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]
Readers are invited to supply Modualwoman with a list of other nations whose cultures are nonexistent because they have been influenced by foreign persons and ideas at any point in their history. I am sure she will want to tell them this herself. While she’s at it, she can inform everyone in Britain whose ancestors came here more recently than 1714 that they are still foreigners whatever their passport says.
– Bernard Condon and the Associated Press in a major article for Fortune magazine.
Here are some excerpts from the article that struck me:
In the past under such circumstances [debtor countries being unable to make interest payments], big government lenders such as the U.S., Japan and France would work out deals to forgive some debt, with each lender disclosing clearly what they were owed and on what terms so no one would feel cheated.
But China didn’t play by those rules. It refused at first to even join in multinational talks, negotiating separately with Zambia and insisting on confidentiality that barred the country from telling non-Chinese lenders the terms of the loans and whether China had devised a way of muscling to the front of the repayment line.
And
Along with the usual mix of government mismanagement and corruption are two unexpected and devastating events: the war in Ukraine, which has sent prices of grain and oil soaring, and the U.S. Federal Reserve’s decision to raise interest rates 10 times in a row, the latest this month. That has made variable rate loans to countries suddenly much more expensive.
All of it is roiling domestic politics and upending strategic alliances.
In March, heavily indebted Honduras cited “financial pressures” in its decision to establish formal diplomatic ties to China and sever those with Taiwan.
Last month, Pakistan was so desperate to prevent more blackouts that it struck a deal to buy discounted oil from Russia, breaking ranks with the U.S.-led effort to shut off Vladimir Putin’s funds.
Sweden has made its choice and must live with the consequences. Two years ago almost to the day, after a vote that attracted unprecedented public interest, Sweden introduced a new national flower. It is Campanula rotundifolia, a.k.a. the Harebell or Small Bluebell. No one ever says what happens to the old national flower on these occasions. Does it sit in its bed glowering at its successor, like Ted Heath, or does it try its hand at hosting a TV show like Harold Wilson? Those were the days, when nubile young couples sat up in bed as soon as an ex prime minister came on the telly. But if poor Mr Wilson was confused by that opening sequence, think how a flower would feel.
The only reason I got onto the subjects of harebells and Harold Wilson and pollination being flower-nookie was so that I could make a joke about how Brett Christophers, professor in the Institute for Housing and Urban Research at Sweden’s Uppsala University, spends most of his Guardian article tiptoeing around the Campanula rotundifolia. Er, that was the joke. Here’s the article.
This, ultimately, is the nub of the matter. What Sweden is facing up to today is massive, long-term political failure to sort out its housing market.
On the one hand, Sweden has continued to substantially subsidise home ownership, pouring unnecessary fuel on the fire of the housing bubble. Most notable here is tax relief on mortgage interest. Decades after such relief was jettisoned elsewhere – even the famously homeowner-friendly UK got rid of it in 2000, Gordon Brown rightly describing it as a middle-class perk – it remains in place, absurdly, in Sweden.
On the other hand, Sweden has a fundamentally broken rental system,
Tip-
which for a variety of reasons
Toe.
comprehensively fails to make affordable accommodation widely and readily available in the largest cities, especially for those with greatest need and least resources. The effect of this lack of viable rental accommodation has been to further inflate demand for home-ownership, putting additional upwards pressure on house prices and debt burdens.
I posted this on the day of the invasion and I think it aged pretty well.
Russia is not attacking Ukraine in response to actions of the USA since then, that’s an Americocentric delusion. This is not happening because Ukraine wanted to join NATO, it’s happening because they are outside NATO, which is not the same thing at all. Russia is not driven by fear of NATO strength, it is driven by perceptions of western weakness. Russia believes the cultural, military and geopolitical balance has tipped in their favour, expecting the west will respond to their invasion of Ukraine today with nothing more than official grimaces. I hope they are not correct about that but we will soon see.
Putin is motivated by oft stated imperial ambitions to Make Russia Great Again, to ‘restore’ Russia to its imperial boundaries with Moscow as the New Rome (yes, they really say that); Ukrainian rejection of that notion and assertion of their own identity is therefore intolerable. But reject ‘the Russian world’ they did, because Ukrainians do not wish to be ruled from the Kremlin even indirectly. That is why they overthrew Russia’s favoured oligarch and sought to chart their own course in the world.
That is what this war is about.
I still see things much the same and am delighted my fears about a lack of meaningful support for Ukraine were misplaced.
The Ukraine conflict has merely demonstrated that Mearsheimer’s realism is as ineffective at understanding the present as it has been at predicting the future or explaining the past. Fitting Putin’s misbegotten imperial adventure into a realist framework requires a conception of international relations that awards Western democracies the power of choice but reduces their enemies to victims of circumstances. And it demands an understanding of Russian aggression so indulgent that it is indistinguishable from appeasement.
Putin’s insecurity might start with anxiety about his personal future, but he has extended this into a vision for Russia that involves a permanent struggle with the West and its liberalism. There is little NATO can do about this vision except to ensure Russia’s defeat in Ukraine. Trenin’s bleak logic works both ways. There is no turning back for either side. Putin’s future and that of his inner circle is a matter for the Russian elite. The fragmentation of the Russian Federation is not, despite allegations, desired by Western governments in that this would be a source of yet more upset and instability. By and large they would prefer that Russia held together – but again this is not up to them. Moscow’s decision to use outlying regions as a source of military recruits to pursue a catastrophic war means that it will have to cope with the consequences. Whether or not an alternative liberal and democratic vision for Russia can develop in the future, upon which any more stable European security order depends, will also be up to Russians. The West can help if there is something to work with for the consequences of continued chaos and anger will be dire, but the first requirement will be a different sort of leader in the Kremlin, with a strong enough political base to confront the harsh reality of Russia’s situation. In the end the biggest threats to Russian security do not lie outside its borders but inside its capital.
“What’s peculiar is that it is often those who have most faith the in ability of government to fix complex and deep-seated problems, like poverty, poor education or climate change, who seem most fatalistic when it comes to the most basic of state functions: policing our territory.”
Of course, the peculiarity of this is less peculiar when one reflects that a lot of those who wanted to allow the entire world to settle in the UK, no questions asked, do so because they subscribe to the “altruist” idea (in the Ayn Rand use of that word) that the most moral thing in the world is to give up a greater value in return for a lesser, or preferably, in return for nothing, not even a word of thanks. It is better to destroy our borders and undermine the notion that citizenship carries with it certain responsibilities, than to refuse it; it is better to trash industrial progress and comfort, in the name of combatting a supposed climate change menace, even if it means condemning billions to misery, because the Earth has some sort of intrinsic value, and so on. At the heart of the attitudes from those who want to stop policing the borders of nation states is a sort of anti-values forcefield that sucks all reason and logic into a hole.
Nations that cannot police their borders aren’t nations, and indeed, the very idea of a shared community, even the most libertarian one, where the State is vanishingly small, are gone if there is no border. Even if that border is just a line in the map, rather than a wall, or fence, or set of Customs posts, borders are like fences. They make for good neighbours. Neighbours try – or should – to get along with one another. Neighbours can look out for each other, share the news and gossip, rally around if there is a problem. Paradoxically, borders give rise to the notions of allegiance and loyalty, from which a sense of trust comes. Take that away, and it fosters all kinds of resentments and problems down the line that are in fact corrosive of a liberal order.
None of this means the usual fears about immigration, that those who arrive in a country are taking “our jobs” or so forth (the lump of labour fallacy). It is not even about the worry that those who come to a country might be a threat to “our” values. But surely, if a person is an illegal immigrant, even proudly so, that doesn’t exactly get that person off to a good start in terms of buying into their supposedly adopted country.
As we near 100K followers, we urge every single one of you to join us in taking vital action against this criminal government and their genocidal plans to issue over 100 new oil and gas licences, which will ensure lethal climate breakdown and the collapse of human civilisation.
You say the third-best time to negotiate would be now. I can see why you would want that, but you’re not a party to the negotiations. Russia and Ukraine are. And why would Ukraine negotiate now?
As I said from the outset, what Ukraine needs is long term security. Not words on a piece of paper. Actual security. If they don’t get it, the lives they “save” now will be lost double when Russia inevitably invades again. And, yes, I’m sorry, long term security for Ukraine means NATO membership which Putin would not agree to as things stand.
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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