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]
And do note that interesting little difference between London and New York. In NYC you must have a medallion to gain a taxi permit. The money from the restriction on the number of cabs flowed to those who owned the medallions, to those who controlled access. London Black Cabs were not so restricted – so it was the drivers who gained the higher incomes from the customers being screwed. But if we restrict the number of drivers with a middleman like Uber controlling the access then it’s going to be Uber – as with the medallions – who gains, not the drivers.
Seriously, this is nuts, Sadiq Khan really is proposing that Uber should have monopoly profits thrust upon it. And why the Hell is a Mayor of London proposing that? Evil or ignorant, your choice.
“Perhaps Corbyn really is just unlucky. But it seems more probable that he’s not. And that, far from being the decent man of legend he’s actually thoroughly indecent. The only possible alternative is that he’s thunderously, crushingly, toe-curlingly thick. On balance, however, it seems more probable that he is, in fact, both. Enough of this. Enough, already.”
– Alex Massie (Spectator is behind a registration paywall.)
“I heard the other day of a quite senior minister who has not been rung for the last six years by the political editor of the newspaper in his local city because he, the minister, can be relied on to say absolutely nothing. No one has ever written a profile of this minister. As he transacts the business of his department, he might as well be wearing a cloak of invisibility. One cannot help wondering whether his own family have any idea of who, politically speaking, he is, for even if he knows himself, he lacks the command of language needed to explain himself to anyone else.”
– Andrew Gimson, musing on the terrible communications skills and speech-making calibre of our political class.
Jeremy Corbyn said he was present but not involved at a wreath-laying for individuals behind the group that carried out the Munich Olympic massacre, a partial admission that led to a row between him and Israel’s prime minister.
The Labour leader had been asked if Palestinian leaders linked to the Black September terror group were honoured at a memorial event he attended in Tunisia in 2014, at which victims of the 1985 Israeli airstrike in Tunis were remembered.
Corbyn said “a wreath was indeed laid” for “some of those who were killed in Paris in 1992” and added, in response to a question: “I was present at that wreath-laying, I don’t think I was actually involved in it.”
The Guardian picture shows Jeremy accidentally holding a great big wreath.
He added: “I was there because I wanted to see a fitting memorial to everyone who has died in every terrorist incident everywhere because we have to end it. You cannot pursue peace by a cycle of violence; the only way you can pursue peace [is] by a cycle of dialogue.”
These remarks are as apposite today as when they were first delivered in 2012. The Boris Johnson ‘burqa’ furore is actually not about burqas at all (nothing happened when Ken Clarke made very similar remarks in 2013), it is a nakedly obvious ploy to bring down the main political threat to Theresa May, by using profoundly illiberal notions that politically designated groups are beyond ridicule or criticism.
The man is a politician known for his implausible hair, and has certainly made some outrageous remarks about a certain foreign politician, which was no bar to high office. I refer of course to the (part-Turkish) Right Honourable Boris Johnson MP. He has made, in passing, remarks against a burka ban, with, I’m told, an allusion to it making the wearer resemble a letter box. His Party Chairman called on him to apologise, but, so far, he has not done so.
He is also, we hear, accused of breaching the Conservative Party’s Code of Conduct:
lead by example to encourage and foster respect and tolerance;
So give him some respect and tolerate his use of language. Is he not fostering tolerance by showing the Conservative Party’s leadership up for the intolerant, virtue-signalling, Lib Dem prigs that they are?
not use their position to bully, abuse, victimise, harass or unlawfully discriminate against others (see further the interpretation annex);
He wrote a newspaper article, whilst an MP, but not as an MP.
The annex to the Code defines discrimination etc.
Discrimination includes victimising or harassing any other person because of race (including colour, ethnic or national origin, nationality, citizenship), sex, gender re-assignment, sexual orientation, marital or civil partnership status, disability, age, religion or belief [which should be interpreted as fully adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism], pregnancy and maternity status.
Harassment is any unwanted physical, verbal or non-verbal conduct that has the purpose or effect of violating a person’s dignity or creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive situation or environment for them. A single incident can amount to harassment. Harassment may involve conduct of a sexual nature (sexual harassment), or it may be related to age, disability, gender reassignment, marital or civil partner status, pregnancy or maternity, race, colour, nationality, ethnic or national origin, religion or belief, sex or sexual orientation. Harassment is unacceptable even if it does not fall within any of these categories. Victimisation provisions protect certain individuals who do (or might do) acts such as bringing discrimination claims, complaining about harassment, or getting involved in some way with another complaint (such as giving evidence).
Victimisation may therefore occur where a person subjects another person to a detriment because either that person has acted in such a way and/or is believed to have acted in such a way, or may act in such a way.
Bullying is offensive, intimidating, malicious or insulting behaviour involving the misuse of power that can make a person feel vulnerable, upset, humiliated, undermined or threatened. Power does not always mean being in a position of authority, but can include both personal strength, influence and the power to coerce through fear or intimidation. Bullying can take the form of physical, verbal and non-verbal conduct.
It seems to me that an actual person is required to be on the receiving end here, and although Mr Johnson’s article is behind a paywall at the Telegraph, I don’t think it would have mentioned any particular person as being the ringer for a letter box.
So the case against him is crock. He is of course, a ‘renegade’ having resigned over Mrs May’s Munich, and a possible threat to the FFC. And whatever the ‘crime’ is , the one thing that is expected by the media and, it seems, most of the political class, is the ritual apology for ‘offence’ found. If he can hold out, he will show himself to have considerable political courage, just what is needed these days.
And if he can face down the PC-boo-hiss crowd and sit out the storm, the curtain hiding the impotent media/politico Wizard of Oz may start to fall, and truth may flourish, like flowers in a woodland glade, just cleared by a storm.
There never was a man so hated, as he who told the truth.
The first sign that young people are turning their backs on university education is expected next week when more than a quarter of a million A-level pupils get their results. The exodus is being led by young men, whose applications to university are at their lowest for three years.
The head of Ucas, the universities admissions service, said the number of young people winning degree course places on August 16 is expected to be “in the order of 2.5% lower” than last year.
Some of that is due to a demographic dip in the number of 18-year-olds — but universities are also being hit by a slump in older and part-time students. The total number of UK applications is down by 3.4% on last year.
Experts said Tony Blair’s vision of ever greater numbers of teenagers going to university looks outdated, with more questioning the value of £9,250-a-year degrees.
Clare Marchant, head of Ucas, said a degree was “usually worthwhile” but added that “university is not for everybody”. She said rates of 60%-70% of people going to university “would be the entirely wrong thing to do”.
The real Clare Marchant was stolen away by the elves and replaced by a changeling. There is no other explanation for the head of UCAS being so sensible. Blair’s great push to get half our young people to go to university has turned out as badly as state-mandated changes in society usually do. Practically everyone is worse off.
Those who would not have gone to university under a saner system, but do go under our system, find that when almost half of all young people have a degree they are nothing special. More than a third of recent UK graduates regret going to university. Regret it or not, if they ever earn over the threshold they will still have to pay for it. While it is true that the terms of repayment of student loans are generous and many will never have to pay them back, the mental burden of debt is still present. No wonder so many partly-educated but, er, not outstandingly bright young people support Jeremy Corbyn: they fell for his ambiguously phrased line that he would “deal with” their debt.
The young people who genuinely are academically inclined find the value of their degrees* goes down because they are now lumped in with those who spent three years studying Clownology or Gender Studies.
Worst of all, those who never did and never will go to university have to pay to benefit a group who on average are richer than they are. The non-graduates suffer other harms as well: many jobs that once would have been open to anyone with two A-Levels are now reserved for those with degrees. When I was a young teacher many of my working-class colleagues had come into the profession in just this way. It seemed to me that they were some of the most effective teachers, often more grounded than their graduate equivalents. Careers such as journalism and nursing that could be learned on the job were an avenue for social mobility that has now been blocked.
One last thing, which I think matters more than we (by which I mean the generally highly educated readers of this blog) realise, is that having each cohort of youth split down the middle into a top half and a bottom half is painful for those who don’t make the grade. When under fifteen percent of young people went to university, as was the case until around 1990, not going to university was the norm. No one thought anything of it. It still surprises me that the political grouping who once filled the Third Programme with their complaints about how cruel and divisive the Eleven-plus was felt no qualms about putting half the nation into the slow stream.
The boys have evidently cottoned on earlier than their sisters. It could be that they are smarter, or it could be that British universities show signs of following the US example and becoming places where males are scorned and treated unfairly.
*Oxford Bloody University and I still cannot decide whether it should be “degree” or “degrees”. At least if I manage to reduce everyone else in the country to the status of illiterate serfs, as is my true aim with this post, the wretches will be in no position to correct my grammar.
If, like me, you are a Brit, then I recommend you depress yourself about Britain by reading Tim Newman’s posting entitled Tommy Robinson’s Appeal. (Although, if you are from some other part of the world, go ahead and depress yourself about Britain anyway.)
But what I really recommend is that you really depress yourself about the future of this country, by listening to something that Tim Newman recommends in this posting. It’s a recording of James Delingpole talking with Ezra Levant. Ezra Levant does most of the talking, and my goodness does he talk a storm. I hr 10 mins went by in a blink.
The more I learn about Tommy Robinson, the more I admire him.
In the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, Parliament committed the huge sum of 20 million pounds sterling to compensate slave owners for the loss of their “assets”. That was equivalent to 40 percent of the entire national budget (and five percent of Britain’s GDP at the time), requiring the government to borrow most of the 20 million from private sources.
– Lawrence Reed. These numbers really put the political feat of achieving this in perspective.
I have never seen so many lefties attacking a Labour leader. And I have never seen so many grass roots Tories attacking a Tory leader. It is a bizarre race to the bottom in which who wins the next election will be based on which despised leader least nauseates their own side.
Since nasty, backward British voters cannot be trusted to believe in or vote for the right things, we need human rights imposed on us at a European level, so that present and future UK governments could not dial back certain rights or entitlements even if they wanted to. This is predicated on the belief that democracy, popular will, should not trump everything, which is actually a perfectly reasonable position – any good constitution should have checks and balances built in to it in order to prevent the passion of the moment finding its way onto the statute books without due discussion, diligence and consideration of the rights of dissenting minorities.
But the academic Left’s naive approach assumes that the EU will always be a force for the kind of socially progressive agenda that its academics seek to champion. By defending a structure which permanently paints the UK as the authoritarian bad guy and the EU as the right-dispensing good guys, it provides no defence in the event that the EU flips and takes a less expansive view of human rights than is currently the case. And this is more than a theoretical, irrelevant supposition – with the rise of populists and authoritarians throughout Europe, a time may eventually come when some decidedly illiberal policies flow down from Brussels. And what defence would Britain then have, given that the Left trust European voters and politicians over British people to be the final arbiter of rights and freedoms in the UK?
Thus, at best this “resist Brexit to preserve women’s rights” movement is guilty of exceptionally short-term, two-dimensional, narrow thinking in which the policy thought most likely to guarantee certain rights and entitlements today is mistakenly held as the optimal policy for the longer-term, and at worst it is as contemptuous of women as it is of democracy itself.
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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