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.
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It is easy to underestimate how radical a change in strategy this is.
It simply would not have been possible in previous wars. Airpower capable of striking significantly behind the front lines did not exist until World War 2. Since then, command and control structures have been too widely dispersed and hardened to make broad attacks on them even theoretically possible until now.
Yes, countries sometimes try to kill each other’s top leaders. But assassinations are less common than civilians realize. Leaders generally do not target each other directly in wars — maybe hoping for a similar courtesy from the other side, or maybe because killing the other side’s leaders can make negotiating peace more difficult.
In any case, what Israel and the United States are trying is not a singular assassination but continuous attacks on a national command structure while at the same time sparing civilians to the extent possible. (Yes, the United States appears to have killed almost 200 girls in a Tomahawk attack. But the strike was clearly a mistake, not a strategic choice. It has not been repeated, and the United States is not trying to defend it.)
The American-Israeli goal is very clear: to convince the people at the top of the Iranian regime that they, and their replacements, and their replacements’ replacements, will die, and die very soon, unless they capitulate.
Can this strategy work?
I don’t know. Since it’s never been tried before, I’m not sure anyone does.
– Alex Berenson
“If money is infinite, why is there poverty?”
Because money isn’t wealth. It’s a claim on wealth.
You can print claims. You can’t print the goods and services those claims are supposed to buy.
Give everyone $10 billion and nothing gets richer. Prices just explode until that “wealth” buys nothing.
Poverty isn’t a shortage of paper.
It’s a shortage of production.
Printing money doesn’t solve that. It hides it for a moment, then makes it worse.
– Rock Chartrand
Zack Polanski may be terrible at economics, but he is a great entrepreneur — a political entrepreneur, that is. The lesson from Corbynmania, the Greta Thunberg movement, BLM, Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil, the gender movement and the Palestine movement is that there is a lot of vaguely youthful, vaguely left-wing, vaguely anti-capitalist political energy around. That energy was looking for a political outlet, a gap in the market which Polanski spotted and filled. I wish he had used his talents to become an actual entrepreneur in the private sector instead, creating wealth rather than promoting ideas that destroy it.
– Kristian Niemietz
For those blissfully unaware of Zack Polanski (original name is David Paulden), here is some information about his approach to foreign affairs. Assuming he is sincere, he is mad, or it may be that he is simply intellectually depraved.
The response to the Iran-Hezbollah drone attack on Britain’s Royal Air Force Base in Cyprus earlier this month has been revealing. For the first time since 1980, Britain had no warships in the eastern Mediterranean or the Gulf. Air defences were effectively absent. The UK’s main carrier strike group was still en route to Greenland. Britain ended up having to rely on Greece and France to help secure its own military base. That is not evidence of foreign capture. It is evidence of institutional incompetence.
– Jacob Reynolds
The truth of course is that ‘Net Zero’ is an article of faith. A state religion masquerading as a moral crusade despite the evidence it is expensive, ineffective, and generally regressive.
Low carbon subsidies transfer wealth from the general population to landowners and corporations. It’s state socialism delivering a caricature of pre-Corn Laws Toryism.
– Andy Mayer
There is far more heat energy in a swimming pool than in a pan of boiling water. You can boil an egg in the pan. You can’t boil an egg in the pool. And if you doubled the size of the pool, you’d double the energy available — and still have a cold, raw egg.
This is not a riddle. It is the single most important concept in the energy debate, and almost nobody making energy policy understands it.
[…]
The proposal to replace gas and nuclear with wind and solar reverses the direction of every successful energy transition in human history. It moves down the density ladder, deliberately, and hopes for the best.
That is what I mean when I say current energy policy is in a head-on collision with physics.
– Richard Lyon
Read the whole thing.
A conservative is actually despairing of finding himself having to call himself ‘conservative’ in the first place.
– James Alexander
The basic justification that Lowe’s online supporters offer for abandoning Reform at precisely the moment when they seem poised to destroy not one but both of the established political parties and usher in a government of a new party for the first time in a century is that the party as a whole, and Nigel Farage in particular, cannot be trusted to deliver on the priorities of the right, especially regarding immigration and demographics.
[…]
This is an attitude which plagues the British Right. The perfect is the enemy of the good. Politics is not a game in which the loser receives a consolation prize and a pat on the back. The stakes now are too high. Either we take power, by whatever means, or we’re done for. A future where there is no right-wing government in 2029 looks incredibly bleak. I do not want to risk backing the weaker horse, especially when its policy is practically identical to that of Reform, just because some of its leaders say the words I want to hear more vehemently and care less about the political impact of doing so. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this happened at the precise moment when the path became clear on both sides for Reform to win a victory at the next election. The desire to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory is palpable.
– Pimlico Journal
Read the whole thing.
While you might think free parking in NHS hospitals is a bit of throwaway populist fluff, it still tells you a lot about how populists think. If they do not see the immediate value in administration then it simply shouldn’t exist.
We then get some confirmation of how Lowe thinks from an interview with David Starkey. Lowe wants to recruit candidates who are accomplished business leaders (basically people like Rupert Lowe).
Regardless of what you think of Lowe’s values (there’s not much I disagree with), the bottom line is that he’s hopelessly naïve and has absolutely no idea what he’s doing. Starkey is right. Politics is not business. Businessmen are often successful because they take risks, and delegate the details to their people. It does not make them experts, and it does not mean their business success is transferrable to politics. Setting things up is a lot different to running things (as Lowe is about to discover).
Very often businessmen have very little understanding of the day to day running of their businesses. They hire people to do that for them so they can think about other things. We saw this during Brexit, where the media was asking CEOs how Brexit might affect their businesses, to find they were no more informed about the complexities of EU customs rules than the man in the street.
– Pete North
Read the whole thing as it is an interesting practical discussion about allocation of scarce resources
To be clear, none of this has much to do with actual right-wing or conservative political thought. If you’re wearing tweed and reading Sir Roger Scruton, please carry on.
The influencer ecosystem I once inhabited was the Chernobyl-ass Frankenstein of right-wing politics. A radioactive, reanimated corpse stitched together from clout, resentment, and cocaine, which desperately needs to be taken out back and shot for everyone’s good (it’s own included). Unfortunately, monsters are hard to kill
– Lauren Southern
Our judges will bend over backwards to find ways to allow people who ought to be deported to remain, and will connive with charities performing strategic litigation in order to allow this to happen. And their genuflections have become so convoluted that it is almost pointless to try to subject them to careful doctrinal analysis. We simply need to cut to the chase: the problem is not a legal, but a political or even sociological one. It is an issue concerning the makeup of the judiciary itself.
– David McGrogan
Read the whole thing.
The British State did not want Birmingham to be portrayed as a “no go zone” for Jews. Instead they submitted fabricated evidence to the Birmingham Safety Advisory Group to secure the ban. For example, they falsely attributed to Tel Aviv fans actions taken against them by Muslims in the Netherlands at a previous match. They said Israelis had thrown Muslims into canals, when the truth (as subsequently confirmed by Dutch police) was the precise opposite. Dutch Muslims on an organised “Jew Hunt” (their words not mine) had actually committed the violent acts that English Muslims were threatening.
West Midlands Police offered no evidence to the authorities about the actual threats. With the usual excuse of potential damage to “community relations”, they falsely portrayed the visitors as the danger. “Community relations” with Britain’s Jews or (still less) Britain’s relations with Israel were not a concern, apparently.
Essentially his force was guilty of cowardice. They bowed before a threat of violence. They were too gutless to be honest about it.
– Tom Paine
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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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