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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“How will the service rebuild in the wake of its catastrophic failure? The agency might argue that it is striving to bulk up, adding personnel needed to thwart assassins. On Monday, the Secret Service advertised two openings. The positions could be found at the U.S. government’s employment portal, USAJobs. Those hired will each be paid $139,395 annually. With what essential mission will they be tasked? Counter-sniping? Evasive driving? No. The title of both jobs is “Lead Public Affairs Specialist.”
– Eric Felten, Wall Street Journal ($).
The humorous writers and mockers of government idiocies, such as the late H L Mencken and P J O’Rourke, would have had much sport with this sort of story.
I wanted to reflect on how Mr Trump’s running mate – JD Vance (he came out of business and he worked in venture capital) – can nevertheless hold often anti-market views. (See his praise for the anti-trust stance of the Biden administration.) At best, Mr Vance seems to be a sort of “small business” champion with a dislike of bigness for bigness’s sake, conflating size with lack of competition. (Anyone who can understand the “Austrian” insight that competition is a dynamic process through time, and appreciate what Joseph Schumpeter called the creative destruction of capitalism, can see the flaw in this sort of prejudice.)
The problem is not Big Business per se. The problem is when businessmen lobby Congress or whoever for favours, such as for tariffs, exemptions from rules applied to others, tax breaks, subsidies, appointments of their people into government for leverage, cheap loans from banks, etc. Anti-trust is absurd and ripe for arbitrary assaults on property and freedom of contract because one can be guilty of “anti-competitive” conduct regardless of whether one charges higher prices than a rival, the same price or a lower one. Without an objective measure, it is a wrecking ball. (Insider dealing suffers from the same problem.)
That’s the sort of issue where Mr Vance needs to focus his anger. But has he? Has he made these points? Has he, for example, pointed out that central bank QE and the holding of interest below the natural rate creates “zombie” corporations, reduces investment into productive enterprise and reduces productivity, and hence wage growth ? Has he understood, and denounced, how finagling interest rates by central banks and politicians has distorted the capital structure of the West, and done so down the centuries, with ruinous consequences? Does he realise that all this monetary madness calcifies business, protects big firms, encourages financial engineering over investment, etc?
If Mr Vance can answer my questions about QE, for instance, with a “yes”, I would like to see evidence of it. (Commenters: please do so!) Because there is a long and honourable tradition of radical politicians – and I mean real radicals, not just people who claim they are – doing this. In the 19th century, in the UK, liberals and progressive political activists such as Richard Cobden and John Bright denounced artificially cheap money, as well as mercantilism. They saw those who want to clip the coinage, and impose tariffs, as enemies of the Common Man. They supported gold-backed currencies. That’s radicalism.
Mr Vance could, if he wanted, reacquaint America with that tradition. He could point out how tariffs favour incumbent firms and hurt small and medium sized firms with higher costs. He could point to a large and corrupting lobbying system that calls for all this stuff.
To be fair to the Trump campaign, it appears that Trump is quite sound – if you believe Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz (both former Democrat voters) – who say that Trump is much saner and better on encouraging tech startups and the like than the Biden administration has been.
We rarely comment on current affairs here, but the V-P has made an address to the Nation.
So we are in for a hot summer.
. . . knowing about Joe Biden’s condition and not being able to say anything.
“After Butler, America has suddenly become a more Jacksonian nation. The shadow of Old Hickory looms larger than ever, and Donald Trump stands taller as his undisputed heir.”
– Walter Russell Mead, WSJ ($)
For those unfamiliar with the extraordinary politician and general, Andrew Jackson, check out this link for some biographies and studies.
Some people are just too “clever by half” or lack a basic level of human empathy, despite playing the moral outrage card. I saw this comment on my Facebook page. To spare the guy (who is in the US) embarrassment, and as his comments were not meant to be fully public, I will not name him, and I suspect he’s not alone in taking this sort of line:
“I’m sick and tired of everybody valorizing Donald Trump in the wake of the assassination attempt yesterday. Somebody tried to kill him and he got an injury to his face. How does that make him more virtuous? How does that make him somehow more qualified to be president? How does that make Biden LESS qualified to be president? Is it even possible to make either of them less qualified to be president? The fact that you endured an assassination attempt simply means you are the passive recipient of somebody else’s misconduct. It does not make you more virtuous or more heroic.”
The penultimate sentence contains the seeds of this writer’s error (such as his words “passive recipient”), and a key point is that, in the writer’s way of thinking, Trump/other shooter victim should only be viewed as a victim. But the writer missed the point, and here is what I wrote in response:
“It’s how a person reacts to an attack that counts. In fact, it’s about when people refuse to play the `victim card’ and behave in a particular way that’s important. It comes down to how composed and calm a person can be in times of stress. In all walks of life, we admire people who display those traits…And I think Mr Trump handled himself well after being shot and realizing that a shooter was trying to kill him. If you can’t give a person credit for that, then that’s odd.”
I would go beyond what I said to this person on FB by making a broader point. Today, we live in an age when it is often widely held among supposed intellectuals, scientists and the like that we don’t have free will, and that we are, in varying ways, the consequences of internal and external forces we cannot understand or control. As a result, it is – as the writer I responded to claims – no cause for praise in how anyone reacts to said forces.
To have free will is, according to this point of view, an illusion, albeit perhaps a necessary one for mental health and maybe also an aspect of biological evolution. (The latter has the risk of being a “just-so” story explanation.) But if free will is nothing more than a handy, surface appearance, then it is hard to see how it has much value, much cash value, from evolutionary terms. After all, knowing you are not the author of your actions might, for some people, be comforting, rather than a nightmare. And think of how certain well-known writers, such as Sam Harris, argue that free will is an illusion and that, for example, criminals are ill, primarily, rather than wicked. The flipside of this is that a person who shows courage, either physical or mental, gets no praise because, on the determinist view, he had no choice in the matter. Everything, including the words I type right now, I had no choice over. None. We are all in the Matrix.
But this is self-contradictory. If determinism is true and judgement is pre-determined, how can we know the truth of determinism if we had no choice but to do so anyway? I think we know from introspection that the sense that we are making a choice to focus our minds or not, to set the course of how we want to think about something (or not), is real as anything is in the universe from an empirical sense. To think is to choose; thinking and volition are intertwined so much as to be one and the same. If introspection is an illusion, then so is sight, smell, taste, hearing, etc. But oddly, determinists rarely in my experience challenge these senses’ validity in conveying reality.
Back to Mr Trump’s way of reacting to the would-be assassin and others like him: I think that Mr Trump, whatever else one can say about him, had the kind of character, a character that for better or worse he has developed, to want to assert himself in the face of danger. That’s not always smart or fashionable in these weird times, but it is there. There is a sort of Andrew Jackson-style baddass mind-set that came to the fore on Saturday.
(Here are some excellent places to look if you want to understand, as I do, why I think free will is real. See this book, by Christian List, for example, or this or this one by Alfred Mele. And finally this, by Lee Pierson and Monroe Trout, for those who want to burrow deep into the evolutionary argument.)
Addendum: The writer is also denouncing the idea that Mr Trump being shot is somehow proof of his virtue. However, I doubt anyone thinks that. Of course, Mr Trump does threaten the agendas of a lot of people, foreign and domestic, but that is not the nub of my point here, although I am sure commenters will want to mention these issues.
I wake up, I check the morning news.
Oh.
Six days ago, on July 8th, President Biden said, “it’s time to put Trump in a bullseye”.
In January 2011, a man called Jared Loughner tried to murder Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and did murder six others. The media rushed to blame his crime on a map put out by Sarah Palin’s campaign showing a map of the US with states that she regarded as political targets marked by crosshairs, with the names of those states’ Democratic representatives whom she hoped to unseat listed below. Loughner was a paranoid schizophrenic who held a longstanding – and bizarre – grudge against Giffords. There is no evidence he ever saw Palin’s map.
Perhaps it is time to dust off this old post:
The uncertainty principle in violence blame mechanics
Sometimes one is privileged to witness the discovery of a law of science.
Δl Δm > M
The variables l, m and M are defined in the link.
“Ladies and gentlemen, President Putin!” Apart from introducing the president of Ukraine as the president of Russia and referring to Kamala Harris as “vice-president Trump”, Joe Biden got through the NATO summit just fine.
The Democrats have got themselves into a bit of a pickle, haven’t they? It is not as if there were no warning signs. Why, the Guardian’s Washington Correspondent, David Smith, compiled a long list of them called “Warning signs: a history of Joe Biden’s verbal slips” only a week ago.
Only a week ago. That is the problem. The first item on the list of warning signs dates from March 2021. The Guardian‘s article attempts to explain why it took so long:
Biden’s team came down hard on reporters who questioned whether the oldest president in American history – now 81 – was still fully capable of doing the job. Journalists also wanted to avoid the accusation of ageism or that they were helping to elect Trump.
“It is simply astounding for the entire country, including its most seasoned reporters, to be as shocked as everyone was by the ugly and painful reality of Biden’s debate performance,” Jill Abramson, former executive editor of the New York Times, wrote on the Semafor website this week.
While it was a “super hard story to report”, she said it could have been done. Instead, Abramson said, the American press failed in its duty to hold those in power accountable. Here are some of the dots that, with the benefit of hindsight, could have been joined sooner:
Or you could have read a proper newspaper like the New York Post or the Daily Mail and learned about them at the time. The Guardian‘s selection of “gaffes” is skewed towards things that, although they happen to Biden more frequently than average, could happen to anyone, such as Biden’s literal stumbles and his accidental substitutions of one word for another. The only really damaging items in the list compiled by David Smith are Biden calling out “Jackie, are you here?” to the recently deceased Jackie Walorski, and one of several claims he has made that his son died in Iraq. None of the charming anecdotes that he habitually makes up out of whole cloth were included. The New York Post was flagging this habit of his back in 2021. Nor does the Guardian‘s list include any of Biden’s frequent descents into meaningless gabble. Remember how he came out with “I’ll lead an effective strategy to mobilise trunalimunumaprzure” at a campaign stop in Luzerne County, PA, back in October 2020? Of course you do, because you read a proper newspaper, such as Canada’s National Telegraph, from where I got the link. The article by Gerry Kaur, includes a line saying that we need to talk about the “massive problem” of Joe Biden’s “lowering cognitive agility”. It was published on November 3rd, 2020. The Democrats, their friends in the media, and the left in general could have started that conversation four years ago and been in a much better position now, but they preferred to suppress the story. The trouble with hiding the truth from other people is that you end up hiding it from yourself as well.
In the end, what I would offer to anyone on either side of the Atlantic who thinks a new Trump administration would yeet the USA out of NATO on a whim is this; get out more. Actually talk to people on the natsec right. Get out of your intellectually onanistic terrariums. And for the sake of your larger credibility and sanity – do not think the America you read about in the NYT/WaPo and their derivatives, especially in an election year, is a reflection of the full reality.
Read broadly. Seek out a contrary opinion. Have reasonable discussions of substance. Don’t assume anyone who disagrees with you on policy is evil and the absolute worst version of their enemies’ caricature.
In the end, we all want the same thing, don’t we? Keep America in, the Russia out, and France & Germany down.
– CDR Salamander
A conclusion is hard to escape: America suffers from an incompetent leadership class. Its problem isn’t ruthlessness but softness, its inability to deal with the world without a media that constantly lies to make it feel better about itself.
– Holman W Jenkins, Jnr.
What we are learning is that much of what Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds sometimes calls the “gentry class” is just not that good, competent, honest, or insightful. And more and more people have noticed.
JD Tuccille articulates, brilliantly, one of the main reasons I am a classical liberal who belives in limited, constrained and small government:
But it’s easier to reconcile a fading, honesty-challenged presidential candidate with a desire for “a smaller government providing fewer services” than it is to credibly claim that an even more badly eroded politician and his unethical minions are exactly the sort of folks you want presiding over an all-powerful state. Frankly, a healthy cynicism about the competency and the decency of government officials is a credible response to what was on display on Thursday evening when Biden spent 90-plus minutes demonstrating that he and his supporters had been lying about his mental and physical fitness to not only run for a second term, but to carry out the duties of office right now.
The idea of an all-powerful, benevolent Daddy federal state is a lot harder to sustain if it appears the head of it is not playing with a full deck of cards, or even knows he’s in a casino.
And if Trump’s comparatively less-bad performance still didn’t fill you with confidence that he’s a person you want presiding over a bigger, more activist government, that’s the appropriate take, too. He didn’t face-plant like his opponent, but the former president gave us every reason to believe that, under his control, a smaller, less-involved government is preferable for reasons ideological, practical, and involving self-preservation.
Exactly. Let’s not forget that the size of the federal debt did not shrink under Mr Trump. And he’s no Calvin Coolidge. Alas.
The final paragraph is right on the money:
The belief that government should do more, provide more, and embrace us all in a warm and nurturing embrace requires an enormous leap of faith. At the least, those exercising such vast power must be wise and well-intentioned. As last week’s debate reminded us, that’s a wildly unrealistic assumption.
It appears too few in the commentariat seem to join the dots between the “aren’t the presidential candidates/political classes awful?” with “and perhaps we should constrain government and make it do less” sort of viewpoint.
I wonder how much the Founders thought about the problems of an ageing president who was losing his mind, of an opponent such as Trump, and other sort of characters, when they composed the architecture of the republic, with its checks, balances and principles. But at times like these, all the abuse that gets thrown at the Founders (some of them kept slaves, etc) needs to be put in context, and that people should be grateful for their wisdom and understanding of the need for government to be restrained. We could use a bit of that mindset around the world.
John Naughton, in an Observer article called “Closing the Stanford Internet Observatory will edge the US towards the end of democracy”, writes
“To make things worse, we also invented a technology that enables every Tom, Dick and mad Harry to publish whatever they like on opaque global platforms, which are incentivised to propagate the wildest nonsense. And to this we have now added powerful tools (called AI) that automate the manufacture of misinformation on an epic scale. If you were a malign superpower that wanted to screw up the democratic world, you’d be hard put to do better than this.”
Worse? It is strange how the writer of an article saying how the ability of everyone to publish whatever they like makes things worse claims to be so concerned for democracy. If he would deny mad Harry the right to publish what he likes and read what he likes, why would he grant Harry the right to vote?
Naughton continues,
At the root of all this are two neuroses. One is the Republicans’ obsessive conviction that academic studies, like those of DiResta and her colleagues, of how “bad actors – spammers, scammers, hostile foreign governments, networks of terrible people targeting children, and, yes hyper-partisans actively seeking to manipulate the public” use digital platforms to achieve their aims is, somehow, anti-conservative.
The other neurosis is, if anything, more worrying: it’s a crazily expansive idea of “censorship” that includes labelling social media posts as potentially misleading, factchecking, down-ranking false theories by reducing their distribution in people’s social media feeds while allowing them to remain on a site and even flagging content for platforms’ review.
Down-ranking theories deemed to be false by secretly stopping them from being communicated freely is not a crazily expansive idea of censorship, it is censorship. The censors’ kindness in allowing the censored material to remain on site so long as nobody sees it is akin to the kindness of the 1960s London gangster Charlie Richardson, who, having had a man beaten bloody in front of him, would make a gift to his victim of a nice clean shirt to go home in.
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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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