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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Lord Mandelson sneered at Brexit supporters this week for failing to understand the complexities of modern trade and how leaving the EU would trigger years of renegotiations that would leave us with a far worse deal than we have inside the EU. Alas Lord Mandelson is a victim of the mandarin-centric fallacy that trade only happens after governments have arranged it in the best interests of their citizens.
– Patrick Minford. Sadly the article is behind the Times pay wall but I am sure you get where this is going.
Claims of dire consequences by business executives are particularly unreliable. In 1999, Adair Turner, then director general of the Confederation of Business and Industry supported Britain joining the euro. Now the number crunchers torture the data to show that British productivity could decline precipitously. This is economic nonsense.
– Ashoka Mody
Indeed and it is comical how many end-to-end lurid scare stories Reuters has been running on Britain capsizing if the vote is in favour of Brexit. It is at times like that it becomes clear who is on the payroll of whom 😉
GERMANY’S secret service spied on the EU’s British foreign policy chief and on the US secretary of state, it emerged yesterday.
The Bundesnachrichten- dienst, or BND, Germany’s equivalent of MI6, placed Baroness Ashton of Upholland under electronic surveillance when she was the EU’s high representative on foreign affairs and security.
It also tried to tap the mobile and office phones of John Kerry, the secretary of state, according to Der Spiegel magazine.
However, the attempt to listen in to Kerry’s mobile conversations failed because a bungling spy used an African country code by mistake. His other phones, including one at the American State Department, were successfully tapped.
The revelations are deeply embarrassing for Angela Merkel, who criticised the US over allegations the National Security Agency (NSA) monitored the German chancellor’s phone as part of a mass surveillance programme that included snooping on allies.
Speaking at the time, Merkel told President Barack Obama that “spying on friends is not acceptable”.
Particularly not those friends. To expose your poor spies to hours on end of Baroness Ashton or John Kerry is an unacceptable violation of the Framework Directive 89/391/EEC on Occupational Safety and Health.
Update: Niall Kilmartin adds, “Wow. They lose track of 130,000 immigrants from Isis recruiting areas but they can (almost) bug John Kerry. Is this a dramatic revelation of German government priorities, or does it merely indicate that the standard of electronic security set by Hillary was followed throughout her department and maintained by her successor?”
Armageddon approaches!
Brexit could bring an unhappy ending for UK’s Oscar nomination bonanza
At first glance, Carol and Get Blake! do not appear to have much in common. One is an Oscar-nominated period drama about sapphic romance set in the lush interiors of upper-middle-class 1950s Manhattan, the other a French science fiction cartoon about alien squirrels. And yet both might never have been made were it not for EU funding.
But while one can just about imagine surviving without Get Blake, which was the centrepiece of a tabloid row about dreadful Europeans wasting our hard-earned British money on pointless film and TV projects in August, it is doubtful whether many right-minded Brit cineastes would be willing to dispense with Todd Haynes’s treasured drama about a love affair between Cate Blanchett’s opulent housewife and Rooney Mara’s wide-eyed department store ingenue.
If Brit cineastes would not be willing to dispense with EU-funded dramas starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara, that must mean that in the event of a Brexit the rest of us would have to dispense with Brit cineastes.
Sounds good. Armageddon outta here.
The black hole at the heart of the Out campaign is this. After all those years of demanding this referendum, they can’t agree on what the UK would look like if it chose to self-eject from the European Union.
– Andrew Rawnsley writing in the Observer.
For a real black hole, the event horizon is the boundary from within which nothing, not even light, can ever escape. As Wikipedia puts it “Once a particle is inside the horizon, moving into the hole is as inevitable as moving forward in time.”
The black hole at the heart of the In campaign, and of the European Union itself, is that it was agreed among the elite what the future would look like years ago.
So the Out campaign – a collective noun that must stretch to encompass George Galloway, Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson – cannot agree? Glory in it! They cannot agree what the future UK would look like because it wouldn’t be up to them. Outside the EU event horizon the future would not be predetermined. It would be decided by the electorate. For real, I mean, in elections that mattered. Those mad buggers might do anything.
“If Brits want to leave, let them leave!”
…says Martin Schulz.
And I agree! How very nice of him to want to ‘let’ the Brits leave. He goes on to say how the UK “tests the patience” of EU politicians, presumably by being a net contributor to the EU’s funds.
Keep talking, Herr Schulz. Please, just keep talking. It is almost as if Farage himself had written this plonker’s remarks to push ever more people into voting OUT.
I believe the cry at Senlac Hill was “UT! UT! UT!”, even if on that occasion it was my Norman ancestors who had the best of the day.
I really do not understand this.
EU warns Britain any membership deal will be hard won
The presupposition seems to be that in order to keep the UK in the EU, the UK will have to give a lot of negotiating ground. Why? If the UK leaves the EU, it will be because the UK electorate, not the UK government, gives Brussels an Agincourt salute in the referendum, and thus it does not behove the UK government, a craven collection of moon-faced pro-EU shits for the most part, to make that outcome more likely by caving in yet again to the Bastards in Berlaymont and elsewhere.
So surely the headline should read:
UK warns EU any continued membership deal will be hard won
It is the EU who must be the ones to give ground. The fact of the matter is, the UK does not need the EU more than the EU needs the UK. The UK are net contributors and will do just fine in a reinvigorated EFTA. The EU’s leaders would do well to remember that they need access to the UK’s market and not just the other way around, and that the UK is and always has been a global trading nation, not just a Little Europe focused one.
With EU political leaders nakedly threatening the UK with political and economic punishment if it leaves the EU, they are pretty much making the case for Farage et al.
If ever there was group of politicians just begging for a two finger Agincourt salute, it is the people mentioned in this article.
The bit I find particularly amusing is the notion the great and good in the EU think they can decide post-Brexit if London will remain a financial centre. Actually all it will take is more deregulation to make the UK even more attractive than it is now, and would that be easier in or out of the EU? Well out, obviously.
Joris Luyendijk is actually Dutch but honorary knighthoods can be conferred on foreigners who “have made an important contribution to relations between their country and Britain”. I think he qualifies. He writes,
Yes, we would strangle or crush the English in the post-Brexit negotiations, the way any group of nations comprising 450 million people would to an opponent eight times smaller who has just tried to blackmail them
…
This is why the best way forward for Europe is to threaten to hit the English as hard as we can. We must stop treating membership of the EU as a favour granted by England, and instead make the English feel their vulnerability and dependence.
Dan Hannan, in a piece about how Indians would like Britain out of the EU so that Indians can more easily do business with Britain, ruminates upon the irrelevance of mere geography in the modern world:
Two generations ago, when most business was localised and freight costs were high, regional customs unions had a certain appeal. But in the Internet age, geographical proximity has never mattered less. Culture and kinship trump distance.
Likewise, in many eyes, lack of cultural affinity and lack of kinship trump geographical proximity, or they should. The biggest reason why Brexit seems now to be winning in Britain is that we are now watching EUrope make a hopeless mess of mass immigration from its geographically near but culturally very distinct eastern neighbours.
Near the end of the same piece Hannan says:
Next year, Britain will have to decide whether we are defined chiefly by our geography. Must we merge with states which happen to be in the vicinity, or do we recognise that some values transcend continents, linking us to kindred peoples in more distant lands?
I was having similar thoughts here, a while back, when the internet was just getting into its stride as a mass experience.
I see that I also had some rather prophetic things to say in that piece (posted in 2002) about the recently concluded Rugby World Cup (2015). The point being that rugby is an activity that was then and still remains at the mercy of geographical proximity. Rugby tournaments that happen every year, all the time, need to be based in the same approximate locality. Northern Hemisphere rugby teams were in 2002, and remain in 2015, physically separated from their superior Southern Hemisphere rivals. England had a little moment of superiority in the noughts, just winning the 2003 World Cup and coming second in 2007. So when England recently got knocked out at the group stage of the latest Rugby World Cup in 2015, in England, it felt like a uniquely terrible failure. But come the semi-finals this time around, no Northern Hemisphere teams remained in the tournament, despite the event itself having been held in the Northern Hemisphere. In the quarter finals, New Zealand slaughtered France, and Argentina decisively defeated Ireland, France and Ireland having been regarded by many as the best Northern Hemisphere bets. Many had realised that Argentina, who now regularly play against the Southern Hemisphere big three (NZ, Australia, South Africa) have recently got a lot better, but many others, me included, were amazed, not just by the fact of Argentina’s victory over Ireland but by the manner of it. Wales and Scotland did better but still lost, to South Africa and Australia.
However, the fact that regular rugby tournaments are obliged to cluster geographically is no reason for political entities to attempt to do the same. Geographical proximity to weaker teams and separation from the strongest teams is seen by Northern Hemisphere rugby people as a problem, not as any sort of answer to their problems.
With Dan Hannan, I say: Brexit. And it has to be a good sign that this anti-Brexit guy, in an article with very high google visibility, is making excuses about why his team may be about to lose rather than even attempting to make persuasive arguments about why it should win.
Brussels is effectively offering landowners money to advertise the EU. Then again, that’s the reason that a lot of people in Britain agree to support the EU: NGOs, charities, big corporations and universities.
– Daniel Hannan
By now, everyone knows about the Volkswagen scandal. VW have admitted installing software that cuts exhaust emissions when their cars are being tested and lets them spew death and disease every which way when they’re not.
So who is the villain here? To my mind there are two possible suspects: the US Environmental Protection Agency and the European Union. I know what you are thinking: why can’t we pin the blame on both of them? Well, cheer up because I think we can.
To my mind pollution is simple. The polluter pays the victim. I would like to find some non-state means for doing this and as I understand it in the days prior to environmentalism just such a mechanism – albeit involving courts – did indeed exist.
Of course, since then government has queered the pitch for everyone introducing two principles which it rolls out according to taste. One, that the polluter pays the government. Two, that the polluter becomes subject to government violence – or to put it in statist terms: pollution is regulated.
So, the government imposes regulations in which if you score below a certain number you are left alone and if you score above they send the boys round. Black mark against the EPA.
But meanwhile the EU has been promoting diesels like crazy over recent years. Whether this is a sinister French plot or the result of the global warming hoax, who knows. The really sad thing is that we have ended up with that abomination: the diesel-powered sports car. Oh yeah, and London’s air ain’t too great either.
 Some diesel Miscellaneous thoughts and questions
Why is that we are quite happy to use the term NOx but not the term COx? It makes no sense.
What were VW doing selling diesel cars in the US? Petrol (US = gasoline) is much cheaper there. So the market for diesel cars is much smaller. Come to think of it it’s probably because they were trying to make inroads into the market in the expectation that diesel taxes would come down making diesels more attractive. It is a tax issue isn’t it?
Why is it that cars are regulated in this way? I find it difficult to believe that a lorry or bus is in any way cleaner than a car. But I bet the latter two are not nearly as stringently regulated. To ask the question is, of course, to answer it. They do it because they can.
Did anyone else catch that excellent Mark Evans documentary about the diesel engine on BBC4 the other night? Comet swirl chambers, eh?
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