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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Which they probably won’t now take, but later they may get the point.
I recall how, some time in the early 1980s, I had a run-in with a British Post Office worker.
I had this package which I wanted the Post Office to, you know, post to someone. So I wrapped it up and took it to the Post Office.
But it turned out that it was just that little bit too big for the hole that this Post Office worker wanted to put it into.
“Look”, he said, as if instructing a small and inattentive boy. “It’s too big to go in,” said he. “Can’t you see that?” He had a point, sort of. It really wasn’t hard to see, now. Big package. Slightly smaller hole. As we would say now: simples. And yes indeed, I could see that now. But when I was wrapping up the package at the bookshop I was then working in, I had no idea about the hole I would later have to stuff the package into. I felt like hitting the Post Office worker with the package, or at the very least explaining all this, in an angry tone.
But, wisely, I did not do this. Instead, all forced charm and bogus ingratiation, I acknowledged the abjectness of my obviously foolish miscalculation, and apologised deeply. What had I been thinking? Then, I tried to persuade him to think of some other procedure to enable the Post Office to post my package, and eventually, after some further instruction of me concerning my sloppy and foolish ways, he did agree to accept the package, despite its obvious failure to fit into his hole. He took the package and disappeared in a self-important manner to some room in the back of the Post Office. I went back to my bookshop, muttering curses to myself and speculating about the hole I would really have liked to shove my package into.
Some little while later, I observed, on the television, some Post Office workers who were engaged in a fight of some kind against our then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. Mrs Thatcher wanted to do something or other to the Post Office that the Post Office workers were angry about. It would cause chaos, they said, and make the Post Office worse, they said, and more expensive, as it quite possibly would, and quite possibly did. But because these Post Office workers were dealing, not with defenceless little me, but with Margaret Thatcher on the rampage, they were the ones now on the defensive. She wasn’t trying to persuade them of anything. She was simply telling them. They were trying to persuade her to do things differently.
To this end, the Post Office workers were appealing for public support.
They thought they would get it, effortlessly. From the way they were talking on the television, you would think that The Public were about to rise up in a great tidal wave and overwhelm the Prime Minister with their hatred of her (then as now quite widespread) and their love for the workers of the Post Office and their admiration for their extreme wisdom and obligingness.
But The Public all did as I did. We just sat there, saying: “You bastards may well be right that Maggie T’s plan will harm the Post Office, but her plan does at least have one huge plus. You hate it! It will make you suffer! You think we will help you stop it. Dream on, you tyrannical, supercilious bastards.” The great public silence that greeted the Post Office workers, instead of the great wave of support that they had been counting on, must have shocked them deeply. Important silences, huge non-events, are not usually front page news. But I noticed, and others surely did too. I wondered what Mr Your-Package-Is-Too-Big My-Hole-Is-Too-Small was thinking and feeling about it all. I hoped he was suffering.
Those Post Office workers had totally misunderstood that package-in-the-hole moment that I had had with one of them, and millions upon millions of other moments like it, stretching back through the decades. They, the Postal Workers, imagined that at the end of such moments, The Public walked away full of love and gratitude for the Postal Workers. But actually, we walked away full of pent-up rage. We had had to force ourselves to fake love and gratitude, and hated the Postal Workers all the more because of this. They had believed our performances. They really thought that we really were full of love and gratitude for them. Big mistake. Huge mistake.
Come the day when the tables were turned by a politician who was aggregating all our rage into a force majeure moment which left them trying to persuade her to do what they wanted, they were helpless.
All of which was brought on by this Instapundit posting about how angry the American Public now feels about American public sector workers of various kinds.
I now feel much better. Also, I wonder if blogs will make a difference to this kind of thing. Will blogs, and especially blog comments, tell America’s public sector trade unionists to back off gracefully, the way no blogger or blog-commenter could tell our unions circa 1984? They surely will. They surely are. But will they listen? Will they get it? It will be interesting to see.
Imagine you are walking down the street and a man in a suit walks up to you holding a large cudgel…
“Excuse me,” he says, “I have seen you walk down this street on a daily basis wearing a tee-shirt and in future I would like you to wear a suit and tie to raise the tone of the neighbourhood.”
“Er, no,” you reply, “I am happy dressed the way I am.”
“I see,” the man replies, “well I would rather not have to threaten to hit you with this cudgel if you do not do what I say so I want you to voluntarily agree to wear a suit and tie.”
“But you are threatening to hit me with that cudgel!” you point out.
“No,” he says, “I will only threaten to hit you with this cudgel if you don’t do what I want voluntarily.”
This statement of the bleedin’ obvious by me was brought on this sadly typical piece of ‘press release’ style journalism:
The three voluntary “responsibility deals” agreed with the food industry are aimed at helping the public to eat more healthily, in a drive to tackle the growing problem of obesity among both adults and children. Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, believes that firms will be more likely to set ambitious targets for themselves if they are negotiated on a voluntary basis. Rather than a “nanny state” approach, he is keen to arm the public with the tools they need to cope in an “obesogenic environment,” where people are bombarded with adverts for unhealthy food.
If firms break their promises, the Government will however consider taking compulsory measures.
So rather than writing an article that explains the dynamic of what is going on here, Rosa Prince in effect just delivers a government press release complete with the approved spin… ‘voluntary’… ‘not nanny state’…
Why exactly does The Telegraph need to have a ‘political correspondent’ at all rather than just republishing whatever the government wishes? What value is Rosa Prince actually adding here? The fact that these food industry groups agreed to do something under threat of compulsory measures means that this clearly is a prime example of the ‘Nanny State’ in action… and moreover if there is an explicit threat of legal coercion, how is this in any meaningful sense ‘voluntary’?
… Kenneth Clarke invariably supports anything with “european” in front of it. If they re-named ebola virus “european virus”, I expect he’d declare himself in favour of that, too.
– Owen Morgan commenting on James Kirkup’s Daily Telegraph blog
I am neither advertising nor criticising this site. The first I heard of it was a few minutes ago, in a comment by someone calling themselves “scrivens” to a Telegraph article called The Grievance Industry. I do not know any more about it than what it says. I just find its existence very, very interesting, as an example of a modern solution to a modern problem.
http://www.serial-litigants.com
Searching for an opposing party can be an expensive and time consuming process as there is no readily accessible database of employment tribunal decisions. Serial-litigants tend to benefit from anonymity.
This is where our service can be of benefit to parties. By searching, and collecting, this information we allow parties, and their lawyers, to check if an opposing party is a serial-litigant. Armed with information about other claims, the opportunities for achieving a successful outcome (or even a strike-out without a full cost hearing) can be greatly increased. In our experience some serial-litigants simply drop their case once confronted with a clear picture of their claims.
These guys charge £99 to do a search of employment tribunal decisions for you, temporarily discounted to £50.That is practically free in comparison to the cost of defending – let alone losing – a case at an employment tribunal. But practically free is not actually free. I wonder if it would be possible within the laws of libel to do something similar that was both open to public view and literally free to use, because done by volunteer labour, in the manner of fakecharities.org (this blog, passim)? I do not say that would be better than a for-profit service such as this; on the contrary my instincts are that a leavening of money in this type of proceeding keeps the cranks at bay. But what an interesting development such a website would be. Of course the people who could be bothered to spend their own time to track down serial litigants for public exposure would be those who had been stung by them, or thought they had.
I know this kind of thing has long been known about and talked about, but the single thing that I most like about David Cameron’s speech about multiculturalism, terrorism, and so on, which he gave in Munich on Saturday, is that I can read it, in its entirety. I don’t have to rely on a journalist, however conscientious he may or may not have tried to be, to pass on to me whatever small fragments of the speech he considers to be significant, along with hostile reactions to such fragments that he has got or read from various people with axes to grind, many of these reactions having probably been supplied by people who haven’t actually heard or read the original speech and are only going on what the journalist tells them it said. And then somebody else gets angry about one of these critical reactions, and it all spirals away from anything that actually got said in the original speech. And the bloke who gave the original speech says to himself: why do I bother? Time was when that kind of thing was all that most people had to go on. But those days are now long gone. Good riddance. Disintermediation, I think this is called.
As I say, hardly a blindingly original observation, but in the matter of this speech, I have never before felt this internet-induced improvement so strongly. The subject matter of Cameron’s speech is a minefield. Although I do not agree with everything that he said (see below), I am glad that he is at least talking about this stuff, at a time when many of our more thoughtful political leaders are scared to. The existence of the internet is the difference between a much-overdue, semi-intelligent public conversation about these vexed issues and mere mudslinging.
So, given that I am able to read it all, what did I make of it? Here are a few early thoughts.
One of Cameron’s most important points is that insofar as “multiculturalism” means double standards in how Muslims are treated by the British law, them being allowed to behave far worse than us indigenous ones, then multiculturalism is a bad idea. It is also a bad idea if it involves state support and encouragement for groups which encourage terrorism. Well said, and about time too.
He makes many other points, which I agree with rather less. He uses, for instance, the now established habit of curtailing the freedom of speech of racists and fascists to justify further curtailments of free speech, for Muslims. But if we all get to hear what they all have to say, fascists, Muslims, (fascist Muslims?), then we can take issue with such notions. And whenever something nasty happens that some nasty has said should happen, the police will at least know where to start looking. Free speech, quite aside from being a human right and everything, is actually quite a practical policy for maintaining civil peace. It helps a lot that most of us think that merely saying nasty things shouldn’t be a crime, and that in a world where people can say pretty much what they like, the police must confine themselves to chasing after those who actually do nasty things.
I also take issue with the way that Cameron muddles together two distinct, although related ideas. On the one hand there is the idea that Islam itself is a problem, rather than just “Islamic extremism”. And then there is the further idea that therefore Muslims ought to be deported, forbidden from speaking their minds, from building mosques, and generally from going around being Muslims. He opposes the second idea, but makes it seem like that necessarily means opposing the first idea also. I support the first idea, but not the second. I definitely think that Islam itself is a problem, but I believe that the answer (see my previous paragraph) is to argue with it, to tell it that it is a problem and why it is a problem, and to invite people who are wondering about it to leave or stay away from it, rather than stick with it or join it. If you must be a believer in something religious, let that religion be something like Christianity rather than Islam, because Christianity, although at least as odd from the merely is-it-true? point of view is, at the moment, so very much nicer than Islam.
Everything I observe in the reactions of the nastier kinds of Muslim tells me that they are acutely sensitive to such arguments, to the point where they would very much like such arguments to be banned, whether such arguments include deportation demands, mosque-banning and so forth, or not. To me, Cameron’s thinking says, first, that banning free expression for racists and fascists is absolutely fine, and that therefore banning free speech for “Islamic extremists” is fine also. But what next? Banning people from even saying (as I do not say) that Muslims should be deported and mosque-building banned? Or even from saying (as I do say) that Islam itself is a disgusting and evil body of thought and that the only absolutely morally correct thing to do if you are a Muslim is to damn well stop being a Muslim?
Which means that I was disappointed, but not surprised, that Cameron made no mention of the right of a person to stop being a Muslim, without being subjected to death threats and worse. Disappointed, but not surprised. For Cameron, being a “devout Muslim” (as opposed to an extreme Islamist) is more than sufficient, as far as he is concerned. As Prime Minister, he is not in the business of wanting anyone to convert this way or that, other than in the very feeble sense of wanting people to vote for him and for his political party. I see that. But he ought, I think to be ready to defend the rights of those who really do want to convert, from anything to anything else, and in particular out of Islam. Cameron called for “muscular liberalism”. So, when push next comes to shove in the form of a big ruckus (will this be that?) concerning someone who has stopped being a Muslim, will Cameron apply a dose of muscular liberalism to that argument, to allow such a person to believe whatever they want to believe, and to be as public as they like about it?
I confess that the phrase “muscular liberalism” did appeal to me when I first read it, and no doubt this phrase has tested positive with the focus groups. But what exactly will it mean in reality? Might it mutate into the government telling people like me that we can’t be rude about devout, law-abiding Muslims and the things that such people say they believe in? (“Muscular liberalism” in the USA would be a terrifying idea.) I am sure that many Muslims already fear – are being encouraged by each other to fear – that it may degenerate into a mere excuse for Muslim bashing, in the physical and wrong sense, by the government and its employees, and by many others. Perhaps (actually I’m inclined, as I read this through before posting it, to make that: probably), as we all challenge the phrase from our various different positions, muscular liberalism will degenerate into one of those mush phrases that mean whatever anyone listening wants it to mean, and then by and by, whatever the powers that be want it to mean. In other words it may degenerate into meaning nothing, just like the words “Big Society” have, in the minds of nearly everyone I meet or read.
But I want to end where I began, with the pleasure I feel that I and all others who choose to comment on this speech, here or anywhere else, are at least able, if we want to, to read the speech itself. Last night, for example, at the Christian Michel evening that I alluded to in an earlier posting, I got talking with an acquaintance about Cameron’s speech. After he had begun to opine about it, rather intelligently, I asked him: Have you actually read the speech? Yes, he said. Me too, I said. This exchange pleased me then and it pleases me still.
If you don’t believe me, read the comments to this, this, this, or this or… do your own search of the archives for more. Note which comments get hundreds of recommendations, and which few or none.
OK, online comments are susceptible to being gamed in various ways. Do not look for statistically representative samples there. Still, if that is what the Guardian is like, just imagine what the Mail is like. (Upon inspection, slightly less angry, although it is difficult to judge.)
It did not used to be like this.
Within a few weeks of moving to my present home seventeen years ago someone mentioned that gypsies – or travellers, people made no distinction then and I will not now delve into the distinctions between Roma, Sinti, or English and Irish travellers – were camped on a nearby field. My neighbours then were a little dubious but not that bothered. I, being new, was more interested in hearing about the gypsies than the people telling me were in telling me. Nowadays? Instant, intense suspicion.
A decade back I hardly ever read about travellers or gypsies in the papers. Nowadays – well, looking at the links above, the Guardian mentioned them on February 5th, January 30th and January 21st.
Was the change in the gypsies themselves? Partly. “Welfare” has continued its steady work of ruin. I read a very fine article in the Telegraph about a decade ago which I cannot now find. It described with sadness rather than hostility how, although gypsies had lived half outside the law since time immemorial, there had at one time been countervailing incentives to build relationships of trust with settled people. The gypsies had regular circuits and seasonal work. They needed pitches, employment and customers. They needed people to remember them from last time as good workers and fair dealers. Welfare has eroded that, and their former means of making a living have gone the way of the cart horse and the tin bucket. Nor is the difficulty just that technology has moved on, it is also that the bureaucratic net of form-filling and taxes has tightened so that the casual jobs they once could do within the law must now be done outside it. As in the drugs trade, in illegal trade in labour where there can be no redress for swindling on either side, such swindling is commonplace.
But I really don’t think it is the gypsies themselves who have changed so much. What has changed in the last few years is that they have become a state-protected group. God help them. State protection is better than state persecution as cancer is better than a knife in the ribs. The scapegoat of the Bible was symbolically loaded with the sins of the people and driven out to starve in the wilderness. The anti-scapegoat of our times is symbolically bedecked with the conspicuous virtue and tolerance of the elite. Someone is set to feed it scraps so that it stays near to the common people, that their lack of virtue and tolerance may be made clear to them.
Some years ago a group of gypsies or travellers broke in and spent some time on land belonging to some people I know. They did damage, most as an accidental side effect of having broken in and lived there, and some for the hell of it, as far as anyone could tell. When hearing about this from several speakers, I noticed an interesting thing. The voices telling of the damage done and what it would cost to repair were annoyed but resigned. The real venom came into their voices when they described the police response, or rather the lack of it. The cops had hummed and hawed and then intimated that ejecting the trespassers was all too much of a political hot potato. If you want to poison a human soul with racial hatred, just do that. Tell him that the laws that burden him do not apply to them. The author of the first Guardian article to which I linked pretends in hope that we still romanticise gypsies; he cites modern authors of gypsy memoirs and George Borrow’s Lavengro and other works (here’s a fascinating snippet from Borrow on gypsy names). The commenters are not interested. What they want to talk about is planning permission: how come they need it and travellers do not. And what enemy of the gypsies could have done them as much harm as whoever thought up this?
I wanted to pass this on to those who might be interested because the Libertarian Alliance, founded by the late Chris R Tame three decades ago, is an organisation through which I got to meet many people, some of whom are now involved in the Samizdata blog, such as Brian Micklethwait, Perry de Havilland and others. This is an interesting development involving Tim Evans, the LA president since Chris’ death five years ago:
After twenty-five enjoyable years of working with the Libertarian Alliance and five as its President Dr. Tim Evans said today that it is now the right time for him to move on from the organisation.”
“I leave the organisation knowing that the Libertarian Alliance has achieved amazing things. Today, the LA is in financial rude health as never before. Its conferences, lectures and seminars are second to none and it freely makes available online 1,000 diverse and scholarly classical liberal and libertarian publications. Moreover, it provides a focal point and network for hundreds of libertarians both in this country and further afield who seek radical free market ideas and debate.”
“As Chief Executive of The Cobden Centre, a Consultant Director at the Adam Smith Institute, Chairman of the Economic Policy Centre, Chairman of Global Health Futures Ltd – not to mention concluding my studies for an MBA – I have decided to refocus my workload. Wanting in particular to spend more time with my family, I wish the LA and its supporters well for the future. For me, libertarianism has always been at its best when it is positive in outlook, methodologically individualist and it seeks to engage and persuade people from many different backgrounds and outlooks. I wish Dr. Sean Gabb, the Committee, and everyone else associated with the organisation the very best for the future.”
“Just before the organisation’s founder and director Dr. Chris Tame died five years ago Sean and I promised him that we would strive to strengthen and grow the organisation. Today, I leave the Presidency knowing that this objective has been fulfilled. I am reassured that the LA now has the potential to further build upon its record of success.”
I won’t presume to speak for Tim, or for Sean Gabb, whom I have known and regarded as friends for a quarter of a century, but this is clearly sad news, even though Tim’s reasons make plenty of sense. I would add one thing that has concerned me about the LA in recent years, which is that much of its public pronouncements, especially by Sean, have tended to focus on a lot of what I would call the “isolationist/nationalist” side of the street, whereas I know that Tim Evans is not really cut from the same ideological cloth. Tim, for example, radiates optimism and enjoyment of the modern world; Sean, as he’d be the first to tell you, is almost blackly pessimistic (although he seems to enjoy it!), and is also a fierce cultural conservative.
Then again, the LA is an organisation that deliberately stresses that it is a broad church and does not insist on any kind of hard “line” on certain issues. I hope that remains the case.
For my part, I really hope that the LA gets less fixated with what I would call “nation-state” issues, which are not always congruent with issues of liberty, or tilting at absurd historical windmills.
“Will the courts protect charities?” wails the Guardian.
Good heavens, thought I, what is this villainous threat to the Cats’ Protection League and the Distressed Gentlefolk’s Aid Association that requires the courts to protect them? And how can it be that the ability or desire of the courts to protect charities, repositories of all that is best and sweetest in this land of Albion, is even in doubt?
Trembling, I read on…
Will the courts protect charities
Yes, we already had that bit in the headline –
against cuts?
Huh? What difference do government cuts make to the cats and the gentlefolk?
Late last Friday afternoon a judge quashed a drastic programme of local authority grant reductions. This would have lopped a £10m slice from a budget which funds around 400 London-based charities and community groups.
Aaah, I see. By charities, the Guardian means “charities”. By “protect” it means “stop the elected government from doing what it was elected to do, namely cut the deficit.”
You can read the rest of the article by clicking the link at the top of the page. For those strapped for time here is a summary:
… process of consultation was flawed and unlawful … failed to meet its legal equalities duties … entire process would have to be re-run. … one of the threatened charities, Roma Support Group … current economic climate … properly assessed for their gender, disability and race equality impacts … hundreds of voluntary sector groups and tens of thousands of members of the public who would be affected … wibble … Labour-led, Tory-supported London Councils has already scaled down its cuts package … wibble wibble … proceeding with even greater cuts… Framework Housing Association … judicial review … Supporting People funding programme wibble … without proper consultation … wibble wibble … co-ordinated response to the identified needs of the poorest Londoners. Wibble! Charities funded under the scheme include homelessness groups, wibble legal and wibble centres, crime prevention charities, and cultural access wibble such as theatre companies.
Strange to see an article like this in what is still sometimes called the Torygraph:
Mortgage lenders penalising couples with children
Mortgage lenders are penalising home owners with children by reducing the amount they can borrow. The crackdown could potentially prevent them from switching to cheaper deals when interest rates rise.
Many banks and building societies have tightened their affordability criteria in light of the Financial Services Authority’s post-credit-crunch review of the mortgage market. But it has emerged that families with children are being hit hard.
Emphasis added by me. All the terms emphasised relate to a metaphor of punishment. But it is not meant to depict just punishment; the author, Teresa Hunter, apparently feels that parents who are lent less money than non-parents are having something unfair done to them. This is reinforced by having the first person quoted in the piece as saying:
“It is absolutely unfair to penalise people with children by reducing their capacity to borrow compared with a single person or a childless couple.”
The whole story is presented as being one of discrimination akin to racial discrimination. Did the author notice that there was a little financial unpleasantness in 2008 that had something to do with indiscriminate lending? Does she feel that encouraging people to to borrow more than they can afford is doing them any favours? Has she not noticed that children cost money?
A rat has been photographed outside 10 Downing Street. Presumably the only thing that makes this news worthy is it was not exiting the building and getting into an official chauffeured government vehicle on its way to Parliament.
I reacted rather badly the other day to Baroness Warsi’s weird rant about ‘bigotry‘ towards Muslims but it is gratifying to see I was not the only one who her remarks rubbed the wrong way.
Warsi seems to be of the view that unless you have a positive view of Islam, it is not really acceptable for you to express your opinions in polite society even in private ‘around the dinner table’. That someone who is a member of the establishment in the UK could think that notion was going to fly is a measure of the disconnect between some people ‘at the top’ and us oiks out in the real world.
There was a time when the cry of liberals everywhere was that the State should keep out of the bedroom – no longer.
Andrew Brown of the Guardian has written an article entitled Why the Cornish hotel ruling should worry conservative Christians.
I think it should worry any person who in any aspect of his or her life is a minority or who might one day be part of a minority.
A law you like is passed; it coerces those you dislike. You rejoice, you “liberals”. But the wheel turns. You do not have to die old in order to live long enough to see what was once persecuted tolerated and what was once tolerated persecuted.
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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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