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]
If a Mafia don forced you and your neighbours to pay him protection and he later had the brass neck to claim that you were getting great value for money instead of the services offered by free marketeers, I think you would, humble reader, suspect a bit of a flaw in the logic. Well, that flaw appears to be lost on the author of a piece that carries the headline, “Why Jonathan Ross is worth the money”. For people who have been blessed with ignorance as to whom Ross is, he is a foul-mouthed, extremely well paid late-night chatshow host and movie pundit who, among other recent glittering performances, told the US actress Gwyneth Paltrow and mother of two children that he’d like to f**k her. Classy.
Excerpt:
The most important thing is that in everything the BBC does, the trust is looking for it to demonstrate as often as possible an understanding that it must justify the licence fee by striving constantly to deliver the highest standards and programmes that stand out from the crowd.
The public values talented performers – but expects, rightly, that it will get the best possible value when paying for them.
The author of this piece forgets that value is in the eye of the beholder. If I think that I get value for money for shopping in Tesco’s, Sainsbury’s or Walmart, that is my judgement, made on the basis of my choice, for specific goods that I happen to buy. If one of those supermarket chains demanded that I pay them a flat fee every year regardless of whether I shopped there or not, and claimed that its services/goods were “great value for money”, and employed loutish staff, I think I might be a tad unimpressed by that logic.
The only way to know if the BBC offers value for money is to let customers pay for it out of their own free will. Everything else is special pleading.
Is the Guardian becoming increasingly illiberal? It may have a section of its website called “Comment is Free”, yet it is now attacking free speech when it disagrees with the opinions expressed.
Once a supporter of liberal values, the Guardian was the sort of paper that would have quoted Voltaire’s “I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend, to the death, your right to say it.” But just as it has dropped support for liberal ideas on economics (it was once a free trade paper), it now appears to be dropping liberal ideas about freedom of expression.
In that vein, it is getting itselfworked up because one of its rivals, the Telegraph, runs a blogging platform, like Blogger or Typepad, where members of the public can start their own blogs. That blogging platform has been one of the reasons why the Telegraph, according to moaningarticles in the Guardian, has recently overtaken the Guardian in online readers.
Among the 20,000 people who have signed up for a ‘MyTelegraph’ blog, one is a member of the anti-immigration British National Party. The Guardian thinks the Telegraph should ban him, but the Telegraph says that it believes in free speech – even when the views are wrong – and rightly so.
The Guardian’s lack of faith in free speech is not just restricted to BNP-type comments. It whines that: “My Telegraph is also inhabited by some very unsavoury characters, including a minority of active members of the far right, anti-abortionists, europhobes and members of an anti-feminist ‘men’s movement’.”
Anti-abortionists! Europhobes! Opponents of excessive feminism! I wonder if the Guardian would prefer a return to the old days before the decentralisation of publishing in which only the elite, who knew best, were allowed a voice.
This would have been the Samizdata quote of the day if there was not one already. It is from our own Michael Jennings, commenting on this posting at my blog, which is about the promising future of specialist publications online – as opposed to general purpose ex-newspapers:
Newspapers employ “fact-checkers”, but their job is not to check facts but to avoid libel suits. Therefore they check that Gordon Brown really did say that, but if the article says that “The moon is made of green cheese” it will go straight through because the moon is not going to sue.
This was only in a comment, so Michael should not be blamed too severely if his facts turn out a bit wrong. Very probably, the moon does now have lawyers.
I do not much care for Simon Heffer, the columnist who writes regularly for The Daily Telegraph. Even if I agree with him on certain issues, he has a way of making his points in a state of such constant anger that I find him rather wearying to read, rather like Paul Johnson in the Daily Mail – though Paul Johnson is to my mind much better when writing his history books, which I regard as superb. Mr Heffer also has a bit of a chip on his shoulder, if my judgement of this column, attacking Boris Johnson, is correct. Mr Heffer went to a grammar school in Essex, one of the best in the country, in fact. Boris Johnson went to Eton. For some people of a certain cast of mind, that is damning enough. But Heffer goes on to write a remarkably personal attack on BJ for his frivolity, lack of management skills, exploitation of old friends and colleagues, and so on. Blimey. I wonder what personal animus might bubble beneath the surface. It is not as if Johnson’s shortcomings were heavily classified secrets.
I sympathise with Heffer to an extent: if the Tories are going to challenge for the mayorality, is Boris really the best on offer? Maybe the harsh truth is that he is. For all that the mayor has a large budget and can make quite a difference to life in The Smoke, the job still has a slightly circus-act feel about it.
But as I have said before, I have reservations about why London needs to have a mayor in the first place. I am still undecided whom I will vote for on 1 May.
There are plenty of appalling things in the world, but the amount of media coverage is far from a reliable guide to what’s important or even real. Really bad things get scant notice if there’s no populist hook (“who now remembers the Armenians?” And see my last post, the story of which featured once in the most serious UK media and then disappeared).
Meanwhile non-stories, virtual risks, and popular panics are underwritten by massive investment in sensational coverage. If you have not read any coverage of horror stories surrounding a former Jersey children’s home, then read this first. If you have but now wonder why it has all gone quiet, I recommend this article on Spiked. I am left wanting to know more about what happened, when, in the investigation team itself.
The BBC is under fire after altering a news story about global warming as a result of activist pressure. Tim Worstall writes that:
I must say, I think this is an absolutely marvellous advance. We pay for the BBC, after all, so we really shouldn’t have any of that elitist nonsense about a factual reality or anything. No, news should be presented to show the world as “you” believe it to be, not as some impartial reporter of the facts would have it.
That, at least, was the view of one Jo Abbess, a climate activist (and a remarkably confused one at that, a little googling reveals that she worries about both global warming and Peak Oil: mutually exclusive concerns one might think. Bless.) who… did indeed manage to have a BBC news report changed to reflect her views. We mustn’t actually talk of static temperatures, or even worse, of 1998 being the hottest so far (and thus since then we’ve had cooling) because that might make people think that the world has, umm, not been warming and might even have been cooling since 1998. Can’t let the proles know the truth now, can we?
Will the BBC’s Roger Harrabin please put the article back to how it was before the lobbying started? Email him your views at roger.harrabin@bbc.co.uk.
Shane Greer – a sound centre-right blogging celeb – keeps popping up on Sky News. The news channel’s blog posting about his appearance yesterday bills him simply as “top blogger Shane Greer”. He was on the channel to discuss the stories moving across the web, although the last time I saw him, he was reviewing the papers.
Shane has got an important political media job too (he is executive editor of the forthcoming magazine Total Politics). The presenter did mention that (it is just before the clip below starts), but while Shane was speaking the caption was www.shanegreer.com, his personal blog. I noticed, similarly, Jeff Jarvis being introduced on the channel either today or yesterday as being the author of the BuzzMachine blog.
This is yet more evidence that blogging really is fully mainstream. Additionally, Shane’s blogging-print media combination highlights for me that the traditional media and the best of the blogosphere are now increasingly one in the same.
I suspected this much would happen but perhaps not quite so quickly.
In the post below, I provided a link to ‘Live Leak’, the only internet video site that was willing to host the movie. Apparently, YouTube and Google were approached but their joint and several response was to hastily gather up their skirts and run away screaming like a pair of Victorian maiden aunts.
The owners of Live Leak are clearly made of stronger stuff but they can hardly be blamed for pulling the plug once their lives had been threatened. The film has been removed from their server. Their official statement says:
Following threats to our staff of a very serious nature, and some ill informed reports from certain corners of the British media that could directly lead to the harm of some of our staff, Liveleak.com has been left with no other choice but to remove Fitna from our servers.
[Emphasis mine].
I cannot say that I am entirely surprised by this development but what I do find discomforting is the reference to ‘certain corners of the British media’. Which ‘corners’ are they talking about? I think we ought to know. Does anybody have any details here?
Anyway, it seems that the film is now being spread virally on all manner of mirror sites so, if you are interested, you will still be able to find it, albeit that you may have to dig a little deeper.
It is a widely accepted fact that one of the key ingredients to the Allies’ victory over Nazi Germany and Japan in the Second World War was the ability to crack the Enigma codes used by these powers, and keep that code-breaking achievement a secret.
A question I’d like to put to Jon Snow, the chief news reader of Channel 4 news and usually a fairly cool-headed fellow, is whether he would have complied with any wartime requests to keep the Enigma achievement a secret, had he been a working journalist in the 1940s. Judging by his antics over the Prince Harry and Afghanistan episode, the answer to that question would be a no. It also makes me wonder whether anything on the scale of the Enigma code-breaking and its remaining a secret could be repeated now. Of course, the argument cuts both ways: in our more open world, it might also be harder for a country like Hitler’s Germany to make its moves in the first place. (I admit that is a guess of mine, not a prediction). Even so, the implications for military secrecy, when it is something of vital importance in defeating an enemy, are troubling if the media outlets refuse to protect a secret for an agreed period of time. And libertarians, even the most ferocious opponents of censorship, need to realise that keeping military secrets is perfectly consistent with supporting armed forces necessary for the protection of even a minimal, nightwatchman state.
There may have been an element of PR in the whole Prince Harry kerfuffle, but he’s already shown more balls than most of the folk who have sneered at him in some internet comments I have read. Come St George’s Day this year, I will be very glad to hoist something alcoholic to the fellow. Well done him.
Alex Singleton’s most recent posting here was on the subject of libertarians in the mainstream media, one in particular. Maybe that has some connection to the fact that Alex seems to be becoming a mainstream media person himself. A few days before that Samizdata piece about a fellow journalist, he did another Samizdata posting about Fairtrade beer, and he returned to the subject of Fairtrade, this time Fairtrade coffee (at the time of me writing this there is a problem with that link – hopefully it will soon work again), in a piece last Friday in one of the Telegraph blogs which he now regularly writes for. Yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph (paper version and online) included a shorter version of that same piece. This was the bit (I’m quoting the longer Friday version) which I found most interesting, and most depressing:
Despite Fairtrade’s moral halo, there are other, more ethical forms of coffee available. Most Fairtrade coffee on sale in UK supermarkets and on the high street is roasted and packaged in Europe, principally in Belgium and Germany. This is unnecessary and retards development. Farmers working for Costa Rica’s Café Britt have been climbing the economic ladder by not just growing beans but by also doing all of the processing, roasting and packaging and branding themselves. Shipping unroasted green beans to Europe causes them to deteriorate, so not only is Café Britt doing far more to promote economic development than Fairtrade rivals, it is also creating better tasting coffee.
But Café Britt is not welcome on the Fairtrade scheme. Most of Café Britt’s farmers are self-employed small businesspeople who own the land they farm. This is wholly unacceptable to the rigid ideologues at FLO International, Fairtrade’s international certifiers, who will only accredit the farmers if they give up their small business status and join together into a co-operative. “It’s like outlawing private enterprise,” says Dan Cox, former head of the Speciality Coffee Association of America. …
Fairtrade is, in other words, a front organisation, crafted by unregenerate collectivists to con believers in nice capitalism to buy something which is neither nice nor capitalist. And the way to deal with cons is to expose them for what they are, so that only those who really do believe in the actual values being promoted here continue to support the thing. Telegraph commenters declared themselves angry and disillusioned, and congratulated Alex on a well-researched piece. I long ago stopped being angry about such people as those behind Fairtrade. I expect duplicity and destructiveness and inferior produce from this quarter. But I do congratulate Alex on a good piece of journalism, and on managing to get paid for doing it.
UPDATE: Patrick Crozier weighs in, quoting another commenter.
I was pleased to read that Allister Heath has been appointed as Editor of City AM, the free daily newspaper distributed in the City of London. The City is generally quite sound, but somehow I think the addition of a noted Hayekian libertarian as editor of this popular freesheet will help the City get even sounder.
Allister came on the scene in the 1990s when he co-founded the LSE Hayek Society. During the heyday of The European Journal, a Eurosceptic magazine, it was Allister who was editor. He says that when someone gave him a copy of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, he found it full of things that resonated with him. For the past few years, he’s been working on The Business, firstly as Economics Editor, then Deputy Editor and finally as Editor, where he has been a consistent and effective critic of Gordon Brown’s economic policy.
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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