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Thus spake the prophet Micklethwait on September 27, a week before the US presidential debate that has just taken place:
Romney is not nearly as big a jerk as a lot of disappointed Libbos and Conservatives seem to think, or as Dems hope. He keeps on winning. I think he will do much better in the debates than most others seem to, because he has a story to tell, to and about an opponent who does not. Romney is indeed not a genius debater, but he knows it, and knowing also that he is winning, he will prepare hard and go in with exactly the right amount of and kind of confidence, like a winning sportsman. He will surprise many by how well he does.
Meanwhile Obama, surrounded by yes men, and fatally arrogant, and tired, a fed-up and probably knowing he is going to lose, and having nothing to say, will not prepare well enough for the debates. He faces a near-impossible task, and will not be up to it.
Correct in every detail bar two. I do not think Mitt Romney knew he was going to win the debate and I do not think Barack Obama knew he was going to lose.
Romney was a Mormon missionary in France for two and a half years. Apparently he met with a slightly less overwhelming proportion of rejection than most, and was promoted. Whatever your opinion of Mormonism, no one can emerge after thirty months of knocking on doors and trying to proselytise the French, in French, and not have developed some debating skills and also seen the limit of what any such skills can do. No one can do this and not learn, ineradicably, that the world contains people who do not think like them at all. Romney lives among the heathen. Obama lives among those who defend him from the heathen.
Unlike some on this blog, Paul Marks, for instance, I do not see Obama as a hard core Marxist. Real Marxists live among the heathen, even on university campuses. I do not see Obama as having a hard core at all; he flows into the shape of whatever vessel he finds himself inside. His current vessel is fine and comfortable. I think he could not quite make himself believe that Romney would dare intrude.
Elections are mostly mere show, but what a splendid show a hard-fought one can be. I caught myself the other day being resentful because I could not turn to the back of the book or look up the episode guide on Wikipedia to see how it will all turn out. Aesop would have sold more fables if he had thought to have the moral (better yet, a hundred competing morals) in the middle but leave the tortoise and the hare still running right until the last page.
In 1992 I turned down a bet that would have obliged me to pay ten pounds for every parliamentary seat of Neil Kinnock’s majority, or gained me ten pounds for every seat short of it. I only turned down the bet because I’m a wimp who has never so much as been inside a bookmakers*; I knew that John Major was going to win because I eavesdropped on my fellow commuters on the Victoria Line. The UK media then were almost as domineering as the US media now; whenever obliged to interview someone willing to admit to the intention of voting Conservative the interviewer would visibly stand back to avoid contamination. I wanted Labour to win – I had stopped being a socialist but I was tired of the Tories – but I could tell, I could just tell that the media and the Cool People were talking each other up while the troglodytes on the Victoria Line were bullied into whispers but not into voting for the Cool Party just because the Cool People said that everyone who was anyone would.
Splendid as I am and nearly always right about everything, I have also been known to make wrong predictions. In the next UK election I thought the Shy Tory effect would still be present. If it was it was washed away in a flood of voters not shy in the least about finally having had enough of the Conservative party in power.
All this talk about bubbles has also reminded me of two occasions on which I specifically took note of obvious signs that the other sort of newsworthy bubble, a house price / stock market / tulip bubble, was expanding serenely away – noted these signs, cogitated upon their meaning, and ignominiously got it wrong. Or at best totally missed their major meaning because I was so keen to lecture the world about a minor sub-meaning. One such sign was seen in Ireland about six or seven years ago. My family is from Ireland and I always listen a little harder to news from there, so I was interested to learn from several different recent visitors to Ireland that everywhere you looked, on every little hillock and crammed into every little gap among the drystone walls, a new holiday cottage was going up, spoiling the austere beauty of the landscape somewhat but nice to see so many people doing well. I knew what that meant. It meant I could write a post for Samizdata about planning laws. Good thing I never got round to that one.
The other sign was from the United States. I, I will have you know, knew what “redlining” was, and knew of the laws and government pressure put upon banks to foribid this practice, and could speak knowledgeably of the Community Reinvestment Act long before the Crash of 2008. I knew what the CRA meant. It meant I could write a post for Samizdata about how the suppression of incentives for poor and marginalised people to act in ways that would help them get out of poverty (such as saving for a deposit on a house, or getting a steady job in order to qualify for a mortgage) would do them no good in the long run, not to mention encouraging them to take on debt they could not afford. There might still be a post in that, but the great floating balloon marked WORLDWIDE FINANCIAL CRISIS COMING TO YOUR TOWN SOON floated straight past me.
Blow me your bubbles, tell me about your predictions, especially the ones you got wrong.
*and also because the person offering it had endowed me with all his worldly goods anyway.
In addition, it’s getting much harder for pollsters to get people to respond to interviews. The Pew Research Center reports that it’s getting only 9 percent of the people it contacts to respond to its questions. That’s compared with 36 percent in 1997.
Interestingly, response rates are much higher in new democracies. Americans, particularly in target states, may be getting poll fatigue. When a phone rings in New Hampshire, it might well be a pollster calling.
Are those 9 percent representative of the larger population? As that percentage declines, it seems increasingly possible that the sample is unrepresentative of the much larger voting public. One thing a poll can’t tell us is the opinion of people who refuse to be polled.
– Michael Barone
I increasingly resent being rung up by someone hoping to learn my opinions about this or that, and am not a bit surprised to learn that the feeling is becoming a lot more widespread. What’s in it for me? Nothing. Just a great gob of time down the drain.
If you want to know my opinions, read Samizdata.
In the particular matter of American pollsters claiming to discover how the presidential election will go, there is also the widespread belief that these people are not so much seeking to serve the voters by telling them what will be what, as to manipulate voters into voting Democrat. In which case, should you happen not to be a Democrat supporter, why would you be inclined to give them anything other than a brief suggestion that they go forth and multiply or words to that effect?
These are the facts. George W Bush left behind a set of books that were not so much unbalanced as vertiginous. At the end of 2008, US debt was $9.9 trillion, or 69.7 per cent of GDP, and the ballooning deficit was $683 billion. Since then, all the key indicators have worsened markedly. By the end of this year, gross debt is forecast to reach $16.3 trillion (the number to which Letterman was alluding), more than 100 per cent of GDP, or a rise of two thirds under Obama. The annual deficit is close to $1.5 trillion, 10 per cent of GDP. Worse still, according to official forecasts, US debt is on course to hit $20 trillion by 2016.
– Jeff Randall
Charles Steele is a blogger I like to follow and he links to some terrific coverage of the “Fast and Furious” gun-running scandal. What surprises me – although I should not be surprised – is how this has just not registered much in the mainstream press, but then considering how much of the MSM is covering for Barack Obama, there is no surprise, really.
On the other hand, if Mitt Romney – who is hardly my idea of a great candidate – makes a correct (sort of) comment to the effect that a large number of people who receive subsidies from the state are unlikely to vote for him, the MSM goes berserk. Colleagues in my office in London were remarking how stupid and nasty MR obviously is. When I quietly pointed out that he merely touched on how hard it is to reform entitlements when almost half the country is receiving them in some shape or form, it produced a few furrowed brows. In their mindset, only a Republican commits “gaffes”; if Obama calls the the Falkland Islands the Maldives, for instance, or gives an execrable speech at the expense of entrepreneurs, it is laughed off. “Everyone is human, we all make mistakes, you got him out of context” etc.
Update: I love this piss-take of the MSM via Andrew Klavan.
“Romney is caught on tape saying that nearly half the country is on government assistance and will vote for Obama to keep the dole coming. In related news, a video is unearthed of Pythagoras saying that the square of the hypotenuse of the right triangle is equal to the sum of the square of the two adjacent sides.”
Romney is no Thatcher – in truth, he’s far from it. It made sense for the unemployed back then to vote Thatcher because she offered an alternative to the headlong rush to destruction. Sadly, Romney may be correct – what sense would it make for today’s unemployed to vote for a marginally slower slide into the abyss?
– Samizdata commenter ‘the other rob’
Much is being made of Mitt Romney’s leaked comments to the effect that 47 per cent of America will never vote for him, because this 47 per cent depend on government hand-outs and he, Romney, has said he will cut these hand-outs.
Judging by what happened in Britain in the Thatcher years, Romney is (assuming I have it right what he said) wrong, about none of these people voting for him I mean. Here in Britain then, as in the USA now, unemployment was unprecedentedly high, and many assumed that nobody unemployed and drawing the dole would ever vote Thatcher. Yet quite a few such people did, and not just once either. They did it again and again.
Anti-Thatcherites said that this was false consciousness. These poor deluded, put-upon Conservative voters simply did not understand their own interests.
But what if such down-on-their-luck Conservative voters actually wanted jobs, even though they did not now have them? Many definitely did. What if they depended on government hand-outs, but hated this and longed for this demeaning arrangement to end? And what if, rather than blaming Thatcher for them having lost their old jobs, or even if they did blame Thatcher for them having lost their old jobs, they instead focussed on the future and regarded Thatcher as a better bet than the Labour alternative for them to get new and different jobs?
Even if all that any voter ever cares about is his or her own economic interests, and damn the country, for an unemployed person in the 1980s in Britain to vote Thatcher was at least a reasonable thing to do. It was not a self-evident case of someone not knowing what was best for them. Voting for the likes of Michael Foot or Neil Kinnock (Britain’s Obamas of those times, neither of whom ever made it to Prime Minister, thank God) might merely have made unemployment even worse, and jobs even harder to come by.
My point is not that such disagreement with the more usual opinion (if you’re unemployed vote left wing) of those times was definitely correct. I merely argue that such disagreement was a reasonable judgement to make, given that it was indeed a judgement call.
The same will apply to many Americans who depend on government hand-outs now, who will likewise vote for Romney rather than Obama, because they reckon Romney is more likely to get them back on their economic feet than Obama, and because back on their economic feet is where they really, really want to be.
And this will remain true, even though Romney has just (or so I have been reading) insulted these people by accusing them of being incapable of rational thought of the sort that I have just described, and of being incapable of voting other than for Obama, like so many sheep. At least Romney is showing hatred of the arrangements that they also hate, and which Obama might well make worse, and showing determination to change those arrangements. That might count for far more, in the eyes of an unemployed person who badly wants not to be unemployed, than those insults. So, he thinks I’m a sheep. So what? I know I’m not.
Thatcher herself never made the mistake of accusing unemployed Brits of being incapable of discerning what a brilliant Prime Minister she was, for them as for all others. From where she stood, only Labour voters were in the grip of false consciousness.
How many unemployed people will vote Romney? Rather more if Romney gives them further reason to vote for him, by saying something like: if you hate being dependent on the government, vote for me, and you’ve got a better chance of getting back into paid work than if you vote for the other fellow. → Continue reading: Why people who are now unemployed and on the dole may still rationally vote Romney (despite him saying that they won’t)
And I have to say it’s a little unseemly for our government to officially take a position on a YouTube video, even one that sparked an international crisis. It’s even more unseemly that our government is taking the same position on that film as the people who just killed our ambassador in Benghazi.
– the indispensable Michael Totten
Well, contrary to my title it actually does matter a damn who wins the US election, even if policy-wise they are largely fungible.
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who has called for scrapping President Barack Obama’s 2010 U.S. healthcare law, said in remarks aired on Sunday that he likes key parts of “Obamacare” despite his party’s loathing of it and wants to retain them.
I want Barack ObamaCare to win, or more accurately, I want Mitt RomneyCare to lose so that the Tea Party have a better chance of completely and utterly destroying the Republican establishment that decided to run a jackanapes like Romney. The objective I would like to see is that the Republican party either collapses completely to make room for something else or actually reinvents itself to make it worth voting for (also fine by me).
Romney is what happens when the Stupid Party (USA Branch) realise they only have to be ever so slightly less evil than the Evil Party (USA Branch) in order to get your vote.
What a fabulously confident and ingenuous-seeming political narcissist Ms. Fluke is. She really does think—and her party apparently thinks—that in a spending crisis with trillions in debt and many in need, in a nation in existential doubt as to its standing and purpose, in a time when parents struggle to buy the good sneakers for the kids so they’re not embarrassed at school . . . that in that nation the great issue of the day, and the appropriate focus of our concern, is making other people pay for her birth-control pills. That’s not a stand, it’s a non sequitur. She is not, as Rush Limbaugh oafishly, bullyingly said, a slut. She is a ninny, a narcissist and a fool.
– Peggy Noonan.
My own prediction: Obama’s finished.
It was extraordinary to see the convention chairman, Mayor Villaraigosa, try to ram through those platform changes yesterday. And succeed in doing so. But dishonestly. Bewildered, he kept having the delegates vote again.
I was reminded of the European Union. Years ago, some countries were given the opportunity to vote on EU membership. When the people said no, the EU made them vote again, until they got it “right.” Remember?
Repeatedly, about half the convention voted for the platform changes, and about half voted against. Then Villaraigosa declared — willy-nilly — that the yes votes were two-thirds of the convention!
That’s what the people were booing about, I think. Maybe they were booing God and Jerusalem tangentially. It suits Republican politics to say they were booing God and Jerusalem (a lovely combination, by the way!) — and heaven knows I want the Republicans to win more than anyone else in the country can possibly do. But I think the delegates were mainly booing the rank dishonesty of the process.
–Jay Nordlinger
The Danish and Irish repeated referenda were about the Maastricht and Lisbon treaties respectively, not EU membership. But the analogy holds – only I don’t think that the EU has fiddled the count as yet.
What Frank J. Fleming says here, to the effect that America has let President Obama down, is, I think, both very funny and nail-on-the-head accurate in describing the sort of man President Obama does indeed seem to be.
The other night I had dinner with a friend and I heard myself saying a couple of things about what might soon be happening in the US presidential election campaign.
First, I speculated that, any week or month now, the mainstream USA media might turn against Obama. All it will take is them deciding that he is going to lose and that nothing they can say will change that, and at that point they’ll stop publicly worshipping him and start reporting on what he says and does and on what people are making of it, almost like he was some kind of Republican or something. Their purpose will not be honesty. Their purpose will be to make the dishonesties they later unleash, upon President Romney in particular and upon the world in general, seem slightly more believable.
And when I got home, I found that something like this was already starting to happen.
Oh, they haven’t all given up on their guy yet, by no means. But they are surely starting to fret quite seriously that just shovelling out nothing but propaganda for him is making them look ever so slightly silly.
And the other thing I said was that if Obama himself decides that he is going to lose, no matter what he says (not least because of all the damn media people selling him out like so many rats running down a ship’s gangplank), he might, at some point between now and election day, say to hell with this, and give America a piece of his mind, rather than just smiling and taking it all on the chin.
He might say things like this, now only the mocking words of Frank J, only for real (here‘s the link to the second page of Frank J’s piece where this is to be found):
These past four years have just proven there is no reasoning with you hillbillies. Obama has given speech after speech after speech explaining things to you, but you never get it. Obama is a fragile flower you oafs keep trampling beneath your feet. You just babble things at him like, “You cain’t make peepul buy health inshuranse! It’s unconstitooshunal!” And then you whine about the national debt, when it’s none of your concern anyway – that’s the government’s business. What is it with you people questioning and ruining everything Obama is trying to do?
For “Obama” read “I”. Also, that “fragile flower” bit would have be changed to something more self-admiring. But otherwise, just like that.
As for my two guesses, the media turning against Obama, and Obama turning against the voters, well, I do admit that the first is a whole lot more likely than the second.
And both are matters of degree rather than absolutes. Some members of the mainstream USA media may change their grovellingly pro-Obama tune a bit, even as others carry right on singing the same old songs like it was 2008. And Obama will probably let his annoyance with the damn voters show a bit, just now and again, but then he’ll rein himself in. There is, after all, a whole big global ruling class out there, and Obama is going to carry on functioning within it just fine and very lucratively, provided he behaves himself reasonably well in the meantime. So a total Obama melt-down is probably too much to hope for. But I would love to hear him say at least some things along Frank J’s lines.
As might quite a few of Obama’s long-suffering supporters, who have surely been saying exactly these kinds of things amongst themselves, and to friendly reporters whose discretion the Obama campaign has, so far, been able to rely on.
And he returns to find the state of the world slightly worse. Things were, of course, pretty bad to begin with, so that’s like Hell being slightly hotter.
The idea that all this monetary madness is only temporary, only to help us get out of the crisis, and that the central banks have an ‘exit strategy’ – a term that I have not heard or seen in any discussion of central bank policy since spring of 2011! – is getting less tenable by the day. There is no exit strategy. Not in the US, not in the UK, not in the Euro Zone.
Calling Mitt Romney. Don’t worry about losing. Worry about winning.
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