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 implore people to stop using private healthcare: it’s killing the NHS”, writes Jessica Arnold, who is described as “associate director of primary care for NHS Bromley clinical commissioning group”.
…this is one of the most insidious and immediate ways privatisation is affecting our universal healthcare system – by poaching staff from their NHS jobs. Private hospitals, private diagnostic testing services, private general practices and other privately run services are creating a vicious cycle of detriment. It is a major contributor to the some 100,000 vacancies currently in the NHS today.
“Poaching” is a strange metaphor to use, given that the “birds” in this case are not being kidnapped by the private sector but leaving the National Health Service to work elsewhere of their own free will. Perhaps Ms Arnold is referring to the eventual destiny of the birds under a gamekeeper’s care that do not get poached.
Please try not to get arrested, but in the shadow of the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, might it not be interesting to have a discussion about the rights and wrongs of assassination?
Most states, most of the time, follow a rough convention that important government employees – heads of state, government ministers, top brass et cetera – of State A do not assassinate their counterparts in State B, however wicked those counterparts may be. President Trump has shown himself indifferent to that convention. He could be praised for his courage (including personal courage: his own risk of being assassinated has obviously gone up) or damned for his disregard of the evil consequences that are likely to fall on others. In a world where national leaders target each other, wars are more likely.
Or are they? Did the fact that men like Soleimani could kill minor employees of other governments, not to mention civilians, without much personal risk, actually smooth the path to war? It does seem unjust that those steeped in guilt are sacrosanct while relatively innocent spear-carriers are acceptable targets.
Here is another question for us and anyone watching us to ponder. Many people have argued strongly over the last few hours that President Trump was right to break the convention of the immunity from assassination of senior state employees. But I have heard no one argue against the convention that only senior state employees can order assassinations.
ADDED LATER: In the comments “Chester Draws” made a very relevant point:
There is a convention that political leaders are not killed.
There is also a convention — literally — that embassies are not to be attacked. Iran broke that one first. And then again recently.
That fact alone, that until now the Islamic Republic of Iran got away scot-free with invading an embassy and kidnapping diplomats, made me much more willing to approve the unconventional killing of a representative of that government. Let those who boast that the rules do not apply to them learn that in that case the rules do not apply to them.
Hat tip to Ed Driscoll of Instapundit for at least giving Britain a few hours’ notice of its icy doom.
The news was first reported by Mark Townsend and Paul Harris in the Guardian‘s Sunday sister the Observer on Sun 22 Feb 2004. Since the world did not take the preventative measures the experts warned were necessary it is clear that nothing can save us now:
Now the Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us
· Secret report warns of rioting and nuclear war
· Britain will be ‘Siberian’ in less than 20 years
· Threat to the world is greater than terrorism
A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.
Continuing my series of “Newspaper headlines mentioning vaguely newsworthy persons that I thought at first sight were jokes but turned out to be literally true”,
Prominent lawyer Jolyon Maugham clubs fox to death while wearing kimono.
Well, I suppose it is traditional to kill foxes on Boxing Day.
Yesterday’s entry: The Attorney General reads “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas”
Like it says on the tin, here is a video in which Geoffrey Cox reads ‘Twas The Night Before Christmas.
No political point is being made. I just thought he read it rather well. If the politics gig doesn’t work out, a more respectable career awaits him as a voiceover artist.
Happy [insert festival of choice here, including but not limited to Christmas and Wednesday] to all our readers.
After selling half a billion Harry Potter books, it ought not to be news that J K Rowling has found a bunch of new readers. She has, though. But not all of them are fans. In the last few days twin rivers of praise and obloquy have washed over her for this tweet:
Dress however you please.
Call yourself whatever you like.
Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you.
Live your best life in peace and security.
But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real?
#IStandWithMaya #ThisIsNotADrill
12:57 PM · Dec 19, 2019
She was referring to the judgement given by the employment judge Mr J Tayler in the employment tribunal case Forstater vs CGD :
The specific belief that the Claimant holds as determined in the reasons, is not a philosophical belief protected by the Equality Act 2010.
Those of you who did not leap to read the 26-page judgement may find it hard to understand what has aroused Ms Rowling’s anger. There are slightly more digestible accounts of the case between Maya Forstater and her former employer, the Centre for Global Development, available from Izzy Lyons in the Telegraph, Gaby Hinsliff in the Guardian, Clive Coleman for the BBC, and Andrew Sullivan in New York Magazine‘s blog, the Intelligencer – scroll down to see the part about the Forstater case. I got the link to the actual judgement from Mr Sullivan’s article.
So, do I stand with Maya?
Er, sort of. I’m kind of hovering sympathetically in the same general area without getting too close. The tragedy is that the debate we are getting is not once but twice removed from the debate we should be having. Should Maya Forstater be free to say what she thinks about the issue of whether transwomen are women? Yes, a thousand times yes. I would fight that battle gladly. Should the Centre for Global Development be free to impose restrictions on the speech of its employees as a condition of their employment? Yes in Libertaria, but in the real life UK… it’s complicated. Are transwomen “really” women? That question is subjective. The attempt to make it a matter of law does nothing but breed hatred. Yet at present all discussion of transgender people quickly becomes lost in an impenetrable maze of competing definitions of womanhood. The one issue that this futile discussion settles is which banner one marches under in the transgenderism wars, when there never needed to be sides at all.
The headline you see when you click on this BBC new story is “Macau: China’s other ‘one country, two systems’ region”, but the headline on the BBC front page that takes you to the story is “HK’s model neighbour that stays loyal to China”.
The rest of the story follows that line.
We hear that Macau has the third highest per capita GDP in the world and that China “has expanded its economy phenomenally”. The government hands out cash to residents “as part of a wealth-sharing programme”. A lady called Mrs Lam – not that Mrs Lam – says of Macau’s relations with China, “We understand the boundaries quite well” and “there has been a big focus on improving the region’s economy as well as its education system”. Even the democracy activist found by the BBC says, when reference is made to the Hong Kong protests, “This dissent does not exist in Macau.”
President Xi Jinping of China is quoted as saying, “I wish to stress that the handling of [Hong Kong and Macau] affairs is strictly China’s internal matter, there is no need for any external force to dictate things to us.”
The article reads as if Mr Xi dictated it to the BBC.
One line from an article about something else has been haunting me for the last two days. I seek to exorcise the ghost. Over at the Great Realignment, I did a post about an interview between Isaac Chotiner of the New Yorker and Professor David Runciman of Cambridge. The interview was about the recent UK election and Brexit, but I was so struck by the wider ramifications of a particular thought of his that I first made it into the title of that post, and now I will continue that theme here. Professor Runciman said,
“We are the first societies in human history where the old outnumber the young.”
Are we? If we are, what difference does it make? Who is “we” in this case?
That leads me to ask this question of our readers:
In what other ways do we in the modern world truly differ from our forebears?
Several years ago, I had a fascinating conversation on this very subject with a friend. (As a matter of fact it was Niall Kilmartin’s wife, so if this whole thing sounds familiar to you, Niall, that’s why.) She and I came up with a few more:
We are the first society in which parents can reasonably expect all their children to outlive them.
We are the first society in which an emigrant to a far country can reasonably expect to visit and be visited by their relatives in the old country.
We are the first society in which the conversation is global.
The coming of the telegraph was the greatest jump in speed of communication that has ever occurred and, barring one of the least scientifically plausible tropes of science fiction turning out to be true after all, will ever occur. The telephone, radio and the internet merely finished the job.
We thought of a few more, but those were the biggest ones that I remember. Do you have any more? Do you disagree with any of those suggestions, or with Professor Runciman’s idea of the old outnumbering the young quoted earlier? Or is the whole idea that we are significantly different from the people of the past merely a childish manifestation of the desire to make ourselves seem special?
Like someone who comes out blinking from having seen a crime movie in the cinema only to find a crime scene in real life, I have emerged from being obsessed with the most important British election campaign of my lifetime to find that while I wasn’t looking politics has only gone and happened in other countries too.
Apparently the Australian government is trying to bring forward a bill banning religious discrimination. The Australian edition of the Guardian has an informative article about it:
Religious discrimination bill: what will Australians be allowed to say and do if it passes?
Statements of religious belief
Protection received: statements of religious belief will not be found to breach other federal, state and territory discrimination laws.
Examples:
A Christian may say that unrepentant sinners will go to hell, an example cited in the EM which mirrors the facts of Israel Folau’s case
A doctor may tell a transgender patient of their religious belief that God made men and women in his image and that gender is therefore binary (EM)
I can see why the coalition between the Liberal and National Parties that is currently in power in Australia wants to pass this bill. In the Anglosphere the politically correct Establishment continues its left wing course even when a vaguely right wing government is in power, as is the case in Australia now. It is common for this Establishment to try to suppress the freedom of speech of religious people, particularly Christians. If it became law this bill would redress the balance somewhat. It also does related things like give religious doctors the right to “conscientiously object to providing what the Guardian calls “a health service”, meaning contraception and abortion, and allows religious institutions to require their employees to hold the relevant religion.
This will help some individuals who are being bullied by the Australian State, but only at the cost of cementing yet more firmly the idea that the only way to escape such bullying is to get your particular group defined as a “protected category”.
I have an idea. Let’s put everyone into one big protected category.
The ceremonial of the State Opening of Parliament includes a moment when Black Rod, the Queen’s representative, approaches the door of the Commons to summon MPs for the Queen’s Speech. Tradition demands that he – or in 2019, she – has the door slammed in her face to symbolise the independence of the Commons from the Crown. Only after knocking three times is Black Rod allowed to enter.
The door closed to a demand but open to a request is a powerful symbol.
In the election we have just had, one of the most contentious issues was immigration and nationality. As stated in its manifesto Labour’s policy was to give the vote to “all UK residents”, and not just the vote, automatic citizenship, according to the Shadow Business Secretary Rebecca Long-Bailey. Labour did not exactly shout about the fact that “UK residents” includes foreign citizens, but several people including the Prime Minister’s adviser Dominic Cummings did notice. He then informed the nation in his own inimitable style: “BATSIGNAL!! DON’T LET CORBYN-STURGEON CHEAT A SECOND REFERENDUM WITH MILLIONS OF FOREIGN VOTES”.
But underneath the all-caps headline he made a fair point:
Before the 23 June 2016, many such as the Economist and FT predicted a Leave win would boost extremists and make immigration the central issue in politics. VL said the opposite would happen: that once people know there’ll be democratic control, it will quickly fade as an issue and attitudes towards immigrants will improve. VL was right, the FT was wrong — as all academic research shows. If you want immigration to fade from politics, then democratic control is the answer. If you go with Corbyn and free movement for the whole world, then immigration will be all over the news and extremism will grow. A system like Australia’s will be fairer, good for the economy and take the heat out of the issue.
Imagine that Corbyn had won, formed a coalition government, enacted Labour’s manifesto promise to give the vote to EU citizens and others, and held a second referendum in which their 2.4 million votes for Remain swept away the majority for Leave among British citizens. Imagine if the ignored and scorned people of Leave-voting towns in what were once Labour heartlands saw that Labour had imported a new foreign electorate to replace them. Some may not like that wording but it would have been accurate. Imagine the bitterness towards foreign residents in the UK if that had happened.
It didn’t, thanks in no small measure to Mr Cummings himself. In a month or two the Guardian will report that public hostility to immigration has gone down and attribute it to a burgeoning movement to rejoin the EU. But the real reason will be that people will feel that at some level the wishes of the existing citizens of the UK control who else comes in the country. When you know you can close the door you become more willing to open it in welcome.
Having written the above, I remembered that this is not the first post of mine with a title that uses the metaphor of knocking on a door. Rather than be embarrassed at repeating myself, I will assert that it is a metaphor with several applications. Here is the old post: “To knock on the door is better than booting it in”. It is about relations between transgender and cisgender women.
Saturday’s Daily Mail carries this headline: ‘He’s a fraud’: Father of London Bridge terror victim Jack Merritt blasts Boris Johnson for making ‘political capital’ out of son’s death – and backs Jeremy Corbyn after TV debate
The article continues,
The father of a man killed in the London Bridge terror has slammed Boris Johnson for trying to ‘make political capital’ over his death.
David Merritt said the Prime Minister was a ‘fraud’ for using the attack as justification for a series of tougher criminal policies in a post on social media.
His son Jack Merritt, 25, was one of two people killed by convicted terrorist Usman Khan at a prisoner reform meeting in Fishmongers’ Hall last Friday.
What bitter irony that the two young people Usman Khan murdered believed strongly that criminals like him could change for the better. Because Jack Merritt and Saskia Jones were attending a conference on rehabilitation of offenders alongside Khan they were the nearest available targets for his knives. No doubt Khan planned it that way. One of the consistent aims of Islamists is to sow distrust for Muslims among non-Muslims.
David Merritt has suffered the cruellest blow imaginable. Nothing is more natural than that he should strive to counter the narrative that the ideals for which his son strove are disproved by the manner of his murder.
It is, of course, right to say that the ideal of rehabilitation is not disproved by one failure. No policy is proved or disproved by individual cases. Let us not forget that James Ford, one of the men who bravely fought to subdue Khan, was a convicted murderer on day-release.
However while Khan’s example of terrorist rehabilitation gone wrong does not prove that it can never go right, it is a data point. Thankfully we do not have many data points for the graph of jihadists playing a long game. But that means the ones we do have weigh comparatively heavily. What Khan did others can copy. The prime minister and those who make policy on parole and rehabilitation of prisoners must assess that possibility. They cannot allow what Jack Merritt would have wanted or what would ease David Merritt’s pain to factor in their decision.
In 2001 I wrote a pamphlet for the Libertarian Alliance called Rachel weeping for her children: understanding the reaction to the massacre at Dunblane (PDF, text). When discussing massacres carried out by Muslims with a Libertarian audience it is worth bringing up the subject of massacres carried out by gun owners, because our prejudices are likely to run in a different direction. We are better protected from the temptation to make group judgements. There are other common factors in how we should strive to think rationally about these two sorts of mass killing as well. In 2001 I wrote how the agony of the bereaved parents of those children preyed on my mind. I would have done anything to comfort them – except believe what I knew to be untrue.
When the parents of the Dunblane children spoke there was every reason for the world to hear about their terrible experience. There was never any particular reason to suppose that their opinions were right. In fact their opinions should carry less weight than almost anyone else’s should. This point is well understood when it comes to juries. It goes without saying, or, at least, it once did, that guilt or innocence must be decided by impartial people. Decisions of policy require the same cast of mind as decisions of guilt and innocence. The relatives of murder victims cannot be impartial. In a murder trial it is no use saying that it is as important to the family of the victim as to the judge that no innocent person be punished. In pure logic it ought to be, but in fact it almost never is. The bereaved want to believe that the evildoer has been punished. If the real evildoer has escaped (either escaped in the literal meaning of the word or escaped by suicide, as Hamilton did) someone must be found to suffer. Even in cases of pure accident we don’t have Acts of God any more: always some arm of government or business is pursued and sued so that the weight of blame may fall on somebody.
“Passengers locked on train with violent thugs”, reports the Times:
Two “psychotic” thugs spent 30 minutes assaulting and abusing commuters after rail staff locked them in a carriage and refused to open the doors.
Witnesses said that the two suspects had been clashing with other passengers on the Southern rail service from Hastings to Brighton on Tuesday last week when a train guard intervened. The men attacked the guard, onlookers said, before he locked himself in the driver’s cabin.
When the train arrived at Lewes station in East Sussex, the doors were locked.
Megan Townshend, 22, who was travelling with her two-year-old daughter, said the decision to trap the men inside the train fuelled their anger.
“The men then began walking up and down the train between carriages threatening people and punching the seats,” she said.
“Anyone who tried to confront them got punched. They tried smashing the windows and said they were going to burn the carriage. I was terrified they’d come near the buggy my daughter was sleeping in.”
This gives a whole new spin on that ancient question, “Who shall guard the guards themselves?”
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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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