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It may be a minor thing but why oh why do people who cover the world’s conflicts seem to have so little technical knowledge of the subject they cover? I saw an article in the Telegraph with an image captioned “This image made from amateur video released by the Shaam News Network, purports to show a Syrian military tank in Homs, Syria”… except it is clearly not a “tank”, it is a BMP… an infantry fighting vehicle.
This is not new. I spent much of the 1990’s in various parts of the former Yugoslavia and was often exasperated to grab a western newspaper in Zagreb and see pictures of “Croatian tanks”… which more often than not captured former Yugoslav OT M-60 APCs pressed into service by the Croatian, HVO or BiH armies… or even rather exotic Croatian improvised armoured personnel carriers (in effect armoured trucks with a machine gun). More recently I also recall a clip on CNN describing “British tanks” in Iraq that were in fact AS-90 artillery vehicles.
It seems odd to me that so few modern war correspondents are ex-military and thus, with apologies to Gilbert and Sullivan, far too many of them cannot tell the difference between a Mauser and a javelin (and neither can their editors it seems). This is certainly why I find Michael Yon so refreshing… he actually understands what he is looking at up the sharp end.
Declare free trade unilaterally, says Tim Worstall in the Telegraph. Good and true are his words, but since you all know that already, allow me to draw your attention to an exchange you may not have seen in the comments that manages to be both entertaining and at the same time slightly sad.
“davidaslindsay” wrote:
A perfect illustration of how there is nothing more anti-conservative than capitalism.
The Cold War is long gone, so there is no remaining need for Tories to be corralled out of fear into voting for Conservatives and other such Liberal parties
Imagine, just imagine, if a site not unlike this one in structure, if in nothing else, were to give a platform to people who recognised that there was no patriotism without economic patriotism, set within a broader appreciation of the rural, the provincial, the socially conservative, and the classically (and Classically) Christian, with the consequent pronounced aversion to global capitalism, to American hegemony, to obeisant Zionism, to wars to make the world anew, to wars generally, and so on.
Just imagine such a voice in the debate. Just imagine it. Even if only for one moment, just imagine it.
“TimWorstall” replied
David, this is a blog.
You have a blog. Thus there already is a blog which reflects such views.
Very democratic place, the internet.
What is both funny and sad about David Lindsay’s cri de coeur is that he does not just have a personal blog but has, or had in 2009, a slot in the Telegraph, a privilege that most bloggers would give their best stripy pyjamas to obtain. Lindsay’s cry of “Just imagine such a voice in the debate. Just imagine it. Even if only for one moment, just imagine it” makes him sound like a combination of Galileo facing the Inquisition and Captain Kirk trying to get the Fabrini to believe they are on a generation ship in For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky. Yet he scarcely had to stretch his imagination to conceive of a voice exactly like his being given a platform even beyond the one offered by davidaslindsay.blogspot.com. All he had to do was remember as far back as 2009.
What is the appeal of believing that you are silenced when you are given a megaphone?
Some of it is persecution envy, or to be more accurate, envy of the chance to be heroic. Mr Lindsay is of the nostalgic Right and appears to me to suffer a little from this condition but the phenomenon is most common and strong on the nostalgic Left. How they do hate being the rich, safe, privileged ones. How they love to reminisce about standing up to Thatcher, or at a pinch, their resistance during the grim Bush years. How they would have loved to have been a Freedom Rider. They would have been heroes, honest.
Some of it is a desire to maintain the delusion that the world would heed your message if only it were allowed to hear it. This thought hurts much less than the thought that the world has had ample opportunity to hear your message and heeds it not. Before you laugh at Mr Lindsay – or being realistic, slightly after – remember that (a) in so far as this is a delusion it is one he shares with us (have we not blogs? Seen the libertarian sentiments of the populace lately?) and (b) the belief that the people are being stopped from hearing minority voices by a semi-conscious conspiracy of the mainstream media is only just now ceasing to be true.
We do not quite match the faithfulness in delusion of those communists who have announced the imminence of world revolution every year for close on a century, but many of the bloggers whose writing I love most – Instapundit, Brian Micklethwait, me – have announced the imminent death of the gatekeeper every year for close on a decade. Yet there the decrepit old bastard is each new morning, bleary eyed, swaying on his feet, pretending not to know about the people who slipped past him while he was drunk and incapable the night before – but still manning his old rotten gate most of the time and just damn refusing to die.
Mind you, we were not exactly wrong about the old boy’s morbidity, just premature. He’ll turn up his toes eventually and the patient messengers of every suppressed creed with break through and be heard in all the land, only we’ll be heard most gladly because we are in the right. I hope. I think.
I have been following the Brett Kimberlin case, much linked to of late by Instapundit, with interest, but with some confusion.
It is not that I consider exercises like Everybody Blog About Brett Kimberlin Day to be pointless. It is that I remain genuinely confused about what that point might be. Who, exactly, are we all trying to convince, and of what, exactly?
I get the impression that all those blogging about this do know their answers to this question, but to them, it’s obvious, and if they ever did spell it out, that was many days ago. So, what are those answers?
Kimberlin is a bad, bad man, who has a history of villainy generally, and in particular of trying to intimidate bloggers who point this fact out. So yes, the cost in potential intimidation from Brett Kimberlin of lots of us blogging about Brett Kimberlin is small, and all the smaller for lots and lots of us doing this, especially from a nice safe distance like from London. But what exactly does me mentioning the name of Brett Kimberlin, on the blog that I write for, accomplish?
Does it intimidate Brett Kimberlin himself, and thereby stop him intimidating any more bloggers and from intimidating any more the bloggers he is intimidating now? How? Isn’t Kimberlin rather pleased to have got up the noses of so many bloggers whom he already detests and despises, and turned into a minor internet celebrity like this?
Does it persuade the forces of law and order to stomp all over Kimberlin, more than they have been doing lately? Again, how?
Is the idea to show to mainstream Americans that the mainstream media are rubbish, for not mentioning this story? If so, what exactly is the plan for reaching mainstream America with this proposition?
Leading directly on from the previous question, is the idea to embarrass the mainstream media into mentioning the story? Their current opinion of all this is, presumably, that a lot of stupid right wing blogs are making a gigantic fuss about a small-time crook, who has gone some way towards rejoining polite society by making himself useful to the left-wing cause, which just goes to show that Kimberlin is doing something good, having annoyed all the right right wing nutters. And given that not even that opinion will find its way into the mainstream media any time soon, nothing much would seem to be being accomplished on that front either.
The pieces I have been reading during the last week or so have entirely convinced me that Brett Kimberlin is a bad man, and that those who support him with money, or who did once upon a time, are at best very stupid, and probably not at all stupid but very, very bad also, arguably even worse than Kimberlin himself, in particular Barbra Streisand and Brett Kimberlin’s evil and/or stupid aunt. My opinion of George Soros, to mention another Kimberliner, has gone done (even further). I had not realised until now quite what a brazen villain he is. But convincing someone like me of things as simple as these hardly amounts to much by way of an objective. I have no objection in principle to preaching to the choir. This can often be a very valuable exercise. I am positively asking for exactly such preaching now. But what valuable lesson might this particular chorister be learning from the Kimberlin affair, that I might otherwise have neglected? Or is it that all this just makes me … think about things?
Is it a case of all of the above? The matter is easily blogged about, fun to blog about, and will achieve a wide variety of relatively small but desirable things.
My questions are genuine, rather than sneeringly rhetorical. If I truly thought that Everybody Blog About Brett Kimberlin Day was pointless, I would not have mentioned it here at all. But, please somebody tell me why it is not pointless, and not perhaps even counter-productive on account of being so over-the-top for what it is actually accomplishing.
I am sure that our commentariat will have useful answers to offer me, and I look forward to reading them.
At the moment I am a daily Instapundit reader, which is because at the moment I find American politics a whole lot more interesting than British politics. At least Obama is interesting! Cameron just makes me want to give up thinking about British politics altogether.
But the interesting American question for me is not who will win their next Presidential election. Personally – in defiance of our Dear Leader (although time may well prove to me the error of my ways), for all the grief it may bring, and for whatever miniscule difference it may make to anything – I support Anyone-But-Obama for President rather than the man himself. No, what interests me about America just now is to what extent the old mainstream media really are in the process of being dethroned.
This is what is so interesting about things like the Obama Eats Dogs story. In itself it is about nothing. Its only significance is that Obama’s cheerleaders want this story to stop, while Obama’s detractors want it to rock on. But that is exactly why it is so interesting. It is pure media. It’s like one of those enemas that doctors inflict upon you, to enable them to see what is happening inside you. It does nothing to you, other than make your insides trackable. Obama Eats Dogs stories tell you about the power of The Media either to suppress a story which they now don’t like, or maybe not to suppress it.
My take on the alleged bias of the American mainstream media is that they have been monstrously biased in a statist direction for well over a century. Every other Media story since the year dot has been about (a) a Problem; and (b), all intertwined with that, what the government is doing about the Problem or ought to be doing about the Problem. There is now a huge constituency of idiots who really do think that the answer to any problem of any sort is for the government to take charge of it, and screw it up some more.
What is now changing is not the bias. What is changing is that now, because of the rise of other media (barium enema media?), this bias is trackable.
Don’t kid yourself that an earlier generation of Old Gents In Suits Who Worshipped Facts were not almost as biased as their now visibly biased progeny. The point about bias is not – or not only – whether you lie. The point is what you say is a story in the first place.
Problem!!! Facts. What is the government doing about it?!? More facts. What does Everyone Important say about what the government ought to be doing about it?!? More facts. There’s no need to lie about anything to skew the way you present the world.
Imagine, on the other hand, a world in which The Media all assumed that problems were there to be solved by humans, and that the “politicians” are just another of those problems that we humans have to deal with from time to time. The “News” would be completely different.
And what interests me about America just now is that this kind of thing is all becoming so much more visible, to the point where it might even be changing, in a good direction.
Considering that Taki, the Greek shipping magnate’s son, hard-right scribbler and socialite, owns a webzine, “Takimag”, in which a notorious recent article by John Derbyshire was published, I wondered whether the fellow was going to write about recent events about Derbyshire. You see, Derbyshire, who lives in the US and has written for various publications such as National Review, was recently fired by NR editor Rich Lowry after a storm of protest concerning Derbyshire’s comments about black people in Takimag.
But when I read Taki’s regular column in the Spectator a few days ago, it was all about Ernest Hemingway (and pretty good, too). No mention of the Derbyshire affair. Odd. Maybe the Spectator’s editor had warned the chap off, but he’s written some pretty fiery stuff before that got into print, so I am not sure. But of course, I had completely forgotten the one-and-only Rod Liddle:
“Derbyshire’s piece contained one or two points with which I do not agree, but I suspect that for the most part its advice was precisely the sort of thing which readers of the National Review have probably passed on to their children, anyway.”
Well, he may be right that that is what readers of that publication tell their children. Who knows, maybe they are all telling their youngsters things such as this:
“Before voting for a black politician, scrutinize his/her character much more carefully than you would a white.”
(10h) Do not act the Good Samaritan to blacks in apparent distress, e.g., on the highway.
(10i) If accosted by a strange black in the street, smile and say something polite but keep moving.
This also:
In that pool of forty million, there are nonetheless many intelligent and well-socialized blacks. (I’ll use IWSB as an ad hoc abbreviation.) You should consciously seek opportunities to make friends with IWSBs. In addition to the ordinary pleasures of friendship, you will gain an amulet against potentially career-destroying accusations of prejudice.
(14) Be aware, however, that there is an issue of supply and demand here. Demand comes from organizations and businesses keen to display racial propriety by employing IWSBs, especially in positions at the interface with the general public—corporate sales reps, TV news presenters, press officers for government agencies, etc.—with corresponding depletion in less visible positions. There is also strong private demand from middle- and upper-class whites for personal bonds with IWSBs, for reasons given in the previous paragraph and also (next paragraph) as status markers.
(15) Unfortunately the demand is greater than the supply, so IWSBs are something of a luxury good, like antique furniture or corporate jets: boasted of by upper-class whites and wealthy organizations, coveted by the less prosperous. To be an IWSB in present-day US society is a height of felicity rarely before attained by any group of human beings in history
It is worth reading the whole piece, if only to get the full, patronising, vileness of much of it; the tragedy is that there might be one or two things he says that actually make some sort of sense (there are issues concerning crime rates among different ethnic groups that need to be discussed, openly and without pandering to PCness). If this article was meant as satire, it failed. An argument I have seen in defence of the piece is that Derbyshire wrote it in response to another idea of what black parents are telling their children about white people. But even if that is true, do two wrongs make a right? I just cannot see how that is the case here.
But what I found particularly bad, from a libertarian perspective, about this item was that Derbyshire, working backwards from some highly debatable statistical assertions, then used them as a sort of rule of thumb test of how to treat a black man as an individual. And this is proof, in my view, of his racial collectivism.
As already has happened, a number of people, no doubt sympathising with these comments, have said they will cancel their NR subscriptions, etc, etc. This is a terrible blow of freedom of speech, etc, etc. It is not. NR would not be obliged to print this material, and as Lowry said in his announcement of the parting of the ways, he would not have done so. If an editor feels a writer is so incendiary that he no longer wants to be associated with such a person, then he or she is entitled to act on that view, however mistaken. That is part of the freedom to act on judgements that, ironically, Mr Derbyshire might claim to be defending, however hamfistedly, in his article. We live in the world of massively expanding internet-based news and views; I am sure that the British-born Mr Derbyshire will find outlets for his opinions.
Update: It seems another NR contributor has got the boot, by the name of Robert Weissberg. Crikey.
Paul Marks of this parish commented on an article in the Economist called ‘A lament for America’s Jews’…
…whereupon the magazine deleted it.
However, for your edification and as if by some black internet magic, here is that deleted comment…
Do you not ever fear your nose growing Lexington? Or your pants catching fire?
You know perfectly well that the “mentors” who got Comrade Barack into Columbia and Harvard were not “Zionists” (not even “liberal” ones).
At Columbia his room mate was Sohale Siddiqi. William (Bill) Ayers worked just down the street at Bank Street College of Education (and he and Barack went to the same Marxist conferences – continuing Barack’s Marxism whilst at Occidental – and his the work of his true “mentor” in childhood the Communist Party member Frank Marshall Davis).
Bill and Mrs Ayers are the pals of Hamas (part of the unholy alliance between Marxist atheists and radical Islamists — that is so much a feature of the Hyde Park area of Chicago, where both Bill and Barack went to live – of course Frank Marshall Davis was a Chicago CP member till he was ordered to go off to Hawaii).
A teacher and friend of Barack at Columbia was Edward Said (not known for his Zionism). They (and Bill Ayers) continued to be friends after the Columbia years.
And Harvard?
Barack got in because of the letter by Percy Sutton (the attorney of Malcolm X – who Barack’s mother had so admired)
And then there is Khalid Abdullah Tariq al-Mansour (again not known for his Zionism) – who started off as Donald Warden.
And on and on…
Lexington, a genuine question… Do you really believe we are so stupid or so ill informed that you can get away with pretending that Barack Obama has a “Zionist” background?
I really want to know.
Do you despise us (the readers) so much, that you believe you can blatantly say things that are untrue (that you must know are untrue) and we will not even notice?
Barack Obama was elected in 2008 because the “liberal” (again I rather think Gladstone and so on would dispute your definition of the word “liberal”) media managed to hide the truth from most voters – and substitute a tidal wave of “Journo-list” disinformation in the place of the truth.
I assure you that the same trick will not work twice.
Before November most people will know Barack Obama for who and what he really.
… the comment taking form once more like some vengeful revenant risen from that un-quiet place where deleted comments supposed slain by a moderator go, reaching through the screen and grasping ‘Lexington’ by the throat.
Damian Thompson at the Telegraph is circumspect, but he quotes Jamie Dettmer, former war correspondent for the Times, who is not:
It has been common knowledge for years among British and American reporters that Bob can just make things up or lift other’s work without attribution and embellish it. I recall him doing it to me on a story in Kuwait about the killings of Palestinians at the hands of Kuwaitis following the liberation of the emirate. I remember also the time Fisk filed a datelined Cairo story about a riot there when he was in fact at the time in Cyprus.
Pope’s theory on this — why Bob gets away with it — is that fellow members of the press corp don’t like to dish the dirt on their colleagues. “The one time I decided to let it be known that a fellow reporter was cheating and passing off others’ work as his own, it was I who became the odd man out, an informer with a chip on my shoulder, and standing joke,” he writes. He notes also that “editors are reluctant to challenge established writers.”
It is noticeable that this collegiate solidarity only fractured when Fisk himself offended against it, by insulting fellow journalists.
(Via Tim Blair, also of the Telegraph, but a different one.)
A while back, in a posting here about a meeting at the House of Commons addressed by Detlev Schlichter, at which James Delingpole was also present, I speculated that maybe Delingpole might at some point in the future choose to get stuck into the question of what has been going wrong with the world’s financial system.
So, I was delighted to encounter this recent Delingpole posting, about why the price of oil is going up. He features a video of Ron Paul saying that if you print lots and lots of money, everything goes up. Or, to put it another way, it’s not oil that is going up; it’s fiat money that is going down.
I see that Delingpole gives the Cobden Centre an appreciative mention, which will please them greatly.
Delingole, whose idea-spreading abilities I admire more and more, is a significant voice in the world. He has a huge following, which is well deserved. He takes important ideas seriously, but himself not so much, in a most engaging and yet informative way, the proof of his effectiveness being how much he gets up the noses of whatever bad guys he takes aim at.
If Delingpole could do to the world’s central banking racket what he has already done and continues to do to the world’s “climate science” racket, that might really be something.
We already have a ‘Samizdata quote of the day’ for today, but, yes, here are seven more. I wrote them down over last Christmas, and then forgot about them. Ant then today, I encountered them again. They still make me smile, so here they all are for you good people.
First, a couple of things said by Patsy Stone, the amazing fashion monstress played by Joanna Lumley in Absolutely Fabulous. Over Christmas there were two new episodes. So much for my “complete” box set that I found in a charity shop last year.
On the terribleness of the recent riots in London:
Oh I don’t know. Nothing wrong with a bit of extreme shopping.
On the drugs issue:
Have you seen the price of methadone? It’s cheaper to buy crack.
Also on a fashion theme, from one of those Father Christmas in a New York Shopping Store movies, said by the Lady Boss:
I don’t know if large women care what they look like, but if they do, let’s exploit them.
That’s the spirit. And depending on how the project turns out:
This is either the smartest decision I’ve ever made or the stupidest decision you’ve ever made.
Which has to be a very old joke, but like I say, it made me smile.
Next, this from the Headmistress of St Trinian’s (played by Rupert Everett), about her (I think) brother (also Rupert Everett), to her brother’s daughter:
Your father has a short memory masquerading as a clear conscience.
Finally a couple of overhearings from BBC Radio 3. Here’s something from the recently deceased Gustav Leonhardt, about and with whom they did a commemorative Music Matters show, featuring a recorded interview with him. Leonhardt is explaining why the biographical details of the lives of the great composers don’t interest him that much, only their music.
When you meet a genius, you don’t know he is one. He is only a genius when he is at work.
Finally, here is Professor Robert Winston, ruminating on science, in between introducing some of his classical favourites with Rob Cowan:
Uncertainty is a good place to be. It worries me when governments take a very assertive position on the basis of very weak evidence and then stick to it.
The phrase “climate science” was never uttered, but you got the distinct feeling that this particular Public Voice is thinking that CAGW is a band-waggon that it now makes more sense to get off rather than to shout from. I must remember to email the Bishop about that.
Something tells me that the CAGW-ists will, any year now, start having short memories masquerading as clear consciences.
Talking to a business contact of mine earlier today, the subject of the Levenson enquiry concerning the alleged hacking of persons’ phones by journalists/others came up. One thing that was mentioned was that the corruption of certain police officers, and possibly other officials with access to important data, highlights the dangers of aggregating large amounts of important data into a few places, since the temptation to abuse this for financial gain – by selling some of the juicy stuff to journalists – will be hard to resist. And that surely is another argument against centralised ID systems of the sort that groups such as No2ID have campaigned against.
Call me optimistic, but at least I hope I can say that for the moment, the case for compulsory ID cards is off the table in the UK. That does not, of course, mean that the Database State is not advancing, quite the reverse. But at least some of the more brazen examples of this are not advancing, and the public are getting a very good education in the dangers of data aggregation and the abuse of data by those who are entrusted to defend the public.
Comment just attached, by “Malcolm”, to my posting here a while back entitled Austrianism as Number Two:
Newsnight has just introduced its story on Ed Milliband’s decision today to back the government’s pay freeze by playing the Keynes v Hayek video from Econstories.tv
The narrator even described it as a “fabulous” video that is “easily the most entertaining explanation of the issues” – as closely as I can remember the wording, anyway.
I realise I’m commenting on a posting that’s six months old, but I’m hoping Brian, as the original author, gets automatically notified of comments. That the video is being used to give context to a now-current news item is certainly consonant with Brian’s original theory about Austrianism as the new #2 (with apologies to The Prisoner).
I did get automatically notified of this comment. Many thanks for the kind thought. However, I also clocked this Newsnight snippet myself, and added an off topic bit in a comment I also added to the earlier posting today about SOPA, which Newsnight is also reporting on, thanks to the Wikipedia black-out that Rob Fisher noted.
The more I ponder those Keynes v Hayek videos, the more of a stroke of total genius I believe them to be. They play especially well with the BBC, because the BBC is never happier than when explaining an issue in terms of competing arguments. Yes, the BBC is often “biased”, in the sense that you get a definite idea of which team they may prefer (which may not be yours), and which team they choose to give the last word to. But the “other” team often gets a more than fair crack of the whip.
As I made clear in that earlier posting of mine, the real sufferers from this kind of bias are the “other other” teams, so to speak, the ones who don’t even get a look in, the ones who are shown as being not even wrong, on account of not even existing.
To quote Rob Fisher in the posting immediately below, about Detlev Schlichter’s performance on the BBC’s “Start The Week” show yesterday morning:
All in all not a bad day for the spreading of Austrian ideas.
Which adds up to two consecutive not bad days for the spreading of Austrian ideas.
Incoming from Detlev Schlichter:
Just a heads-up in case you are interested, I will be one of four guests on Andrew Marr’s show Start the Week on BBC Radio Four on Monday, 16th January. The program starts at 9 am but there are various ‘listen again’ facilities, and it will also be published as a podcast. The topic is the financial crisis, and the other guests are The Economist’s Philip Coggan (author recently of Paper Promises), Angela Knight, chief executive of the British Bankers’ Association, and the Labour life peer Maurice Glasman.
I am interested.
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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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