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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Ian Dale writes that the internet and all that is having very little effect on this general election. I’m sure we can all see what he means. The politicians strut about emitting their parallel universe proclamations, while the rest of us stolidly refuse to be impressed as we sit about wondering just which big party and big party leader we loathe and despise the least, so that we can humiliate most of them, instead of what we would really like to do.
But in another sense, a negative sense, I think that the internet is already having a very profound effect on this campaign. Put it like this. The good thing about blogs and facebook and twitter and all that is that we can speak our minds. We tell it not necessarily like it is exactly, but how we truly reckon it is at the time or writing. The big cheese politicians? Like I say: parallel universe of staged dishonesty.
Trying to combine doing regular politics with joining in the New Media hubbub means either being ignored as a useless bore, or getting into trouble, for saying something honest and eloquent but verboten. The two just don’t mix. Remember that scene in that great regular politics movie The Candidate, starring Robert Redford, where the Redford character tries telling the truth (as he happens to see it) at a campaign event. His handler just tells him to do up his trouser buttons, grow up, and campaign properly, i.e. go back to emitting the correct barrages of staged dishonesty. As far as the old pro regular politician is concerned, telling it like it is, like you are blogging or twittering or something, is just waving your willy about like a stupid little kid. Honesty didn’t work then for regular politicians, and it doesn’t work now.
But the difference is that the rest of us can now do honesty, and consume honesty. We now have honesty. For several years now we’ve been waving our willies about and having a ball. It’s just that the regular politicians can’t join in without making asses of themselves.
So, one: rise of the New Media. And, two: a general election in which almost nobody looks like they’re going to be happy. None of the politicians, with the possible exception of The Clegg, and none of the voters. Nobody is going to “seal the deal”. It used to be that someone did. Now, we seem to hate them all.
No effect? I think not. I know exactly what Iain Dale means. The New Media aren’t contributing anything positive to regular politics. The New Media aren’t helping regular politicians to canvass, get out the vote, assemble people to mass meetings and get them all excited about their preferred version of regular politics. The New Media aren’t helping to spread barrages of lies, and then cheering like lunatics. They (we) are merely standing at the back muttering to each other that it’s all lies. But just because the New Media are doing nothing positive for regular politics doesn’t mean they’re having no effect on regular politics.
Iain Dale is nearly there when he describes the internet this time around as “the dog that didn’t bark”. But the fact that the dog isn’t barking is highly significant, as Sherlock Holmes himself pointed out in the original story. The New Media dog, from where Iain Dale stands, is doing nothing, and that is what is so interesting.
Alas one of our redoubtable Samzdatistas is marooned at Newark Airport as all flights into the UK have been delayed due to the volcano eruption in Iceland.
I am still pondering some way to blame David Cameron for this…
The late Chris Tame, whom I used to assist in the running of the Alternative Bookshop and of the Libertarian Alliance, used to say, of blogging, that it was “here today and gone tomorrow”. Well, indeed, most of it does pretty much fall off most of our merely mental radar sets by around the middle of the following week, but most of it is still there, and if you want to remember and refer back to an ancient internet essay or blog posting, you can usually find it. And actually, as the internet gets older, what is striking is how much better it remembers things than did the old print media, or even than did the pre-internet apparatus of print-based scholarship. Why? Basically, because anyone (you don’t have to spend the entire day in some newspaper library in North London) can type a few vaguely remembered words or phrases into Google, and up it comes. So long as you have even a vague recollection of whatever it was, then you can dredge it all up again, and tell the world all about it, again.
I was reminded of all this by a posting yesterday by Mr Eugenides, which is basically a quote from something written in 1995, which is about – please forgive how self-referential this is becoming – how the Internet wouldn’t ever amount to anything:
Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data.
The author now admits he was quite wrong. He has had to, however much he might have wished that his unwise words could just have been forgotten.
The central point is that the power of the internet to entertain, inform, and by and by to change the world for the better, is not derived from the average quality of the average internetter, but from what the best internetters manage routinely, and from what us more routine internetters manage at our best. And that power just grows and grows.
The internet adds up to a brilliant bunch of reviewers, a brilliant bunch of critics, and a brilliant bunch of editors, brilliant meaning whatever you think brilliant means. It corrects errors. It draws your attention to things that on your own you would have entirely missed. It plants numerous flags and banners in that “wasteland”. It filters data relentlessly, to suit all intellects and tastes. A “wasteland of unfiltered data” is exactly what it is not.
It helps that almost all persistent internetters, as a natural consequence of what we do and of how others respond, also learn and learn.
Which reminds me, I must dig up an ld posting that Mr Eugenides did a few months back about what a useless git Richard North is. Ah yes, here. This took me about ten seconds to find. I wonder what Mr E thinks about that now.
One of my current top bloggers Richard North points to a new blog, Political Facts, where posting number one is about the Convenient Criminal. And since Richard North is now one of a lot of other people’s top bloggers also, that means that news of this new blog will spread fast, perhaps faster than its writer might have preferred.
The story its first posting tells if of how the British police, animated by the desire to meet targets rather than to mete out justice, have resorted to arresting the easiest persons to arrest, rather than the guiltiest. The guilty ones flee before the police arrive but the victims of the villainy stay, waiting for help and support, unpractised in the arts of obstructing the police. So they, or their angry sympathisers, get arrested, basically for being a bit angry about having been set upon by actual criminals.
Police arrive. One police officer tells the violent drunk, now a few yards away, to leave the area. The bleeding victim is helped to his feet and tries to point our his attacker but by now he has already left the scene as instructed by a police officer. Not good for the police who have attended an assault but now have no boxes to tick.
One girl tells the police they are useless and is arrested for a Section 5 Public Order Offence for screaming and swearing at the violent drunk as he assaulted the young man. A female bouncer from the nightclub who has witnessed this rushes across the street and tries to tell the police they have the wrong person. (Captured on CCTV) Police tell her to go away and proceed to issue a Fixed Penalty notice. Another Convenient Criminal without police having to take the time and effort of now trying to find and arrest the violent drunk. Effortlessly ticks all the boxes the officers need ticked for their performance targets while justice is thrown away.
But are that event and another similar one outside a pub real events, or were they merely, as they say in the movies, “based on fact”? Are these actual people, or merely composites. This first posting is strong on principle, not so strong on chapter and verse. A widespread set of prejudices about how the police now operate is eloquently laid out. But where are the actual reports of actual events, in local papers or in other blogs? At first glance, the posting looks to be full of links, but all that bold-and-in-colour stuff turns out merely to be bold-and-in-colour. It doesn’t lead anywhere.
But, as I say, it’s early days for this blog and with luck it soon will start to lead somewhere. More to the point those facts alluded to in the blog’s title may start gravitating towards it. After all, the blog’s readers now at least know the kind of facts being sought. The man can obviously write, and with luck, he will turn out to be well placed enough, near enough to the kind of dramas he now describes in a generalised way, soon to be deploying some serious facts and making some serious waves.
For several years now, most of us mainstream bloggers have been loftily contemptuous of paper and television “journalists”. They are ridiculous dinosaurs, say most of us, slaving away fully clothed at desks and at computers that they often don’t even own, pushing prejudices and biases that may not even be theirs, stuck in their own myopic little worlds and blind to the larger forces at work in the world. Worse, these bizarre individuals often insist on tramping about in the open air, talking to people who are, if anything, even more bewildered by the story in question than they are themselves. They need to get out less. Don’t they understand that there’s an internet in there, full of blogs, which they could learn stuff from? And none of these journalists have proper jobs, because this is how they make their living!
Actually, most journalists do make extensive use of the blogosphere. Where would they be without bloggers to supply them with facts and with coherent arguments?
But as for the idea that these journalists, writing in “newspapers”, present any sort of competitive threat to the mainstream blogosphere, well, most of us greet such outlandish notions with a pitying smile at best, and as often as not with loud laughter.
But I believe that we bloggers may be making that common error of confusing the typical with the most significant. Just opening up ten random newspapers and sticking a pin into them ten times, and then reading whatever one happens to encounter, doesn’t do justice to the potential importance of newspaper journalists. Sure, most of what they write is pompous crap recycled from anonymous political or business spin-doctors and gossip-mongers. But the best of the output of these journalists is often well worth reading, and bloggers can often learn useful extra titbits from them.
Obviously, there have to be bloggers to draw the attention of readers to the good stuff in newspapers. Regular people with jobs to do and lives to lead haven’t time to search through great piles of paper every day, looking for the occasional treasures buried in among the landfill. And the average journalist is indeed a bizarre figure, with little in the way of a future. But the best of the journalists are, I would argue, worthy to be ranked alongside the better bloggers, and some bloggers are starting to sit up and take notice.
Bishop Hill, for example, wrote magnanimously yesterday about the efforts of a journalist who writes under the name of “Fred Pearce”:
Still, Pearce is new to questioning climate science, and he hasn’t made a bad fist of this story.
Indeed.
Richard North is taking all this a stage further. Not only does he make extensive use of the reactions of journalists to stories first aired in his and other blogs. He also himself sometimes writes things for a newspaper. He even occasionally appears on television.
Wise moves. We bloggers must guard against complacency. We cannot and must not assume that our current domination of the media world will last indefinitely.
Tom G. Palmer, a writer I greatly admire, nicely calls out some rather boorish behaviour by the leftist writer, Jonathan Chait. I am a bit surprised: I always figured that Chait was one of the more reasonable leftists, so it seems a bit disappointing that he is a sneering jackass.
Mr Chait’s powers of reasoning are in any event, somewhat over-rated. I fisked something by him in relation to the Great Depression some time ago.
If you want to see how different the world now is from how it was before the internet, look no further than this story (now bouncing energetically around the world):
It is claimed that the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia has been hacked and there is a massive file of emails and code up on a server in Russia. If what has been posted is real then the balloon is about to go up.
Excerpts of the emails have been posted here. They include a CRU scientist welcoming the death of a prominent sceptic, discussion of how to fiddle results and so on.
Amazing. If true.
As someone says, if it looks to good to be true, it probably is.
Those were my first sentiments exactly (although I don’t think that being glad when an opponent has dropped dead is all that surprising – I’m sure we all know that feeling), and the sentiments of practically everyone else in the anti-AGW blogosphere when they first heard about this. Now, it is looking ever more likely that it is true, all of it.
Not least because the first big response from the hackees has been to cry, not: load of made-up bollocks, but rather: stop thief! Yes, we have been hacked, and that’s outrageous. The story is that we have been hacked. (Lots of people are suddenly discovering the case for intellectual property rights.) The BBC’s first version of this story goes with this angle, and with pretty much nothing else. AGW scientists (good) robbed by anti-AGW fanatics (bad). But this response has not killed the story. It has only given it legs. If there’s nothing to it, why be so fussed about the hacking?
Even if the mainstream media try to bury this, they can’t stop us anti-AGWers from talking about it amongst ourselves, and my bet is that they will quickly abandon the attempt to ignore the content of this material, and instead make copious use – perhaps even acknowledged use, with links – of the work even now being done by all those damned bloggers. If they don’t do this, they will merely look foolish. It’s a different world, from the one where all the journalism was done by “journalists”, and only those journalists could decide what journalism would be done.
Sure enough, the New York Times already has a report about this, and James Delingpole already has a piece up at the Telegraph blog. (Thank you Instapundit.) This won’t now be buried, even if the story ends up being that a lot of trivia was hacked, and then a lot of incriminating stuff was forged and added, which is looking less and less like the story with each hour that passes.
Two particularly good bloggers on this story so far have been Bishop Hill (already quoted above) and Devil’s Kitchen, the Bishop for the trawling through that he is already starting to do, and DK for the way he (among many others) is already teasing out what it all might mean:
What these emails do show is that there is not consensus amongst scientists and that, privately, they think that certain papers are crap. No word of this gets to the media, or to the people being soaked for ever more cash to pay for these delusions.
What these emails really show is why such information never gets to the public: it is because climate scientists – like doctors – close ranks when attacked.
Not only this, but these emails also clearly show that climate scientists have been doing their absolute best to ensure that those who would question their findings cannot find the data.
The Bishop even has a new book out about AGW trickery, entitled The Hockey Stick Illusion. Coincidence? Well, yes, and one that is liable to mean lots of further work for him, riding whatever wave these new revelations may cause. But a nice coincidence nevertheless. This could now become a global best seller.
I already know what some of our cup-mostly-empty commenters here will say about all this, or want to say. Yes, the anti-AGW camp may now be starting to win the argument, but “they” still command the institutions they need in order to impose AGW-based tyranny. True. But those institutions can never be neutered, closed, etc., if they do not first lose their argument. (Think: USSR.) This is already rather good news, and potentially very important in its longer term impact.
For other early AGWer reactions, read this, together with all the comments.
As Samizdata regulars might recall, I am not exactly a great fan of Naomi Klein, author of the Shock Doctrine, a book that tries to argue, rather absurdly, that various dastardly free market governments (which ones? Ed) exploited, in a sort of underhand way, the inexplicable failures of socialism (the horror!) to impose those terrible ideas of people such as Milton Friedman. Yet there was nothing underhand or deceitful about what say, Sir Keith Joseph – one of Mrs Thatcher’s close political allies – argued when he said that the stagflation of the 1970s had undermined the Keynesian settlement and proved that big government was harmful. Far from being some sort of sly attempt to exploit a shock, the governments of Reagan/Thatcher or even some of the social democratic governments in the 80s such as Spain, implemented some forms of free market reform because it made sense, given the situation. Anyway, you can read some of my views on this here, and there is a demolition of the book here.
Robert Higgs, a libertarian writer, has pointed out that in fact, it is frequently the case that disasters of various kinds frequently are used by political leaders to expand, not roll back, the state. It may be that the partial halt, if not reverse, to the growth of the state that occured under the Reagan/Thatcher episode was an aberration, although I obviously hope it was not.
Of course, in the ultra-long run, the numerous failures of endlessly repeated regulation, tax and yet more regulation and taxes, may yet produce such a disaster that this “shock” may once again encourage the “doctrine” of free markets, limited government, honest money and free trade. So I guess we must hope that in a perverse kind of way, Ms Klein is vindicated, if not quite in the way she imagines or wants.
Why give a damn what this person says? Well, she sells a lot of books. A lot. JK Galbraith, Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, and others do the same. And there are articles by the Richard Murphys, George Monbiots and countless other characters that feed the collectivist narrative that what the world needs even more of is more government, more rules and more powers for the likes of them. Therefore, I share the view of the US libertarian and author, Tom G. Palmer, that we need to be better at knocking their theories down and responding vigorously. And that is why I salute the indefatigible Tim Worstall, who seems to have dedicated part of his blogging energies to making the existence of Richard Murphy, hater of economic and social liberty and a general buffoon, a waking nightmare. It may seem cruel to mock the afflicted, but bear in mind that at the moment, the Murphys of this world seem to be succeeding in their desire to shut down an element of global markets, otherwise known as tax havens, since these places create one of the few incentives left to keep taxes down. He’s not just a harmless buffoon, comforting though it might be to assume so. He’s certainly not harmless, and neither is Ms Klein.
There is swear-blogging, and then there is this:
Emily Thornberry MP: a very stupid and thoroughly unpleasant person who should be severely punched in the cunt, and then thrown into the sea.
That’s way too far over the top of the top for me. Maybe I’m getting old. It’s in a posting in response to a posting here by Johnathan Pearce on Saturday, about how giving women rights at work will make them more expensive to employ and consequently cause women to be employed less.
I’m genuinely in two minds about this swear-blogging thing. (See also this blog.) On the one hand, as with the passage quoted above, I think it can be horribly offensive by almost any standard and liable to make a lot of people think badly of something I value, namely the libertarian movement. (If you look under affiliations, you see that DK is affiliated to the Libertarian Party.) I can foresee a time when such passages as the above will be quoted in evidence against us all. If anyone points out that “they” (i.e. us libbos) were writing things like that, and none of “them” complained, well, I did. And if this posting alerts enemies of the libertarian movement otherwise unalerted and it all blows up in our faces, then the sooner the better, I say. Get the argument about swear-blogging over with.
On the other hand, this kind of language does at least communicate just how angry people get about the plundering and bossiness of politicians. If you are similarly angry, read on, Devil’s Kitchen is for you. You are not alone. It libertarianism was only written calmly and dispassionately, something important would be lost.
One thing I do know is that if Devil’s Kitchen was nothing but the above offensiveness, I wouldn’t give a … flip … about him. It is because he writes good stuff about important topics, in among the effing and blinding and sometimes worse, that I now ruminate upon the wisdom or lack of it of how he writes. Whatever I end up thinking about this, I am not now recommending and never will recommend that what I might consider to be excessively sweary swear-blogging should be illegal, to read or to write.
The story, which I learned about today, here, has already done the rounds. After all, it happened a whole two days ago. Still, all those interested in new media, and all who fret about where news will come from if newspapers collapse, will find (will have found) the story interesting. It’s the sort of thing they presumably now study in media studies courses. If not, they should. Not that you need to be doing a media studies course to be studying the media (and the rest of us certainly shouldn’t have to pay for you to do this), but you get my drift.
Basically, a London Underground staff member called Ian swore at an unswervingly polite old man who had got his arm stuck in a train door and was trying to explain that fact to Ian. Ian said (shouted more like) that the old man would have to explain himself to the police. At that point a nearby blogger who just happened to be there, Jonathan MacDonald, started up his video camera, and soon afterwards did a blog posting, complete with video footage, about what he had witnessed. In due course the mainstream media tuned in, and went ballistic.
If you do feel inclined to follow this up, I suggest reading the original blog posting, and then some thoughts, also by Jonathan MacDonald, concerning what it all means. He supplies copious further links.
Hard to say if the snappily titled “When Your Neighbor Loses His Job It’s A Recession. When You Screw A Whore Behind Your Wife’s Back, Get Caught, And Lose Your Job, It’s A Catastrophic Economic Meltdown” is my favourite blog post title of the year or not but it is both howlingly funny and 100% on the money.
Disgraced criminal Eliot Spitzer has for reasons unknown been occupying a columnist spot at Slate.com for some period of time. His column is always dull, hysterical, and powered by a level of self-satisfaction that is undiminished by any apparent shame over the pain the columnist has caused not only for his own family but for a good Jersey girl trying to make a living by providing an honest service.
Hehe… read the whole thing.
CNN is talking about something called ‘Blog Action Day‘, which describes itself as follows:
Blog Action Day is an annual event held every October 15 that unites the world’s bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day with the aim of sparking discussion around an issue of global importance. Blog Action Day 2009 will be one of the largest-ever social change events on the web.
Yet would anyone care to bet that when they say ‘social’ change (such as deciding to do something yourself, such as recycling your plastic bottles) a great many of the contributors are actually talking about ‘political’ change (using the collective means of coercion to force people under threat of violence to be more ‘green’).
Of course such folks are just following the well establish and rather Orwellian conflation of opposites used exemplified by socialism, which I have often argued is the most ironic use of human language ever – a system by which all social interactions are forcibly replaced by intermediating politically derived formulae.
Well I would like to dedicate a previous samizdata blog post to “change.org” and the Blog Action Day jamboree, called My carbon footprint is bigger than your carbon footprint by the indispensable Michael Jennings, that one man global warming machine that we are privileged to have as a writer for our splendid blog.
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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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