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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I used to be a matron but as a patient I was treated worse than an animal. That was one of the headlines in yesterday’s Sun. I do mean headlines, too. Jean Emblen’s account was not top story but it was right up there among the footballers’ wives. The editor of the Sun thought the readers would go for a story criticising nurses.
When did that happen? When I was a kid everyone was all soppy over nurses. It was considered quite shocking when a 1970s BBC soap opera called, tellingly, Angels depicted them as less than angelic.
We can’t simply attribute this loss in esteem to the NHS. For round about the first half century of the existence of the National Health Service, nurses continued to be loved by all (it is only fair to say there are plenty of people, including those with recent experience of the NHS, for whom that has not changed; a huge amount depends on the individual hospital). So what has caused it? Does it reflect reality – are nurses really not as good as they used to be – or is it just fashion, a last ripple from the wave that knocked politicians over in the 1960s and teachers in the 1970s?
One possible explanation is that nurses are no longer paid that badly. There is nothing like low pay for calling forth guilty affection. Once the pay improved people no longer felt they needed to make up the shortfall with love.
However my impression is that the downward trend on the nurse popularity graph best tracks the increasing moves for the nursing profession to become more… professional. It’s all “nurse practitioners” and degrees these days, and being more like doctors. No one ever had any trouble hating doctors, once the thermometer went down. People think that nurses these days think themselves too grand to change a bedpan.
Is this charge fair? Lucky me: I don’t know. You tell me. All I can say is that it would not surprise me if there was a tendency for both human contact and the dirty but necessary jobs to be de-emphasised in modern nursing, and maybe I can find a way to blame the NHS after all. It is what I would expect to see from an old command economy. Compared to most command economies, the NHS in its early years had a huge amount going for it: a sense of mission was in its collective blood. But as time as passed the blood has thinned, or done something else old and dry and sad that I lack the medical knowledge to build into my metaphor. (The blood of armies dries up in the same way, but then a war comes along and de-mummifies them. Or replaces them. ) An old and somewhat ossified organisation instinctively prefers its staff to have measurable, academic and relatively high status skills rather than unquantifiable, physical and and traditionally low-status ones. But no one was ever loved for academic skills.
In the US, I learn, there has been a similar move from plain old nurses to nurse practitioners, but if the American equivalent of the Sun has started on the anti-nurse stories then I had not heard about it. This might be because US healthcare is, for the moment, not provided by the taxpayer. At least, a lot of it is, but not so visibly. My impression is that the extravagant love for nurses in the past and the extravagant annoyance with them now are both British phenomena.
Wrapped up in some fairly predictable lawerly laments about Thatcher’s Cameron’s heartless cuts in legal aid there is a fascinating examination of the rise of the crowd-sourced legal advice website here: Tricks and cheats are the price of culling legal aid
Motoring trials are more frequently now defended by people who are making use of public special-interest websites such as PePiPoo which give advice to motorists both prior to and during a trial. Some advice is sound, some not so sound, but with the capacity to share approaches to defence has come the temptation in forums to share advice which, if followed, would result in a miscarriage of justice.
and
In some ways sites like these are a good thing: mass participation to help individuals to establish their legal rights is laudable, but to the extent that they encourage bad-faith practices, and ultimately provide tools to undermine the already buckling justice system, they are a serious problem – a price to be paid for legal aid cuts. The insatiable demand for help with litigation has given rise to websites on which anyone can offer their opinion on the law whether it is correct or misleading. In those circumstances it’s the individuals in need of help who will lose out, running trials on a hiding to nothing, which will leave them worse off than when they started.
The author, the barrister Rupert Myers, whose articles for the Guardian are usually more friendly to civil liberties, concludes that “the government must find ways to curb the spread of tricks and cheats, while replacing these sites with the benefit of reliable help for those that need it.” I suspect the call to replace these open websites with government ones is his professional self-interest talking. It does not matter. The government cannot replace these websites. Oh, they could find some legal grounds to close down these particular ones, PePiPoo (weird name) and Child Support Agency Hell, and “replace” them with government information website number four million and six, which rather fewer people would trust on account of the legal advice being sought in these cases being advice on how to legally fight branches of that same government. But unless the government is willing to censor the internet to a degree hitherto unprece- OK, better stop there for fear of giving ’em ideas.
As I was saying, now we have the internet people are going to discuss their problems on it, including their legal problems. Other people are going to give them advice. Have you noticed that about the internet? Rather sweet, I always think; the only thing people like doing on the internet more than talking about sex is advising others on everything from plumbing to childbirth for no reward. Of course some of the advice you get from unqualified strangers is bad. That, however, has also been known to be true of advice from qualified professionals.
This is about Barack Obama’s relationship to a charming, well-meaning but ultimately rather contemptible chap called Dave.
This Dave. Another guy called Lawrence also comes into it as well.
I loathe the film Dave. As entertainment it’s fine. Politically it is a liberal (US sense) wish fulfillment fantasy with the sole redeeming virtue that it implicitly acknowledges that the only way they would get their way is by lies. In it a nice but dopey guy called Dave substitutes for his double, the philandering, i.e. Republican, President of the United States. The switch was intended to be just for one appearance at first but ends up being permanent when the President has a stroke.
From the synopsis: “When he takes the extreme action of reworking (with the help of his friend Murray, an accountant from Baltimore) the national budget in order to save a $650 million program for helping the homeless … ” When he takes the extreme action, you mean, of foisting on the American people a programme they did not vote for and presumably voted against when they elected a President who opposed it. Again from the synopsis: “…Dave convinces her [the president’s wife] to remain and keep up the ruse, when he realizes he has a chance to improve the nation.” You mean, a chance to impose his will on the nation. “Dave then holds a news conference announcing that he is firing Alexander [conniving Chief of Staff], and proposing a comprehensive full-employment program to Congress. [Liberal wish fulfillment fantasy.]
For some reason the film does not cover the bit where he gets hammered in the mid-term elections, having suddenly proposed a lunatic plan to Congress that seems to come from the manifesto of the sort of party that Ralph Nader voted for when young and silly.
None of the nice characters in the film seem troubled by the idea what they are doing – unconstitutionally replacing the elected leader with an unelected leader who takes the country in the direction he personally thinks best – scarcely differs morally from a coup d’état. All is justified by Dave’s goodness.
The plot of Dave, a movie that deeply annoys me, is very close to that of a science fiction novel I love, Heinlein’s Double Star.
Can I think of a better reason than political partisanship for claiming that the people who substituted Dave Kovic for a political leader in a coma in Dave acted wrongly and the people who substituted Lawrence Smith a.k.a. The Great Lorenzo for a political leader in a coma in Double Star acted rightly? I think so. Heinlein, who had thought deeply about democracy even if he did not always like it, went to some trouble to give John Joseph Bonforte’s staff as little choice as possible.
Most urgently, if Bonforte does not turn up at a Martian ceremony in which he is to be adopted into a Martian clan it will be taken as an insult graver than any human can imagine and will probably cause inter-species war. That’s the whole reason he was kidnapped.
Secondly Bonforte is not out of commission because of natural causes but because his political enemies kidnapped him and used drugs to damage his mind. In other words the substitution is stopping the bad guys benefiting from their evil deeds. People are being deceived, yes, but the deceivers are doing all they can to make what would have happened without the crime happen despite it, not to make new things happen.
Oh yeah, thirdly, he is not actually in office when the substitution occurs. The voters are not having someone they did not vote for secretly substituted for someone they did; they are subject to the lesser deception of being asked to vote anew (in an election part-way through the book) for someone who is not really who he says he is. I think that makes a difference.
Anyway, back to Barack. This “secret Muslim” theory is conspiracy crap, or possibly people having a laugh when answering surveys. He was born in the US and Trig is Palin’s child so you can all put away your warming pans. And the man has a rather distinctive physical appearance that would be difficult to duplicate.
Bodily he is but morally he is not the Barack who campaigned as a centrist. Which deceiver does he resemble the most, do you think, Dave or the Great Lorenzo?
Added later: I would like to expand on my last sentence above in the light of thoughts prompted by the comments. Having an elected leader diverge from the manifesto he or she was elected upon is sometimes the price you pay and sometimes the benefit you get for electing a human being rather than an automaton. Human beings adapt to circumstances, which may include justifiably breaking a promise. They also deceive or – and this is an interesting case – are happy to let others deceive themselves. Caveat emptor.
Two articles. Right next to each other on page 7 of today’s Times. I hope you lot are grateful; I can no longer link to the Times so I had to type all these quotes out myself. The first article is by Ashling O’Connor and Andy Stephens and is headed “Call for action against novelty sport bets”. The “action” to which it approvingly refers* is that of the government passing more laws to regulate cricket. The article says:
Cricket, with its complex rules and endless permutations makes it an ideal companion of spot-betting. Traditional British bookmakers avoid bets on what might occur during short passages of play and were not affected by the events allegedly manipulated at Lord’s on Friday. However, the more arcane aspects of the game attract huge interest in some parts of the world, especially Asia, where betting is unregulated.
The second article is by Mike Atherton. It is headed “Shift of power base to gambling-obsessed India fuels corruption”, and it says:
The only bookmakers who offer markets on elements of the game open to so-called micro-manipulation are those in India where bookmaking is illegal and designed to avoid tax and service the black market.
Two questions.
1) Why is the Times printing contradictory articles on the same page?
2) Which one is right?
Two comments. Firstly, even I know that Mike Atherton has played a little cricket in his time, has mixed with teams from all the cricketing countries, has made a genuinely successful career as a sports writer after his retirement from cricket, and might be presumed to know something about these matters. In contrast the O’Connor/Stephens article appears to have been churned out from a Play-doh Fun Factory using the Quango Calls for More Regulation extruder template. Secondly, they might be right and Atherton wrong even so.
*Dear Lord, what misery has been inflicted upon the world because no one ever looked good issuing a call for inaction.
Love, when legislated, becomes hate.
– John B, from the comments here. (This is a SQOTDBPD, or Samizdata Quote of the Day by Popular Demand.)
John Hillary, Executive Director of War on Want, has written an article for – amaze me some more – the Guardian. Here it is: A myopic Tory approach to fighting global poverty
Mr Hillary, I am sure, sincerely wants to fight global poverty. The trouble is that he and his colleagues in the development “community” have become a mini-class in their own right, complete with a class interest. I am forever saying that people often have an incredibly sensitive “nose” for their own class interest that operates a little below the conscious level. In this, Marx had a point. Classes always convince themselves that whatever benefits them as a class is also to the benefit of the world.
What benefits the aid community is that aid is seen to be very complex and difficult, so you need a special class of people to mediate giving aid.
Hence:
“Ultimately, a country’s development path is determined by historical forces and political choices at a far higher level than aid, and it is these more complex factors that risk being overlooked in a narrow focus on measurable, short-term outputs. “
I do in fact agree with this statement – although my view of which political choices have which results might differ from that of Mr Hilary. I also agree that it really is complex and difficult to work out how best to use the government’s aid budget, assuming that one has decided that there is benefit in doing this at all. But the intense practical complexity of (making up an example) arranging for perishable medicines to reach a flood-stricken area before they go off, a process that might involve both technical and human factors, is not the sort of complexity that John Hillary means here.
That sort of complexity in a problem can be solved by clever people making clever plans or by average people making individually minor but cumulatively clever adjustments and innovations. The success of the plans or adjustments then shows up in measurable outputs – if not in the very short term, at least in the medium term. That does not serve the class interest of the aid community. It needs aid to be philosophically complex, basically so that their class will always be needed.
Hence one could predict that the aid community will favour un-measurable and long term (“long” tending to “infinite”) solutions. It is also likely to favour indirect solutions. Every stage of indirectness is an evolutionary niche for someone in his sub-class to find sustenance. Sure enough, in the Guardian article Mr Hillary is indignant about the government scrapping the DfID’s global development engagement fund, “a scheme designed to increase public understanding of the causes of global poverty and to mobilise action in support of international development.” He imprudently included a further link that said that the cancelled projects included:
£146,000 for a Brazilian-style dance troupe in Hackney, London; £55,000 to run stalls at summer music festivals; £120,000 to train nursery school teachers about ‘global issues’; £130,000 for a ‘global gardens schools network’ and £140,000 to train outdoor education tutors in Britain on development.
We laugh. But we should no more blame Mr Hillary for thinking that the Hackney dancers or the global gardens schools network have some use in ending poverty than we should blame a General Motors executive for saying, and sincerely believing, “What’s good for General Motors is good for America.”
The problem is that hipsters are nothing like their namesake predecessors who attempted to operate outside convention with distinct agenda of cultural and social change. Nothing about the modern hipster is anti-anything. Rather, hipsters now are a manifestation of late capitalism run amok, forever feeding itself on the shininess of the Now: an impatient, forgetful mob taught to discard their products as quickly as they adopt them. They are not a cultural movement, but a generation of pure consumers. If capitalism were to really be altered in any way, the hipster as we know it would lose its raison d’etre.
And I thought hipsters were knickers that came up to your hips. Now I know better. Chap in the Guardian says that because this clothes company called American Apparel went bust it just goes to show what he always said about capitalism.
Death spirals of a co-opted public relentlessly co-opting itself, knowing acceptance of our generation’s role in the capitalist meta-narrative, knickers losing their raison d’etre… I tells ‘ee, one of these nights we’ll all be murthered in our beds.
A simply astonishing story from Alex Deane of Big Brother Watch: Smokers harrassed – with the encouragement of a school, and the co-operation of the police
On one perfectly reasonable reading of this story, “harrassed” is too mild a term. The correct word is “assaulted”. I am no lawyer, but this looks to me as though it could involve multiple crimes – not just assault but also theft, and encouraging minors to commit assault and theft, if those are separate charges.
Outrageously the fagins here are not underworld characters but the Hundred of Hoo Comprehensive School in Medway (cute name, shame about the Special Measures), Kent Police, and something called “A Better Medway”, described as “a joint initiative between the council and NHS Medway that encourages healthy living”. “A Better Medway” part-funded the project, paying for filming equipment.
According to This is Kent, quoted by Alex Deane, the first few filmed attacks featured stooges and then they went on to “other people”. I can’t quite figure out whether or not the”other people” were members of the public who participated voluntarily as “extras” in an admitted fiction or whether they were real victims. My spidey-senses are a-tingle with the suspicion of some hasty re-writing of history after hostile attention; the comments to the sycophantic This is Kent piece are gratifyingly hostile. Also, the video admiringly profiled in Kent Online has now been removed by the user.
Irrespective of whether the videos are real or fake, videos that show apparent assaults in an approving manner incite others to commit similar assaults on smokers for real.
Indeed, they incite others to commit any other type of assault that the attackers may deem is good for the victims. The law, of course, forbids people to rip the veils off Muslim women who go about swathed – though at least as many people the veils offensive as find cigarettes offensive, and there is a reasonable case to be made – as reasonable as the case for doing good by force being made by the Ciggy Busters – that having their veils ripped off might do them good in the end and help them kick the masking habit. The law also forbids incitement to such assaults. If I were to make a “burqa busters” video the police would be round in an instant, and the defence that everyone involved was only acting would cut no ice with the Crown Prosecution Service.
Why should not that law also apply in this case?
The A-Level pass rate has risen for the 28th successive year.
Debasing the coinage. It’s what governments do.
Vicki woods writes in the Telegraph that Greek justice makes a mockery of the law.
Now the trouble with cases like this is that just as one is firing up to get outraged… along comes the thought, yeah but he might be guilty.
So he might. Or he might not. But the Greek justice system does not seem to be in any hurry to find out in the case of Andrew Symeou. He has spent a year behind bars without trial. Oddly enough the Greek authorities did manage to energise themselves sufficiently to issue a European Arrest Warrant. That got snappy action all right! A stirring display of how the nations of Europe can act together to leapfrog pettifogging national legal procedures! After this strong start, however, the Greeks did not quite manage to maintain the spirit of pan-European efficiency when they twice denied Mr Symeou bail on the grounds that he was not a Greek national.
The vile ContactPoint database, which held details about every child in England and was accessible to hundreds of thousands of professionals has been switched off.
I have to say that in pulling the plug the government has confounded my gloomy predictions that no matter who won the election civil liberty and privacy would be equally poorly served.
Good comment to a BBC article on the subject here:
I work with large data sets professionally (I am a data architect working with large companies). ContactPoint was always going to fail, either disastrously through its own failings, or through an eventually inevitable political decision. The experience of data management within public and private organisations is that almost any data set like this will eventually end up on a laptop or a memory stick which then gets lost, and that users need to be carefully trained and monitored to ensure appropriate use. That was never going to happen here, with 300,000 users in a number of organisations, roles and lines of business, spread across the country.
Dr Robert Daniels-Dwyer, Oxford
However Simon from Doncaster feels differently:
David Cameron, in my view, will be directly responsible for any child who is abused in whatever form as a result of scrapping this system. How long before another Victoria Climbie? Well, with the cut backs to child social care, expect more and more and no doubt it will be local authorities who take the blame. This government is a disgrace.
Where did you say you worked again, Simon?
One Catherine Bennet has yet another article in the Guardian about that jam experiment. Hers is called Since when was giving people a choice a good idea?
It is not merely the chorus from anguished parents (and patients), that they cannot exercise choice where there is no spare capacity, that might give a rational education secretary pause, but a growing body of research indicating that too much choice is overwhelming. Gove will know of the much cited experiment with jam, by the US academic Sheena Iyengar, which found consumers were more than six times more likely to buy a pot if they had to choose from six varieties, rather than 24. If uncertainty about preserves is a problem one can probably live with, or possibly enjoy, a similar helplessness in the face of big, irreversible decisions is, to judge by a new study, State of Confusion by Professor Harriet Bradley of Bristol University, something that should worry a government that advertises choice as an unmitigated good.
Mr Eugenides says,
So, just to recap: a woman who used to live with a lord in a 365-room mansion, now in a household with a combined income of some quarter of a million pounds a year, has read a PR puff commissioned and paid for to advertise a price comparison website, and uses this as evidence that we should all just take what we’re given by the state and shut up.
Ironically, price comparison websites are themselves a market mechanism for making choice easier.
I say, to Catherine Bennett and the next fifteen journalists to go into an ecstasy of servility when pondering this little demonstration that some people find shopping boring, shut up about the jam already. It’s jam. The process of choosing it has no deeper meaning. Unless one is a connoisseur of jam, in which case one probably finds choosing between 24 varieties a pleasing experience, as people usually do when shopping for something that interests them.
Look at it this way, Ms Bennett. You have twice to my knowledge chosen a man as mate and helpmeet. Was making that choice from all the prospective partners you could have had ever stressful? There is some literature – like about half of it – to suggest that some people find it so. Some people regret their choice. The evidence suggests that you have at least once. Can we assume that if by any sad chance you find yourself seeking a man again you are willing to let a civil servant choose for you?
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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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