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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Once upon a time there were Progressives who actually believed in progress, who despite their flaws did believe in a brighter and better future. These were supplanted c. 1970 by a new Left with the new motto “Learn to live with less, you hate-filled greedy bastards!” The Apollo program was the last hurrah of the old Progressives and Earth Day environmentalism was a manifestation of the new Left that supplanted them.
Now those actually-for-progress Progressives had some major flaws. One was a willingness to bulldoze people’s personal plans in favor of their own Big Plans For Society. Another was to seriously underestimate just how poisonous socialism and government regulation are to an economy. But they still favored a better, brighter, more prosperous future in a way the “Learn to live with less!” Earth Day leftists did not.
– Deep Lurker
The social media link buttons to Twitter and certain IM platforms have returned. I wonder why? 😀
The anti-anti-Putin Left are most usefully described as “campists”, whose geopolitical philosophy is summed up by the phrase “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. America is the font of all evil, therefore its opponents must have something going for them.
The British-Syrian writer Leila Al-Shami calls this “the anti-imperialism of idiots”: “This pro-fascist Left seems blind to any form of imperialism that is non-western in origin. It combines identity politics with egoism. Everything that happens is viewed through the prism of what it means for westerners — only white men have the power to make history.” Russia’s unprovoked war of imperialist aggression is as inconvenient to campists as China’s oppression of the Uyghurs. Either they must find a way to blame America after all or they must downplay the issue. Left-wing support for corrupt authoritarians such as Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega is disappointing enough, but sympathy with Vladimir Putin, Bashir al-Assad and Xi Jinping is symptomatic of a morally broken worldview.
– Dorian Lynskey, making observations that also apply to certain libertarians/conservatives in the grip of the Americocentric delusion.
From the ever-brilliant Kristian Niemietz
 Click for slightly larger version
On this particular day, I will commemorate St. George with a picture I took in Kyiv a few years ago, the symbolism of which is even more apt.
Sorry but someone needed to say it… 😀
Information liberalism was already in trouble in 2016, when Brexit and the election of Donald Trump made it clear that freeing information didn’t always produce progressive results. Perhaps, respectable voices began to suggest nervously, all this fake news and misinformation means more discourse isn’t always better.
Since then, ever more of our public life has been forced online. And with it, information management has intensified and grown more organised. Facebook has censored anti-vaccine content; UnHerd interviews and even British MPs have been removed from YouTube; “free speech” messaging app Parler was kicked off Apple and Android platforms after the Capitol riot; Donald Trump was banned from Twitter; what turned out to be a true story about Joe Biden’s son was censored at a delicate moment in Biden’s election campaign.
In the digital age, then, the right side of history no longer wants to free information, but to curate the right message. To that end, many erstwhile cheerleaders of free speech have pivoted to claiming for themselves the place of those bishops and inquisitores haereticae pravitatis Leo X tasked in 1515, with controlling what could be published.
– Mary Harrington
The author of this Reuters article on the German jobs market plainly hasn’t heard of Linkedin, or jobs advertising, or even old-style labour exchanges where people can go to find out where vacancies are and retrain. Time for a good old fisking:
Germany’s industrial heavyweights are teaming up to retrain workers in areas such as software and logistics to fill a growing skills gap and avoid layoffs among workers of all ages as the economy shifts to clean energy and online shopping.
There is nothing wrong with firms exchanging ideas with one another to fix an issue. (Although ironically, government “anti-trust” laws might work against that.) It is worth noting, of course, that losses of jobs in areas such as petrol-driven cars are partly caused by government policy itself, such as the Net Zero decarbonization efforts that, depending on your point of view, are necessary or barking insane.
More than 36 major companies, ranging from auto suppliers such as Continental (CONG.DE) and Bosch (ROBG.UL) to industrial firms BASF (BASFn.DE) and Siemens (SIEGn.DE), have agreed to coordinate on redundancies at one firm and vacancies at another, training workers to move directly from job to job.
Right.
The scheme underscores Germany’s long-term social market economy model, which gives more influence to labour unions as opposed to free-market capitalism focused on maximizing profits.
Does it? I mean, I assume German firms want to pursue a profit. They’re not charities.
The costs of the initiative will be shared by the companies involved on a case-by-case basis. So if a factory closes, a dialogue will begin on what to do with its workers and then involve another company which may be seeking new skills.
Again, this seems like rational self-interest to me. There’s no objection I see to firms liaising with one another, and forming pacts about dealing with the need for skilled people. The key is that the State keeps its nose out of it. Also, if firms try and steer staff who might lose a job to another firm, that needs to be weighed against whether and how the employee might want their lives to go. The tone of the article seems to be that what is needed is a sort of hand-holding paternalism, but that creates a vicious circle where employees lose the desire to manage their working careers in a proactive way.
A study by think-tank Ifo Institute warned that 100,000 jobs linked to the internal combustion engine could be lost by 2025 if carmakers failed to transition fast enough to electric vehicles and retrain workers.
Forcing an entire industry to abandon a reliable, effective technology used for a century and switch to an arguably less reliable, and more costly one. Yep, there are going to be consequences. It also doesn’t help that German government policy in the past 20 years on energy has been almost calculated to harm its manufacturing base in the long run.
Engineering, metalwork and logistics are among the sectors seeking high numbers of people in Germany, alongside care work, catering and sales.The demand for skilled workers is coming from overseas companies too, highlighted by Tesla’s (TSLA.O) decision to build its European electric vehicle and battery plant in the state of Brandenburg, where it will create 12,000 new jobs.
Good news, so long as the jobs are financially viable.
Ariane Reinhart, board member responsible for human resources (HR) at Continental and chief spokesperson of the [jobs] business-led initiative, was quoted as saying: “Leaving it to the free market is not enough – it would not be what’s best for workers, or the economy.”
Wrong. For a start, none of the ideas about firms collaborating to move workers with desired skills around could not happen in a free market without state interference. Employers (I am one) know that finding talented staff is one of the most important issues there is, and in an open economy, there are all kinds of ways people with skills in demand can find jobs. Further, it is hardly a mystery to employees that they should keep on top of new skills to make themselves more desirable and increase what they earn. That’s the “free market”. The author of this article might want to reflect that it was the free market economy, and not some sort of top-down socialism, that helped propel West Germany after 1945 into being one of the richest economies on earth. By 1960 or thereabouts, that country had matched the UK in terms output per head.
To repeat an important point: there is no reason why firms could not and would not collaborate, if their self-interest coincided, in figuring out how people with desirable skills could be moved from place to place. What the author of this article cannot or will not address is whether firms in the article are not just doing what they might do anyway? Why did this question not get asked? Why just accept, at face value, that this sort of collaboration is some wonderful example of a less market-based system? After all, I can log on to the internet and find jobs, homes, flights, hotels, courses for training in new skills, etc, without anyone from government or some official entity holding my hand. Amazing, isn’t it, this “free market” of ours.
“Boris Johnson has said any peace talks over Ukraine are likely to fail as he compared holding talks with Vladimir Putin to negotiating with a crocodile.”
BBC reports that Boris Johnson made crocophobic remarks today, with LGBTQIAC activists decrying this blatant display of Tory prejudice as “triggering”. A Tory spokesman dismissed the criticism as “a complete croc”.
It is important to be open minded, but not so open minded that one’s brain falls out. This is one of those rare moments in the affairs of states where the moral and geopolitical realities are as clear as night and day.
– Perry de Havilland, seen lurking in the Daily Telegraph comment section (£)
The job of the BBC is to inform us of the Governments intention to send migrants to Rwanda. Our job is to determine whether we deem it racist or not.
– Chris Samps
April 2021:
“Sri Lanka will become first country to be free of chemical fertilizer”, the Sri Lankan news website News First reported:
COLOMBO (News 1st); President Gotabhaya Rajapaksa has stated that he will take up the challenge in making Sri Lanka the first country in the world to eliminate the use of chemical fertilizers without reversing any of the steps that have been taken.
The absence of any country in the world that has eliminated the use of chemical fertilizers is not an obstacle to achieving the goal, President Rajapaksa noted.
The President urged all to unite to educate the farmer and create a healthy generation at a discussion held at the Presidential Secretariat on Thursday (29) to raise awareness on the use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides and the ban on such imports.
“The government must guarantee the right of the people to a non-toxic diet to produce a healthy and productive citizen,” said the President.
April 2022:
“How Sri Lanka’s shift to organic farming left it in the manure,” reports the Times:
What turned Sri Lanka’s economic situation from difficult to catastrophic was the decision by the Rajapaksa government to implement a nationwide ban on synthetic fertiliser. It was made not at the behest of neoliberal economists doing the bidding of global capital, but rather on the advice of environmentalists in the name of sustainable agriculture.
[…]
But that strategy backfired in spectacular fashion. Domestic rice production fell by 14 per cent from 2021 to 2022, forcing the nation, long self-sufficient in rice production, to import hundreds of millions of dollars of rice and more than eroding all of the savings from ceasing fertiliser imports. On top of that, the ban decimated tea production, leading to a $425 million economic loss to the industry in its first six months of implementation. Tea, one of the nation’s primary crops, is a key source of its total export income, making a bad foreign exchange situation far worse.
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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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