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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The dependably dismal Archbishop of Canterbury, a man who thinks his god favours a massive force backed regulatory state which takes one person’s wealth implicitly at gunpoint and gives it to someone else, get a well phrased hammering by Graeme Archer:
It is obscene, Dr Williams, that some people choose not to work, and are better off as a consequence than those who do not make such a choice. Such people are less deserving than others. If there are no jobs available, what are all these Polish men doing on this bus, at 6.30am? They deserve more than to be viewed as taxable cart-horses.
And you? On an average salary? Trying to raise a child and thinking about having another? Coming to the conclusion that you might be able to balance commuting against mortgage costs, if you moved to an unpopular area farther out than you’d like? It must be hard for multiple houseowners such as Mr Cruddas, or the Archbishop in his palace, to understand: this is life, for most of us. And we’re not fascists because we make a distinction between the deserving and the undeserving when we see where our tax is spent.
Read the whole thing. My only regret is Archer does not follow the moral argument to its logical conclusion.
I tend to have a “half empty” view of the world – but even I do not believe that the British population contains no pro freedom people. Indeed I believe that there are millions of pro freedom people in Britain – and basically the British book trade was telling us all to bugger off, that we were not welcome in the book shops.
Well we got the message – it is not all “the internet” that is the reason for the decline of the British book trade, basically they were telling non-socialists that our custom was not wanted.
– Paul Marks
As a BBC news announcer gave out the round of story headlines this morning on the television, I heard this particular classic of its type connected to this story about extremism and universities:
“Government money is no longer going to be given to Islamic extremists”.
First of all, there is, as readers of this blog know, no such thing as “government money”. All money spent by government is, despite what some might believe, owned by you, the taxpayer, or lent to it, by other people. Second, it is not just appalling that money levied on pain of imprisonment (taxes) is then transferred to people who want to impose a particular worldview on their fellows; it would be just as bad if the money were to be given to the forces of sweetness and light. No such groups, whether it be Islamic Jihad, The Women’s Institute or the Worshipful Company of Bald People, should receive a penny from the taxpayer. End of subject.
The ineffectiveness of modern government is a great blessing. It means that proposals like this – “Cameron-backed report to protect children from commercialisation” – will almost certainly come to very little.
For the record, like Tim Worstall, I think T-shirts for five year olds that read ‘Sexy Tart’ are not the most tasteful of fashion statements. My opinions are rather more hostile than that, as it happens. But my hostility to chav parents is mild compared to my hostility to the governing classes, who first bred the problem (by ensuring that two generations have grown up who had no need to be respectable), and now step forward to “solve” it by giving themselves more power.
Mercifully, the modern Big State is made of fat, not muscle. Listed below are the key proposals of this report, and next to each what will actually happen.
• Retailers to ensure magazines with sexualised images have modesty sleeves. Measurable, enforceable, provides work for council busybodies. Might happen.
• The Advertising Standards Authority to discourage placement of billboards near schools and nurseries. Discouraging noises will be made.
• Music videos to be sold with age ratings. Measurable, enforceable, work for busybodies. Will be about as effective as the age ratings for computer games and films. (I have nothing against manufacturers giving an age rating for a product voluntarily, by the way – but see the final sentence of this post about “voluntary” self-regulation.)
• Procedures to make it easier for parents to block adult and age restricted material on internet. Could be dangerous, since procedures to make it easier for parents to block adult material on the internet are necessarily also procedures to make it easier for governments to block any material on the internet – but fear not, they can’t afford the people who can write the program.
• Code of practice to be issued on child retailing. OMG, a code of practice!
• Define a child as 16 in all types of advertising regulation. Presumably they mean “under 16”. If the current regulation allows scope to define a child as “under 13” this might make a difference. Or it might not. Probably all concerned will work very hard to find all the clauses and sub-clauses in fifteen different laws that refer to this, harmonise them all, then sit back and contemplate the beautiful consistency of the result. No one else will notice.
• Advertising Standards Authority to do more to gauge parent’s views on advertising. Colourful website to be set up. Two comments will be left a week, in Chinese.
• Create a single website for parents to complain to regulators. Colourful website to be set up. 45,000 comments will be left a week, often in something resembling English. Government will promise to clear backlog by 2021.
• Change rules on nine o’clock television watershed to give priority to views of parents. Will be acclaimed by all until someone who is not a parent threatens to sue.
• Government to regulate after 18 months if progress insufficient. Although I do think it most unlikely that the government ever really will send out inspectors to measure the amount of black lace on pre-teen bras, I still find this type of sickly-sweet concealed threat, so common nowadays, nauseating. “Voluntary change is so much nicer, don’t you think? So much more meaningful. But, of course, if you don’t change voluntarily…” It always reminds me of Dolores Umbridge early in her career.
Never mind he is debasing the currency and starting us on the road to runaway inflation, is functionally indistinguishable from Tony Blair and his ‘savage cuts’ are a fiction simply parroted by a mainstream media seeming unable to do simple math… he has ‘Ease and authority’
Well, phew, good to know! I guess we’ll be ok then!
– Perry de Havilland commenting on a Telegraph blog article claiming that “Ease and authority make David Cameron hard to beat“
… no, I am not talking about his, er, other talents but rather the clarity of his economic analysis…
Ladies and gentlemen, Guido presents the Great Inflation Swindle, we have just seen the second-biggest one-month increase on record and a record high in core CPI yet the Governor of the Bank of England has told us for 3 years inflation was a blip and that the real danger was deflation. It was a deliberate lie to excuse the most reckless monetary loosening since… well actually monetary policy has been too loose globally since back to 1998 when Greenspan “saved the world” after Long Term Capital’s financial theory geeks had a close encounter of the reality kind. The loosening up of monetary policy to smooth the aftermath of that hedge fund collapse told financial risk takers to rack up the risk because central banks would step in if you got in to trouble. Everyone was “too big to fail”. Central bankers turned capitalism from a system of profit and loss into a system of private profits and socialised losses. Taxpayers had their chips put on the gambling table without even being asked.
Read the whole thing.
The Business Secretary, and member of the Liberal Democrat Party, Vincent Cable, likes to let us know he supposedly predicted the recent credit crunch (I am not sure he did, actually), and still manages to be presented as a sage voice on current affairs. Never mind that many of his views are nonsense.
Anyway, the Daily Mash satirical website has nailed him.
Here is one of those quotes where you add “read the whole thing”:
But next time you are told that Osborne is imposing savage, reckless cuts on the UK, remember that the figures tell a different story. So far, spending is still going up. The plan is for total spending to go up in cash terms overall this financial year and to fall by 0.6 per cent in real terms (the measure that really matters). This will hurt, especially given that debt interest payments are soaring, reducing the funds available for public services by a lot more than the 0.6 per cent overall cut. But this should also be put into context. Barack Obama, who was in London yesterday, wants to cut public spending by 3.8 per cent next year, more than the 3.7 per cent pencilled in over four years by Osborne. In other words, Obama’s cuts – which many in the US want to make even larger – are four times larger than the average annual cuts proposed by slowcoach Osborne.
So it is no wonder really that the UK’s credit rating was downgraded yesterday by (wait for it) Chinese rating agency Dagong, which cut the UK by one notch to A+, from AA-, and placed it on a negative outlook. You may snigger – but unless the UK is able to deliver on its fiscal austerity not just this year but for the next four, our creditors will soon start panicking again, with good reason.
That’s Allister Heath, writing in the London giveaway newspaper, City A.M., which he edits. His point being that the journey in question has only just begun.
Read the whole thing. The above quote comes at the end. Before that come a few of the facts and the figures.
I suppose the optimistic take on all this is that you can’t wrench a graph that is going up onto a downward path, just like that. But how much wrenching is actually going on?
So, Ken Clarke hamfistedly but correctly says there are degrees of seriousness in rape and the law reflects this – and causes great outrage. Not just from the avowedly feminist Guardian either. The Sun says he’s a danger to women, no less.
Interestingly, both the the Guardian’s and the Sun’s commenters seem to take a more nuanced view than their respective papers. As they should. Clarke was attempting to make a valid distinction. Sure, he messed it up, particularly when he appeared to confuse date rape and statutory rape, but of course there are degrees of seriousness in rape as in any other crime. To say that is not to say that any form of rape is trivial. Whoopi Goldberg’s much derided comment that Roman Polanksi was not guilty of “rape rape” was not outrageous because she attempted to distinguish between statutory and actual rape, but because Polanski had committed rape rape.
It distresses me that so many of those who seek to help to rape victims seem to act all the time as if they were a politician on the radio. By this I mean that they have always ready in their heads one idea, one sound bite, that they must express. Nothing must detract from that message; no ifs, no buts, no side issues. I agree entirely with the One Idea in this case: all rape is serious. But when one sees what trouble a real politician on the radio got into for merely touching upon the reasons for a sliding scale of sentences one also sees why most politicians try so hard to stick with the pre-prepared One Idea. Meanwhile Lara Williams in the Guardian (linked to above), a woman whose real-life experience of helping rape victims would lead one to hope that her views were rooted in observation, comes out with the sort of mindlessly simplified slogans that have given politicians a bad name:
Through distinguishing “serious” and “less serious” rape, Clarke assumed a perverse gradient of suffering, a warped taxonomy of perceived victimisation.
No one actually believes that. If called upon in court to state what impact a particular rape had had on a particular victim, I have no doubt that this writer would recoil in horror from saying, “Oh, the usual. All rapes have the same impact. All rapes are equally bad.” Yet that is the logical implication of what she has written. She is not the only such commenter. It is sad to see obviously intelligent and compassionate people with so little faith in the public that they make themselves believe that the only way to put forward a true idea – all rape is bad – is to coarsen it into falsehood.
We seem to be having quite a lot of referendums at the moment in the UK and Europe. As we might note with a sort of grim amusement, the largest recent ones – on the EU Constitution – were airily ignored with customary insouciance by the EU political elites, and therefore fill many people will understandable cynicism. Over at the EU Referendum blog there is a long item about protest movements, violence, referendums and political change. I may have more to say when I have the time to study it. It looks a good piece, and I recommend it.
Talking of protests, here is a nice collection of photos of recent “rally against debt” held in central London a few days ago, as taken by our own Brian Micklethwait.
Owing to my habit of listening to the BBC radio news at 9 a.m. on Saturday morning, on account of me liking to record CD Review, I just heard about this:
The heads of 15 green campaign groups have written to the prime minister warning the government is in danger of losing its way on environmental policy.
I do hope so.
The letter says the coalition should promote a green economy with “urgency and resolve” if it is to follow its vow to be the “greenest government ever”.
The groups include Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the RSPB.
Downing Street says it stands by its record of protecting the environment and delivering a low carbon economy.
A year ago, David Cameron said the environment would be a top priority.
I love the phrase “a top priority”, in particular the “a”. And when a government says that it “stands by its record”, that often means that it realises that it’s a stupid record and is about to attempt a somewhat different record. It will never apologise for past errors, but is now wanting to make different errors, now that the political wind has altered somewhat. It was trying to get elected. Now, it is trying to at least to appear to balance the books that the election has placed in front of it.
David Cameron is the sort of politician who cannot be relied upon even to break a “vow”, but this news sounds, if not good, then at least like an improvement. There has been quite a little furry of news lately to the effect that his government is starting to have doubts about its electoral promise to wreck the British economy in the name of junk science, by making modern life illegal. Given that the British economy is already being wrecked in the service of junk money, I guess they are starting to reckon that one self-administered catastrophe is probably as much as the country can take just now.
Presumably similar calculations are going on in all other countries. Again, I hope so.
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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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