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]

Dutch job disease

Shocking news from today’s Sunday Telegraph:

Dutch job disease: how labour rights have undermined the Netherlands

Sacking an employee in the Netherlands is no easy feat.

Ask many managers and they will explain to you the nuisance of having to apply to the courts to obtain a “dismissal permit” for an underperforming employee.

Even if a worker has agreed to leave, they then have a two-week cooling-off period to possibly change their mind.

The process is so arduous that the Dutch are deemed by the OECD to have one of the strictest worker protection regimes in the developed world.

This might sound unambiguously progressive for the Netherlands, and a potential inspiration for Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner as she seeks to enhance workers’ rights in the UK.

However, for plenty of workers, the Dutch system has backfired.

Underpinning the problem is the fact that many bosses are increasingly reluctant to hire workers given the difficulties they later encounter when trying to sack them.

The result is that more than one quarter of Dutch workers are employed only on temporary contracts, far more than any other rich country.

The Guardian discovers the dead hand of the state

‘The system is the problem, not people’: how a radical food group spread round the world

Incredible Edible’s guerrilla gardening movement encourages people to take food-growing – and more – into their own hands

Pam Warhurst insists she’s no anarchist. Nevertheless, the founder of Incredible Edible, a food-focused guerrilla gardening movement, wants the state to get out of people’s way.

“The biggest obstacle is the inability of people in elected positions to cede power to the grassroots,” she says.

[…]

Her big idea is guerrilla gardening – with a twist. Where guerrilla gardeners subvert urban spaces by reintroducing nature, Incredible Edible’s growers go one step further: planting food on public land and then inviting all-comers to take it and eat.

I doubt this idea would scale up, but if growing food to give to others gives people pleasure, go for it. I cannot bring myself to feel outraged about the odd unauthorised carrot in a municipal flowerbed. And long have I waited to see lines like those I have put in bold type appear in the pages of the Guardian:

But as much as Warhurst’s idea has simplicity and wholesomeness, it also has a radical streak. At its heart, Incredible Edible is about hijacking public spaces – spaces nominally owned by communities, and paid for through their taxes, but administered and jealously guarded by public authorities.

And that is where Incredible Edible meets its biggest challenge: the dead hand of the state.

“Swiss colonial exploitation”

I have just returned from a holiday in Switzerland, where I often go to do deplorable things. While visiting a country, I try to keep an eye on which news stories are trending there. The almighty algorithm has observed my interest in things Swiss and even after my return keeps sending stories from the “swissinfo.ch” website my way. I am sure you can guess what it was about the following story that struck me as odd:

Swiss colonial exploitation highlighted by National Museum

Switzerland’s colonial history is the focus of an exhibition at the National Museum in Zurich. Based on new research, it looks at the country’s role in colonialism and slavery, and considers its legacy today.

If it were not for the way that every museum in the Western world has scrubbed out and re-written the labels on its displays to be “anti-colonialist”, I might consider this exhibition to be a welcome corrective. The Swiss are an admirable people, but they do have a slight tendency to think that their neutrality and their benign absence from the indexes of history books are entirely the results of virtue rather than geography. As the exhibition points out, many Swiss were happy to profit from slavery. Then I read further:

It [the exhibition] tells the story of businessmen who took part in the transatlantic slave trade or made their fortunes trading in colonial commodities and exploiting enslaved populations. In particular, the exhibition presents the whips and handcuffs used on slaves on coffee and cocoa plantations in Ghana, which enabled Swiss businessmen to make their fortunes.

It also tells the story of people who traveled the globe as missionaries or left Switzerland to found settlements and exploit territories considered uninhabited.

Why are traders in colonial commodities, missionaries and migrants lumped in with slavers, as if trading with other peoples, trying to persuade them to believe in the same things you do, or moving to a place you thought was uninhabited were evils in themselves?

It looks to me as if this exhibition is less about telling the stories of the forgotten victims of Swiss oppressors than about classifying the Swiss as an oppressor people, or, to be more exact, about making sure the Swiss know that little things like never having had any colonies are not enough to acquit them of being members of a colonialist race.

*

Related post: “N star star star star, not N star star star star star”.

“How Rent Controls Are Deepening the [Insert Region Here] Housing Crisis”

I have read that in the days when newspapers still used metal type, the compositors used to keep commonly used headlines ready-formed. The Bloomberg headline below would require only the substitution of the appropriate country name to work for anywhere in the world in any decade since governments came to vex mankind:

How Rent Controls Are Deepening the Dutch Housing Crisis

A law designed to make homes more affordable ended up aggravating an apartment shortage.

Two years ago, Nine Moraal and her two children moved into a one-bedroom flat near the Dutch city of Utrecht, a comfortable spot close to family and friends. Although she had only a two-year lease, she expected to be able to extend it and stay until she could get one of the Netherlands’ many rent-controlled apartments.

But last spring, her landlord told her she’d have to move out in November, because renting the flat was no longer profitable. Despite “frantic efforts on social media, phone calls, visits to realtors and housing agencies,” the 33-year-old educator says she hasn’t found anything. “The cost isn’t the problem, but a real shortage of housing is.”

Moraal is among the growing number of Dutch people struggling to find a rental property after a new law designed to make homes more affordable ended up aggravating a housing shortage. Aiming to protect low-income tenants, the government in July imposed rent controls on thousands of homes, introducing a system of rating properties based on factors such as condition, size and energy efficiency. The Affordable Rent Act introduced rent controls on 300,000 units, moving them out of the unregulated market.

[…]

ASR Nederland NV, which owns about 15,000 apartments across the country, has called on the government to rethink the measure. Almost its entire portfolio was shifted into the regulated segment on July 1, spurring it to abandon plans to purchase more rental properties, says Jos Baeten, ASR’s chief executive officer. “There are other investment categories that are more appropriate,” he says.

One provision of the law bars short-term leases, instead requiring all contracts to be open-ended. Some in the industry suggest the change will encourage landlords to prioritize foreigners, who are more likely to move away after a few years, giving owners more flexibility.

Emphasis added. That’ll go down well with the PVV, currently the largest party in the Dutch House of Representatives.

This is why you should not suppress conspiracy theories

Never say “no more debate”.

Fluoride in drinking water at twice safe limit linked to lower IQ in children, the Guardian (yes, that Guardian) reports.

Probably many of those who were against fluoride were against it for irrational reasons. But a great many people were against them for irrational reasons. If this report pans out, look again at hydroxychloroquine.

Reader discretion is advised

I have given this BBC story the “Health & Medical” tag due to its description of traumatic events:

‘Trauma’ as Pride flags vandalised for fifth time

Pride flags vandalised for the fifth time in north-east London have left residents “traumatised”, a local LGBTQ+ organisation says.

The flags, which are on the pavement near Forest Gate railway station, were covered with white paint on Monday.

They were also vandalised on 9 March, as well as on 23 and 26 June and 19 July.

Rob DesRoches, founder of Forest Gayte Pride, external, said the organisation would work with Newham Council to repair or replace the flags, adding: “We feel that people have been traumatised by the repeated vandalism, which needs to be sorted out now. The healing process needs to take place.”

The Metropolitan Police previously said it was treating the vandalism as a homophobic and transphobic hate crime.

I send my good wishes for the progress of this deeply necessary “healing process” to the traumatised people of Forest Gate, especially to the approximately 25% of them who are Muslim. Despite my view that we would all be better off if there were no such thing as public property, I do not approve of individuals taking it upon themselves to inflict criminal damage on public property. But the line taken by the left since the toppling of the statue of Edward Colston is that it is fine to destroy street furniture of which you disapprove. So – anyone taking odds on how long it lasts till next time?

Maybe Modern Monetary Theory is true after all…

I have seen the light. The man who convinced me of the truth of MMT was someone called Daron Medway, who replied to a tweet by Richard Murphy that said,

The government can never run out of money https://youtu.be/2m3BXdkDJYI?si=cjSA5MJ5AcDWkKgJ
Politicians, commentators and journalists all like to claim that the UK government could run out of money, but that is total nonsense. The UK government can always create the money it needs to pay its debts. It is the one and only organisation in the UK that can never, as a result, run out of money.

with this extremely persuasive point:

This is great! I guess I can keep all of mine then?

Saved from the peril of toy steam engines

Government anti-terror ban forces closure of UK model steam train firm

A historic British firm which produced model steam trains for 87 years has been forced to close its doors after getting hamstrung by red tape.

Mamod this month closed down production in its factory due to dwindling sales and spiralling overheads, in an era of gaming consoles and social media.

The firm was also hobbled by a government ban on the ‘dangerous’ hexamine fuel tablets that had long been used in the models to heat water and set the intricate engines chuntering.

Founded in 1937, Mamod’s steam trains quickly became a favourite of children across the country, boasting static generators which powered models with wire loops and scaled-down traction engines.

While it is true that model steam engines of this type had all but disappeared as toys, there is a considerable market for them among dangerous men with names like Kenneth and Stanley who might convert their garden railways to hexamine-powered rail-mobile nuclear missile launch systems.

An ever-smaller circle

The BBC reports,

SNP MSP John Mason has been stripped of the party whip after “completely unacceptable” social media posts about the conflict in Gaza

Mr Mason said he was “disappointed” by his suspension, which came after he wrote on X that the country’s actions in Gaza did not amount to “genocide”.

In response, a spokesperson for the SNP Chief Whip said: “To flippantly dismiss the death of more than 40,000 Palestinians is completely unacceptable.

“There can be no room in the SNP for this kind of intolerance.”

The spokesperson added the SNP Group would now meet to discuss the matter, with a recommendation of a fixed period suspension, for what they described as a “utterly abhorrent comment”.

The withdrawal of the whip means Mr Mason is effectively expelled from the SNP with immediate effect and must sit as an independent MSP until it is restored.

His “utterly abhorrent comment” was this tweet:

John Mason
@JohnMasonMSP

There is no genocide. If Israel wanted to commit genocide, they would have killed many many more.

If the Scottish National Party wants to eject Mason for having a different definition of the word “genocide” to the one the party favours, that is its prerogative. I am not clear on how it helps anyone in Gaza, or indeed Scotland, but the decision is not mine to make.

What interests me is the way that this type of political thinking shrinks the parties and political tribes that practise it. The three steps are: (1) Take an existing word. (2) Change its definition. (3) Throw anyone who does not accept the change out of your in-group.

Redefinition – the first two steps – is a standard political technique, common on all points of the political compass. Many American campaigners for gay marriage dropped the “gay” and spoke of themselves as campaigning for “marriage”. It worked. Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit often prefaces links to stories about gun rights with the general term “Civil Rights Update”. The good version of the idea is that the reader will do a double-take at seeing something they had never previously thought of as being an example of [marriage / civil rights / whatever] so described, but will then think, “Is there really any reason it shouldn’t be?” The manoeuvre can veer off into being annoying or even deceptive, and I think that some politically involved users of the technique such as the American LGBT advocacy group called the “Human Rights Campaign” do not appreciate how confusing the use of a general term for a much more specific purpose can be to those who are less politically aware, but as a rhetorical technique, it’s fine.

I can also think of things to praise about Step (3). A party – or a doctrine – that does not define itself is pointless. “Vote for us! We’ll do everything!” If the definition concerned is a clear distillation of what that party believes and the other parties do not, it is right and necessary to eject dissenters. No party is obliged to host its opponents. This remains true if the party changes and the opponents being ejected are those who were orthodox yesterday, although I do feel sorry for the Old Believers in this situation.

Step (3) leads into a quagmire when the definition in question is as distant from the party’s main purpose as, well, Gaza is from Scotland. Or, worse yet, when a new Step (3) pops up every week.

As with the Gaza “genocide”, a pattern of making acceptance of a newly-altered definition a condition of continued membership was followed – indeed pioneered – by the SNP with regard to the meaning of the word “woman”. That went very badly for the party, and also for the Scottish trans women it was meant to help. It did not have to be this way. Cast your mind back seven or eight years. Theresa May was Prime Minister. The Equalities Minister was Justine Greening. When Greening announced a bill to enable transgender people to choose their sex more easily, the standard view was mild satisfaction that this reform was being proposed by a Conservative government.

It started to go wrong for the SNP when they reduced their position to four words: “Trans women are women”. Just as John Mason balked this week at accepting that Israel’s actions in Gaza amounted to genocide, while still expressing sympathy for the people of Gaza, so quite a few SNP politicians balked at that definition of “woman” while still stressing that they remained “committed to human rights, equality and dignity for all people”. Several of the MPs and MSPs who signed that letter in 2019 have since left or been thrown out of the party. Things came to a head in 2023 when a double rapist now called Isla Bryson was remanded to a women’s jail. Faced with a wave of popular anger, the then First Minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, backed down and effectively introduced a third legal gender to Scottish law, that of “rapist”. Once punctured, the four word rule “Trans women are women” soon deflated entirely in Scotland, and I think the same is happening across the English-speaking world. The new dominant four word rule is “Transwomen are men”. It would have been better to let people agree to differ.

Having seen how well insisting on a novel definition of “woman” worked out for Nicola Sturgeon, John Swinney appears to have decided to see if insisting on a novel definition of “genocide” is going to work any better for him.

Why do parties nowadays so often try to force an immediate yes-or-no answer on an issue, proudly insisting that there should be “no debate”, when it is obvious that in that case many of their own supporters are going to answer “no”? Why do they compound the error by doing it on issues that most of their supporters did not previously care about?

Discussion point: “No, the government isn’t planning to introduce ID cards”

One should aim to seek out good expositions of arguments with which one usually disagrees. I found an example via the UK Politics subreddit, this piece by James O’Malley: “No, the government isn’t planning to introduce ID cards”.

The article made me think slightly more kindly of the previous Conservative government and slightly less apprehensively about the plans of the new Labour government. Or have I been misled, and Labour’s resurrection of a failed Conservative policy is exactly as sinister as I always thought it was?

“Joy” was last week. This week it’s Trump’s clothes.

A young cosmopolitan such as I did not need the foreign terms explained. When well-meaning people tried to tell me that the “Cookie Monster” was equivalent to a “Biscuit Monster”, or that the “trash can” in which Oscar the Grouch resided was the same as a dustbin, I responded, with some hauteur, that I already knew these things. There was, however, one thing that I did not understand about Sesame Street, and that was why on earth at some point in every episode the announcer would say something along the lines of, “Today’s show is brought to you by the letter P and the number 6”.

Oh well. I liked the puppets.

I remain a fan of the letter P and the number 6. But when it comes to the American media I consume nowadays, I no longer like the puppets.

Oh, I can sympathise a little with the American newspapers for dutifully hastening to parrot every Word of the Week that the Harris campaign gives them. It is human nature to follow the herd. Although, as Glenn Greenwald put it in this tweet, “Not even herd animals are this flagrant about it. You tell me how and why corporate media constantly speaks from the same exact script this way, verbatim.” “Not happiness, not glee, not delight, not jubilation.” The cue card says JOY.

Until Kamala’s JOY expires and the next card comes up. The next card is Donald Trump’s dress sense, or lack of it.

As I said, I can understand, if not admire, the obedience of the American press. But why do British newspapers feel the need to immediately follow suit in complying with the “TRUMP’S SUITS” order?

Cue the Telegraph: The meaning behind Trump’s ill-fitting suits

Cue the Guardian: Donald Trump’s weird clothes: from shoulder pads to extremely long ties, what do they mean?

Insulated from reality

The Observer’s Property section had a sad but interesting story last Sunday:

‘They encouraged us to insulate our home. Now it’s unmortgageable’

Householders are angered by the discovery they cannot remortgage or sell their homes after installing spray-foam insulation to cut energy use.

Jim Bunce thought he was doing the right thing for his purse and the planet: in 2022, as fuel costs soared, he and his wife decided to improve the energy efficiency of their house.

They discovered that the government had endorsed spray-foam insulation, a quick and unobtrusive technique by which liquid foam is spray-gunned into roof spaces and walls. Their loft was successfully treated at a cost of £2,800 and their gas bills duly fell.

Now, two years on, they have found that, by making their home more energy efficient, they have also made it unsaleable. “We are unable to borrow against it, or potentially to sell it, unless the foam is completely removed,” says Bunce.

I feel sorry for Mr and Mrs Bunce. My title was not intended to single them out as being unusually insulated from reality; until recently the great majority of the population would have assumed that taking up a scheme promoted by the government was a safe choice.

It isn’t. On the contrary, if a new type of technological product is being pushed by government in order to meet national policy targets, that means that it has not been through the filter of large numbers of people freely deciding to buy it and telling their family and friends that it benefited them as individuals.