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]
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The Institute of Economic Affairs is the mothership of the free market think tanks, certainly in Europe. Or, it was. Because now, the IEA’s reputation is almost entirely based on the stir that it managed to make when it was presided over by the stellar duopoly that was Ralph Harris and Arthur Seldon. Those two men ensured that the classical liberal intellectual tradition remained alive in Britain, and they brought it, and the developing tradition of Austrian school economics, to bear on the failed Keynesian consensus of the 1960s and 1970s, laying the intellectual foundations for the Thatcherite economic rescue act of the 1980s.
Harris and Seldon had always been very careful, first, to ground their activities in pro freedom scholarship. The intellectual war was what they cared about most. Seldon fought that war. Harris, although also a considerable warrior himself, concentrated on making sure that the war effort was paid for. Second, they were careful not to get too closely intertwined with the Conservative Party, to the exclusion of any others. They always kept their lines open to anyone who was willing to listen to what they had to say and to help them say it, of any party or of none.
However, when age inevitably caught up with Harris and Seldon, the IEA then chose a man called Graham Mather as its new boss, who proceeded to use the place as his personal campaign office to turn himself into a Conservative MEP, while declaring that “the intellectual arguments have been won”. Mather was hurriedly dumped, and under John Blundell’s leadership the IEA then did rather better, even if it never really lit up the landscape like it had in the old days. To switch metaphors from fireworks to aviation, under Mather, the IEA was crashing earthwards and was about to burn up completely. Under Blundell it glided near horizontally, not at all disastrously, but without any upward impetus that I could see. When I heard that the Institute of Economic Affairs had, however long ago it was, appointed as their new boss Mark Littlewood, whose previous job was as a media relations person for the LibDems, I reacted with indifference. I hardly, that is to say, reacted at all.
Mark Littlewood has clearly always understood what classical liberalism and libertarianism are all about, and has done as much of them as he could, given the day jobs he has had. He has always been a friendly and civilised presence, albeit rather too EUrophile for my liking, at the various Libertarian Alliance events I have seen him at over the years, at quite a few of which he has spoken. Nevertheless, I assumed that in hiring such a person, the IEA was merely going to throw a big chunk of its still impressive stash of money at a pointless media-based charm offensive, which would achieve nothing. Pick a nice chap, with lots of contacts in politics and in what they used to call Fleet Street, hope for the best and get nothing very much. After a few years, Littlewood would move on. In due course, the building would be sold and the IEA would move from Westminster to somewhere or to nowhere. Its few surviving supporters would become even more geriatric. Another member of the Political Class, more unscrupulous than Mark Littlewood and cut from the same cloth as Graham Mather, would move in and hoover up all the remaining money, and that would be that. Way of the world. Old order giving place to new. Such is life. Such is death.
I never really thought any of this through, apart from the Mather episode, when I became tangentially involved as a junior advocate for the team that ousted him. I merely realise, now, that the above sentiments about Littlewood were what I was thinking, insofar as I was thinking anything at all. The point being that as far as the IEA was concerned, and like many others, I had pretty much stopped thinking.
So it was that when I got invited to a Libertarian Alliance dinner about a fortnight ago, at which Mark Littlewood was to speak about how he was setting about his various IEA tasks, I did not, as they say, jump at the invitation. I merely, having nothing else fixed, said yes and went along, expecting little more than some nice food. But as soon as Mark Littlewood started talking, I realised that I had been seriously misjudging him. → Continue reading: Mark Littlewood and the future of the Institute of Economic Affairs
Guido Fawkes wryly notes that the Financial Times, which for a long time has backed Labour in its editorial pages, and for a long time taken a ploddingly, predictably, wrong-headed stance on many issues (such as joining the euro), has now come out for the Tories.
Of course, the FT, like the Economist – which has also backed Cameron – is a purveyor of conventional wisdom, so it may be that a centrist, social democratic paper like the FT feels fairly comfortable in backing a party that has not shown any considerably conservative political views. But as Guido says, there may be another reason in that the FT has seen some of its readers die off or defect to other, more robustly pro-market, publications. If the latter is the case, then that is an admirable lesson to be learnt: if you want to see how a product has to change in the face of consumer trends, look at the business media.
I seldom read the Independent, but today the blogosphere lead me to this story, about an Indy journalist, Jerome Taylor, who got beaten up for the crime of investigating electoral fraud in East London.
I also learned something that I did not know, about the art of being beaten up:
As their fists and feet slammed into me, all I could think about was some advice a friend had given me. She’s a paramedic and has dealt with countless victims of assault. “Whatever you do don’t get knocked to the ground,” she once said. “Blows on the floor are much more dangerous.” …
I never knew that, but it makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? Punched in the face is not good, but you really don’t want to be kicked in the kidneys. Presumably Taylor managed to remain standing. It reminds me of an old Elton John song that I have always quite liked.
Luckily for Taylor, he was saved from further punishment by a nearby onlooker who intervened, which was enough for the beaters-up to go away, two of them “into the candidate’s house”.
Good bit of journalism, that last bit. Your face is a mess, but you still clock the vital fact about your attackers. I hope (a) that Jerome Taylor’s career prospects improve as a result of his ordeal, and (b) that both the barbarians who did this and the barbaric puppeteers they were doing it for live more miserable and complicated and dysfunctional lives from now on.
Raedwald, the blogger who lead me to this story, says that it was “naivety or foolishness ” that got Taylor into this fracas. Maybe so, but that strikes me as a bit harsh under the circumstances. Isn’t trying to learn the truth about things, sometimes naively and foolishly, going where people who already know it all are too wise to venture, what journalism is all about?
Also, was that Good Samaritan onlooker who chased away the villains also perhaps being rather naïve and rather foolish? Again, maybe yes, but it’s a good thing he did what he did.
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 thought that this quote, by a commenter called “Berlinerkerl” in response to a Guardian article that really was called “Arm our children with media studies”, was too good to be left languishing in the “more than 50 comments” bilge tanks of a Comment Is Free article.
In his detailed study of Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men, Jones (2001) draws our attention to the mass of early post-modernist contradictions running throughout the series. Whilst Bill and Ben live in an idealised, hedonistic, not to say nihilistic world, they only come out to play when the Man Who Works in the Garden, the authority figure par excellence, goes to have his dinner. Whilst the Class Oppressor is therefore an absent figure, he nevertheless should not be ignored. Class Oppression is, indeed, a recurring theme, as every time Slowcoach the Tortoise appears, the Flowerpot Men dance on his back, as Marxist critics such as Stalin (1995, p786) have pointed out.
That the Flowerpot Men are invariably awoken by the Little Weed is a clear pointer to a drug-addicted subculture. The language used by the Flowerpot Men harks back to the Theatre of the Absurd – Smith (1997, pp 129-150) draws parallels with Ubu Roi.
Bee-bop-flobbalob 🙂
Another commenter called Pressman56 suggested instead that instead of arming our children with media studies we arm them with Kalashnikovs.
I recall a time when President Clinton was really quite unpopular, or so it appeared from where I was sat, then as now, in London. It was during his first term. In particular, I recall a libertarian friend who had recently been in America (although he may not himself have been American – not sure about that), sitting on my sofa in my living room, at one of my last Friday of the month libertarian talk evenings, telling me that President Clinton was absolutely not going to be re-elected. Too many people just did not like him. I pressed for details. Are you sure it’s not just that you don’t want Clinton to be re-elected? No, he isn’t going to be re-elected. And the point is, my libertarian friend was sort of right. Clinton wasn’t going to be re-elected. At the very least he didn’t then look like being re-elected. But then, Timothy McVeigh blew up that big office block in Oklahoma and from then on, Clinton never looked back.
Politics is all about story telling. It is about, as we like to say here, the meta-context. And what this explosion accomplished for Clinton was that it completely changed the story being told at that time about what the state was and is. It turned the state from an economic and regulatory threat to the people, into the leading protector of the people. And it turned right wing grumblers about all those damned taxes and regulations into enemies of the state, and hence enemies of the people. Clinton no longer had to struggle to tell the story that he had been trying all along to tell, of the state as the necessary partner of the people, and of the people who were suspicious of the state as people who, at best, simply did not get this. Timothy McVeigh did that for him. And I remember how my heart sank when I heard about the Oklahoma bombing, and who had done it, and why, because I feared exactly the story switch that then happened.
Now the grumblers against taxes and regulations are back being the people. And the Democrats might yet find themselves losing their epic battle, the one which was supposed, in the words of Kyle-Anne Shiver, to have …
… delivered the plum of America to the international socialist collective, or at least pushed us past the point of no return.
Even if regular people forget what turned this kind of story around for Democrats last time around, Democrats surely do remember. And just in case anyone has forgotten what a difference Timothy McVeigh made to the story told by President Clinton in particular and the story of America in general, Clinton is himself now reminding everyone.
But Bill Clinton, not for the first time in his life, is taking a chance. The danger for the Democrats is that they risk looking like they want another Timothy McVeigh. As quite a few of them surely do.
However, if the Democrats do get lucky and another McVeigh really does materialise, there is a big difference between now and the time when the original McVeigh did his thing. Then, there was no internet. The story was whatever the then mainstream media decided it was. But that rule no longer applies.
And guess who the new owner of this leftist newspaper is? I wonder how Robert “my brain hurts” Fisk, columnist at that paper, is taking the news.
A good example of not getting it. Some Michigan agency, surprised and aroused by the success of social networks, thought that it would be a bright idea to replicate this for students undertaking the transition from school to university.
The state of Michigan is currently building a custom social network called the Michigan College Access Portal, at a cost of $1.5 million, to help students looking to transition from high school to college and beyond.
One point five million dollars of public funds. To build a Facebook knock-off.
This needs no further comment.
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.
My Climategate pieces here have been of two sorts. There have been the big set-piece pieces where I at least try to say vaguely original things about it all, which given my life experiences tends to mean what sort of argument this is, how it is going and how it seems likely to go on going. And, there have been little bits like this one which basically just say: be sure not to miss this.
So anyway, be sure not to miss this, which is a report, from one of Bishop Hill’s readers, of a tactical discussion by a bunch of climate alarmist journalists, thinking aloud about how to handle the situation now that the general public has started smelling rats all over the place, rats which they helped to bury, but which those mad bloggers have been digging up. How to bury all the rats now?
Typical quote:
I used to think sceptics were bad and mad but now the bad people (lobbyists for fossil fuel industries) had gone, leaving only the mad. We published a string of articles in late Jan, early Feb showing that people had misinterpreted the emails as casting doubt on CC.
We as in the Guardian. And that worked really well, didn’t it?
Oh well, at least they are finally getting that we sceptics say what we say because we actually believe it, rather than merely because we have been paid to say it. That’s something. Next thing you know, they may even be admitting that some of their fellow climate alarmists are only still climate alarmists because someone is paying them, and that many more who would like to be sceptical are staying mum for similarly economic reasons.
Don’t miss the comments, which say everything that the good Bishop himself didn’t feel the need to say.
LATER: Bishop Hill now has a Tip Jar. The Bishop has a wife and three children, and I am guessing that even a quite small amount of cash that has been earned directly from his blogging efforts would make him an even more potent force in the Climategate debate. If the commenter who says Big Oil might be about to switch sides in this argument, again, is right, then how about a little oil money in the Bishop’s collecting plate?
At the start of my previous Climategate posting, I suggested that James Delingpole might be slacking off on the subject. Maybe he is. There is still nothing up at his blog beyond his afore-linked Beano bit. Maybe he feels he needs a breather. But maybe he is working very hard on another Climategate story, of which there are now dozens to chase up. Talk about a target rich environment for journalists.
Not that you would know it in the USA, if blog complaints like this are anything to go by. The way that the USA’s old media are mostly ignoring the biggest scientific fraud in history, and one of the biggest global stories of the century so far, is itself an amazing story. Delingpole has written an entire book on recent US politics, and surely has many acquaintances in the US old media. Maybe he is now grilling these people, and will soon be doing a piece on why these persons are covering themselves in such unglory, Climategate-wise. Someone should.
Although, maybe I’m out of date and the US old media are getting their Climategate act together at last. Or maybe the Americans I’ve been reading are wrong, and the US old media have always been noticing Climategate, just not in the way those Americans would like. Comments from US readers about those possibilities would be most welcome. The Washington Post seems to be noticing. Weren’t they the guys who lead the way on that original gate thing?
ADDENDUM: In the course of shortening this post, cutting out some digressions, I omitted one crucial non-digression which I now take the liberty of adding.
If it’s true that right wing bloggers and right wing Brit newspapers are now savaging the Warmists completely wrongly, well, isn’t that a story in its own right, given the huge scale of this phenomenon? Aren’t these bad bloggers and cynical Brit journos threatening the very future of the planet? And you guys are ignoring that? Why aren’t you grilling these bad, bad people? Why no big exposures of the wrongness and wickedness of Steve McIntyre? Why no stuff saying “What’s up with Watt’s Up With That??” One way or another, this is a huge story.
Trouble is, I guess they want the story to go one way, but that if they investigate it properly they fear that they’ll find it going the other way.
ANOTHER ADDENDUM: Bishop Hill:
Steve Mosher, the man who broke the CRU emails story and author of Climategate: The CRUtape Letters, is interviewed on PJTV. Some interesting thoughts on what it means and why the US press has largely ignored it.
Which would at least further suggest that they have ignored it.
There has just been a burst of speculation about whether a certain Paul Dennis leaked the Climategate files. In a comment on a posting at Bishop Hill, Dennis denies it. The police did talk to him. But that’s all, he says.
A few weeks ago, in among the comments on this posting at Watts Up With That?, I came across the following comment from Anthony Watts himself, following earlier comments speculating about who the leaker was:
You missed the joke, the “mole” was CRU’s own incompetence, they left the file out in the open. The mole was whoever left it there. Steve McIntyre can confirm this, as can Steve Mosher. We were all just having a bit of fun with CRU until they figured out their own blunder, and when they did, they started erasing all sorts of public data on the FTP server.
http://climateaudit.org/2009/07/31/the-cru-data-purge-continues/
I got half way through doing a posting about this at the time, but then I thought, what do I know? I am about as much of a journalist as I am an astronaut. I mean, if I had noticed something, how come nobody else had?
But did I perhaps stumble upon the simple truth of this, told to me by the people who actually know? Simply, the CRU people (Jones?) just left a lot of stuff lying around in a what they thought was a private place, but which was actually rather public, to anyone who knew their way around. Then CRU realised this, and scrubbed it. But by then the bird had flown, as speedily as such birds can nowadays, and, over the next few weeks, it was a skeptic or skeptics quite unattached to CRU who put together that Read Me file. He/They started out that editing process with a lot more stuff.
Dennis did send some emails asking about the leak, but he did not initiate process. That is what he says in his comment at Bishop Hill, and I do not think he would lie in a blog comment. Not now, or ever if he’s the kind of guy I now guess him to be. And not there. If he was the leaker, he’d now be working on a big splash admitting it (proclaiming it), and meanwhile telling no lies, or very many truths come to that.
Or have I got the completely the wrong end of completely the wrong stick? Apologies all round if I have totally misunderstood this situation. This is one of those postings that may find itself with an ADDENDUM, saying ignore all that, see comment number whatever from so-and-so. But, maybe not.
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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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