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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There is obviously plenty of controversy – seen across the internet and the MSM – about the decision by the BBC, the UK state broadcaster, to let the British National Party leader Nick Griffin appear on the BBC’s Question Time current affairs show. For non-Brits, I should explain that QT is a show where a panel of politicians, pundits and the occasional “personality” take questions from an audience. The audience is selected, according to the BBC, from a supposed balanced cross-section of the public. What in fact this means is that such folk are often drawn from a series of pressure groups and the like. The journalist Paul Johnson once said, many years ago, that if the QT audience were representative of the UK population as a whole, he would think of blowing his brains out. I agree. If I ever chance upon the programme, I feel murderous not towards the panelists, but towards a large part of the audience. It fills me with despair.
Even so, the decision of the QT producers to let this man on the show has thrown up some bizarre arguments. This morning, the Labour MP and pundit, Diane Abbott, told the BBC Breakfast TV show that Griffin should not appear. At the core of her argument, if one can dignify it with such a word, was the idea that only “mainstream” parties should be allowed to be panelists. The interviewer did not immediately hit back with the question as to what Ms Abbott defines as “mainstream”. After all, one could object to a Labour, or indeed Conservative politician, appearing on the show on the grounds that both parties support the idea of seizing a large portion of our wealth on pain of imprisonment; support wars against countries that, whatever the justification, involve the deaths of innocent civilians; support the UK’s membership of an oppressive and undemocratic European federal state, have taken away the right of self-defence for householders; have supported, and continue to support, an intrusive, meddling and yet also incompetent state apparatus. On those grounds alone, one could argue that such politicians should not only be banned from Question Time or any other forum, but hanged from a lampost.
Given that the BNP – a party with a hard-left, socialist economic agenda, by the way – has been elected to several seats in the EU Parliament, it would be odd not to allow the leader of a party that has won a million votes not to be held to account in the run-up to a general election next year. Of course, if we had a genuine free market in broadcasting, the editorial judgement of the BBC, which is funded by a tax, would be irrelevant. But given we have a state-financed broadcaster, that broadcaster, under its charter of incorporation, should enable elected political parties to be put to the public test. The BNP is an odious party for a libertarian, and Mr Griffin is, as his background suggests, a nasty piece of work. What have other parties to be afraid of in putting this lot under the media microscope?
The story, which I learned about today, here, has already done the rounds. After all, it happened a whole two days ago. Still, all those interested in new media, and all who fret about where news will come from if newspapers collapse, will find (will have found) the story interesting. It’s the sort of thing they presumably now study in media studies courses. If not, they should. Not that you need to be doing a media studies course to be studying the media (and the rest of us certainly shouldn’t have to pay for you to do this), but you get my drift.
Basically, a London Underground staff member called Ian swore at an unswervingly polite old man who had got his arm stuck in a train door and was trying to explain that fact to Ian. Ian said (shouted more like) that the old man would have to explain himself to the police. At that point a nearby blogger who just happened to be there, Jonathan MacDonald, started up his video camera, and soon afterwards did a blog posting, complete with video footage, about what he had witnessed. In due course the mainstream media tuned in, and went ballistic.
If you do feel inclined to follow this up, I suggest reading the original blog posting, and then some thoughts, also by Jonathan MacDonald, concerning what it all means. He supplies copious further links.
Sir Christopher Bland (somewhat unfortunate surname, Ed) has a debate in the latest edition of the UK magazine, Standpoint, with Charles Moore, former Daily Telegraph and Spectator editor, as his opponent. Moore – who has vowed not to pay the BBC licence fee tax until Jonathan Ross – a boorish chatshow host and radio DJ – is sacked for a certain incident, challenges the whole idea of tax-financed broadcasting. His arguments are forceful, not least the point that the BBC, as a privileged recipient of funds raised on pain of imprisonment, can and does undermine would-be commercial competitors, therby stifling potential new ideas and models of broadcasting. He points out that while the BBC claims to not be biased, it is in fact biased, and it would be better for such biases to be upfront rather than concealed. I am sure that Samizdata readers are mostly familiar with the standard liberal critique of the BBC’s very existence, so I will not rehearse the argument here again.
What struck me, however, is how lame Sir Christopher’s debating points are. Check them out for yourself, gentle reader. Pretty much most of his comments fall into the “only a fool could deny how wonderful the BBC is” and gives variations on how the sky will fall in on the quality of UK television if the licence fee system is scrapped. We get the now-standard sneer about American and foreign TV. Zzzzz. In fact, he rarely engages very energetically with Moore’s points; rather, he harrumphs that Moore is some sort of free marketeer zealot, and of course, brings out the standard BS line that anyone who disagrees with tax-financed broadcasting is a “philistine”. The lameness, the refusal to think in principles of any coherent kind, is really quite striking. It is hard not to smell a certain whiff of defeat.
The attitudes of Sir Christopher – no doubt a most civilised and agreeable member of what might pass for the “establishment” in this country – are pretty widely shared across much of the population. His worldview, his inability to understand a world in which the state did not grab such a huge share of our lives and attempt to manage it, is shared, for example, by all those who cannot consider how healthcare will be delivered without a Soviet-model system such as the NHS. Moore makes this point; he even points to the parallel between the old Church of England, and its now-abolished tithe on parishioners, be they Anglicans or not, and the licence fee, which is paid by those who either watch the BBC, or who do not. Bland, of course, just brushes it aside. One suspects that much of his worldview is shared by the likes of David Cameron.
Incidentally, I thoroughly enjoyed reading Standpoint. It is a definite plus in the UK magazine scene.
It’s no secret. No secret at all. Every second or third blog I read has stuff about it. Film Director Roman Polanksi (Repulsion, The Pianist) did something bad of a rape-like nature to a teenage girl several decades ago, and lived in Europe from then on.
But now they are going to extradite him or not as the case may be, from France or Switzerland (somewhere European), and big cheese lists of Hollywood big cheeses are saying he’s a great artist and therefore regular morals and laws and suchlike don’t apply to him, ease up, forget about it, freedom of artistic expression, it wasn’t really rape (“rape-rape” as Whoopi Goldberg (Ghost, Girl, Interrupted, Rat Race) has famously put it), it was her fault, it was her mother’s fault, it was the judge’s fault, blah blah, and the rest of us are saying: bullshit you evil bastards.
If you care about the details you now know them. I care about the details, a bit, and I too am of the bullshit you evil bastards tendency. Not my point here. No, what interests me about this ruckus is how the internet has so completely changed the rules of such debates, and so completely wrong-footed the big cheese evil bastard team. → Continue reading: How the internet has put Roman Polanski and his idiot Hollywood defenders in the spotlight
The other day, I criticised a short programme slot about how the Chicago school of economics – to use that rather loose term – might have to carry some responsibility for the credit crisis. The programme was put together by the Channel 4 news programme. Anyway, someone at the show noticed my comments, and the journalist who put the programme together, Faisal Islam, was kind enough to comment at some length in an email to our editors. Here goes:
“Hello Johnathan,”
“I saw your comments on the piece on economics that aired on C4 News last month. I thank you for your understanding of the limitations of television. Even C4 News would be hard-pushed to do a piece on the history of economic thought. It was really meant to be the entree for a main course of red-blooded economic debate, but that didn’t quite come off. Anyway, clearly I would dispute the notion that it was ‘propaganda’. I think it’s a bit harsh when the main protagonist is a chicago professor who does a fairly good job of defending his position, yet also recognises that they did get some things wrong.”
“Likewise we ran almost unchallenged a piece featuring Jim Rogers’ Austrian-ish critique of Obama/ Brown’s global stimuli. so I’d like to think we are more eclectic than you seem to indicate.”
“Anyway, you’ll be interested to see the rest of the Robert Lucas interview. I put it on the blog as a balance to the Paul Krugman NY Times magazine article. It’s all here, I’m sure it might stimulate some debate on your excellent blog.”
Here is Faisal’s link.
Good for Channel 4 for its reponse to what was a fairly grumpy posting by me. I guess I should have mentioned its Jim Rogers interview. I actually did link to it a while ago on this site. Jim Rogers is great value.
Anyway, I think my original point still stands, although in the light of the reaction, I will be a bit easier on Mr Islam from now on. It is gratifying that we got a response, and that Mr Islam even understood the significance of why we are writing about this topic and get annoyed if schools of economic thought are presented in a seemingly unfair way. If parts of the MSM pick up on the idea that the credit crisis cannot be blamed on “greedy bankers” and derivatives – although these instruments can be aggravating factors – but has origins in erroneous ideas of printing money, “too big to fail” bailouts and the rest, then we might be making progress. By continuing to slog away at it, we can influence ideas that are held in the media/academy and even public affairs more broadly. And influencing a guy who presents economic and business news for a major UK news channel is a pretty big deal.
Rod Liddle, in his role as knuckle-dragger-in-chief at the Spectator, has an article bearing a most arresting headline. Now the writers of such articles often don’t get to choose the headlines, so this might even have taken Mr Liddle aback somewhat:
“We should seize whatever opportunity we are given to be racist”.
The Spectator now has a new editor in the form of Fraser Nelson, one of journalism’s good guys. Well, I know it is good to start one’s term in the editor’s chair with a bang, but er, isn’t this a bit off? Actually, if you read the article, it is quite clear that Rod Liddle, despite his salty turn of phrase and spirit of cheerful nastiness, is not saying that being a racist is a good thing.
The journalists who produce the UK’s Channel 4 news programme produced a rather sly piece of leftist propoganda last night (Quelle surprise? Ed). Faisal Islam – whom I have met – had a brief slot on last night’s daily broadcast suggesting that the Chicago school of economics, most famously associated with the likes of Milton Friedman, is somehow partly to blame for the credit crunch. Yes, you read that right.
Mr Islam went on about the “complex models” that were used by these economists and somehow sought to draw a link between the Chicago School, and the decisions taken by banks, both central and private. That seems a bit rum. I don’t recall Dr Friedman or his associates granting a sort of blanket blessing to financial engineering techniques of the kind associated with recent turmoil, suchas using derivatives to put bank liabilities off the balance sheet. That school has also hardly been in favour of encouraging sub-prime lending by legislation. After all, quite a lot of economists with conventional “soft Keyensian” views pretty much signed up to how banking has operated in the last few decades, and of course signed up to the idea that former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, and his successor, Ben Bernanke, did a spiffing job.
There was no apparent attempt – admittedly quite difficult in a short TV spot – to explain what the key arguments of the Chicago school of economics actually are. Nor was there any attempt to point out that this “school” is only one of the centres of free market economics. The Austrian viewpoint, which tends to eschew statistical formulae completely, went unmentioned. And yet it is the latter approach, as exemplified by the likes of Thomas Woods, that has been most active in pointing out the sheer folly of central bank activity in the past decade or so. And this central bank activity is what has been the prime culprit, a fact that Mr Islam’s documentary left unmentioned.
The programme also failed to ask any questions of the Keynesian tradition, with its love of big, artificial aggregates such as “consumer demand” etc. If one is going to point to the hubris of statistical models of economic behaviour, then the Keynesian macroeconomic tradition is surely as much in the firing line as the Chicago one.
As propoganda, it was very effective on anyone who might not understand the issues. It might have been put together by that performance artist, Naomi Klein.
Maybe the problem is that these issues are often highly complex and difficult to portray intelligently in a 5-minute news slot. Well indeed.
ELSPA director general Mike Rawlinson said:
The discovery that the Video Recordings Act is not enforceable is obviously very surprising. In the interest of child safety it is essential that this loophole is closed as soon as possible.
In this respect the videogames industry will do all it can to support and assist the government to that effect. ELSPA will therefore advise our members to continue to forward games to be rated as per the current agreement while the legal issues are being resolved.
FFS!
Watch this outstanding commentary on political correctness in academia and the culture and naked lies in the media called MSNBC & The Great Liberal Narrative: The Truth About The Tyranny of Political Correctness.
And I know Bill and he is a really great guy, a true gentleman. But Bill… stop calling them liberal. We are the true liberals.
PJTV really is getting some truly great stuff up lately.
Dan Rather is calling on the state (naturally) to prop up the old mainstream media and had this to say:
“If we do nothing more than stand back and hope that innovation alone will solve this crisis,” he said, “then our best-trained journalists will lose their jobs.”
From your lips to God’s ear, Dan.
But innovation is indeed ‘solving’ this ‘crisis’ as the meteoric spread of blogs and other forms of new media are demonstrating. And Dan, if you think all those bloggers who are pissing on the ashes are trying to help put the flames out, I assure you their motives are rather… different.
(Via Instapundit)
Which is why you can’t trust nature. Anatole Kaletsky is worried about stagflation. Can this be the same Anatole Kaletsky who only six month ago called for government to “punish savers”?
As I wrote at that time,
[Unsubbed original:] The purpose of banks used to be to make a profit by using the deposits in their care productively at second-hand. That is why they pay interest: to bring in funds to be lent. If they don’t do either then they are no longer banks but state-sponsored rentiers.
Far from encouraging productive capital, Mr Kaletsky’s prescription would have us reverting to a pre-capitalist economy where those with savings dare not recycle them. Their personal cash will end up converted to valuables, hoarded, and hidden to keep them safe from predatory tax farmers. Printing money is also a well-tested means of encouraging the same sort of behaviour.
For a recovery we need capitalism and the market to do their work. However painful, that is better than reversion to the Dark Ages because governments and their advisors want to be seen to be doing *something*. Doing nothing may be the best alternative.
Mr Kaletsky has got what he asked for and now finds he does not want it. Human, all too human.
It is revealing in the coverage of the conviction of two racists for expressing their views, that there is a near complete lack of any debate over the profound civil liberties issues involved. It is being flatly reported, but not debated.
The mainstream media are always telling us how ‘essential’ they are for ‘our democracy’. But I have yet to see anyone raise the point that just because the people stating their opinions are crackpots, maybe crackpots should also be allowed to say what they think? I was waiting for the papers to surprise me today…
But no. This is ‘ground breaking‘ we are told, and indeed it is, but that is as far as the reports go. Does the Guardian or Telegraph not have anything to say about the broader implications?
State commissars like Adil Khan in Humberside, who is in charge of making us diverse but cohesive (or face prison if we demur) tells us:
“This case is groundbreaking. The fact is now that we’ve been able to demonstrate that you’ve got nowhere to hide; people have been hiding on [sic] the fact that this server was in the US. Inciting racial hatred is a crime and one which seems to occur too regularly. This kind of material will not be tolerated as this lengthy investigation shows.”
Which is actually quite a misleading statement. The state only regards people stating their extreme opinions as “incitement” if they belong to ritually abominated groups like white racists, whose extreme views must be punished because there is no political cost to doing so. For groups who actually throw bricks when the cops come calling, well, stating their extreme views is treated rather differently.
This is hardly new of course. Incite violence with words, but be unlikely to actually do anything, well you might well go to jail… actually kill people over many years, ah, that eventually gets you invited to help govern. No? I have two words for you: Sinn Fein.
Last time I called Britain a police state, I was dismissed as overheated because, after all, I can run this blog and state my contrary opinions, so this is hardly a police state.
Yet were Simon Sheppard and Stephen Whittle not just jailed for running a website on a US server (just as Samizdata is on a US server)? If you cast your eyes back through our archives, you will find we have on many occasions called for this or that group to have fairly violent things done to them (Ba’athists for example… and certain Wahhabi folk on occasion too… and certain Serbian nationalists)… and I suspect trawling through the archives of the Daily Telegraph would turn up articles ‘inciting’ not just ‘violence’ but calling for full blown wars.
Well it is now clear that we can say what we think, not by right as ‘freeborn Englishmen’ (hah!) but rather at the sufferance of the likes of Adil Khan and the whole apparatus of thought control that people like him represent. They do not feel the urge to come after us because we are not unpopular enough, although I doubt they like folks like us suggesting they prose a vastly greater threat to liberty and, gasp, “social cohesion” than a couple comically wacko racists.
Have you seen this being hotly debated in the media? Even a little? Pah. So much for the fearless and ‘essential’ media guardians of our liberal western order.
The sooner the old media are driven out of business by the internet, the better… ten years tops… except they will of course just rent seek tax money to keep themselves alive (or more accurately undead as no one will actually read them/watch them any more) due to their ‘essential role’ and the ‘public interest’ of having newspapers and TV channels no one really needs and do who not actually do anything essential or even particularly useful.
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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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