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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As the UK administration implodes, the sort of idiotic ideas that might once have been swept aside by a pliant media can be now guaranteed to get wide coverage. The Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, is obviously determined that Mr Brown’s fall from grace is swift and brutal. Oh but the voters are going to like this:
Islamic extremists could escape prosecution and instead receive therapy and counselling under new Government plans to “deradicalise” religious fanatics.
The Home Office is to announce an extra £12.5 million to support new initiatives to try to stop extremism spreading.
What, so being an Islamist is like being an alcoholic or crack addict. I am not sure how Muslims will react to the idea that the more extreme representatives of their faith are somehow mentally ill. In a way, the therapy culture undermines what ought to be the most important message of all: that we are rational, responsible beings, with free will, able to take the consequences of our behaviour. Islam means “submission”: to challenge that viewpoint does not involve putting some hate-filled fuckwit on a couch, but by advocating the values of reason and freedom without apology.
The idea that our tax pounds should be used in some daft attempt to “cure” Islamic fanatics is frankly laughable. It also shows how profoundly unserious this government is about the problem. What next, therapy for “extreme” Christians, Jews, atheists, Communists, Fascists, Jedi Knights (okay, that was meant as a joke), Jehovah’s Witnesses?
When Islamic extremists are caught for offences of violence or plotting terror, the correct object of public spending should be on things like these instead.
I am out of tune with the spirit of the age. My first reaction was to laugh out loud:
The grandson of prominent anti-gun campaigner Pat Regan has been arrested on suspicion of stabbing her to death.
– Yahoo/ITN News
It is not just the paradox. It is the way such an incident – horrific in reality though it no doubt is – puts the lie to all such sentimental campaigns.
Children are not angels corrupted by contact with mundane implements; they are social animals, small brutes that will grow into large brutes unless civilized. A civilized man ought to be able to carry a gun without offering to shoot anyone under any provocation short of violence offered. A brute will assault you with whatever comes to hand if he feels slighted, and the last thing society needs is for him to have is greater self-esteem. [(1) – (2)] Fetishising mere tools just further exculpates violent people in their own minds.
Am I too cynical, or too idealistic?
Via the Boing Boing website – is this superb picture. Enjoy.
I recently got round to reading Peter Oborne’s “The Triumph of The Political Class”, which I would tentatively rate as the most important book written about the state of British politics in recent years. His basic argument is that today’s political class has little experience of the real world outside the corridors of power, is drawn from an insular group of metropolitan folk who consider themselves superior to, and cut off from, the ordinary mass; it craves power for its own sake and for its monetary rewards, is corrupt, venal, obsessed by controlling the media, and has damaged and is damaging any institutions and practices – such as the old House of Lords or judiciary – that get in its way. Oborne argues his case with a tremendous passion and penetrating use of argument. At the end of the 334 pages of text one is left – which I think is the idea – feeling rather depressed. With good reason.
So why do I say that the book is incomplete? Well, for a start, Mr Oborne does not spend much time figuring out how the European Union and the growing centralisation of power in Brussels plays into all this. This strikes me as a bit of an oddity. Consider this: if we accept Mr Oborne’s idea that this class of people are determined to acquire power and wealth, why have they been so keen to transfer so much power to the EU? Sure, some of these politicians may have made the base calculation that they can feather their own nests very nicely in Brussels or Strasbourg, but for a lot of them, turning parliament into little more than a branch office of Brussels with a few perks is not much of an ambition. It is odd that he does not spend more time on this aspect of the question.
I also think that Mr Oborne’s attack on the mainstream media for getting too close to the established parties – especially Labour – is seriously undermined by his completely ignoring the role of modern electronic media, particularly the internet. He makes no mention of things like blogging whatever. Now, I do not think that the role of the web should be exaggerated, but surely, the role of blogs in digging into subjects left alone by the MSM has, at the margins, made a positive difference. Take the scandals that have been exposed by Guido Fawkes, for instance.
But perhaps the biggest mistake in the book is quite simply this: it is no good Mr Oborne or anyone else attacking such a political class unless they attack the fundamental problem at its root: Big Government. Remember, that this class is powerful because it has a large structure off which to live. Re-establishing some traditional checks and balances into public life may reduce some corruption and public venality, as Mr Oborne no doubt hopes, but it is only by cutting the state down to size that we will realistically starve the beast that feeds this class. As I have pointed out several times on this site, one of the most damaging things done by the current government was to have enabled a massive rise in the number of people employed directly and indirectly, by the state. The reversal of this process is, in my view, rather more important than wondering whether an MP is fiddling his expenses or having sex with his secretary.
Even so, I urge people to read this book if they want to get a good handle on the state of public life in the UK in the early 21st century.
A report by the right-leaning think tank Civitas states that police are now targeting small offences, and hence going after what the Telegraph dubs “middle class” folk, in a bid to meet UK government targets. As a result, more serious crimes, such as the recent spate of knife crimes, are not getting so much attention.
This is perhaps unsurprising. It is not just the obsession with targets that is causing this development. More profoundly, the police, as “public servants”, have few incentives to deliver what their paymasters – us – want. One of the arguments I hear for privatising the police is that it would force coppers to become rather more focused on dealing with serious crimes that have so alarmed the public in recent years. I read somewhere that there are now many more private sector security guards employed in the UK than there are police officers, although I cannot find the source. This is perhaps an example of the private sector reacting to meet a need. If this sort of trend continues, we can expect the growth of private security to continue.
My recent experience of being randomly searched under terrorism laws while driving out of London has certainly convinced me that the priorities of our police are seriously out of kilter with actual crime.
Boris Johnson, the new London mayor, has already decided it is time for some R&R and has gone on a yachting holiday in Turkey. Good for him. Even better still if he can properly sail the thing. I like to think that politicians have some abilities beyond pulling the levers of power, fiddling expenses and writing terrible memoirs. For all that I loathed the late Tory leader Edward Heath, the fact the he sailed in a number of major competitions, including the Fastnet, put him up a peg in my estimation.
What is it with people who want to complain that politicians take holidays? Take a look at this rather sulphorous leftwing site, full of bile at the very idea, unless it is two-week camping holiday in some crappy part of the UK. As a fan of small, restrained government, I think there is a lot to be said for encouraging the political classes to get as much down-time as possible. That way, they can do less damage. Ideally, of course, such holidays should be paid for out of their own resources and not from the taxpayer.
Political leaders of great talent have taken plenty of time off in the past, arguably to the benefit of their job and country. Sir Robert Peel enjoyed his trips to the Highlands of Scotland; Stanley Baldwin liked to relax in France. For a contrast, Gordon Brown has had hardly a day off since he was given the job, and look at what has happened to him.
In an ideal world, politicians would be on holiday 12 months a year.
Update: lest anyone suffer from the illusion that I think that Boris is going to be a good mayor, I agree with much of what the columnist Brendan O’Neill has to say over at Reason about Johnson. However, O’Neill’s argument would be a bit more persuasive if he was not, himself, a self-declared fan of Karl Marx, who is not exactly a poster child for individual liberty.
Greedy, greedy, lying, incompetent, untrustworthy, crooked bastards.
– From the first comment in response to Guido Fawkes‘s latest revelations about how much MPs are now deciding to pay themselves
This unintentionally hilarious news story at The Observer reveals a great deal about the mindset of the urban, ecologically aware types that write for that newspaper:
Soaring food prices are threatening to inflict widespread ecological damage on the countryside, as farmers abandon environmentally friendly schemes that have improved much of the landscape.
It is a matter of debate whether these schemes have improved or harmed the landscape: such an observation has as much to do with a certain aesthetic taste as anything else. For years, policymakers have thrown vast gobs of taxpayers’ money to discourage farmers, such as in my native Suffolk, from growing crops like wheat, barley, soybeans, beans and so on. Now that the price of wheat has skyrocketed, encouraged by such developments as biofuels and rapid growth in emerging market economies, the economics of “set aside”, as the daft policy is known, looks completely indefensible. So farmers are acting as entrepreneurs should in the face of rising prices for their produce: they are growing more crops. If that means that land that had been set aside for cute little meadows is now being ploughed up and sown with wheat, well, that is just too bad. Do the Observer journalists argue that there should not be some change in land usage at a time of rapidly rising food prices? There is no point in bashing the current government for such rising prices – I don’t think even the most fanatical Gordon Brown hater thinks he is to blame for this – if farmers are not allowed to exploit market forces in the way they should have been allowed to do all the way along.
For what it is worth, the Suffolk farmer’s son in me rather objects to the countryside being regarded by the Guardianista classes – many of whom have no idea about husbandry – as a glorified park for them to ramble around in. It is, as this article reminds us, primarily a place of work, where food is produced. It is sometimes useful to be reminded that the landscape has been moulded by the hand of Man. I personally rather like to see large, golden fields of wheat. But then I’m kind of strange in that way.
The Labour Party has suffered a crushing defeat in a by-election for one of its supposedly safe seats. The odds now must be rising that Gordon Brown will be challenged for leadership of the party. Having been given the job in a coronation last year rather than face a democratic election, his credibility is in shreds. Quite who would want to step up to challenge him is another matter. Labour looks to be headed for defeat at the next election, which must happen by 2010, and who wants to be the man or woman at the helm when or if that happens?
Watching the BBC television networks this morning, I see Labour folk blaming the government’s woes on the economy. This is pretty disengenuous. Yes, of course, the darkening economic situation is a worry for millions of people and Labour – which shamelessly tried to claim credit for the previous fat years – is now suffering from the effects of rising economic worries. But the reasons for the public anger go much deeper. There is a sense that this government is lazy, out of ideas, corrupt, incompetent.
I also like to think that the government’s assault on freedom, particularly civil liberties, might have something to do with the public anger, plus its shameful behaviour over the EU Constitution, sorry Treaty, being rammed through parliament in flagrant defiance of Labour’s previous election promises. It would be nice to imagine that authortarianism was a reason for hatred for this government.
Everyone has things that they would destroy them if they were publicised. I once orchestrated a coup in a small African country from a base in an extinct volcano with the aid of a lot of fit-birds in 1960’s specs and very short lab coats, holding clipboards for no apparent reason, whilst I stroked my Persian cat. That should never be revealed. Oh, bugger! Like all Bond villians I give it away towards the end.
I love that. Readers will recognise the inimitable prose style of regular Samizdata commenter NickM, who now writes regularly at this place. This is taken from an excellent attack on the idiotic efforts of UK police to prevent people from criticising Scientology. It shows how respect for freedom of speech – which must, by definition, include the right to offend and upset – is now under serious assault in this country.
Any attempt to censor criticism of belief systems is an outrage. So long as the critics do not try to violate the lives and property of the people they are criticisng, the law should stay well out of it.
Read the whole of Nick’s piece.
The Daily Telegraph, perhaps not surprisingly as this is not a flattering story for the current government, points out that official figures show that almost 2 million Britons have left the UK since 1997. However one tries to spin this, such an outflow of people is not exactly a ringing endorsement of government policy, although there has always been and I hope will remain a steady two-way flow of people to and from this island, if only as an expression of the understandable desire of people to live in new places, to strike out to make a new life and so forth. Naturally, much of the media focus will be on the reasons why people are leaving. This is well-trodden ground already (crime, tax, weather, cost of living, etc).
One factor that struck me was that 1.58 million foreigners resident in the UK left during the 1997-2006/7 period, which suggests that while millions of foreigners come to the country, many of them do not choose to stay for more than a few years. What counts of course is the net trend. During the period, 3.9 million people came to the UK, with 500,000 arriving in 2006 alone. The pace of inflow – and possibly outflow – seems to be speeding up.
As I learned on a previous posting about immigration and emigration, there is a tendency – even among generally liberal people – to treat the movement of people from A to B as a utilitarian calculus, to work out if the net benefit or harm of human migration can be computed into a neat, hard number. Rarely does one hear the question addressed in terms of the freedom of a person to move to another place more to their liking so long as they respect the rights and property of whomever they choose to make their new neighbours, do not violate the laws of a host country, etc. Instead, the point is asked, “How does the arrival or departure of people to and from this nation benefit or harm me?” The question has no easy answer. For some low-paid indigenous workers, the sudden arrival of foreigners will put downward pressure on wages in the short run, but add new sources of consumer demand in the medium and long run. An exodus of entrepreneurs, meanwhile, reduces the “national pie”: but should any classical liberal worthy of that name care about the collective wealth held within a given geographical area? The UK is not a company – which has a defined end, like making cars – but an association of hopefully free persons pursuing their own ends within the boundaries of certain laws. I think it is sometimes worth stepping back to reflect on the fact that in this globalised age, millions of people are taking advantage of the ability to find the place to live that most suits them and their families and achieve their ambitions. I happen to think this is mostly a good thing, whatever caveats one can throw in about welfare, the pace of cultural assimilation and the like.
Here is an article by the journalist and parliamentary sketch-writer, Edward Pearce, that is well worth a read.
Thanks to those invaluable guys at The Taxpayers’ Alliance, we have a clearer idea of how much of our money is spent on quasi-governmental organisations. What is even more shocking is that the UK government does not provide such clear information and as a result, we have to rely on the likes of TA to provide it. I guess it bears out the comment of P.J. O’ Rourke in his wonderful “Parliament of Whores” book, to the effect that one of the key reasons why government and its agencies are so massive is no one can understand the sheer amount of what government does or claims to do.
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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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