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]
|
Last night I dined at chateau Perry, and in connection with nothing in particular I found myself asking the above question. Can you, I asked my hosts, think of a worse decision? Both in its consequences for the people who made the decision, and morally, in terms of its consequences for the people it was inflicted upon? I mean, this lunatic policy might well be in the process of taking out an entire civilisation. Thanks to this insanity, to quote the cliché (because dramatic and very quotable and likely to be all too true) about China that has been doing the rounds for a year or two now, they’ll get old before they get rich, a soundbite which was launched by this publication.
And they are still bashing ahead with this policy, as I serendipitously discovered when I got home last night and was browsing through an internet site called Weird Asia News. Mostly this site features weird headlines concerning weird stories like: Papuan Police Recruits with an Enlarged Penis Denied Job; and: Britons Suffer Chemical Burns From Chinese Sofas, which I suppose I ought to care about more than I do what with me having bought a sofa myself not that long ago; and: South Koreans Revolutionize iPhone Market with Sausage Meat Stylus, the last one being a lot less interesting than it sounds. But in among such drollery is to be found this report, entitled Thousands Sterilized In China Population Crackdown, about how they are even now, still – well, as of last month anyway – enforcing this exercise in national suicide.
A 20-day campaign was begun on 7 April to sterilize 9,559 adults in Puning county, which with a population of 2.24 million is the most populous area of Guangdong Province. On 12 April local officials said they had already achieved about half their goal.
Doctors have been working 20 hour days to complete the massive round of surgeries. Local officials are so determined to reach their target they have been detaining relatives of those who resist the operation, potentially in violation of Chinese law.
Some 1,300 people are being held in cramped conditions around the county and forced to listen to lectures about the one-child policy while their relatives refuse to submit to the surgery.
At Perry’s, conversation later ensued about why they unleashed this madness. What were they thinking? What are they still thinking?
My guess was that this began as a classic communist response to shortages. Communism always causes shortages. Faced with their shortages, the Chinese Communists figured that if they could only reduce the number of people suffering from these shortages, the shortages would go away. If that’s right, then, as Perry said, this was another of those Fixed Quantity fallacies in action. Also a classic case of a doomed attempt at economic calculation under Socialism.
My further guess now is that this has become a pissing contest between the Chinese government and the Chinese people, with the government now being too bloody stubborn to back down. If they give up on this policy now, that will suggest either (a) that it was wrong for them to have persisted with this for so long, and maybe even wrong for them to have done it at all; or else (b) that they no longer have the power – the balls, you might say – to enforce such arrangements.
I have heard it suggested that it is simply that the Chinese government fears the Chinese people and wants to thin the numbers down. When this policy got started, the Chinese government was much more completely in charge than it is said to be now. But if that is the thinking, why impose a policy that results in millions of sex-starved men wandering around? That’s not going to keep the peace.
One of the most striking political developments of my lifetime has been the rise of opinion polls. Now that we are into an election campaign, rival polling enterprises announce results concerning the relative strengths of the various political parties, major and minor, and the relative popularity and performing skills of their leaders, seem to be announced every day and sometimes, when something dramatic like an election debate has just happened, every hour, and become the object of obsessive analysis by the kind of people who like thus to obsess.
The contrast with general elections of an earlier epoch, such as the one in 1945, when the election result, a massive Labour victory and a humiliating defeat for Prime Minister Winston Churchill before the war that made his reputation had even been concluded, came as an enormous surprise to vast numbers of people, not least to the amazed and delighted mass membership of the Labour Party. The Conservatives were gobsmacked. Were there opinion polls then, telling anyone who would listen about this landslide before it happened? My understanding is: not. The only poll that happened then, certainly the only one whose results were widely discussed, was the election itself. Now, opinion polls don’t just happen before elections; they happen all the time.
So what has this change, from pretty much no opinion polls to wall-to-wall hour-by-hour opinion polls done to politics? I am sure that commenters will be able to suggest all kinds of effects that have not occurred to me, but I can certainly think of a few political trends that have at the very least been reinforced by the relentless rise of opinion polling. → Continue reading: On the impact of opinion polls
“I think that one of the narrative themes of the progressive era that spawned our modern state is the deliberate smashing of the poor and, in particular, of the “petty capitalism” that sustained them. One of the things I get from reading through the hugely influential London Labour And The London Poor by the reformist activist Henry Mayhew is a horror of the poor, as he describes the costermongers and hawkers and small underclass production businesses which sustained them. The poor had to be done away with and replaced with something more acceptable to higher class tastes and, by all kinds of social activism and regulation they were, to a large extent, done away with as, their petty capitalism squeezed out by the State, they were dragooned into a compliant workforce for factories run by bewhiskered, interfering philanthropists who voted for Victorian Nick Cleggs. And in the end, they all got their council flats and a better wage, and all they had to give in return was their spirit.”
IanB, who has happily resurfaced over at Counting Cats after a period away from the blogging gig.
I’d add my two cents to this article by arguing that although some people want things like council houses, rent controls and minimum wage laws out of a naive but sincere belief that these are good, it has always struck me that part of the reformist zeal to do away with things like “cheap labour” is a sort of “yuck” factor. I sense a lot of this whenever I watch a programme about the downtrodden, poor workers of distant lands. It never seems to cross the minds of the do-gooders here that such folk face far worse alternatives to working for a relatively low wage to a Western one – not working at all. The poor child labourers of Asia do not have the alternative of spending much of their teens in a school and then off to college. And in any event, their best hope of escaping their plight is to have as much vulgar capitalism as possible.
IanB identifies puritanism – both of the religious and the secularised versions – as a key driver of the reformists’ zeal. I’d also add in a sort of aesthetic dislike, even hatred, for industry and trade. The Fabian movement that has had such a baleful effect on the past 100 years or so was inspired not just by the Evangelical “Great Awakening” of the 19th Century, but by the back-to-the-land movements inspired by the likes of John Ruskin and William Morris.
Read the whole article.
Update: It might be objected (and indeed it was, predictably, by an incredibly rude and now banned commenter) that religious puritanism has anything to do with the nanny statist trends of our time. But while there are some who argue, with Max Weber, that the “Protestant Work Ethic” was in some ways pro-market, the fact is that that ethic was double-sided. Sure, there was a striving, pro-enterprise side of it, but there was also a strong, anti-materialist side and a side that scorned pleasure, which provided some of the intellectual fuel for groups such as the “Christian socialists” of the 19th and early 20th Centuries. The teetotal movement, for example, found ready adherents. And consider the intellectual backgrounds of folk like RH Tawney, Arnold Toynbee, and so on. To deny that they had religious inspiration for their views is obtuse.
Fellow imperialist Norman aggressor Harry de Quetteville does an exquisite take down of Oliver Stone in the Telegraph. It is so delicious that extracting a passage just does not do it justice.
…Oh I just cannot resist…
I pushed a woman under a bus this morning. Nice looking old girl she was, looked like she’d just had her hair done. Maybe she was off somewhere special, but we won’t know now will we, not since I pushed her under the bus.
She hadn’t done anything wrong, apart from being old. But you wouldn’t believe the hoo-ha the whole scene created. Some people next to me looked positively aghast as those big double-decker wheels rolled over her. Then some others jumped on me and held me down until the police arrived.
Read the whole thing. Simply splendid.
The weather is cold and snowy in Britain just now – even, now, in central London – but people like Richard North are actually quite enjoying this:
It is global warming here again, and it is getting serious. It is not so much the depth, as the repeated falls. Each layer compacts and freezes which, with fresh global warming on top becomes lethally slippery.
Time was, what with the AGW crowd pretty much completely controlling the agenda, when this kind of elegant mockery would be dismissed as the ignorance of the uninitiated. But the fact is that the present wintry weather is extremely significant in this debate. True, the weather today is not the climate for the next century, but sooner or later weather does turn into climate, and the weather has, from the AGW point of view, been misbehaving for a decade. Their precious Hockey Stick said that the temperature of the globe would disappear off the top right hand corner of the page, right about now. Well it hasn’t, has it?
As John Redwood recently asked Ed Miliband in the House of Commons, concerning the present very cold weather:
… which of the climate models had predicted this?
None, it quickly became clear from Mr Miliband’s faltering reply, that Mr Miliband has been paying any attention to (although other sorts of models have predicted cold winters rather successfully).
But this is not just about looking out of the window and seeing if global warming is to be observed or not (as Richard North well understands). The other point here is the authority of the people upon whom people like Ed Miliband have been relying. Not only have none of Miliband’s “experts” (sneer quotes entirely deliberate) been able to predict the recent succession of colder winters; it goes way beyond that. The point is: these experts assured the world, or allowed their more ignorant followers to assure the world, that these cold winters would not happen, and despite all their protestations now about how weather is not climate, well, shouldn’t they have born this in mind when saying, only a few short years ago, and repeating ever since, that winter snow in places like Britain would be a thing of the past? Should they not have been more careful about seizing upon any bursts of warm weather, any bursts of weather of any kind, come to that, as evidence of the truth of global warming? Had they truly understood the point that they have been reduced to making now, they would have been a lot more modest in their recent, and in Britain economically disastrous, medium range predictions. See also, John Redwood’s follow up posting. Redwood is now talking more sense about the world’s climate than the British Met Office. → Continue reading: Cold wars
When an argument is being won and lost, the retreating team does not issue statements saying: By gad, you were right and we were wrong, sorry and all that, we’ll try not to let it happen again. No, the way you spot a victory and a defeat is when you see bits of bullshit (linked to rather admiringly, on account of the piece not being complete bullshit throughout, from here) like this from the Los Angeles Times:
The real scandal illustrated by the e-mails is not that scientists tried to undermine peer review, fudge and conceal data, and torpedo competitors, but that scientists and advocates on both sides of the climate debate continue to claim political authority derived from a false ideal of pure science. This charade is a disservice to both science and democracy. To science, because the reality cannot live up to the myth; to democracy, because the difficult political choices created by the genuine but also uncertain threat of climate change are concealed by the scientific debate.
Actually that is pretty much exactly what the real scandal was, except that they missed out the bit about sabotaging the entire world economy.
But allow me to draw your particular attention, just in case you missed it, to this bit:
… scientists and advocates on both sides …
Position one: Our guys are right and your guys are wrong. Position two: Yes, it’s true that our guys are wrong, but … but … so are your guys! “If we have the decency to admit that our bad guys are bad, now that your good guys are proving it, can’t you at least be a sport and say that your good guys are bad also?”
No.
How, exactly, do the AGW sceptics “continue to claim political authority derived from a false ideal of pure science”? How has their conduct earned them the insult of being part of a “charade”? How have the sceptics been undermining science? Or democracy? There has been a charade. But the sceptics are busily unmasking it, and replacing it with truth.
This is a classic retreat from fraudulent moral superiority to fraudulent moral equivalence.
Once again, as so often in this ruckus, I’m thinking: Cold War. “Yes indeed, Communism is not working very well and many of the communists are very bad people, but capitalism and those who support it are no better …” No, communism was indeed a catastrophe, but capitalism was and is colossally, world-transformingly better. I despised the fraudulent army of anti-anti-communists then, and I despise the fraudulent and soon-to-be-huge army of anti-AGW-sceptics now.
This evening I am doing a recorded conversation with Bishop Hill, and by way of preparation have been rootling around in his archives. And I just came across this, which the Bishop posted on November 19th 2006:
In this connexion the thing to be remarked is that the Whigs proceeded by the negative method of repealing existing laws, not by the positive method of making new ones. They combed the Statute-book, and when they found a statute which bore against “the liberty of the subject” they simply repealed it and left the page blank. This purgation ran up into the thousands. In 1873 the secretary of the Law Society estimated that out of the 18,110 Acts which had been passed since the reign of Henry III, four-fifths had been wholly or partially repealed.
Excellent, apart from the odd spelling of “connection”.
That’s not by Bishop Hill himself. It was recycled from somewhere called “Outside Story”, the link to which no longer works. But there’s no reason to doubt theis particular story, which should now inspire us all. For too long we have been ruled by politicians who measured their success by how many laws they could pass. Because of these fools, we now need politicians who measure their success by how many laws they can unpass.
Bishop Hill’s latest posting, as I write this, is to this. Well worth reading. Climategate is not nearly over. It is just getting into its stride. At Copenhagen, lots of laws, seemingly unshiftable from then on, will be made, maybe not as many as would have happened without Climategate, but still, most of us here surely fear, a lot. But the point is: laws can be unmade. There can be, and there must soon be, another great purgation.
I’ve just watched the Channel 4 Sky news video clip to be seen here, in which Bob Ward, policy director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, berates Fraser Nelson, editor of the Spectator, thus:
“… it’s remarkable how the so-called sceptics have been using this as a propaganda tool to promote a political end … People with a clear vested interest in creating public confusion because they want to undermine action on climate change, they should shut up and wait until the investigation is done rather than carry on a witch hunt.”
Fraser Nelson took exception to this, in particular because Fraser Nelson thinks that AGW is quite a bit truer than I now think it is. In other words, said Fraser Nelson, he is a true sceptic, rather than a “so-called sceptic”.
However, if Bob Ward had been shouting at someone like me, instead of at Fraser Nelson, as in his own mind he surely was, then he would have had a point. I definitely want the whole AGW thing to collapse in ruins, and suspect that it quite soon may collapse. In the meantime, I definitely do dislike all the regulations and taxes that Bob Ward and co want to see introduced, and I am most definitely using Climategate as a propaganda tool to promote that political end. I certainly prefer the current state of public confusion about climate science to the public unanimity that this confusion has now replaced. Insofar as I had any tiny part in helping to create and spread such confusion, and I did, I am a proud man.
But, as the true object of Bob Ward’s ire, I do have some incidental disagreements with him.
→ Continue reading: Bob Ward says we should shut up!
History is an interesting thing, often said to be “written by the winners”… but is it? Certainly in much of Eastern Europe, the end of Communism did not necessarily means the political end of the communists behind the system.
James Mark is a senior lecturer in History at the University of Exeter and he has written a very insightful article on the subject that I commend to all Samizdata.net readers.
David Thompson – a blogger who seems to find some superb photos for his site, by the way – has a nice roundup connected to the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, about which Perry de Havilland has already had some thoughts. As a reminder, here is a film I mentioned some time ago, based in former East Germany, that is a telling story about the dangers of the surveillance state.
It remains something of a mystery as to why Communism was able to appeal to some very smart people for so long. Oh sure, many supporters of totalitarian socialism were transparently evil or very, very thick but obviously that does not quite explain it all. The idea of Marxism-Leninism as a substitute for religion comes closest, in my mind, to explaining its hold on many well-meaning minds as well as less benign ones. Some of that religious-substitute drive has now been shifted to the Green movement.
But even so, I continue to this day to be surprised by how supposedly sharp people got swayed by communism. Take one random example: the 20th century spy novelist and film screenwriter, Eric Ambler. I have long been a fan of his fiction: the modern spy novel owes a lot to his style and method. He died in the late 90s at a ripe old age; reading an introduction to one of his books, I was a bit taken aback – although maybe I should not have been – to read that he was an enthusiast for the Soviet Union right up until the Hitler-Stalin pact at the start of WW2, which “depressed him deeply”. One wonders why this acute observer of human nature in its more sleazy respects had not cottoned on to the massive killings, the Man-made famines, that were already an established feature of 1930s Russia? By the mid-30s, this stuff was not a secret any more. British journalists like Malcolm Muggeridge had already exposed a lot of what was going on; even old Bertrand Russell, a man capable of considerable foolishness as well as brilliance in other ways, fingered the Soviet Union as a gangster state.
There is a very revealing article in the Guardian (natch) called ‘East Germans lost much in 1989‘. The ‘money quote’ (in GDR Marks of course) is:
On 9 November 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down I realised German unification would soon follow, which it did a year later. This meant the end of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the country in which I was born, grew up, gave birth to my two children, gained my doctorate and enjoyed a fulfilling job as a lecturer in English literature at Potsdam University. Of course, unification brought with it the freedom to travel the world and, for some, more material wealth, but it also brought social breakdown, widespread unemployment, blacklisting, a crass materialism and an “elbow society” as well as a demonisation of the country I lived in and helped shape. Despite the advantages, for many it was more a disaster than a celebratory event.
Yes it is hard to not shed a tear for all those unemployed Stasi and blacklisted apparatchik that made the whole system possible. I have long suspected the real reason the wall was built was to keep out the waves of oppressed Western workers who were flooding into the socialist worker’s paradise and threatening to overwhelm the system.
More seriously, the blacklisting process did not go nearly far enough in my view. A large number of people who were the enablers of the communist state should have spent a great many years in gaol. In 1955 the USSR created East Germany… and it ended in 1990… so it would seem to me that putting the most egregious enablers of that system in gaol for thirty five years would be a measure of poetic justice for the people who lost a generation of personal liberty by living in that open air prison called East Germany. Blacklisted? Apologists for tyranny deserve far worse than just being ‘blacklisted’.
Bishop Hill:
Devil’s Kitchen has a must-read post up, detailing the increasing use of enabling legislation by the government. And he doesn’t swear at all – must be serious.
Indeed.
I daydream that one day, a British Cabinet Minister will grab hold of one of the laws that DK writes about, where it says that, if there is a crisis (and it is up to him to decide), then he, the British Cabinet Minister, may do whatever he considers to be appropriate (i.e. whatever he damn well pleases). I daydream that he, the British Cabinet Minister, will bring into the House of Commons a huge list itemising all the laws that he is now going to repeal, just like that, no ifs no buts no discussion, because he, the British Cabinet Minister referred to in one of the laws, says so, on account of there being a crisis caused by all the damn laws.
Impossible, you say? Very probably. But it is surprising how much of history consists of impossible dreams that were dreamed during earlier bits of history.
|
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.
|
