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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No doubt I will be attacked (again) for writing critically about this ‘free market’, ‘pro-American’ journal. However, I will proceed.
The Economist magazine (or newspaper, as it chooses to describe itself) last week had a weird racialist rant against Secretary of State Rice. A whole page devoted to claiming (amongst other things) that Condi Rice went along with the evil Bush on Iraq (that the Economist supported the judgement to go into Iraq was somehow forgotten) because she was black and,. therefore, had learned that the way to get ahead was to conform to the will of powerful white men (Rice as Aunt Thomisina?).
There was also a claim that Secretary of State Rice was a poor administrator who ran the State Department badly – this claim rather pleased me, as it can only have come from State Department staff and anyone who is unpopular with the death-to-America fanatics who have tried to dominate Foggy Bottom for decades can not be all bad.
This week the Economist ran a little article on the trial of Lewis Libby. The article claimed that the defence of Mr Libby (against the claim that he obstructed justice in the inquiry into the exposure of CIA agent – the fact that the person was a CIA staff member, not a secret agent, was of course not mentioned in the article) would be that it was all Karl Rove’s fault. But (the Economist article explained) the guilt of Mr Rove does not mean that Mr Libby is innocent.
In fact the ‘exposure’ of the CIA ‘agent’ was nothing to do with Mr Libby or Mr Rove – the person responsible was Richard Armitage.This is common knowledge and Mr Armitage has himself has admitted it.
The whole thing goes back to the effort of the husband of the CIA employee (an ex-State Department person and donor to the 2000 Gore and 2004 Kerry campaign) to discredit American and British claims about Saddam Hussian efforts to buy materials for his atomic weapons program, specifically from the nation of Niger. Elements in the State Department and the CIA opposed British and American policy on Iraq and so tried to discredit the claims made in support of that policy. Richard Armitage, then working for Secretary of State Colin Powell, tried to fight back by pointing out to the media that the supposedly independent people attacking the Administration were part of these factions in the State Department and the CIA who had an agenda of their own. All perfectly normal in the cat fight that is politics.
I am no expert in these matters, but my understanding is that Saddam was after such material. But the Economist article did not cover any of the basic matters – or even that it was Richard Armitage (not Mr Libby or Mr Rove) who ‘leaked’ the fact that the ex Ambassador’s wife was part of a certain faction at the CIA.
All the Economist was concerned with was the ‘lies’ of Mr Libby and Mr Rove. The fact that, whether or not there should be a court case, the whole thing is directed at the wrong person, Mr Libby not being Mr Armitage, escaped them.
In fact the prosecutor involved is politically motivated (no surprise there, we are dealing with the United States after all) and has attacked Mr Libby in order to attack the Vice President and, through him, the President. The jury is of course stacked with Iraq war critics. I did not think highly of the judgement to go to war myself – but I do not like political show trials either.
As for the Economist’s level of knowledge: It was as if an American journal had run an article about British politics and had talked of ‘Prime Minister Cameron’ and ‘Queen Diana’.
I do not know where the Economist gets its staff from (some ‘school of journalism’ perhaps), but I rather resent that they get paid money for writing about things they know nothing about.
Still, as I am careful never to pay for reading bits of the Economist, at least they are not spending my money.
David Cameron, the Leader of the Opposition and of the Conservative Party, is mainly known here as the man who makes Perry de Havilland spit blood.
But quite aside from the fact that most of us here disagree with the things that Cameron has been saying in recent months, there is the puzzle of why he has been saying them. I am thinking of things like fluffing on tax cuts, the NHS, Europe, and so on. He seems determined not just to be more left wing than Conservatives used to be. He seems to want to be more left wing than the country. All the politicians, for instance, now seem to accept the virtues or at least the inevitability of relentlessly high taxation. Except the voters!
Tony Blair did not get where he got by altering the substance of Thatcherism. He did it by putting a more amenable face on the front of it, that of a Hugh Grantish ingratiator, rather than of a bald, out-of-touch, Conservative. Cannot Cameron see that? What the country seems to want is Conservatism with a non-Conservative face. Thatcherite policies, but without those smug bastard, crowing and thieving Conservatives fronting for it all. They want Blair, before he became mired in sleaze and incompetence. But Cameron has gone out of his way to supply more than this. The Conservative Party has changed, he says. Who is he trying to convince, and of what?
Why is he apparently dumping all of the substance of Thatcherism, and thereby risking the very leakage that Perry notes, of voters from the Conservatives to things like UKIP, or almost as damagingly, to the screw-them-all-we’re-not-voting-for-anybody party? The we’re-not-voting-for-anybody party has really hurt the Conservatives in recent elections. Why is Cameron risking the wrath of this party yet again?
I think we can best understand Cameron’s performance so far as an exercise in allowing the mainstream media to attack Labour.
Media people are never going to like Conservatives, but towards this Conservative or that Conservative they feel very variable degrees of dislike. Cameron has presented himself to London’s media people as the kind of Conservative Prime Minister that they would be willing to put up with, given that they have to put up with Conservative Prime Ministers from time to time.
This has made a big difference to the political atmosphere of Britain. I recall, somewhat over a year ago (I have searched through the Samizdata archives but have failed to find the posting in question – sorry), noting that something had happened to what used to be called “Fleet Street”, and that suddenly they were really putting the knife in. At the time, I was rather puzzled, but guessed it might have something to do with some particularly annoying tax things that Gordon Brown had just been doing. Now, I believe that the biggest difference has been made by David Cameron. → Continue reading: How Cameron turned the media loose on the government
I seem to recall someone, maybe even Iain Dale himself, saying to me some weeks back that what 18 Doughty Street TV needs is for someone important to say something newsworthily scandalous on it. The world, and in particular the Mainstream Media, would then start to pay attention to it.
So, could this be the breakthrough?
Iain Dale is surely hoping so:
In an interview on 18 Doughty Street’s One to One programme last night, Lance Price, former Downing Street spin doctor, has sensationally claimed that Tony Blair himself was the source of quotes describing Gordon Brown as having “psychological flaws”.
Price continues to say he was told by a figure very close to the Chancellor that Alastair Campbell “took the rap” to allow the Prime Minister to escape blame.
Judging by the email that I (and presumably the rest of the world) just got, in the small hours of this Wednesday morning, I get the feeling that Iain Dale reckons that this just might be the media ruckus he has been waiting for.
Now do not misunderstand me. I care very little for the fortunes of the Blair government, nor for the fortunes of whichever political gang – Brownies? Cameronics? – gets to replace these people for the next few years. 18 Doughty Street TV would like it be Mr Cameron and his friends, but I really do not care. I consider them all to be as psychologically flawed as each other. Whoever wins the next spasm of electioneering, we already pretty much know what will win, and it is unlikely to be nice.
What I am interested in, and do feel entitled to be optimistic about, is seeing the British broadcasting media go the way of the British print media and of the internet itself. I want British broadcasting – in particular British broadcasting about politics, and about what politics is and what politics should be – to lose its air of cosily unanimous religiosity, in which the only competition is in who can present the same centre-to-left news agenda and the same stale centre-to-left editorialising about it with the greatest earnestness and piety, and to become instead a bedlam of biases, biased in all imaginable directions, with no meta-contextual assumption left unchallenged. 18 Doughty Street TV has been a small step in that direction, not so much because of what has actually been said on it, but because of the example it has set to others concerning the viability of non-majoritarian broadcasting, and about the possibility that truly different things could start getting broadcast.
Although I do not know or care who Lance Price is, lots of others do, and I am accordingly still intrigued by the possibilities opened up by what he has said. Because of it, a whole lot more people are liable to hear, not just about 18 Doughty Street, but about “internet broadcasting” in general.
British print media people have always been quite diverse in their tone, so although the internet has been a technical and professional challenge to these people, it has not been that much of an ideological jolt for them. British broadcasters, on the other hand, have tended to understand the new ‘social’ media rather better, in the purely technical sense. The BBC web operation has had a huge impact. But ideologically, British mainstream broadcasting people are far more uniform in their ideological outlook, and potentially therefore face far more of an ideological upheaval at the hands of the new media.
So, I hope that neither Iain Dale nor I are making a fuss about nothing. I hope that this proves to be a fuss about something.
In conection with the above, this BBC report (credit where it is due) about Skype offering internet TV services, also makes interesting reading.
Recently I have been reading gadget blogs a lot, and it would seem that I am not the only one who likes to do this. This week, all the gadget blogs,along with the rest of the world, have been screaming, in among their regular stuff about incomprehensible boxes: iPhone iPhone iPhone. Which is understandable. Either the iPhone is a truly remarkable thing, or the hype surrounding this unremarkable thing is all the more remarkable.
Now hats off to Apple and all that, especially for keeping it all so secret for so long, although, they do rather seem to have screwed up the calling it the iPhone side of things. But the iPhone, for all its various innovatory features, is just another mobile phone with some add-ons. It is the embodiment of the claim that mobile phones are destined to swallow up all the other mobile objects people like to travel around with, such as music machines and digital cameras (the camera is the only iPhone add-on that really gets my attention), but this notion has been rattling around for some years now. The iPhone looks like being a smash hit precisely because so many people already understand why they want one.
However, of all the things I have read about on the gadget blogs this week, this item was the one that I found the most striking. This, for me, has the look and feel of a life changer:
In a patent filing Google has revealed that it is looking into entering the physical advertising industry. The patent filing itself alludes to placing adverts on billboards, with the primary innovation being that they’re interactive and connected to the internet – what, you didn’t really believe that Google would go in for static ads did you? The system apparently works by only advertising products that are available and in stock within stores in the local area. Stores will be able to buy advertising on these local electronic billboards through a similar system to how AdSense currently works: by logging into a computer and buying them. One of the key positive developments – at least for busy consumers — is that once stock of the product has run out, the advertised project on display automatically switches onto the next one that’s in stock. This whole project relies greatly on there being adequate infrastructure for Google to make a return (which obviously isn’t a problem when it comes to the internet), so this patent is far from an assurance that you’ll be seeing “Ads by Goooooogle” reminding you to pick up some milk from your local 7-Eleven any time soon.
Now once again, this is something that the sort of people who saw this coming saw coming. But, to me, when adverts change moment by moment in a semi-intelligent way, perhaps even in response to their understanding of who is in the area that they are pointing at, then that will be a very different world to the one I have become used to. It will look different and it will feel different. → Continue reading: Billboards are about to become computer screens
Signs of technical advancement from Britain’s own constitutional monarchy.
Frank Johnson (journalist, editor, columnist and all round newspaper man) has died at the age of 63.
Mr Johnson was of working class origins in the East End of London and left school at 16. However, he never viewed any of this as a reason why he should be hostile to high culture and from his boyhood was a great admirer of opera and ballet. Indeed Frank Johnson was fond of pointing out that many individuals among the working classes were once a lot more cultured than their self declared friends of more fortunate birth gave them credit for, with (for example) the biggest sales among early recordings of music being for serious works, and many men whose hands were hard often being also very well read.
Mr Johnson was no friend of the left – either in the Labour party, or of those in the Conservative party who were patronising statists (always out to ‘help’ the poor with more government spending, taxes and regulations).
Nor was Mr Johnson afraid to write unpopular things. For example he pointed out that for working men in the south of England and in the Midlands, the 1930’s were not a time of collapse, indeed that Britain did better in terms of the rise of real incomes in the 1930’s than National Socialist Germany – and vastly better than FDR’s vaunted ‘New Deal’ United States.
As for the sacred cow of British politics – the Welfare State, Frank Johnson pointed out that it is not a matter of it being “something designed in the 1940’s which must be adapted for changing times” (as cowardly people on the conservative side of British politics used to like to put it), but something that had a powerful negative side from day one, both collectivising hospitals that had been provided free for the poor by charitable effort and helping to destroy the tradition of self help and mutual aid that had once been the greatest aspect of the working classes (of course such things as the Friendly Society movement had been undermined by government activities all the way back to the early schemes of the ‘New Liberal’ government that was elected in 1906).
Even the supposed higher living standards of the 1940’s being an illusion – the war time “prosperity” (boasted of by upper class leftists like A.W. Benn) being a matter of American aid and eating our overseas investments. And the post war time being a matter of rigged stats (claiming that wages were higher than the 1930’s whilst ignoring real inflation – i.e. the black market price of rationed goods) and neglecting future investment. Although it is worth remembering that government spending on the Welfare State started off in a very small way (the real economic harm of the late 1940’s being nationalization, general high taxes and high government spending and the vast web of regulations by which the “educated” men in Whitehall told everyone else what to do and what to do). The real growth of the Welfare State and, more imporantly the changes it was making in the British character (as opposed to such things as the decline of the Friendly Societies and other voluntary associations), did not really even start to be seen till the 1960’s
Mr Johnson remembered the “stoicism of the London working class” (of course he accepted it was more than the London working class – but he was a Londoner), as to what there is now it is best to say nothing.
I will miss Frank Johnson.
I do not buy the Financial Times because, whilst there are some decent people on its staff, its employees are mostly European Union supporting New Labour types.
However, I do make a point of checking it from time to time. I have been amused by its relative lack of coverage of the KGB/FSB activities in London and Italy (in connection to the recent murder in London). It celebrated the sacking of three top Italian intelligence chiefs (in the same issue that it demanded that Donald Rumsfeld be put on trial for the “torture” of poor innocent Muslim head hackers) as these men were too close to the evil CIA and had made charges against the noble Italian Prime Minister (and ex-head of the European Union) Mr Prodi.
What these charges were was not mentioned, the Financial Times (due to some of its staff over the years – the old Soviet Union liked to have links with the newspaper of ‘Finance Capital’) tends to get a bit nervous when KGB links are mentioned.
The Financial Times did invite an expert on Russia to write an article for them – Mr Putin himself (it was like “a word from our sponsor”… as Richard Littlejohn would say “you could not make it up”).
However, there was a Russian story right on the front page of the weekend edition of the Financial Times: The Russian state gas company has ordered new offices to be built – there was an artists impression of the new offices all over the page.
No doubt for its next Russian story the Financial Times will inform its readers that the PLAN has been over-fulfilled by X per cent.
Last Monday morning I did what I think was probably my best recorded conversation yet, with a man named Leon Louw. Here is the conversation we had, and here is the publication that Leon Louw was talking about. I recommend both with enthusiasm. Here is my bloggage about it all. Anyone even slightly interested in what distinguishes successful governments from failing governments, nice countries from nasty ones, will profit from following at least one of those links.
A few days before that, I did another recorded conversation, about the Libertarian Alliance and its workings, with Tim Evans, (pictured on the right here), who is now its President. Bloggage about that from me here.
And then last Tuesday, I had another of the regular conversations I have with Antoine Clarke about elections and related matters around the world, this time about the recent US midterms.
These conversations, especially the one with Leon Louw, have stirred me into setting up another of these things, with someone I have long wanted to talk with in this way, namely Samizdata’s own Perry de Havilland. I have just spoken on the phone with Perry and he has no objections to me flagging this up beforehand here nor to me asking the Samizdata commentariat if they have any questions that they would particularly like me to put to Perry. I do not promise to use every such suggestion, but all suggestions that do materialise will be considered.
This conversation will be happening this coming Saturday afternoon. Perry and I will be talking about what Perry did before Samizdata, what made him start it, about what it has been like doing it for the last five years, and about what effects it may or may not have had, during that time and in the future. That kind of thing.
I am going to start whatever preparatory reading I manage to do here.
There are quite a few fans of Sean Gabb who read this blog, so they might like to be told, if they have not been already, that Sean will be on 18 Doughty Street TV this evening between 9 and 10pm, discussing libertarianism. Sean is a fluent and experienced media performer and should be well worth seeing and hearing.
Here is a picture of him that I took last weekend, hatching who knows what plots with fellow Libertarian Alliance supremo Dr Tim Evans, at the LA’s Conference in the resplendent National Liberal Club.
Captions anyone? Mine goes: “One day all this will be ours! Ours I tell you!”
I was on 18 Doughty Street intertelly last night, and I really enjoyed myself, not least because Iain Dale, presiding, also seemed satisfied with the efforts of me and my fellow late night chatterers. I was also on 18 Doughty Street on only its second night in action, and it was a mild relief to get asked back. That is the only compliment that really matters after you’ve been on something.
Many intriguing things got alluded to, but the basic message I want to put across here, now, is that, basically, 18 Doughty Street is doing very well. When I was first on, there was a palpable air of panic, with people saying things like “I can only do one thing at a time” through clenched teeth and with that terrifying evenness that people do just before they explode. This time, things were working more smoothly. Which is just what you would expect. → Continue reading: 18 Doughty Street TV is doing very well
I normally have to get into my office in London’s docklands financial centre of Canary Wharf at some ungodly hour in the morning, so I rarely get the chance to browse the news headlines on television or radio before rushing off for the Tube. But laid low with a nasty headcold this morning, I watched the BBC Breakfast television show for about 30 minutes. This is what I saw:
Item: The local council in Richmond, west London, is proposing to slap heavy parking taxes on people who own cars that are deemed ecologically incorrect (SUVs, etc). The programme interviewed a few bedraggled locals moaning about this, a retired TV personality who said it was a jolly good idea, and left it at that.
Item: A group of MPs want to ban sale of fireworks to ordinary citizens because loud bangs emitted by such things frighten animals and the elderly. We had a brief “debate” in the studio between a puritanical MP and an elderly lady who said what a shame it would be if fireworks were banned. No clear defence was made of the right for law-abiding people to have their fun. The safety-trumps-liberty issue was taken as a given.
Item: The pop star Madonna, who is trying to adopt a baby boy from the African nation of Malawi, has spoken of her anguish about this bureaucracy involved on the Opra Winfrey TV show in the US. This was deemed to be a news item worthy of the BBC’s attention.
Item: recycling of baby’s diapers.
Item: Litigation continues between ITN, the British television network, and the US authorities, over the death of ITN veteran broadcaster Terry Lloyd in Iraq about three years ago.
Item: BBC business journalist discusses how to avoid back injuries in the workplace. It is taken as given that companies must be forced to spend more money to ensure their staff are comfortable.
Now I think a trend is at work here. Many of the “news” items are pretty minor stuff, compared to the ongoing crackup in the Middle East, etc. They are relatively minor stories, what I would call “consumer journalism” stuff that typically used to be confined to daytime television and the dumber ends of the tabloid press. Maybe the producers figure that viewers are unable to digest anything more substantial at 7 in the morning and maybe they are right (but radio news and current affairs seems to have more gravitas, or at least it used to). However, the choice of subjects also reflect the current liberal/left intelligentsia’s obsession with bossing us around in order to protect the environment; they reflect a distinct strain of neo-puritanism (such as Richmond’s persecution of owners of big cars and bashing of fireworks), and an assumption that the child custody arrangements of a person, even a famous one like Madonna, are any of the State’s business.
Bring on Guy Fawke’s Night, is all I can say.
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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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