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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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.
Andrew Neil, former Sunday Times editor, now TV pundit and all-round-media mogul and stirrer, has a fine column here about the latest developments surrounding the scientific credibility, or lack thereof, of the IPCC.
I notice that the Times (of London)’s front page splash is on the unfolding scandal of what sort of data has been concealed as inconvenient to the AGW alarmists. As some of us have noted in recent weeks, the MSM has been a very slow – to put it politely – to pick up on this issue. But not now. The other night, the issue even figured on the evening news on the BBC’s flagship news channel.
Of course, it is unclear how far the effect of these stories will go. The other day, chatting to an investment manager who was talking about a climate change fund he was promoting, I casually mentioned the University of East Anglia scandal, and he gave me a funny look. The problem is that a lot of money is now tied up with this AGW stuff, not to mention a lot of political credibility.
All of which proves a point that the new media forms are now breaking stories that could and should have been broken in the days of yore. The internet is having an effect. I’d even go so far as to say that one of the reasons why Barack Obama cannot count on fawning coverage any more is because, while the MSM was in adoration mode, the internet and related channels ensured that the less flattering aspects of his administration got attention. And sooner or later, people noticed.
Last night I watched most of a discussion programme “chaired” (I’ll get to that) by Kirsty Wark on BBC2 television, about President Obama and how he is doing. It was something called The Review Show.
Three things struck me about this show.
First, the BBC is finally acknowledging that President Obama is in some political trouble. This is refreshing.
But second, the dominant explanations of why Obama is in trouble are delusional. There is, said Bonnie Greer, without contradiction, a racist backlash going on. Sadly, in BBC-land, if a black person accuses white people of racism, the accusation is still allowed to stand, no matter how unpersuasive it may be, and no matter how unsatisfactory it is as an explanation for whatever is being talked about.
The other dominant explanation for Obama’s fall from political grace, aside from racism, offered by a blond American lady who talked too fast, was that this backlash is “emotional”. Obama, she said, is making the mistake of concentrating entirely on being “rational” in how he responds, and we all know what wins when facts have a face-off with feelings. → Continue reading: BBC thoughts and feelings about President Obama
A tiny but brazen piece of churnalism has just amused me in a post on WITsend, a blog on ComputerWeekly.com that is ‘…a place for women in IT…tackling issues facing women and other minorities working in technology’. The post, dated 12 January and headed ‘Frances Allen: first woman to win Turing Award’, begins
Frances Allen was has become the first woman to receive the prestigious Turing Award since it was set up in 1966.
Why did the author first write ‘has become’ and later correct it to ‘was’? And why did she draw attention to the change by retaining the struck-through words? The explanation is at the end:
Correction: this story is true, but it’s not new! Allen received the award in 2007, no idea why I got sent a press release on it now.. sorry!
So she took a single press release, and without even the slightest cross-checking – not even a quick glance in Wikipedia – she generated her blog post. Wish I could be so fluent. I have been all over the Net in the course of checking this and that, just for this tiny squib.
In case any reader does not know the term, ‘churnalism’ is the journalistic practice of recycling press releases as news with only the minimum of rewriting. It is a Bad Thing, and the blog author should care, because it is one of those issues facing women and other minorities working in technology. And men. And majorities. And people not working in technology.
When this woman got egg on her face, she did not even have the grace to be embarrassed by the exposure of her sloth. Instead of making the change silently, hoping no-one would notice, she flaunted this decline in standards (can you see what’s coming? Yes …) She should have hidden the decline. Phil Jones could have given her some pointers.
In Scott Brown we have an irresponsible, homophobic, racist, reactionary, ex-nude model, teabagging supporter of violence against woman.
– Keith Olbermann, MSNBC host.
To which Mark Steyn responded, under the heading “Homophobic Nude Teabaggers on the March”:
That’s certainly why I’m supporting him. But who knew there were so many of us?
Today’s Guardian leader, purportedly on social class, is worth reading. It is utter rubbish. But it is worth reading because it is utter rubbish.
It is an informative compression of the muddled thinking of the reflex left: non sequitur piled on fallacy, piled on miscomprehension of both theory and real people, piled on all-or-nothing thinking, piled on misprision of fact, bonded together only with a sticky, sighing outrage. Read it out loud and you may find yourself using that furious-sobbing-child tone and plonking emphasis affected by professional radical activists—especially women—to convey how strongly they feel about the world. As is universally acknowledged, strength of feeling is the same as strength of argument.
I say ‘the reflex left’ because the alternative, ‘the conventional left’, though it offers the pleasure of mocking the unoriginality of the radical, suggests a developed coherence in what is usually just attitudinal stamp-collecting reinforced by mutual approval (libertarians beware). Considering that the reflex left is obsessed with economics and sociology, and professes to derive its policy from them, the arrant ignorance of either, even as they are invoked, is an unending wonder. (Libertarians beware, bis.) That is on fabulous display here in a jazz hands incursion into social mobility, offering numbers that are not numbers (“But a child born 20 years later who is a successful professional now would probably come from the top quarter…“) and that lead to no detectable conclusions, which can only have been included for emotional colour. Impersonal social forces are held to dominate, but paradoxically regarded as tools of the wicked if they do not do what is wanted.
There is another way that ‘reflex’ is appropriate: this is reflexive discourse. It preaches to the converted. It says, “Look! We were right all along.” And assumes therefore that nothing need be said to engage the unconvinced (and again, beware). It is offered within code.
The best non sequitur in the piece is an epitome of an epitome. I considered offering it as a quote of the day. It has everything: it erupts into the discussion from nowhere, is complete nonsense, is nowhere meaningfully followed up, involves an appeal to shared attitudes and beliefs in the reader as reinforcement, and contains an implied accusation of wicked motives in others:
Politicians want us to believe that it is possible to make better-off people richer without making poor people poorer.
The Guardian leader-writer thinks we already do believe that it is impossible. Not even unlikely. Impossible. If we object that sometimes people have got rich by enslaving and impoverishing others, but that mostly both rich people and poor people have got richer together, though at different rates, then we must be wrong. The rich are richer ergo the poor are everywhere poorer. If the Prince of Wales is running his Aston Martin on spare wine and skiing every winter, it can only be at the direct expense of the Duchy of Cornwall’s serfs – who are now starving in greater numbers than in 1337. The politicians stand accused of denying such an inconvenient truth
No wonder the people think they are out of touch.
The most successful media companies out there are just digging their graves more slowly than the rest
– Greg Hadfield
(hat tip to Kristine Lowe)
Someone called Andrew K is using the excellent Bishop Hill’s blog to help him to compile a database of environment correspondents, complete with educational qualifications or lack of them. Says Andrew K of this project:
This is as much as anything an appeal for information: to do a little crowdsourcing.
Commenter MikeE is not sure he likes the tone of this post:
… I am not sure I like the tone of this post.
Yes, interesting. One of the biggest frauds in the whole history of our species is still being attempted, but don’t let’s be too nasty to the newspaper cheerleaders still trying to promote it. Let’s not get the tone wrong. I say that Andrew K’s tone is spot on.
Bishop Hill himself defends his guest-blogger:
One of the most interesting aspects to the history of AGW is the sheer unquestioning awfulness of the media coverage. This is an attempt to explain that phenomenon, and is not unreasonable.
Well, I think it goes beyond that. This is indeed quite nasty, as MikeE says, but only in the same sort of way that a prison sentence is nasty for a criminal. It is nasty but thoroughly deserved. Nasty but still the exact right thing to do. Just as I am in favour of prison sentences for criminals, I am also thoroughly in favour of the spotlight being shone on these (mostly) ridiculously unquestioning environmental correspondents. I said when Climategate first broke that once the “science” had been given a good seeing to, then next in line would be people like the idiot journalists who had been passing this “science” on with such enthusiastic credulity, them being a big part of the story itself. Excellent. What a difference an internet makes, eh?
So, if you can help with relevant information, please go to the Bishop’s blog and provide it. Comments about the general goodness or badness of compiling lists of bad people can go wherever that makes sense to commenters. Personally, as I say, I am all for it.
The weather is cold and snowy in Britain just now – even, now, in central London – but people like Richard North are actually quite enjoying this:
It is global warming here again, and it is getting serious. It is not so much the depth, as the repeated falls. Each layer compacts and freezes which, with fresh global warming on top becomes lethally slippery.
Time was, what with the AGW crowd pretty much completely controlling the agenda, when this kind of elegant mockery would be dismissed as the ignorance of the uninitiated. But the fact is that the present wintry weather is extremely significant in this debate. True, the weather today is not the climate for the next century, but sooner or later weather does turn into climate, and the weather has, from the AGW point of view, been misbehaving for a decade. Their precious Hockey Stick said that the temperature of the globe would disappear off the top right hand corner of the page, right about now. Well it hasn’t, has it?
As John Redwood recently asked Ed Miliband in the House of Commons, concerning the present very cold weather:
… which of the climate models had predicted this?
None, it quickly became clear from Mr Miliband’s faltering reply, that Mr Miliband has been paying any attention to (although other sorts of models have predicted cold winters rather successfully).
But this is not just about looking out of the window and seeing if global warming is to be observed or not (as Richard North well understands). The other point here is the authority of the people upon whom people like Ed Miliband have been relying. Not only have none of Miliband’s “experts” (sneer quotes entirely deliberate) been able to predict the recent succession of colder winters; it goes way beyond that. The point is: these experts assured the world, or allowed their more ignorant followers to assure the world, that these cold winters would not happen, and despite all their protestations now about how weather is not climate, well, shouldn’t they have born this in mind when saying, only a few short years ago, and repeating ever since, that winter snow in places like Britain would be a thing of the past? Should they not have been more careful about seizing upon any bursts of warm weather, any bursts of weather of any kind, come to that, as evidence of the truth of global warming? Had they truly understood the point that they have been reduced to making now, they would have been a lot more modest in their recent, and in Britain economically disastrous, medium range predictions. See also, John Redwood’s follow up posting. Redwood is now talking more sense about the world’s climate than the British Met Office. → Continue reading: Cold wars
I thought this might interest and rile up some of our readers, many of whom I expect are as great fans of Michael Yon as I am:
Got arrested at the Seattle airport for refusing to say how much money I make. (The uniformed ones say I was not “arrested”, but they definitely handcuffed me.) Their videos and audios should show that I was polite, but simply refused questions that had nothing to do with national security. Port authority police eve…ntually came — they were professionals — and rescued me from the border bullies.
He was not at all pleased by the treatment and has written:
When they handcuffed me, I said that no country has ever treated me so badly. Not China. Not Vietnam. Not Afghanistan. Definitely not Singapore or India or Nepal or Germany, not Brunei, not Indonesia, or Malaysia, or Kuwait or Qatar or United Arab Emirates. No county has treated me with the disrespect can that can be expected from our border bullies.
When, I ask you, are we going to FIRE these un-american, untrained, brainless, worthless, useless apes? (I beg forgiveness if I offend any of our near relatives by use of this comparison. Great Apes are marvelous creatures.) Of course, they might have to go on welfare if we fired them because no one but a government bureaucracy would be stupid enough to hire people whose only contribution to America will be their retirement.
Mad? You are damned right I am mad. The TSA and INS are out of control. Disband it. Fire them all. NOW, DAMN IT!!!
New info from Yon in addition to the above on FB: “The Customs people (CBP) were the actors who handcuffed me.”
As Michael Jennings has already reminded us, it is now that time of year, when we look back at the rest of the year. I too will now look back at 2009. Whereas Michael trots the globe, my preferred outdoor activity is walking around London, taking photos, an activity which, as of now, remains more or less legal.
And one of the things I especially like to photo is Evening Standard headlines. Not the headlines in the actual newspaper itself, but the ones on the outside of the contraptions behind which the sellers of the Evening Standard sit. I don’t do this as obsessively as this guy, but I do it every few days or so, whenever a particularly intriguing or doom-laden headline hoves into view.
Click on all these headlines to get the original picture that I took, often a bit prosaic, as in: just the headline and its immediate surroundings; but sometimes with further fun and games, in particular further headlines next to the one I’ve featured in the little squares below. So, for instance, to consider just the first two snaps, on Jan 5, besides the amazing news that it was quite cold in January 2009 (just as it is quite cold now – see Dec 22(a)) you can also see talk of “TORY TAX CUTS”. We wish. Still in January, you can ponder the ever widening gap that separates the ever more bogus hero Barack Obama from the real deal: “CAPTAIN COOL IN RIVER JET CRASH”.
The most regular themes are: economic woe, politicians cheating on their expenses, the consequent relentless criticism of and plotting against the Prime Minister, and the equally relentless way the Prime Minister just bashes on with his ruinous activities, seemingly impervious to all complaints.
See especially June 5, which is worth clicking on for, I humbly submit, artistic reasons This is certainly my favourite photo of all these, in terms of the atmosphere it evokes and the memories it will stir in me in future years, one of the main reasons I take photos being just remind myself of what I was interested in, whenever it was. I love that digital cameras automatically attach dates to everything. So, here we go.
There are three for July, because none of the three headlines you see seemed to me to deserve exclusion.
January 5, 20 – February 11, 19:
   
March 19, 23 – April 15, 24:
   
May 2, 5 – June 5, 24:
   
July 10, 21, 31 – August 11, 26:
  
 
September 8, 10 – October 8, 20:
   
November 17, 19 – December 22, 22:
   
Well, I hope you liked all that, even if without a lot of clicking.
You may now be saying to yourself that November and December have become pretty anti-climactic, and you would be right. For there is another story here, besides all the stories alluded to in the headlines. These photos serve not just as a random walk through the year 2009, but as a probable elegy for the Evening Standard itself, and certainly for the long London era of Evening Standard headlines in the streets.
Click on October 20 for the first clue. That’s right. Some time around then, the Evening Standard stopped costing any money, and started being handed out free. At first the guys giving it away carried on with the billboards, but I knew that this practice would soon fade away. If no money is being made in the street from these newspapers, why go to all the bother of advertising them in the street. So it is that if you click on the last picture of all, you see that where there used to be informatively alarming stories about doom and disaster, now there are only forlorn signs saying that the ES now costs nothing.
This switch to the ES being a giveaway came only a few months after its takeover by a Russian Oligarch. How soon before the ES vanishes altogether, becoming itself the subject of a few more doom-laden headlines in other organs, before it sinks from the memory of Londoners?
Richard Castle of the Burton Mail wrote the following story about a recent act of vandalism: Vandals deface the town war memorial :
A ROYAL British Legion boss says vandals have “dishonoured those who have given their lives for our country” by defacing Burtonʼs war memorial.
Roy Whenman, vice-chairman of the town’s Legion branch, received calls from members saying an extremist message had been written on the statue. Having been informed at 9.20am, borough council chiefs had cleaned the graffiti from the relic, situated outside Burton College, in Lichfield Street, by 9.40am.
Mr Whenman, of Birches Close, Stretton, has described whoever committed the offence as “diabolical”.
He said: “There’s nothing worse, in my eyes, than discrediting a war memorial. It dishonours those who have given their lives for our country.
“I don’t know how long it was there for, but I was pleasantly surprised by the council’s quick action and I commend them for it.
“What I would say to them is there are other ways of expressing your anger about certain issues.”
Dennis Fletcher, chairman of East Staffordshire Racial Equality Council, said he suspected someone from the far right was responsible.
He said: “My reaction is one of horror. Just two nights ago at our general committee meeting we were talking about the harmony between communities in the borough.
“I suspect members of the far right have done this to stir things up and there are generally very good inter-cultural relations in East Staffordshire.
“Graffiti of any type is terrible but when it includes racist material it has to be considered utterly unacceptable.”
An East Staffordshire Borough Council spokesman said: “We would say that this vandalism is deplorable and we do our best to clean such graffiti as soon as we possibly can.”
â– The Mail has manipulated the mainpicture to remove some of the content of the message.
The Burton Mail would like you to think that what was removed in the manipulation was swear words or something like that.
Actually, no. A picture of the graffiti has been posted by “OldWarDog” of the “4 Freedoms Worldwide” blog. It shows that the censored words were…
…Before I tell you, see if you can guess. Not the exact words, but the general idea. You can make a guess based on this gnomic comment from the vice-chairman of the Burton branch of the British Legion: “What I would say to them is there are other ways of expressing your anger about certain issues.” (What issues? Why are you talking in this strange, indirect way?) You can make a guess from the otherwise inexplicable involvement of the chairman of East Staffordshire Racial Equality Council, and his guess – unsupported by any evidence – that “someone from the far right was responsible”, when the British Far Right are usually all too anxious to muscle in on displays of support for the armed services. You can make a guess from his further comment, which only starts to make sense when you realise that something is being hidden, that “Just two nights ago … we were talking about the harmony between communities in the borough.”
Did you get it? Here is the picture.
And in case that link goes dead, let me just tell you. The graffiti says “Islam will dominate the world. Osama…” The next few words are difficult to read in the picture. Never mind, you guessed the general thrust of them anyway.
Now read Kathy Shaidle’s post :When media bias becomes media malpractice.
What is the Burton Mail playing at? I was about to write, “you can’t get away with that sort of thing now we have the internet” until half a second’s more thought told me that you couldn’t get away with that sort of thing in the days before the internet either. Hundreds of people in Burton must have seen the graffiti, even if it was removed quickly by the council. When even one or two of these hundreds saw that report in the Burton Mail they will have instantly realised they were being lied to, and will have become far more likely to spread the news about what they really saw. The graffiti on its own will do harm to race relations. The graffiti plus the cover up will do far worse.
(Via House of Dumb)
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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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