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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What developments favourable to liberty will happen during 2011?
… and a happy new year to all.
I can now safely say that Mr Tommy Sheridan, once the lion of the Scottish Socialist party, displayed more than comradely affection while visiting a Manchester sex club called Cupids. In 2006 it was not safe for the News of the World to say this: Mr Sheridan successfully sued the paper for libel. If his life were a play this would be Act III when the hero seems all-conquering. Enter Iago:
The jury’s verdict implies that it also believed that it was Sheridan whose voice was heard on a secretly recorded video confessing that he made these admissions. The video, taped by his former friend George McNeilage and bought by the NoW for £200,000, became a central part of the perjury trial. Sheridan insisted it was a forgery.
Sheridan has been told to expect a prison sentence.
When he gets out he can have a chat with Jeffrey Archer. They will have plenty in common.
I find the sheer, vulgar symmetry of both of their stories fascinating. You could plot their fortunes as a sine curve. It’s like the plot of a Jeffrey Archer novel, only less subtle.
And Samuel told all the words of the LORD unto the people that asked of him a king.
And he said, This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you: He will take your sons, and appoint them for himself, for his chariots, and to be his horsemen; and some shall run before his chariots.
And he will appoint him captains over thousands, and captains over fifties; and will set them to ear his ground, and to reap his harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and instruments of his chariots.
And he will take your daughters to be confectionaries, and to be cooks, and to be bakers.
And he will take your fields, and your vineyards, and your oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants.
And he will take the tenth of your seed, and of your vineyards, and give to his officers, and to his servants.
And he will take your menservants, and your maidservants, and your goodliest young men, and your asses, and put them to his work.
He will take the tenth of your sheep: and ye shall be his servants.
And ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen you; and the LORD will not hear you in that day.
Nevertheless the people refused to obey the voice of Samuel; and they said, Nay; but we will have a king over us;
That we also may be like all the nations; and that our king may judge us, and go out before us, and fight our battles.
– 1 Samuel 8 verses 10-20, King James Version
WikiLeaks: Cuba banned Sicko for depicting ‘mythical’ healthcare system.
According to the Guardian (!):
Cuba banned Michael Moore’s 2007 documentary, Sicko, because it painted such a “mythically” favourable picture of Cuba’s healthcare system that the authorities feared it could lead to a “popular backlash”, according to US diplomats in Havana.
The revelation, contained in a confidential US embassy cable released by WikiLeaks , is surprising, given that the film attempted to discredit the US healthcare system by highlighting what it claimed was the excellence of the Cuban system.
But the memo reveals that when the film was shown to a group of Cuban doctors, some became so “disturbed at the blatant misrepresentation of healthcare in Cuba that they left the room”.
Castro’s government apparently went on to ban the film because, the leaked cable claims, it “knows the film is a myth and does not want to risk a popular backlash by showing to Cubans facilities that are clearly not available to the vast majority of them.”
Back in 2007 I mentioned a milder version of the same reaction among British people to Moore’s depiction of “empty waiting rooms and happy, care-free health workers” in the NHS.
UPDATE: Hat tips to commenters Jock and Alisa. The Guardian story has now been corrected to say that Sicko was shown in Cuba, confirmed on Michael Moore’s own website. Pity. That was a fun meme while it lasted, but truth must prevail. Moore says that the cable was purely a lie. Not necessarily: indecision as to the “line to take” is not exactly unknown in totalitarian regimes. Both showing the film and forbidding it have their dangers from the point of view of the Cuban rulers.
This round to Michael Moore, but I shall defiantly repeat something I said in 2008:
When the history of Fidel Castro’s rule in Cuba comes to be written all that stuff about the excellence of the healthcare system will turn out to be lies but the claim of high literacy rates will be more or less true.
Communist education gets results because force is near to the surface. I acknowledge but do not approve … A further advantage of communist education is that the wishes of the teachers are given almost as short a shrift as those of the pupils.
Force works well in education because the forcers can look at the forcees all the time they are doing the forcing. It works less well in healthcare and very badly indeed in agriculture.
My id always said that an article by a Freudian therapist would be a sloppy half-cooked pizza of generalities and buzzwords, and this one in the Guardian by Darian Leader is much as expected:
Therapy occupies a unique space in the modern world. In a culture obsessed with surface and statistics, it allows the detail and narrative of a human life to be explored. Where society tells us what to be, therapy allows us to reflect critically on the imperatives that shape us. Challenging received notions of wellbeing and happiness, we can try to find out what is really important to us, often with life-changing consequences. It offers a system of values freed from the moral judgments of social authorities.
Then he whinges away about how his woo is going to be regulated, and throws in a couple of digs at the “market-led vision of human life” for good measure. While complaining about being regulated. Boo Woo Hoo.
There is only one thing stopping me having a really good laugh. His complaint is just. His concern is justified.
(And, unusually, Tim Worstall, whose blog is linked to by the word “woo” above, is wrong.)
If people, for reasons that seem good to them, want to pay to spend time with a therapist, what right does the Health Professions Council have to force the interaction into a tidy format of input and output? Who asked them to the party?
There seems to be a growing belief among our dear protectors that whenever money changes hands then their guiding presence is necessary. They generously allow us to speak more or less as we choose to our friends, lovers, and random blokes on the Clapham omnibus, but as soon as a cheque is written, they say, away flew an invisible invitation to make a threesome: me, you, and the government.
I see no logical justification for this. Some people might end up paying for therapy and then feeling they had wasted their money. That is sad. It is also sad that in my time I have wasted good money on dresses that looked bad on me, plays that I left during the interval, and exercise machines.
Come to think of it, money you can get back. Time is irrecoverable. I am still traumatized by the fact that in 1978 I watched 17 episodes of the original Battlestar Galactica thinking something interesting might happen. Some people who have experienced therapy say it was a waste of time; others say it saved their sanity. My only opinion on the matter is that the Health Professions Council has no right to an opinion on the matter. Certain clear categories of abuse or fraud by therapists have long been forbidden in law. If someone’s beef with their therapist is big enough for them to sue, then the State might just have a role. Other than that, the bureaucrat should not intrude.
Here.
Scroll right out, then right in. Rotate. Wonder.
Hat tip: Photon Courier
You can’t blame them. It would go to anybody’s head.
You can, in a way, blame Frederick Lindemann, the first (and last) Viscount Cherwell.
Apart from the facts that he more or less founded Oxford physics and so got a laboratory named after him and was some sort of scientific adviser to Churchill, most of what I know about Lindemann I learned today, from this site, aimed at children in secondary schools, and Wikipedia.
Lindemann ought to be more famous. He developed the first theory of how to recover when an aeroplane goes into a spin, and learned to fly so that he could repeatedly and dangerously put it to the test on his own aircraft. Umpteen pilots owe him their lives. Umpteen Germans owe him their deaths: his hatred of Nazism was “almost pathological” and – well, let Wikipedia give you the flavour:
When Churchill became Prime Minister, he appointed Lindemann as the British government’s leading scientific adviser … Lindemann established a special statistical branch, known as ‘S-Branch’, within the government, constituted from subject specialists, and reporting directly to Churchill. This branch distilled thousands of sources of data into succinct charts and figures, so that the status of the nation’s food supplies (for example) could be instantly evaluated. Lindemann’s statistical branch often caused tensions between government departments, but because it allowed Churchill to make quick decisions based on accurate data which directly affected the war effort, its importance should not be underestimated … In 1940, Lindemann supported the experimental department MD1. He worked on hollow charge weapons, the sticky bomb and other new weapons … “In his appointment as Personal Assistant to the Prime Minister no field of activity was closed to him. He was as obstinate as a mule, and unwilling to admit that there was any problem under the sun which he was not qualified to solve. He would write a memorandum on high strategy one day, and a thesis on egg production on the next” … Following the Air Ministry Area bombing directive on 12 February 1942, Lindemann presented the dehousing paper to Churchill on 30 March 1942, which advocated area bombardment of German cities to break the spirit of the people … Lindemann also played a key part in the battle of the beams, championing countermeasures to the Germans use of radio navigation to increase the precision of their bombing campaigns.
Lindemann’s achievements in science, though distinguished, have been surpassed by those of other scientists. But never before or since has a single scientist, in his role as a scientist, been so close to the seat of power. He was like a Grand Vizier of old. His name may not be that famous, even among scientists, but his role in the Great Drama has become a folk memory; a fantasy.
In the 1950s Isaac Asimov, writing under the pseudonym Paul French, produced an enjoyable series of science fiction novels for teenagers featuring David “Lucky” Starr, Space Ranger. (In which occurs the first known appearance of the lightsaber trope. I didn’t know that.) Like the Lone Ranger, Lucky has a faithful sidekick. Like James Bond – whose career began at about the same time – Lucky has gadgets. And backup. On Lucky’s wrist there is a tattoo which is invisible until Lucky exerts his will, triggering some chemicals or hormones or something, which makes the tattoo become visible. Then they sit up, take notice, and hasten to do what he says, because the tattoo reveals that he is a member – indeed, the youngest ever member – of the Council of Science.
The Council of Science!
Quoting Wikipedia again:
In a later novel in the series, Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus, the Council of Science is described this way: “In these days, when science really permeated all human society and culture, scientists could no longer restrict themselves to their laboratories. It was for that reason that the Council of Science had been born. Originally it was intended only as an advisory body to help the government on matters of galactic importance, where only trained scientists could have sufficient information to make intelligent decisions. More and more it had become a crime-fighting agency, a counterespionage system. Into its own hands it was drawing more and more of the threads of government.”
And just for a while a year or two back it all looked like coming true. Lindemann’s heirs back in the saddle again. Maybe not the tattoos, but the Scientist taking the President’s calls, speaking with grave wisdom to the frightened assemblies and governments of mankind.
You can’t really blame them, can you? For remembering their time of glory and feeling just a smidgeon of pleasure that those days were here again?
From the story quoted by Brian in the post below this one:
Scientists have called for Second World War-style rationing in rich countries to bring down carbon emissions, as world leaders meet in Cancun for the latest round of talks on climate change.
What follows was not written by me but by a friend of mine, Niall Kilmartin. As will be apparent, he has known me since university. – NS
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At the end of a recent post about lefties making laws for us because they think we’re like them, Brian Micklethwait asks what similar errors we make. I think I can answer with examples from his own post.
First, he talks of gun control freaks – people so violent that if they had guns to hand during temper tantrums, they’d murder – and suggests that these people want guns banned because they think we’re the same as them. Here he does have a specific, documented, public-domain example of a gun-control advocate with a domestic violence history. But let me offer a rival example.
In the week I first met Natalie Solent, she was sitting in the Oxford University D&D club chatting to two friends of mine whom she’d just met. An accident occurred outside and my friends went to help – thus incidentally establishing their bona fides as caring people to her. That situation resolved, they sat down again and – as my friends have a tendency to do, for some reason – began talking about guns. Natalie then was in some ways not Natalie as we now know her. As she told me later, if that accident hadn’t happened, she would have written them off in the unthinking way of many British people: “They like guns, guns are for killing people, so they must like the idea of killing people; I’ll not pursue their acquaintance.”
Natalie, as she then was, is far more representative of how left-wingers think than Brian’s example. No doubt Brian’s example is useful in debate: “We’re not the only violent ones. In fact, we’re not specially violent. In fact, if we can look at some among our opponents for a moment… “. But as regards political fundamentals, that argument is so like the left’s tactics, that it’s fair to use it only when debating with them. My friends’ reaction to the accident persuaded Natalie to change her mind a little. You would have got nowhere with her by saying, “You only think that because you’re so violent yourself”. It would be very like some accusations against the Tea Party: propaganda failures because it is so obvious to Tea Partiers and their friends that they are not true.
Brian’s next illustration is even worse, because he has no public domain example, just speculation about some guy who thinks homosexuality will destroy civilization if tolerated because it would destroy his mental equilibrium if he tolerated it. In a world of seven thousand million (is it?) human beings, this guy may well exist. But in my (far from complete) knowledge of the Anglosphere public domain, past and present, I cannot offhand come up with an example. I can however think of counter-examples.
Before we meet them, however, let’s meet a counter-argument. Turn the argument about homophobes being repressed homosexuals around and assert that homosexuals are really repressed gynophobes or androphobes. Here I can think of public domain examples. Women staff at Bletchley Park said that if a woman so much as spoke to Alan Turing when he was not expecting it, he would visibly shrink into himself in alarm. When the gynophobia is in itself so clear, it’s a fair diagnosis that the homoerotic symptoms are mere side-effects.
Now look instead at, for example, Noel Coward. If I were willing to argue like a leftie, I could diagnose gynophobia. Think of his joke about the queen of Tonga at the coronation. As the enormous queen and diminutive ambassador from Pakistan passed in their shared carriage, someone asked him who that was with Queen Salote: “Oh, I think that’s her lunch.” Think of the plot of Blythe Spirit: the two women make the man’s life hell quarrelling over him and eventually kill him. A clear diagnosis of gynophobia? Or a clear diagnosis of comic genius? Certainly, if Noel Coward was terrified of women, he handled it very much better than Alan Turing – unless you claim his homosexuality shows his bad handling of it, but then we’re into circular reasoning.
In short, a hand-count of examples of people who are or may be assuming that laws should be written to deal with people like themselves does not a true-for-all-cases proof make. Arguing with some supporter of Canada’s current laws against hate speech, I’d think it very fair to push Brian’s argument. But with anyone more reasonable, I would not pretend to know things I don’t know.
But as I said, I can offer counter-examples as well as counter-arguments. Many decades ago, my mother was raised, in humble circumstances, in a very straitlaced small Scottish town, attending the local school, but when she was 13 years old, she knew plenty about homosexuality – because she had a classical education. And there was nothing unusual about this level of classical knowledge even among ordinary people: many of you will know the In Parenthesis anecdote about the WWI Welsh private assigned to latrine duty who defended the utility of his task with the words “Don’t you know the army of Artaxerxes was utterly destroyed for lack of sanitation?” (I love this anecdote because it’s so easy to say “for lack of sanitation” in an appropriately-Welsh accent.)
My mother, aged 13, imagined that homosexuality was one of those things, like polytheism, human sacrifice and slavery, that had been common in the past but had died out under the beneficent influence of Christianity. Not that anyone told her that – it was a 13-year old’s way of understanding what she was taught in the light of where and when she lived. (My mother aged 16 had become aware that “died out” was putting it too strongly.) Until half a century ago there were many people like her – people who were not taught to respect Socrates because he was homosexual, any more than they were taught to respect him because he owned slaves, or worshipped Zeus and Athena. Although they saw homosexuality as a perversion, they were taught to respect Socrates, and to see Athens killing him as a tragedy – not as good riddance to a nasty pervert. They knew exactly what they believed, but they were also taught to know intimately and respect a culture, and people in that culture, who had very different values from theirs.
Now imagine presenting to these past people – who would certainly fail the Haringey council “anti-homophobia” test or similar – the idea that they believed what they did because they thought tolerated homosexuality would destroy civilization. They would have thought of two responses.
– They would have thought of Sparta, where the idea that homosexuality destroyed a civilization is a possible thesis. The Spartans made homosexuality obligatory for their military training, and (uniquely amongst Greeks), had a positive, rather than just contemptuously tolerant, view of female homosexuality. The Spartans suffered a 90% decline in their citizen body during the classical period; eventually it destroyed the old Sparta. The Spartans had customs – marriage-by-capture, willingness to let visiting nobles sleep with their wives – which it’s easy to explain by saying that their homosexuality was easier to learn in their teens than unlearn when it was time to procreate. So yes, if it is promoted enough, our ancestors would have argued, homosexuality can indeed destroy a civilization.
– But they would have set this level high, because they would also have thought of Athens. In Athens, philosophers taught that men who desired other men showed better taste than men who desired those inferior creatures, women. (And so women who desired women showed bad taste, but then women were inferior, so they would sometimes show bad taste – no need to get in a tiz about it.) Athens did not suffer a decline in its citizen body. If Athens destroyed itself – as one can argue it did – it was for other reasons. Just as with teenage-Natalie and guns above, so for our ancestors – and, today, for those who reject political correctness – Brian’s explanation is simply an irrelevance.
These I think show ways in which we can avoid the vulgarities of left-wing argumentative methods. When you’re forced to debate with such people, it may be fair to use their own tactics of pick the (unrepresentative) example or even invent the hypothetical (irrelevant) example. With anyone fairer, understand what they believe and the reasons why they do.
So much for Brian’s post. One last reflection: writing this raised a question for me – and gave me my answer. People who defend Canada’s anti-free-speech laws say they must because the alternative is the laws of the past. I’m sure that’s just another of the lies the left uses to keep us in line. But suppose (God forbid!) they forced me to believe it? Suppose I had to choose between evils: between Canada’s laws today and the laws of my mother’s youth? Actual sex acts are by their nature private. Free speech is by its nature public – more effectively subject to law. In his first letter on the French revolution, Burke lists requirements for liberty: “… a simple citizen may decently express his sentiments upon public affairs … even though against a predominant and fashionable opinion…”. So I have my answer.
The Guardian laments the stillbirth of the clause in the Equality Act 2010 that required public sector bodies to consider the impact of every policy on inequality. The Act itself was passed as one of the last flourishes of the previous government, but this clause was not due to come in until April 2011. Now Teresa May says it never will.
In practice the “public sector equality duty” would have meant that local authorities would have had to carry out an “Equality Impact Assessment” on, well, everything. Here is a link to the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s own guidance on carrying out an Equality Impact Assessment.
The Guardian says that the clause was “a moderate and sensible effort to provide exactly the ‘framework for equality’ she [Teresa May] claims she wants” and May was mean to kill it. I quote from the editorial linked to above: “All the clause required was that every new policy had to be considered through the filter of its impact on poverty. ”
All? That “all” is no small thing. Funnily enough it was the left that alerted me to the sinister effects of having to consider things through a filter chosen by the elite. “Hegemonic discourse” is their preferred term for it.
Now the Guardian says the clause was nothing more than a light steer given to councils that they would be free to interpret how they wished, and talks as if the description “socialism in one clause” was just Teresa May’s snark and scaremongering. Back in January 2009, though, Polly Toynbee wrote an enthusiastic article about its potentially “mind-bogglingly immense” impact and quoted a Labour Cabinet minister who described the public sector equality duty “with relish” as… guess what?
“Socialism in one clause”.
Rather let the cat out of the bag, there.
The IMF auditors have arrived in Dublin. What should Ireland do now?
According to Allison Bray writing in the Irish Independent the smoking rate in Ireland has soared despite the Irish smoking ban.
Despite hikes in tobacco tax, the smoking ban and a new law against the public display of cigarettes for sale, the number of smokers has steadily risen since 2007 when 29pc of the population smoked.
The survey, which was conducted between March and September, revealed the largest group of smokers — 45pc — is aged between 16 and 30.
I wonder if “despite” should actually be “because of”, though I am not sure why that should be.
The Irish Independent article is actually over a year old, but still of interest, I thought. I found it via a comment from Dave Atherton to this post by Mahendra Jadeja at Big Brother Watch.
John Crace of the Guardian writes about someone totally cool.
Max Hardberger makes his living by stealing back stolen cargo ships, beating pirates at their own game from Haiti to Russia.
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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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