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]
|
If the philosopher A. C. Grayling ever had ambitions to stand for elected office, this tweet will have killed them stone dead:
As usual, here is the text of that tweet in case it disappears:
A C Grayling #FBPE #Reform #Rejoin #FBPR
@acgrayling
U of Bath study: “only 40% of people with the lowest cognitive ability voted Remain, while 73% of those with the highest cognitive ability voted Remain…people with lower cognitive ability and analytical thinking skills are more susceptible to misinformation and disinformation”.
10:23 PM · Nov 23, 2023
The replies, unsurprisingly in this egalitarian age, are overwhelmingly hostile. But since I, like Professor Grayling, have no political ambitions, I can admit that he is probably right. It would be a strange chance if the average IQs of Leave and Remain were perfectly equal. If they were not equal, one group had to be cleverer on average. Because I assume that people usually vote in their class interests, I assume that the cognitive elite, whose intelligence usually translates well into wealth and prestige, voted to perpetuate the status quo. Alas for them, the lesser folk also had a vote and had a pretty good inkling that it was not a good idea to remain under the increasingly immovable rule of a class of people who despised them.
While Professor Grayling’s first sentence is probably true, the three little dots that he put between the claim that the stupider-on-average (can I stop adding the “on average” now?) people voted Leave and the conclusion that they did so because they were particularly susceptible to disinformation are doing so much work that they ought to bring a claim under the EU Working Time Directive.
I was about to quote Orwell’s line about “There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them” when a fortunate burst of insecurity led me to check the quote and find out that Orwell never said it; it was Bertrand Russell. Clever bloke, Russell. Also frequently a twit, though capable of being embarrassed by his own previous excesses. Whoever said it, it’s true. It is proverbial among those who study scams that the easiest people to scam are those who think they are too clever to be scammed.
Edit 27/11/2023: In the comments, Rich Rostrom has supplied the phrase with a very similar meaning that George Orwell actually did say, namely “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.” It occurs in Orwell’s 1945 essay “Notes on Nationalism”. Change a few words and the whole paragraph could be re-used today:
“It is, I think, true to say that the intelligentsia have been more wrong about the progress of the war than the common people, and that they were more swayed by partisan feelings. The average intellectual of the Left believed, for instance, that the war was lost in 1940, that the Germans were bound to overrun Egypt in 1942, that the Japanese would never be driven out of the lands they had conquered, and that the Anglo-American bombing offensive was making no impression on Germany. He could believe these things because his hatred for the British ruling class forbade him to admit that British plans could succeed. There is no limit to the follies that can be swallowed if one is under the influence of feelings of this kind. I have heard it confidently stated, for instance, that the American troops had been brought to Europe not to fight the Germans but to crush an English revolution. One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.”
A related point was made by Dominic Cummings in his famous “Frogs before the storm” blog post:
“Generally the better educated are more prone to irrational political opinions and political hysteria than the worse educated far from power. Why? In the field of political opinion they are more driven by fashion, a gang mentality, and the desire to pose about moral and political questions all of which exacerbate cognitive biases, encourage groupthink, and reduce accuracy. Those on average incomes are less likely to express political views to send signals; political views are much less important for signalling to one’s immediate in-group when you are on 20k a year.”
“Violence in Dublin after five hurt in knife attack” reports the BBC:
There are violent scenes in Dublin after an earlier knife attack in the city centre in which five people were injured
It is not clear exactly what caused the disturbances – involving clashes, and reports of a number of vehicles set on fire
The BBC’s line about it not being clear exactly what caused the disturbances is disingenuous. It is entirely clear what they are rioting about. From the Telegraph:
Violent anti-immigration protesters descended on Dublin city centre on Thursday night after five people were injured in a knife attack outside a school. At least three small children were injured in the attack in the Irish capital, as well as a man and a woman. A five-year-old girl sustained “serious injuries” and was receiving emergency treatment, police said. Despite police not revealing the suspected knifeman’s identity or motive, far-Right thugs emboldened by “misinformation” descended on the streets of the capital, setting fire to a police car, a tram and a double-decker bus, among other vehicles, and throwing fireworks at officers.
The only thing that is not entirely clear is whether the rioters are correct in thinking that the man who stabbed the children and adults is an Algerian migrant, as believed by those replying to this tweet by Micheál Martin, the Tánaiste (the deputy head of the Irish government).
It does not excuse the riots in the least if the rioters are correct to think that the would-be child murderer is any or all of a migrant, legal or illegal, or a Muslim, or from an ethnic minority. But the obfuscation from the Irish authorities and media on this point is making the situation worse.
The usual flashpoint for riots throughout history has been a rumour of crimes committed by a member of Group A against Group B. The riots in the Lozells district of Birmingham in 2005 have been almost forgotten because whites were not involved, but they were a typical example of the type, having been sparked by a completely unsubstantiated story that a black girl had been gang-raped by a group of South Asian men.
Sometimes the rumour is true, sometimes it is not.
If, as in that case, the inciting rumour is not true, the best tool for squelching the false claim and quelling the violence is a trusted press, taking the term “press” in a wider sense than just newspapers. If the rumour is true, the best tool for quelling the violence is still a trusted press. It can do things like publicising condemnations of the crime from leaders of the group to which the perpetrator belongs. What a pity that Ireland, like much of the Western World, no longer has a trusted press because it no longer has a trustworthy press.
It’s not “Despite police not revealing the suspected knifeman’s identity or motive, far-Right thugs emboldened by “misinformation” descended on the streets of the capital”, it’s a damn sight closer to “Because of police not revealing the suspected knifeman’s identity or motive, far-Right thugs emboldened by “misinformation” descended on the streets of the capital”. If the official sources of information won’t do their jobs, don’t be surprised when people turn to unofficial sources instead.
*
Related posts: “Try not lying” – about the sexual assaults in Cologne and other German cities during the New Year celebrations of 1 January 2016, “If you do not want to see the BNP vindicated, try not proving them right”, and “Politically correct evasiveness fails on its own terms”.
The Guardian‘s “social affairs correspondent”, Richard Booth, has written an article with the title “Five things that could help fix Britain’s private rented sector”. By “fix” he must mean “fix its current problems in stone”, because, with the possible exception of the first, every one of them would make yet more landlords run for the exits while they still have the chance.
An astonishing number of people think it is a good argument to say at this point, “Aha, but the houses would still exist, so landlords selling up would be good for the tenants because they could buy them”. There is indeed often a temporary glut of houses for sale just before laws such as Mr Booth advocates are passed, which is like winning the lottery for the people rich enough to buy at that moment. Then the door closes for decades. The great majority of tenants cannot afford to buy the houses they are renting and most would not want to even if they could. They are students, or people on temporary contracts, or people happy to do a fast-paced job in the big city while they are young but who never had any intention of settling there forever. Rent control and legal “protection” for these tenants is nice for one generation of them, a disaster for those who come after.
Then again, a return to the days of yore when most people lived and died within a few miles of where they were born can seem quite a charming prospect to those who think that it will not apply to them. And there is no doubt that an end to all this social mobility would be very eco-friendly.
In my recent post, “Peace-lovers love using the passive voice”, I asked you to supply particularly egregious examples of media attempts to downplay murders by Hamas and other protected groups. Ben did just that. From Canadian TV:
In case it disappears, the tweet from @CTVNews says, “Canadian peace activist Vivian Silver, who went missing after Hamas attack, has died.”
The use of “has died” rather than “is dead” makes it sound like she passed away in hospital within the last few days. Actually, she has been dead for a month because she was murdered on October 7th, alongside more than a thousand others. The only thing that has happened within the last few days is that they finally identified her remains. In most situations I would not read so much into a journalist’s slightly odd use of the present perfect for an event a month ago, but when every such oddity of phrasing works to push the murderers out of sight, it is not a coincidence, it’s a technique. Most headlines are written to grab the reader’s attention; these headlines are written to be forgotten. Like the small print in a dodgy contract, they are carefully crafted to meet the technical requirement of having been stated somewhere, but, in a betrayal of the normal function of journalism, those who write them would prefer you not to read on. That someone “has died” is scarcely news at all. Every morning’s news report gives its crop of vaguely prominent people who have died during the previous few days. They don’t want you to think about when or how she died. They don’t want you to think about the state in which Vivian Silver’s body must have been found, given that her remains were not identified for a month. They don’t want you to feel the horror of her murder.
I am going to post an image. If I have done this right, it will be hidden “below the fold”, so you must click the link in order to see it. I put it below the fold because it is horrifying. Am I doing the same as CTV in that tweet I was complaining about, then? No, the opposite. They do all they can to stop their readers ever thinking about the reality of terrorism. I am giving readers who cannot stop thinking about it the option not to see one particularly distressing photograph. The image I am talking about shows a poster put out by the Royal Ulster Constabulary in response to the La Mon restaurant bombing carried out by the IRA in 1978. These days people discussing this poster feel obliged to blur it out, but in Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles they were not so sensitive. The poster shows what CTV and so many others in the modern media want to hide. Again and again, it says the word they will not say.
→ Continue reading: Lest we remember
Ten years and ten days ago, the sadly missed Brian Micklethwait wrote this: “What if there is a real collective disaster?”
Brian quoted this article by Paul Murphy which said that the response of governments and the scientific establishment to what they saw as the global warming crisis had “destroyed the credibility of all involved” and “greatly weakened the world’s ability to recognize and respond to a real threat should one now materialize.”
Brian added,
An unfree society may be great at imposing immediate unanimity, but what if what it immediately imposes unanimously is panic and indecision? (Think Stalin when Hitler attacked the USSR in 1941.) And what if it then imposes a wrong decision about what needs to be done? A collectivity that is hastily assembled by freer and more independent persons is just as likely to act in a timely manner, and is far more likely to have a proper argument about what must be done, and hence to arrive at a better decision about that.
Besides which, what is often needed in a crisis is not so much collective action, but rather individual action for the benefit of the collective. That is a very different thing, and clearly a society which cultivates individuality will prepare individuals far better for such heroism than will societies where everyone is in the habit only of doing as they are told.
“An unfree society may be great at imposing immediate unanimity, but what if what it immediately imposes unanimously is panic and indecision?” There could scarcely be a better description of the response of the UK and the Western world as a whole to Covid-19. Masks are useless! Cancel that, masks are compulsory! Herd immunity! Cancel that, vaccines are compulsory! Lockdown! Cancel that, ‘Eat Out to Help Out’, er, cancel that, back to lockdown!
Soon after Hamas attacked Israel, Jeremy Corbyn made a speech. Kyle Orton noticed something odd about it:
“young people who died in the Negev desert”
“young people who’ve been killed by Israeli forces in Gaza”
Telling how he thinks.
So sad about those young people who “died in the desert”. What happened, did they forget water bottles and sun cream? Tut, tut, young people are so imprudent.
All languages have their irregularities. For instance, in Modern Journalese Jews can kill, where “to kill” is a transitive verb, but they die intransitively. Their allotted span of years happens to come to an end that day. The nearest the grammar of Journalese gets to expressing the idea that someone might have – uh, whatchamacallit, done that thing to a Jew so that they end up dying – is to tentatively mention an event that preceded it:
“Jewish man in California dies after confrontation during Israel-Hamas War protests” – Time magazine.
But remember, folks, correlation is not causation. Though in this case, it was. The Community Notes to that tweet by Time magazine state “The medical examiner ruled Paul Kessler’s death a homicide.” He was – I’m speaking normal English, not Journalese, so this sentence is grammatical despite Mr Kessler having been a Jew – killed. The definitional question that remains open is whether his killing was murder.
That question is not open when it comes to the young Israelis who were murdered by Hamas at a music festival in the Negev Desert.
Edit: In the comments, AFT points out that the distinction between transitive and intransitive verbs is not the same as the distinction between active and passive voice. An example of the latter distinction would be “The Israelis killed the Palestinians” versus “The Israelis were killed by the Palestinians”. I have seen enough evidence of the journalistic preference for headlines in which Israelis actively, dynamically, kill specified people versus those in which Israelis are killed by unspecified people, and vice versa for Palestinians, that I think I can leave the double meaning of “passive” in my post title unchanged. If you have seen a particularly egregious example of either distinction, add it to the comments.
This is the hierarchy:
1. A killed B.
2. B was killed by A.
3. B was killed. (No killer specified.)
4. B died after some event. (Whether or not their death was a result of that event is left unspecified.)
5. B died at a given location or time, such as “in the Negev desert”, from which the reader who keeps up with the news might be able to deduce that the death was not natural.
A related strategy for avoiding naming murderers from a protected group is to blame it all on the instrument. This might be called the “killer car” strategy, as perfected by the Washington Post’s infamous reference to “the Waukesha tragedy caused by a SUV”.
This article about “climate fatigue” by Francesco Grillo is one of the better arguments I have seen in the Guardian on the topic: “Climate fatigue isn’t a sign that Europeans are in denial – it’s a sign of their fear”. It starts very much in the usual fashion:
The first step is to recognise that climate fatigue in Europe has little to do with Europeans being less concerned about the impact of volatile climate systems. Indeed, people feel the effects directly and terrifyingly as the continent is increasingly battered by heatwaves, wildfires, storms and floods.
I am suspicious of that claim that the decline in European popular support for climate measures “has little to do with” many Europeans ceasing to believe in the seriousness of the claimed coming catastrophe. It has lots to do with it, obviously. If the people of Europe still held the same level of belief in the imminence and severity of CAGW (Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming) as they did five years back, their support for drastic measures to head off this disaster would also be at the same level as it was then. They don’t and it isn’t. Their increased scepticism is justified. A great many predictions of doom have failed to come to pass. Click on the word “CAGW” to see relevant past posts by me and others on this blog going back more than two decades. I will restate my own opinion: that anthropogenic global warming probably is occurring but at nothing like the apocalyptic level claimed. Angela Merkel would have been better off saying, “Wir schaffen das” about climate change.
However honesty compels me to say that some of the decline in belief is motivated by people finally having twigged that the bill for Net Zero will not ultimately be paid by the infinitely absorbent corporations and governments of legend, but by them. When people drop a luxury belief because it ceases to be a luxury they can afford, they do advance towards reason, but not by means of reason. Sometimes that’s the best we can hope for. It’s not like the prophets of doom are immune from motivated reasoning themselves. The point is that Europeans have realised, correctly, that if we actually do all that the Greens want us to do, it will impoverish us. If we do a quarter of what the Greens want us to do, it will impoverish us. That would be bad, even from – or especially from – the point of view of people worried about climate change. Impoverished societies cease to care about the environment.
This is why I said that Mr Grillo’s article is one of the better ones I have read in the Guardian. They are not usually so honest about the cost:
But people are also terrified of what they believe will be the cost to individuals of the required energy transition. According to the consulting firm McKinsey, the global transition to net zero will require additional investments in fixed assets of $3.5tn a year until 2050. That’s about a quarter of all the tax raised worldwide. There is still no convincing mechanism for financing this in ways that reassure families, individuals, small firms and farmers that they are not going to be bankrupted. Increasingly, ordinary citizens know that many of them will have to foot crippling bills for such things as renovating homes to make them comply with energy efficiency rules.
And
… in a country such as Italy, more than half of existing homes need to be adapted to the new standards. Italian families would have to pay out about €500bn over the next decade, an average of €40,000 per affected household, according to a study done for the Vision thinktank I am affiliated to. No wonder many families, impoverished by years of economic stagnation and more recent inflation, view the green deal not as a transition to a more just model of distributed energy production, but as a waking nightmare.
“Netanyahu quits over withdrawal from Gaza”. Having got your attention, I will now admit that the Guardian story by Conal Urquhart to which I just linked dates from 8 August 2005. Despite the news of Netanyahu having quit being eighteen years out of date, it is worth your time to read. It will give you a sense of why, despite his many failings, Israelis might be willing to cut their current prime minister some slack:
Israel’s finance minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, resigned from the government yesterday, claiming its plan to withdraw from settlements in the occupied territories would allow the creation of a base for “Islamic terrorism”.
In what is widely seen as a prelude to a challenge to the leadership of the prime minister, Ariel Sharon, Mr Netanyahu submitted his letter of resignation as the cabinet met to rubber stamp the first phase of the evacuation of settlements in Gaza.
“I am not prepared to be a partner to a move which ignores reality, and proceeds blindly toward turning the Gaza Strip into a base for Islamic terrorism which will threaten the state,” he wrote.
He called it horribly right.
Here is another report from 2005, this time by the BBC, “Israel completes Gaza withdrawal”.
Israeli troops have pulled out of the Gaza Strip more than 38 years after capturing the narrow coastal area.
Tanks and armoured vehicles left under cover of darkness and the last officer shut the Kissufim border at dawn.
Thousands of jubilant Palestinians entered the former Jewish enclaves, and some set an abandoned synagogue ablaze in a settlement near Khan Younis.
Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas described the withdrawal as an historic and joyful day for his people.
In 2005, the Israelis finally did what so many goodhearted, decent, moderate people in their own country and worldwide had long urged them to do. They gave up land in the hope of peace. They dismantled the Jewish settlements, by force if necessary, but famously left behind high-tech greenhouses full of crops as a gift for the new owners of Gaza. The illusions of the donors who had funded that generous gesture did not last the day. The illusion that giving up the Gaza Strip would be a step towards peace lasted until October 7th, 2023, another historic and joyful day for the Palestinian people.
And now all the goodhearted, decent and moderate people – often, since the careers of newspaper columnists can span decades, literally the same people – are once again calling for Israel to be reasonable and call a ceasefire.
Until the morning of October 7th, the Israelis thought they had a ceasefire.
The video embedded in this tweet from the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) shows Ghazi Hamad of the Hamas Political Bureau speaking on LBC Television, a Lebanese TV channel, on October 24th 2023. What follows is my transcription of the first minute of this video clip. I often do this, transcribe what was said on video into writing, to make it easier for people to search for and cite the relevant words later.
*
Ghazi Hamad: “Israel is a country that has no place on our land. We must remove that country because it constitutes a security, military, and political catastrophe to the Arab and Islamic nation and must be finished.”
“We are not ashamed to say this with full force.”
“We must teach Israel a lesson and we will do this again and again.”
“The Al-Aqsa Flood is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth, because we have the determination, the resolve, and the capabilities to fight.”
Interviewer: “Will we have to pay a price?”
Ghazi Hamad: “Yes, and we are ready to pay it. We are called a nation of martyrs, and we are proud to sacrifice martyrs.”
“We did not want to harm civilians, but there were complications on the ground, and there was a party in the area with (civilian) population. It was a large area, across 40 kilometres… The occupation must come to an end.”
Interviewer: “Occupation where? In the Gaza Strip?”
Ghazi Hamad: “No, I am talking about all the Palestinian lands.”
Interviewer: “Does that mean the annihilation of Israel?”
Ghazi Hamad: “Yes, of course.”
“Comic book fans will be familiar with the term ‘retcon’, which in layman’s terms means that the writer waves his hand and tells you ‘Remember when we said this? We screwed up, forget about that.'” – ‘Spoony’ quoted on the TV Tropes website.
“There is no history of Wales without the history of black experiences in Wales”, tweets @WelshLabour. Why do so many people say stuff like this nowadays? What do they think it achieves? Sure, it would be fair to say that any history of Wales that goes up to modern times but leaves out the chapter on Black Welsh people was incomplete. But, given that they make up only around 0.6% of the Welsh population now, and that prior to modern times their numbers were far lower than that, to say that the history of Wales does not exist unless it includes black history to say that entire history of Wales from Neolithic times until the mid twentieth century does not exist. It also implies that white experiences do not count as history unless there were some black people around at the same time to experience history properly. TV Tropes has a name for that idea, too, the “Magical Negro”.
This desperate retconning of the odd Phoenician, Libyan or Egyptian who turned up in British history as “black”, and the whole trend to exaggerate the number of black people in British history, has two effects, both of which increase racism. White people from the majority population resent seeing the history of their ancestors falsified and even erased, as the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, did when he said that “This city was built by migrants.” For black people, and indeed anyone of any colour whose ancestors did not come from these islands, it cements the idea that a person cannot truly be Welsh or British unless they can point to examples of people with enough genes in common with them having lived in those places centuries ago.
As I wrote a few years back,
For those that know their history, to read the line “Britain has always been a nation of immigrants” promotes scorn. When those who at first did not know the facts finally find them out, their reaction is cynicism. Worse yet, this slogan suggests that love of country for a black or ethnic minority Briton should depend on irrelevancies such as whether the borders were continually porous through many centuries, or on whether people ethnically similar them happen to have been here since time immemorial. (The latter idea is another “very odd corner” for progressives to have painted themselves into.) If either of these claims turns out to be false, what then?
Better to learn from the example of the Huguenots and Jews. Whether any “people like them” had come before might be an interesting question for historians (and a complex one in the case of the Jews), but whatever the answer, they became British anyway.
It is not necessary to have ancestors in a country to love it and to take inspiration from its history. This was well expressed in the maiden speech of Kemi Badenoch MP:
There are few countries in the world where you can go in one generation from immigrant to parliamentarian. Michael Howard spoke of the British dream—people choosing this country because of its tolerance and its opportunity. It is a land where a girl from Nigeria can move, aged 16, be accepted as British and have the great honour of representing Saffron Walden.
There are some in this country, and this Chamber, who seek to denigrate the traditions of this Parliament, portraying this House as a bastion of privilege and class, that “reeks of the establishment”, as someone said. It is no coincidence that those who seek to undermine the institutions of this island—Parliament, monarchy, Church and family—also propagate a world view that sees Britain, and the values we hold dear, as a force for bad in the world. Growing up in Nigeria, the view was rather different. The UK was a beacon, a shining light, a promise of a better life.
Dr Wahid Asif Shaida has worked as an NHS doctor for a practice in Harrow for more than twenty years. He is described as having a senior role at the surgery as a mentor and trainer for recently-qualified doctors.
Remember the Hizb ut-Tahrir member who led the chant for jihad the other day?
Same guy.
London jihad demo leader is NHS doctor: Islamic extremist’s double life as a suburban GP is exposed
The firebrand leader of an extremist Islamic group that called for ‘jihad’ at an anti-Israel protest works as an NHS GP under a different name, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
As head of Hizb ut-Tahrir in the UK, Abdul Wahid celebrated the barbaric Hamas terror attacks that slaughtered 1,400 Jewish men, women and children earlier this month as a ‘very welcome punch on the nose’ to Israel.
But he has also spent more than 20 years practising as a family doctor under his real name, Dr Wahid Asif Shaida.
|
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.
|
