Today is the 31st anniversary of the dissolution of the USSR, one of the most delightful events in history. Hopefully within the next 30 years Russia will be back to its 1263 borders 😀
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I was depressed to see Ros Kaveney tweeting this:
I briefly met Roz Kaveney many years ago, at a speech she gave. She dealt very patiently and graciously with the curiosity of her mostly student audience about her having had a sex change, at a time when it was much more rare to meet openly transgender people than it is now. I do not think she is a psychopath or a liar. I just think she has succumbed to the terrible effects of being in a social media reverberation chamber. I had heard of the Lemkin Institute, too, named after the scholar of genocide Raphael Lemkin, most of whose family were murdered in the Holocaust. The world is not yet safe from such horrors, as shown by the Institute’s pages on historical, ongoing and threatened genocides in places such as Armenia, Somaliland and Ukraine. It should get back to the day job, which urgently needs doing. The Lemkin Institute’s “Statement on the Genocidal Nature of the Gender Critical Movement’s Ideology and Practice” is absurd. December 21st, 2022 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
 I am not being sarcastic when I say that I admire the way that Nick Young, writing for Greenpeace Aotearoa (the country formerly known as New Zealand), at least has the guts to admit that Sri Lanka’s ban on chemical fertiliser was a disaster. In a piece called “Sri Lanka’s fertiliser ban and why New Zealand can phase out synthetic nitrogen fertiliser”, he gives his reasons for supposing that despite Sri Lanka’s experience, it will work next time. He is enthusiastic, for instance, about the prospects for the Indian state of Sikkim which has also prohibited chemical fertilisers. He writes,
It is strange to me to see someone delight in the fact that the choices of shoppers or farmers, the ordinary people whose lives would be affected most, played no part in this change. This Guardian article is five years old now, but I would bet that the problems it describes have not gone away: “Sikkim’s organic revolution at risk as local consumers fail to buy into project.” More recently, Pawan Chamling, who as the then Chief Minister of Sikkim did much to put the policy in place, said that the current Sikkim government “has put Sikkim’s organic mission on the back burner”. He writes,
Freely sold and freely bought. Farmers making their own decisions. How awful. Despite everything, I have nothing against organic farming. But the way that Sikkim being “100% organic”, a source of pride and a key part of Sikkim’s identity according to Mr Chamling, withered as soon the government subsidies dried up suggests that the change was never, if you will forgive the metaphor, organic in the first place. It was imposed from the top down. It had no roots. December 20th, 2022 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
My latest purchase is an English jug produced in 1847 commemorating the repeal of the iniquitous Corn Laws, reminding us that the struggle against an overmighty state is nothing new. December 13th, 2022 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
For some reason I was not as enthused about the recent actions of the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, Muthuvel Karunanidhi Stalin, as the mykhel.com reporter seemed to be:
I have nothing against sporting achievement being rewarded, but there does seem to be something disturbingly arbitrary about a public servant having the power to give away entire houses to players who have a good debut against New Zealand. Given that Mr Stalin celebrates Social Justice Day, I assume he was not generously donating his own money: the “gifting” was actually done, involuntarily, by the taxpayers of Tamil Nadu. Aside from that, history relates that when sportsmen are lavishly rewarded by political leaders it does not always go well for them in the long run. While I am sure that Karthi Selvam, the young player in question, is happy with his new house, he should remember that what the State giveth, the State can taketh away. I hope for Mr Selvam’s sake that he does not disappoint in his next game. November 30th, 2022 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
In the 1480s, complaints lodged by Casimir’s envoys accumulated in Moscow: “thieves” from Muscovy were raiding across the border, burning, and pillaging villages, sowing terror. Ivan professed ignorance and claimed innocence, but clearly the raids had his backing. They were part of a systematic strategy for destabilising the border. Towards the end of the decade they escalated outrageously. In 1487, one of Ivan’s brothers occupied a slice of borderland on the Lithuanian side, and Ivan appointed a governor in districts traditionally part of Lithuania. A raid in 1488 carried off seven thousand of Casimir’s subjects. – Felipe Fernandez Armesto, 1492, p164, 2009. Reminds me of something but I just can’t quite put my finger on it. Anyway, the Casimir mentioned was the head of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth – yes, there was such a thing. The Ivan was not Ivan the Terrible but a predecessor. November 14th, 2022 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
In 1647 Colonel Thomas Rainborowe famously said, “The poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he … I think it’s clear, that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that government that he hath not had a voice to put himself under.” Rainborowe was speaking during the Putney Debates, which as Wikipedia says, “…were a series of discussions over the political settlement that should follow Parliament’s victory over Charles I in the First English Civil War. The main participants were senior officers of the New Model Army who favoured retaining Charles within the framework of a Constitutional monarchy, and radicals such as the Levellers who sought more sweeping changes, including One man, one vote and Freedom of thought, particularly in religion.” Time was when the Left would have proudly claimed to be the political descendants of the Levellers, although as these posts by Brian Micklethwait point out, at least as good a case can be made that they were proto-libertarians. Nonetheless, I miss the days when the Left wanted to be seen as the ones who sought to give “the poorest he” an equal voice with “the greatest he”. They do so no longer. “So basically Elon thinks Bubba’s opinion is just as valid as a credentialed journalist,” tweets Chris D. Jackson who describes himself as “Dad, Husband, Local Elected Official, Fmr. State Director @YEOnetwork, Fmr. Dem. Party Chair, Animal Enthusiast, Higher Education Advocate, OG #TeamJoe member” I have a grudge against Elon Musk for reasons I described in this post. And though I certainly think that Bubba’s opinions and the journalists’ opinions are equally valid in the sense of having an equal right to be said, I do not claim to know whether Bubba or the journalist is more often right. But if Musk brings about a situation whereby Bubba can speak on the same terms – a fee of $8 – as the highest paid graduate of the most prestigious school of journalism in the United States, then he, too, is a Leveller. The link to Daniel Hannan’s Oxford Union speech in the first of Brian Micklethwait’s posts no longer works, but a video of the speech can be seen here. The part about the Levellers starts at 10:30. Hannan paraphrased Richard Overton’s 1646 pamphlet An Arrow Against All Tyrants, which deserves to be better known. This passage might particularly resonate for Americans as they choose new legislators tomorrow: “For the edge of your own arguments against the king in this kind may be turned upon yourselves. For if for the safety of the people he might in equity be opposed by you in his tyrannies, oppressions and cruelties, even so may you by the same rule of right reason be opposed by the people in general in the like cases of destruction and ruin by you upon them” November 7th, 2022 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
– Janice Dean September 11th, 2022 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
Our ancestors, wiser than we, were not shocked by the idea of praying for a good death for oneself or others. Queen Elizabeth II’s health is clearly failing. I pray that she will have a good death, whenever it comes. Nobody, least of all a libertarian, would invent the idea of monarchy if designing the world from scratch. But we do not design the world, we inherit it. Constitutional monarchy is like one of those very old houses which started to fall down centuries ago but somehow settled into an unexpectedly beautiful state of wonky stability. Elizabeth has been a very good constitutional monarch. Update: She has died. May she rest in peace. September 8th, 2022 | 55 comments - (Comments are closed)
It would appear that the Ukrainians have begun a major offensive in the Kherson region. So, using my knowledge of the First World War, how do I think it’s going to go? “Using your knowledge of a war that ended a century ago! What is this nonsense, Crozier?” Let me explain. I like history in and of itself but I also believe that it can teach us things. Or, to put it another way, part of an historian’s job is to stick his neck out and use his knowledge of the past to make predictions about the future. So, what predictions am I going to make? I’ll try but first of all I’ll lay down my reasoning (you get marks for that in exams, don’t you?) beginning with the similarities between 1916 and today:
And now the differences:
There is another element to this which is regime existence. This is not about the survival of Putin who seems to be a dead man walking. This is about what sort of Russia is going to emerge from the wreckage. In the First World War, Germany was a monarchy. Now, I’ve never heard anyone say this, but my guess is that just about everyone in the Kaiser’s regime knew that if they didn’t win it was all over. It wasn’t just Willhelm who would get the push but all of them. And, so it proved. Pretty much. That’s a pretty good incentive to keep fighting. Do the Russians have anything similar? They don’t seem to. The reluctance to call up and use troops from Moscow suggests that Putin is very worried about public opinion. Why this might be, I really don’t know. It does, however, suggest that he is fighting this war with one arm tied behind his back. So, prediction time. The big factors to me are the lack of experience and equipment of the Ukrainian army and the fragile morale and incompetence of the Russian army. At some point it really will be a case of “Kick in the door and the whole building will collapse” as someone once said. I just don’t think it is going to happen in August 2022. August 31st, 2022 | 38 comments - (Comments are closed)
– President Joe Biden, press briefing, 8th July 2021. Kabul fell on 15th August. From Guido Fawkes’ post of 16th August 2021, “Biden’s tragically optimistic Afghanistan press briefing shows lack of intelligence” August 15th, 2022 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
I know the spectrum of views on this topic among Samizdata folk varies widely, from “Hell, yes” denialist to, well, me. That is, to someone who climate alarmists would call a climate denialist but who does not self-identify as such. Anyway, on Monday and Tuesday it was hot. I mean really hot compared to the UK average. I remember 1976, and it was hotter than that. We have often poured justifiable scorn on predicting the climate by computer models and quoted versions of Groucho Marx’s line from Duck Soup: “Who are you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?” – or in this case, your own epidermal thermo-receptors. The evidence of my own senses said it was the hottest two days of my life and that’s still true even if the BBC said the same. July 23rd, 2022 | 44 comments - (Comments are closed)
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