groups.
Aaah, I see. By charities, the Guardian means “charities”. By “protect” it means “stop the elected government from doing what it was elected to do, namely cut the deficit.”
You can read the rest of the article by clicking the link at the top of the page. For those strapped for time here is a summary:
… process of consultation was flawed and unlawful … failed to meet its legal equalities duties … entire process would have to be re-run. … one of the threatened charities, Roma Support Group … current economic climate … properly assessed for their gender, disability and race equality impacts … hundreds of voluntary sector groups and tens of thousands of members of the public who would be affected … wibble … Labour-led, Tory-supported London Councils has already scaled down its cuts package … wibble wibble … proceeding with even greater cuts… Framework Housing Association … judicial review … Supporting People funding programme wibble … without proper consultation … wibble wibble … co-ordinated response to the identified needs of the poorest Londoners. Wibble! Charities funded under the scheme include homelessness groups, wibble legal and wibble centres, crime prevention charities, and cultural access wibble such as theatre companies.
Strange to see an article like this in what is still sometimes called the Torygraph:
Mortgage lenders penalising couples with children
Mortgage lenders are penalising home owners with children by reducing the amount they can borrow. The crackdown could potentially prevent them from switching to cheaper deals when interest rates rise.
Many banks and building societies have tightened their affordability criteria in light of the Financial Services Authority’s post-credit-crunch review of the mortgage market. But it has emerged that families with children are being hit hard.
Emphasis added by me. All the terms emphasised relate to a metaphor of punishment. But it is not meant to depict just punishment; the author, Teresa Hunter, apparently feels that parents who are lent less money than non-parents are having something unfair done to them. This is reinforced by having the first person quoted in the piece as saying:
“It is absolutely unfair to penalise people with children by reducing their capacity to borrow compared with a single person or a childless couple.”
The whole story is presented as being one of discrimination akin to racial discrimination. Did the author notice that there was a little financial unpleasantness in 2008 that had something to do with indiscriminate lending? Does she feel that encouraging people to to borrow more than they can afford is doing them any favours? Has she not noticed that children cost money?
There was a time when the cry of liberals everywhere was that the State should keep out of the bedroom – no longer.
Andrew Brown of the Guardian has written an article entitled Why the Cornish hotel ruling should worry conservative Christians.
I think it should worry any person who in any aspect of his or her life is a minority or who might one day be part of a minority.
A law you like is passed; it coerces those you dislike. You rejoice, you “liberals”. But the wheel turns. You do not have to die old in order to live long enough to see what was once persecuted tolerated and what was once tolerated persecuted.
To hang your head when you are not guilty is an immoral act.
“The struggle for definition is veritably the struggle for life itself. In the typical Western two men fight desperately for the possession of a gun that has been thrown to the ground: whoever reaches the weapon first shoots and lives; his adversary is shot and dies. In ordinary life, the struggle is not for guns but for words; whoever first defines the situation is the victor; his adversary, the victim. For example, in the family, husband and wife, mother and child do not get along; who defines whom as troublesome or mentally sick?…[the one] who first seizes the word imposes reality on the other; [the one] who defines thus dominates and lives; and [the one] who is defined is subjugated and may be killed.”
The quote is from Thomas Szasz, psychiatrist and libertarian. The race to get your side’s definition in first perfectly describes the frenzy of the left wing media establishment to link the murders carried out by Jared Loughner to the right, the Tea Party, and Sarah Palin. I posted about the contrast between Guardian columnist Michael Tomasky’s haste to explain Loughner’s murders and his reluctance to explain Nidal Hassan’s murders here.
Over the last few days further evidence has emerged that Loughner was (a) simply a drug-addled madman, judging from his strange pseudo-logical screeds on YouTube and (b) had began to fix his mad rage on Gabrielle Giffords in 2007, after she gave what he regarded as an inadequate answer to his question, “What is government if words have no meaning?” At that time Palin was barely known outside Alaska.
A prescient remark from Thomas Szasz, then. Yet anyone who knows anything of his work and writings will have predicted that I am about to say that an apt quote is not his only relevance to this situation. Szasz is famous for opposing the many authoritarian crimes of the psychiatric profession: among them imprisonment without trial or appeal, assaults under the name of “treatment” (such as lobotomies, electric shocks, injections of drugs against the patient’s will), and collusion with the state to define dissent and eccentricity as mental ills. All very great dangers and he was right to oppose them, as he was right to oppose the prohibition of drugs.
And yet – there is Jared Loughner and the lengthening list of those like him. Lougher was is (Why do I keep saying was? He is alive and in custody!) a drug-addled madman who killed six people. “He should have been locked up before this” does not seem an unreasonable thing to think.
Clayton Cramer is a former libertarian. His article Mental illness and mass murder contains food for thought. This 2007 post by Brian Micklethwait is also relevant. I would welcome your opinions.
In today’s Guardian Michael Tomasky has written the following article about the murder of six people and attempted murder of many others, including Congresswoman Giffords: In the US, where hate rules at the ballot box, this tragedy has been coming for a long time. Some selected extracts:
… You don’t have to believe that alleged shooter, Jared Loughner, is a card-carrying Tea Party member (he evidently is not) to see some kind of connection between that violent rhetoric and what happened in Arizona on Saturday.
… So what particular type of nut is Loughner? We don’t have a full picture yet. But we have enough of one. His coherent ravings included the conviction that the constitution assured him that “you don’t have to accept the federalist laws”. He called a female classmate who had an abortion a “terrorist”.
In sum, he had political ideas, which not everyone does. Many of them (not all, but most) were right wing. He went to considerable expense and trouble to shoot a high-profile Democrat, at point-blank range right through the brain. What else does one need to know? For anyone to attempt to insist that the violent rhetoric so regularly heard in this country had no likely effect on this young man is to enshroud oneself in dishonesty and denial.
I would like to report to you that my nation is in shock, and that we will work together to ensure that nothing like this ever happens again. Alas, neither of these things is close to true. Of course an event like this is hard to believe in the moment; but in the context of our times, it’s really not surprising at all. Last summer, a California man armed himself and set off for San Francisco with the express intent of killing liberals at a nonprofit foundation that had been pilloried by Glenn Beck and others. Only the lucky accident of his arrest en route for drunk driving prevented the mayhem then.
The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence has documented more than two dozen killings by or arrests of rightwing extremists who intended to do serious political violence since 2008. One Tennessee man killed two worshippers at a liberal church, regretting only that he had not been able to ice the 100 liberals named by author Bernard Goldberg as those most responsible for destroying America. Giffords herself received threats after voting for the healthcare reform bill, and shots were fired through the window of her district office. An event like this has been coming for a long time.
In contrast, here is the article that Michael Tomasky wrote when Major Nidal Hasan murdered thirteen people and attempted to murder many others: American, for better or worse. Some selected extracts:
We have much more to learn about Hasan before we can jump to any conclusions. A New York Times profile of him from yesterday notes that this army psychiatrist, who’d presumably heard many blood-curdling war stories, obsessively feared being sent over to Iraq or Afghanistan. But it then says that the FBI has monitored some internet postings by a certain Nidal Hasan that spoke positively of suicide bombers, comparing them to soldiers who risk their lives for their comrades. The Times didn’t know if it was the same Nidal Hasan.
For all most Americans know about Palestinian culture, Nidal Hasan could be as common a name as Dave Johnson. The Palestinian is an unknown person in the US. Jews are a part of the country and have been for decades, but average Americans pretty much know Palestinians only as suicide bombers. Sadly, for some Americans this event will reinforce an image of a people who resort first to mindless violence.
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We should assume until it’s proven otherwise that Hasan was an American and a loyal one, who just snapped, as Americans of all ethnicities and backgrounds and political persuasions do. And, as is so rarely the case in these situations, he’s alive, so we’ll have a chance to hear him express his views some day.
Health and safety kills off the Lear of a lifetime. Jim White writes in the Telegraph:
Earlier this week, I went with my son to see Derek Jacobi in King Lear at the Donmar Warehouse. We were so close to the action we were almost in it. It was clear that the enthusiasm expressed in Charles Spencer’s review for this paper was not misplaced: the actors delivered the poetry brilliantly, the pace crackled and fizzed.
For 50 minutes, we were entranced. Then: bang. Just as Kent had been sentenced to a spell in the stocks, the lights went out. For a moment, I thought this was a directorial ruse, and that the next scene would find him in some Tarantino-style torture chamber. But no. It was a power cut.
The house lights cranked into action, and for a minute or so, the actors carried on, the scene barely diminished by the reduced visibility. Quite right, too. As this was a show almost spartan in its freedom from special effects, there seemed no reason not to continue. The communication of the verse would have been as powerful in the gloaming.
But then a technician announced that since there had been an outage, the performance was being cancelled, for – you’ve guessed it – health and safety reasons. “Your safety,” he said, “is our number one priority.”
I struggle to know how to respond to this. Could I, perhaps, take a line or two, as suggested in my title for this post, from another of Shakespeare’s plays:
Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more.
Or could I say, begone, abominations. You are dead things that pretend to live.
There is furious debate in the comments to this article in the Guardian by Naomi Wolf, in which she argues that “Julian Assange’s sex-crime accusers deserve to be named”.
Do they? He has been after all.
I just don’t know. Neither about Assange’s case, or the general case.
On a point of fact, Wolf is quite wrong in claiming that the rule of law by which the plaintiff in a rape case is given anonymity is a “Victorian relic”. Commenter “snoozeofreason” said that anonymity was introduced, for what were seen as feminist reasons, in the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act 1976. This link to RapeCrisis, an activist group, confirms that fact. It also argues in favour of anonymity for the accuser but not the accused. I reject that. The only thing of which I am sure is that the accused and the accuser should be treated the same: anonymity for both, or for neither.
Naomi Wolf is an icon of feminism. In making this argument she has broken ranks with other feminists. Schadenfreude at the the sight of them rending each other is never far away, but schadenfreude does not actually give me an answer as to whether anonymity in rape cases is a good or a bad thing. I have bitterly criticised feminists and anti-rape activists in the past for their wilful denial of the possibility of false accusations of rape. I sneer at Naomi Wolf’s late discovery of this type of possible injustice. Yet she makes a strong argument:
“Though children’s identities should, of course, be shielded, women are not children. If one makes a serious criminal accusation, one must be treated as a moral adult.”
Against that is a more nebulous pressure, but one with deep roots in the human psyche: rape is different from other forms of assault. The trauma of a rape victim, male or female, does not arise only from the physical injuries received. Harm is done to them by having the fact that they have suffered such a violation made public. Some victims would feel unable to come forward if it were to be made public.
Yet other rape victims argue that this reluctance merely reinforces the barbaric idea that there is something shameful in being raped. We use the word shame to mean too many things.
Too old. Too gay. Too rich. Too weird. These are some of the objections raised to Elton John and David Furnish adopting a son born of a surrogate mother.
Is this a good thing? I have no idea. Ask me, or better yet, ask young Zachary in 2028. (Until then, leave him alone.) Should it be allowed? I think so. Even on the most harsh interpretation possible of Mr John and Mr Furnish’s probable ability to give the boy a good start in life, there is no denying that billions of children are born to a worse one.
That was the peg. This is the coat. A great big dirty overcoat that will not hang up neatly and drips over the floor: what objections ought to be enough for the state to forbid people to adopt?
Everyone has heard stories of how social workers seem to actively enjoy seeing would-be parents contort themselves to fit through ever-tinier hoops of social worker righteousness. So you’re a smoker? Shake of the head. I see you are fat. Tut tut, going to have to lose a few pounds, aren’t we? What’s this – you are a Christian who disapproves of homosexuality? I am afraid… oh, you are a Muslim. That’s OK, then.
I read an account by one couple who said that the sight of a four-pack of beer bottles among their shopping on the table was enough to make their inspecting social worker devote a whole paragraph to their incipient alcoholism in her report. I heard of another who deduced from a couple’s dog being overweight that they had a dysfunctional attitude to food. What fun, to be your own Sherlock Holmes and have the consequences your deductions played out in human lives. These are the powers they would gladly take over all parents. Be warned.
Most here will be as angered as I am by the thought of children remaining in council care, becoming more harmed and mentally stunted by it with every month that goes by if the eventual fates of children who grow up in care are anything to go by, while people who would have loved to give them a good if not perfect home are turned away.
But can we dispense with the State altogether?
Without the social workers, how are you going to stop paedophiles, cultists, Fagins, and would-be owners of slaves from adopting children?
Not that I am recommending such behaviour as this to any Samizdata reader, of course.
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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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