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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I imagine that even we hardened watchers of public affairs are getting a tad bored by the Murdoch/phone-hacking/police corruption affair, but an angle that is starting to gain some ground in the last few days or so is just how biased the BBC has been in its coverage. There is, of course, a website, Biased BBC, that tracks the failings of the BBC. As a state-licensed broadcaster in receipt of a licence fee collected on pain of imprisonment, the network has a status, and a presence in the media world, almost unlike any other. (I often have to explain to my American friends how the BBC is funded: they are frequently shocked when they find out).
Stephen Glover at the Daily Mail has a particularly good item on just how biased the BBC’s coverage of the Murdoch business has been. And here is a good item by Charlie Cooke at the National Review’s “Corner” blog.
When all is said and done, News International and its sister businesses do not send me a letter demanding that I pay for its services and products with a threat of fine or worse for non-payment. That fact needs to be pointed out more than it has been. The BBC needs to be broken up more urgently than any other media business.
When I first began to read that David Cameron could soon be toppled by all this News of the World stuff, I was amazed, just as I was amazed when I first heard about the News of the World itself being shut. I still don’t know how badly Cameron is threatened, but if he is threatened, he has only himself to blame.
Cameron got the job of leading the Conservatives because enough of them thought that he would make a satisfactory Blair the Second, to replace the original. The question was, remember, during the Blair years: How shall we spend all this money? The answer was: nicely. Blair is the answer to the question: What sort of chap do you want your daughter marrying? A nice one, that’s what sort.
But well before Cameron became (only just) the Prime Minister, the questions had all changed, from being about niceness to being about what the hell was happening and what the hell should be done about it. Yet Cameron exudes no sense of crisis. On the contrary, he makes a point of not doing so, of suggesting that all will be well provided we don’t panic and just carry on carrying on, when in reality the situation is very troubling and getting worse and worse by the day. It’s as if Stanley Baldwin was still the Prime Minister in 1939.
I have a friend whose take on Britain’s political party leaders has been an infallible guide to their success or failure, during the last two decades or so. Blair? Nice one. Major? No. Hague? Thumbs down. The next bald Conservative chap, ditto. The next Conservative bloke – Howard was it? – ditto again. Brown? A definite thumbs down. But Cameron? I remember particularly asking her about Cameron. What do you make of him?
Shrug. → Continue reading: Is Britain about to shrug off David Cameron?
“Revulsion, however justified, is a dangerous counsellor.”
– Bruce Anderson, on the continuing saga of Rupert Murdoch. A good article overall, somewhat spoiled by a daft remark about Australia.
Steve Baker, the MP whom we here actually rather like, has a piece in the latest Jewish Chronicle, which makes what seems to me like a very important point. I have this point alluded to vaguely, but never spelled out. It is that the outrageous behaviour of the merchant banking fraternity in recent years is as much a product of bad bank regulations as it is of mere capitalistic greed.
It being the Jewish Chronicle he’s contributing to, Baker alludes to some scales that are criticised at the beginning of the Book of Proverbs, Chapter 11 (which American readers may consider rather appropriate, what with the times we (and they) are now living in).
The particular rules that Baker zeroes in on are the accounting rules that define profit:
Among other problems, IFRS accounting rules incentivise trading in derivatives by enabling unrealised, perhaps fake, profits to be booked up-front, leading to large but unjustified bonuses and dividends. They grossly inflate profits and capital and discourage banks from making prudent provision for expected loan losses. They also discard the time-honoured principle of prudence embodied in UK company law. In doing so, IFRS gravely weakens the audit function and the vital check it imposes on bank management. This undermines effective corporate governance in banking. The upshot is that IFRS makes bank accounts highly unreliable; no-one has a true view of our banks’ financial strength. All this contributed greatly to the financial collapse. IFRS made banks appear more profitable than they were. This led them to imprudent expansion, to payments of bonuses they could ill afford to make and to inadequate provisioning for likely losses.
I am not qualified to second guess Baker on this. But I do know, as a general principle, that when one observes something going wrong with the world, one should not immediately assume that yet more laws and regulations are needed to curb whatever it may be. Rather, one should ask what laws or regulations – laws or regulations already in place – are causing or at the very least greatly exacerbating the problem in question, and should accordingly be got rid of.
Well, the reactions to the decision by Rupert Murdoch to shut the News of the World, and try and halt his empire collapsing, continue. Fraser Nelson, editor of the Spectator, used to have a weekly column for a paper once known as “News of the Screws” (for non-Brits, this paper was obsessed by the sex lives of the rich, powerful and celebs). Nelson has thoughts about it at the Spectator’s own website. I think he gushes a bit too much and as the comments suggest, readers are not happy at Nelson’s defence of much of what the NoTW stood for over the decades. But never mind that. The great thing about the Spectator commenters is that they are often splendidly barmy, if not quite as consistently rude as over at the Guido Fawkes site.
This one, by a “David Lindsay,” wins the prize for me. I quote it all, for its genuine insights and wrong-headed, state-worship of a kind that might make an old Soviet functionary blush (although it is entirely possible that Lindsay is a certain kind of “High Tory” who sentimentalises working class life). This comment reminds me of a piece of dialogue of that brilliant Peter Sellers film, “I’m All Right Jack”, when Sellers, playing the union shop steward constantly at loggerheads with “the bosses”, is praising life in Stalin’s Russia. Take it away, Mr Linsday:
“In the farewell souvenir edition [of NoTW ed], it was heartbreakingly easy to trace the decline in the writers’ educational and cultural expectations of their readers. Murdoch is not solely to blame for this. But he is hardly blameless of it, either.”
As the praise for the News of the World from George Orwell on its own final back page indicated, this was a paper of the wider culture of working-class self-improvement underwritten by the full employment that was itself always guaranteed, and very often delivered directly, by central and local government action: the trade unions, the co-operatives, the credit unions, the mutual guarantee societies, the mutual building societies, the Workers’ Educational Association, the Miners’ Lodge Libraries, the pitmen poets, the pitmen painters, the brass and silver bands, the Secondary Moderns (so much better than what has replaced them, turning out millions of economically and politically active, socially and culturally aware people), and so much else destroyed by the most philistine Prime Minister until Blair, who in her time as Education Secretary had closed so many grammar schools that there were not enough left at the end for her record ever to be equalled.
For the first hundred or more years of its domination of the Sunday market, that domination coincided with a high degree of weekly churchgoing in this country. Its strongly working-class readership must have contained a well above average proportion of what are now called traditional Catholics, but in the days when there was no other kind.
Well, with no more competition from what the News of the World lately allowed itself to become, why not one or more People’s Papers again, affordably hooking people in with a bit of entertainment in order to educate and inform them on the premise that they deserve nothing less than the human dignity and respect of education and information? Central and local government, the trade unions, the co-operatives, the credit unions, the mutual guarantee societies, the mutual building societies and the Workers’ Educational Association all still exist. Just for a start.
What are they doing “to give to the poorer classes of society a paper that would suit their means, and to the middle — as well as the rich — a journal which due to its immense circulation would demand their attention”?
I loved the patronising lines about brass and silver bands. I wish Peter Sellers were still alive now; how he would have loved this sort of comment and used it for his material. I am not sure if Mr Lindsay would get the joke.
“Poor old Dave, he tries to mix with some common folk and look what happens.”
A commenter, “Percy”, at the Spectator’s Coffee House blog, talking about the arrest of Andy Coulson, former press advisor to David Cameron.
It has been a bit of bad summer for Mr Cameron. He’s lucky he has been up against such a weak opponent.
You see what’s happening? Two separate grievances and two separate targets – one totally justified, the other largely not – are being joined together. The “journalistic culture” Campbell has spent the past 10 years complaining about is not newspapers that have invaded people’s privacy – but newspapers that have been too unkind to important public servants such as himself.
– Andrew Gilligan, under the headline: “Phone hacking scandal: enemies of free press are circling”. Indeed.
I’ve just discovered what many must have known for years, that the true test of a real news story is when you just don’t believe it.
When I read just now, at Guido‘s, the news that the News of the World has been closed, I thought, you’re ‘avin’ a laugh, and I was merely puzzled as to why. What, I thought to myself, is the point of concocting this bizarre joke (in the form of a fake press release), and at such bizarre length? Newspapers that are making tons of money and which have lots of readers don’t just close, merely because they’ve done something wrong. Newspapers die, but that’s entirely different.
Yet, it appears to be so. The News of the World is indeed to shut.
The only serious attention that I have ever given to the News of the World was when it broke this story about Pakistan cricket corruption. I was grateful for that sting operation then, and am accordingly a bit regretful now. Although I do agree that if you want to make your newspaper hated by everyone, then it is hard to think of a better way of doing it than to get caught busting into the phones of a murder victim and her family.
The NotW is being shut, I presume, to enable Rupert Murdoch‘s various television plans to proceed profitably. Will this dramatic step do the trick? Might it not make Murdoch look even worse, by drawing yet more attention to the skullduggery that he presided over and surely knew all about, and to the fact that he only closed the NotW when the skullduggery became public knowledge?
David Cameron, because of his close connection to the NotW gang, is also looking very bad. The line here at Samizdata on that will presumably be: oh dear, how tragic.
Yesterday, there was a mini-rebellion in Parliament, to be precise in one of its Committee Rooms. Britain’s (increased) IMF subscription was being discussed, and although it got through, there was a little flurry of excitement, as Guido reported:
Something very rare happened in what is usually the dullest of committees. A dozen or so Tory non-members of the committee came and spoke against affirming the instrument. Government whips cajoled the pliant Tory and LibDem members of the committee to vote to affirm the instrument while Tory MPs spoke from the floor against it. Promising new boy Steve Baker and backbench eurosceptic Douglas Carswell were among those who spoke against affirming the instrument.
You can now read what was said in Hansard.
When these kinds of things are argued about, everything depends on whether the contrariness on show is a genuine argument that we should switch to an alternative and better policy, or merely grumbling. If all that is happening is that people don’t like whatever it is, what with them not having created the problems (or so they say) with their decisions, and what with all the cuts they are having to put up with now, well, frankly, that doesn’t count for very much. If the powers that be are able to say: Well, what would you do that would be any better? – and if you don’t then have an answer, you might as well not have bothered. All you are saying is: This hurts. And all that the government has to say in reply is: Yes, we hear you, we feel your pain, but we are going to do it anyway, because despite all the pain, we remain convinced that this is the best thing to do.
Scroll down at Hansard and you can read, in particular, what Steve Baker MP had to say. The thing about Baker is that he really is arguing for a paradigm shift in economic policy thinking. He even quoted a chunk out of Human Action, which I think I will quote here, again:
The wavelike movement affecting the economic system, the recurrence of periods of boom which are followed by periods of depression, is the unavoidable outcome of the attempts, repeated again and again, to lower the gross market rate of interest by means of credit expansion.
There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.” (Human Action, p. 572)
Baker is not just saying: this is a crisis. Everyone knows that. He is also saying: and we need to have the crisis, now, all of it and get it over with as soon as we can.
Hayek also got a mention, as did Jesus Huerta de Soto, who gave the Hayek Memorial Lecture last October.
This is the kind of politicking that is capable of having actual impact. Not now, and certainly not right away, but … in the longer run. In the longer run, ideas can change.
LATER: The Cobden Centre blog now has a more user friendly version of Steve Baker’s words, here.
The Prime Minister of China has just been on the television news (more on the story here) telling “Britain” (by which he seems to mean the British government) not to indulge in “finger pointing” about China’s human rights record. He loves Shakespeare, he said. Do any of China’s critics know anything about Chinese literature?
It’s an interesting idea, that you need to acquire a love of Chinese literature before you can reasonably complain about circumstances like this (just lately linked to by Instapundit):
… Workers complained they were forced to stand during 12-hour shifts with only two toilet breaks, forbidden to drink water while on the job.
They also charged that the factory, operated by Simone Ltd., was feeding them blackened rice and other substandard food, for which deductions were made from their wages. “The Korean management treats us less than human beings,” said one worker. “The male managers walk into female toilets any time they please; we can’t contain our anger any more.” …
But it is not enough of an explanation of such events to say that the people of Guangdong don’t like being horribly treated. My question is: how come they now feel able to be so angry? I mean, it’s not like they have never been maltreated before.
Answer:
Long-term social trends and the problems of authoritarian rule explain much of the restiveness, but there is another principal reason. Employees these days have much more bargaining power. Back at the Simone factory in Panyu, management said it would fire those who did not return to work. That threat used to be effective, but not now.
Why not? For several years, Guangdong has been short of help. Some residents have become relatively well-off and no longer need mind-dulling employment in factories, something evident in Shenzhen, the booming city bordering even-more-prosperous Hong Kong.
It sounds as if finger pointing by the likes of David Cameron won’t be necessary to make China’s bosses, political and economic, start to become a tiny bit nicer, year on year. Supply and demand, of and for labour, is now working that trick.
The Forbes piece, with its headline about “Conflict handbags”, implies that soon there may be calls for boycotts of handbags made in China. But is it not the willingness of richer people to buy such stuff that is bidding up the price of labour in China, and making such things as the denial of toilet breaks so unsustainable?
Meanwhile, where is the voracious demand for the services of Britain’s public sector workers, who are also threatening strike inaction? The government is going to stop! State teachers will stop teaching! Here is a case where a strike is being triggered by a fall in demand for the relevant labour. The paymaster is feeling the pinch, and wants to cut their pensions. I wonder what the Prime Minister of China thinks about that? Seriously, I would like to know this. Even better, I would like to see him doing some finger pointing. That would be a real laugh.
I don’t know how many illusions Britain’s state pen-pushers and button-pushers have about how loved they are by the rest of us. When we encounter them we tend not to discuss any feelings of rage towards them that we may be engulfed by, which is all part of why we often get so enraged with them. On the other hand, they talk about the “front line” services that they supply, like they know they are in a war, rather than serving anyone besides their bosses. Their calculation has to be that the government needs them, in order for the government to go on being the government. But, the threat by them to stop the government … spending money, won’t necessarily come over as much of a threat to the nation as a whole.
But those state teachers might also want to be a bit careful. If they go on strike too enthusiastically, they might find that people might work out how to get along okay without them, and maybe with humiliating speed.
It has emerged that the Provisional IRA, rather than its deniable offshoot the South Armagh Republican Action Force, was responsible for the 1976 Kingsmills Massacre. If you do not know about that event, the grim story is here.
On 5 January 1976, the 10 textile workers were travelling home from work in the dark and rain on a minibus in the heart of rural County Armagh.
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A man asked their religions. There was only one Catholic left on the bus. He was identified and ordered away from his Protestant work mates. He was able to run off.
The lead gunman spoke one other word – “Right” – and the shooting began.
Mr Black was the only one to survive.
It seems almost indecent to let such an event be the starting point for a more general line of thought, but that is the way the mind works sometimes.
I had remembered the Kingsmills massacre. The last question put to the men and the awful choice of what to answer when you did not know whether the terrorists asking were Loyalist or Republican had stuck in my mind. Today I have advanced a little further in knowledge: I now know that analysis of the guns used confirms that it most likely was the IRA after all. The thing is, though, that my level of knowledge, which I tend to think of as average, is actually way above average. I have known for three decades that this massacre occurred. I knew that a few days previously five Catholics had been murdered and that the Kingsmills massacre was carried out in reprisal for this. And here’s the point, I know that there are Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, Republicans and Loyalists, and could give you a basic account of which side is which and how that situation came to be.
My own background is Irish Catholic. My family loathed the IRA. So I grew up paying a slightly above average amount of attention to Northern Ireland and I noticed over the years that plenty of people in the world literally did not know that there were any Protestants there. These people thought that that it was a case of “the English” occupying Ireland. Partisans on the Republican side also spoke thus, but selective rather than complete ignorance was their problem, as it was for partisans on the Loyalist side. The way in which those soaked in the history of a conflict can blank out the other side and talk of “the people” when they mean “our people” is tragic but a quite different phenomenon from that of ordinarily well educated members of society who simply have no idea – but not, alas, no opinion.
I have explained the existence of a Protestant population in bad French and worse Italian. I remember reading of angry editorials in American newspapers of thirty years ago that appeared to be unaware that the Republic of Ireland was an independent state. Colonel Gaddafi of Libya – now there’s a name from the past, wonder what happened to him? – at one time was visited by a delegation of Protestant paramilitaries who convinced him that this was not a straightforward anti-Imperialist struggle and got him to cease sending arms to the IRA.
I think a few of the commenters to this article still literally do not know of the existence of the Protestant population. If they do know of it, they ain’t showing it.
The ignorance that is rational for individuals can do great harm.
What are your experiences of spectacular historical ignorance? What effect does that ignorance have? To count, examples should not be the ignorance of the illiterate and semi-literate. There are millions on Earth who do not know the world is round. That is sad but not interesting. What is sad but interesting is the state of those for whom some basic historical fact is an “unknown unknown”, to use Rumsfeld’s formulation.
On second thoughts, why confine ourselves to history? A Scottish friend of mine relates that some of people she talks to in her part of the world literally think that the financial crisis of 2008 arose because bankers took “all the money” for bonuses. They think the government could get all the money back and make everything OK again, had it but the willpower. Discussing the matter, she modified that slightly, and said that if these friends and acquaintances were ever to articulate the idea I have just described they would probably see that it could not be correct, but they never have articulated it. This is in a Labour-voting but by no means deprived area near Glasgow, but I would not bet on the proportion of people thinking thus in my Tory part of Essex being much different, for all that ‘banksters’ keep the local economy going.
These holes in peoples’ knowledge will have their effect in the end. One could call it trickle-up ignorance.
Ever before I wrote this, I was on the lookout for Fixed Quantity Of… theories, and even more since then. Usually these theories are fallacies. Often, changing how something is done, and in particular changing the rules or the overall setting within which something is done can quite dramatically change, for the better or for the worse, both the quantity and the quality of whatever is being argued about.
Here is another such theory/fallacy, the Fixed Quantity of Education fallacy. Toby Young takes aim at it here. He and some friends of his are setting up a “free school”. Their critics in the state education sector object, because this new school will suck educational excellence out of their schools and make it available only to a privileged few.
In particular, it is said that this new school will draw middle class children away from state schools, to the educational detriment of these schools. State educators who talk like this sometimes make it sound as if most of the good teaching that goes on in their schools is done by middle class children rather than by educationally expert adults. Perhaps they have a point.
But the amount of satisfactory educating going on is very variable, depending on how relaxed or restrictive are the rules about how it may be done and who may do it. (For instance, if it were forbidden for parents to educate their children at home, that would, I believe, sharply diminish the supply of good education.) Toby Young says that the real reason the detractors of the educational venture he favours are so vocal is that they fear being shown up as bad educators, by a new school that creates a vast new surge of educational excellence, thereby proving that they could be doing this too. No upper limit on the total amount of available education is stopping them, only their own stupid educational ideas and habits. I am sure that he has a point.
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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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