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]
At a time when the credit/money bubble financial institutions are in crises the Economist chooses to lead with a story on Mr Cameron – the leader of the British Conservative party. I can not claim to have read the story as I do not find Mr Cameron very interesting – at least compared to other matters. And, as I am British and have been an active member of the Conservative party since the end of the 1970’s, if he was of such great interest to anyone (other than his family and friends) it would be surely be me.
In case anyone makes the defence that the financial crises was not known at the time when the Economist went to press…
Well the absurd government created Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae had not lost 50% of their stock market value when the Economist went to press – but their problems were obvious, as were the problems of the compassionate lender to the poor (always run a mile from a company that says it is in business to help the poor) Indybank of California, the run on that enterprise was well under way.
The people at the Economist could have made some reasonable predictions about the general financial situation, but they did not – or at least did not lead with them. I will make the prediction now that the the gutless Bush Administration will not order the arrest of the corrupt Mr Johnson (the ex head of Fannie Mae and leading Democrat) as this would upset his friends, such as Senators Obama and Durbin and Congressman Barney Frank – and we must not upset these upstanding individuals…
…Any more than we must upset Speaker Nancy Pelosi by having a Presidential press conference asking people to telephone her to ask why she will not allow a vote in Congress on whether or not to allow more drilling for oil at a time of record fuel prices – although it is fine for Speaker Pelosi to have a press conference telling everyone to telephone the President Bush to blame him for high fuel prices.
Of course the Economist did have other stuff in it:
A brief look, thanks to the library, showed an article sneering at Governor Bobby Jindal (the upcoming Republican and someone the Economist shows signs of fearing) and another puff piece about the all wise Senator Obama – this one claiming that his cynical habit of saying anything to get elected (even, supposedly, reversing positions he has held all his life – well reversing them till after the election) is a good thing, and pointing to his economic advisers as the height of “sensibleness”.
No doubt they will prove about as sensible as the fanatical collectivist Paul Krugman – a man the Economist long favoured.
I could go on, for example examining their obituary of the late Senator Richard Helms and showing how the obituary shows the Economist writers do not understand the nature or effects of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but I will stop here.
Anyone who is still buying the Economist is beyond rational argument.
The reason I ask is that I was half listening and I heard a really good and rather funny quote go by. I stopped what I was doing and typed as much of it into the computer as I could remember. Then I went to the ABC News website and replayed the story. The quote was either removed from the story or I am confusing two similar stories on the same night. That is why I am asking for help.
As I recall, a reporter, I think but I’m not certain it was the John Berman piece, was reporting Obama’s latest policy shift as he maneuvers against McCain. Apparently a campaign staffer said or was quoted as saying : ” [Obama] makes decisions based on what he thinks is right.” To which the reporter added rhetorically “The question is ‘how far to the right?”
Great quote. Where’d it go? Obamabots?
And as an aside, I realize that Obama is promising us “change”. But does it have to be so often?
A forceful article in the Times today stating that the pessimists are wrong. In Iraq, in Afghanistan and at home, the death-cultists of Islamism are on the run.
What is also clear that if this progress is lost, it will not be because of the lack of bravery or skill of the US, British and other allied forces. They have been magnificent. No, the weak link in the chain remains, in my view, the craven attitude of the domestic western populations to the constant demands from home-grown radical Islamists. The farcical treatment of Mark Steyn in Canada is a case in point.
What remains an issue for advocates of isolationist foreign policy – which is actually not a policy at all – is how any of the gains that the Times’ article talks about could have been achieved by adopting the equivalent of hiding under the bed with a bottle of whisky.
The Economist ran a comparison of Senator McCain and Senator Obama this week. Senator McCain was damned with faint praise for his ‘orthodox’ supply side deregulation proposals (things the Economist itself is supposed to believe in) and then the magazine (sorry ‘newspaper’) dismissed proposals to deregulate health care and other areas of life with the following statement.
“America is already a pretty deregulated place”.
So the thousands of pages of Federal, State and local regulations that are strangling life in the United States, do not really exist?
And people wonder why I hate the Economist. The writers know nothing about the political economy of the United States – or anywhere else. Ignorance is not fatal if someone understands that they are ignorant (for example, I am ignorant of spelling and grammar) but to be ignorant and to think oneself knowledgeable is a fatal combination.
However, how can the writers of the Economist be anything other than ignorant – when they are the products of modern universities?
I recently heard a Professor of Economics from the University of York on BBC Radio. This person suggested that a good way to reduce inflation (so that the Bank of England could reduce interest rates) would be to take yet more things out of the (already rigged) Consumer Price Index. The Professor was not being ironic – the man really thought he was making a sensible suggestion.
The students of such people go on to be writers for the Economist.
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.
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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