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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Alfred Marshall’s grand vision of economics was that you did the maths to check your logic. Then you translated all of that into English and burnt the maths. Steve Keen won’t do it that way for of course Marshall was a neoclassical and that’s just wrong, see?
Keen did once try to insist that I followed along with one of his papers – he was showing that there are no free markets, there are only oligopolies and therefore everything must be controlled by politics – and was most put out when I said well, yes, that’s mathematically true but useless.
For his contention was that as we’ve never got an infinite number of producers (nor consumers) therefore that model of free markets – which relies upon no individual producer or consumer having pricing power, which in itself implies an infinite number – therefore neoclassical economics was all wet. His maths was fine for that’s all true too. Except for the bit where if we analyse markets which we know are oligopolistic and then see how many producers we need for them not to be then the number seems to be about 5 or 6. True, true, 7 supermarkets doesn’t mean a wholly perfectly free market with profits no higher than the cost of capital but it’s pretty damn close. Close enough for either jazz or the economics of public policy.
The maths is for working through the logic not a replacement for it.
– Tim Worstall
I remember when the main way to answer that question was to watch the News at Ten. More sophisticated people would read newspapers. The limitations of mainstream media are ever more apparent. The internet democratized information, so that should help. There are still various problems, including filtering and resources.
YouTube is probably the most successful solution to the latter problem. It is possible to be a full time YouTuber focusing on a niche topic and earn a living.
The former problem is hard. Search engines have bias; bots abound. I offer here a handful of ways I figure out what is happening.
To answer specifically what is happening, lately I have found the Miltary and History channel useful. In the linked video he explains what is known about the results of the US strike on Iranian nuclear facilities, complete with satellite imagery. He has daily updates with information about multiple conflicts with lots of detail. He is analytical and unpolitical.
To answer why it is happening, William Spaniel’s channel looks at events from the perspective of crisis bargaining theory: it is war economics where territory is the currency, hence the refrain that everything is about “lines on maps”. In the linked video he explains why the USA bombed Iranian nuclear facilities when it did, in terms of Israel setting the stage and creating a window of opportunity. More generally, the channel is useful for understanding why fighting is happening instead of negotiating, and how different things will have to look before negotiation is possible.
For a broader perspective of capabilities and defense economics, there is Perun. He explains the principles, brings in real world data and describes the range of possibilities. An unexpected bit of information in the linked video is that Israel would likely run out of ammunition for its iron dome before Iran runs out of cheap, badly aimed ballistic missiles. That is why eliminating launchers is so important to Israel, and it affects how long an air campaign can go on for.
In general, if I really want to understand something, I have found that finding a good specialist YouTuber is one of the better ways to do it. The feedback loop of financial reward and algorithmic feedback seems to work: not universally, but enough that there is a rich vein of good information on any given topic amongst the noise.
For something lighter, I can also recommend Daniel Owen if you are looking to buy a GPU for your computer, and Chris Spargo for dull yet fascinating pop history like the story of nationalised pubs.
Please add your recommendations in the comments.
Sadiq Khan, the Labour mayor of London, and Anne Hidalgo, the Parti Socialiste mayor of Paris, have written a joint article for the Guardian called “In London and Paris, we’ve experienced vicious backlash to climate action. But we’re not backing down”. They write,
“We welcome efforts such as the EU’s Digital Services Act, which requires online platforms to counter the spread of illegal content, including disinformation, and lays the groundwork for holding platforms accountable. But much more is needed. For example, the UK’s Online Safety Act could be strengthened by explicitly recognising climate disinformation as a form of harmful content.”
It is remarkable how people who would be ashamed to support a law to “counter the spread of illegal speech” happily praise a law that “counters the spread of illegal content.” The magic of words: just re-label “speech” as “content” – as being inside something – and it can now truly be contained, as in “restrained or controlled”.
The same people regularly proclaim that Europe is a place which has banished censorship of the press. That is almost true, although both the EU and the UK governments are working to restore their old powers. In the meantime they are willing enough to temporarily refrain from censorship of ideas spread by old technology if it gives them cover for censoring ideas spread by new technology.
Do not go along with their word games. The term “Freedom of the press” is not restricted to words conveyed to the public by means of a a mechanical device for applying pressure to an inked surface resting upon a print medium. Nor does “freedom of speech” only refer to words that come out of mouths by the action of tongue and lips. In the words of a source they claim to respect, Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says,
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
Emphasis added.
And while I’m emphasising things, let me also emphasise this: the minute I learn that an idea is being censored, I give that idea more credence.
No, that does not mean that I automatically believe any censored idea entirely. (How could I? A million contradictory falsehoods are censored alongside the truth. The problem is that the act of censorship destroys our ability to tell which of them is the truth.) It means that I strain to hear what is being said behind the gag. It means that I start to wonder how real the claimed consensus is, if those who depart from it are silenced. It means that I start to wonder why the proponents of the “accepted” view feel the need to protect it from counter-arguments.
I said in 2012 that my belief in Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) was two and a half letters to the left compared to most commenters on this blog. Damn, it should have been one and a half letters to the right. Oh well, you knew what I meant. With regard to CAGW or whatever they are calling it now, whether I phrase it as my belief moving to the left or my disbelief moving to the right, the surest way to make that movement happen is to pass a law defining “climate disinformation as a form of harmful content”. Then I will know that the so-called scientific consensus on climate change is no such thing. If certain hypotheses cannot be discussed, not only is there no scientific consensus, there is no science.
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A related post, but focussing on self-censorship rather than the government censorship that Mayors Khan and Hidalgo favour: “Bubbles, lies and buttered toast.” Any form of censorship is fatal to science.
In Rousseau’s time, the feeding was purely metaphorical. He lived before the Industrial Revolution, and people were still as poor as they had ever been. The literal feeding only began in the 19th century, and what you see is that the more people enjoy the fruits of a capitalist society, the more opportunities they have to engage in criticism. So, capitalism and industrial modernity become a victim of their own success because they breed this class of people who have their material needs met and can spend their lives biting the hand that feeds them. Karl Marx is a great example. He was living off of the handouts that he received from Friedrich Engels which were made possible by Engels’ father’s cotton factory. Capitalism was affording him the freedom and the material prosperity to write screeds against capitalism.
There was a recent study about how the hotspots of degrowth—the philosophy that calls for an end to economic growth and a controlled shrinking of material production—are all in wealthy countries. You don’t hear a lot of degrowth-ism from people in developing countries because they have a more immediate understanding of the benefits of capitalism and industry. But if you’ve been prosperous and well-fed and affluent for a long time, you tend to take those things for granted. If you read the degrowth literature, they seem to have no clue at all about what it means to farm, for example, and be self-sufficient. They romanticize it, and they can afford to romanticize it because nobody is there to tell them what it was like. Even their grandparents never experienced it.
– Maarten Boudry, philosopher and author, quoted on the Human Progress website. Worth a read.
The thesis – that the West gets a lot of stick because people have the freedom to be critical of it – chimes with another, related point: the elite “overproduction” idea. In other words, if you create a lot of people who have the time, money and energy to do things other than earn a living and so on, you are going to get a lot of this sort of reflection and in certain cases, destructive criticism.
This all reminds me of a couple of books that I read many years ago that are still worth a read, and in the case of the Johnson one, marvellous for its colour and detail: Roger Scruton and Fools, Frauds And Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left, and Intellectuals, by Paul Johnson. Sadly, both men are no longer with us. I haven’t yet read Intellectuals and Society, by Thomas Sowell, but I will get round to it.
What we are living through today, in a phrase, is an unprecedented break in national continuity. As a country we are disconnecting from the old Britain. The Britain of our national story is disappearing, the Britain of the Romans through the Anglo-Saxons, the Normans, the Tudors, Nelson and Wellington, the two world wars and even the Attlee settlement.
Gone is the Britain of Christianity and the Church as a core component of British identity, and moral judgement has become utilitarian, about what is convenient, disconnected from any traditional, let alone transcendental, set of values.
Fast receding is the Britain of real state capacity and national ambition, as we move from Victorian St Pancras to the hole in the ground at Euston, from the first nuclear power station back to the windmill.
Our national character is changing. We are, at last, becoming the “young country”, the country without a past, that Tony Blair wanted.
– David Frost (£)
Personality traits such as patriotism and bravery are viewed as desirable within the military. This often encourages overt masculine behaviour amongst its members, therefore stepping outside the norm and challenging the group is often looked down upon and difficult to do. The task-focused approach can also lead to corners being cut if it is deemed that the ends justify the means, that certain actions or behaviours are tolerated if they achieve the desired result. The danger with this is that such undesirable behaviours, if tolerated for long enough, become the norm and the level of standards gradually erodes… Methods of bonding and creating team cohesiveness within the military often involve pranks and banter, but this isolates those who are different to the norm.
– Group Captain Louise Henton OBE (£) writing in 2003 prior to her tenure as base commander for RAF Brize Norton.
What could possibly go wrong?
On Tuesday, Parliament voted to decriminalise abortion after 24 weeks. On Friday, Parliament voted to allow assisted dying. All eyes were on the latter change. LBC’s report was typical: “MPs pass landmark assisted dying bill by just 23 votes following emotional debate in historic social change”.
In contrast, the change to the abortion law had an easy birth. It was passed by a landslide. Scarcely anyone talked about it before it was passed – it featured in no manifesto – and, beyond a few sighs, even the right wing press does not seem to want to talk much about it now. It is portrayed as a merely technical change to deal with a few edge cases. Much is made of the fact that late abortions are not being legalised; rather they are being decriminalised. “It would not alter the settled time limit for a termination,” said the Labour MP Stella Creasy, disingenuously in my opinion, given that it makes the settled time limit into dead-letter law.
My record in political predictions is not great, but I will make three of them now.
1) This law will result in far more late-term abortions than its proponents predict. Many supporters of decriminalisation have pointed out, as did the Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi in the BBC article I linked to above, that nearly 99% of abortions happen before a pregnancy reaches 20 weeks, leaving just 1% of women “in desperate circumstances”. But the number of people willing to do a thing when there are no penalties for doing it is much greater than the number willing to do it when there are penalties. And as the number of late term abortions becomes higher, the reasons for doing it will become slighter.
2) It’s 2025. People film everything on their smartphones. People will film late term abortions. Supporters of abortion will do it to show that they are not ashamed. Opponents of abortion will do it to show how similar the foetus you are now allowed to kill at 35 weeks looks to the baby you are not allowed to kill at 40 weeks. (Or at 35 weeks if it happens to have exited the birth canal.) And some will livestream late term abortions to show, or sell, the video to the curious. The dissemination of close-up images of what a late term abortion looks like in real time will change the abortion debate in the same way that the dissemination of close-up images of what being on the receiving end of an airstrike looks like in real time have changed the debate about war.
Of course visceral reactions to seeing war or abortion at close range do not change the logical arguments about either. But the Left has very little practice in countering the strongest argument against abortion, the very one that will be literally brought into sharp focus by the smartphone “record” button. As I said in a post called “How not to change minds on abortion”,
Over the years I must have read hundreds of Guardian articles on abortion, mostly in its US section because abortion is such a live issue there. I do not recall a single one that argued against the main sticking point of the pro-life side, namely that abortion takes a human life – let alone argued for it.
The arguments put forward in these Guardian articles and others written by progressives almost always relate solely to the rights of the woman. That is indeed an important question, but it avoids the question of whether the foetus also has rights. But pictures are harder to avoid than words.
There is nothing new about abortion being shown on film. You can find examples from both sides if you look. One of the best known examples from the anti-abortion side is the 1984 film “The Silent Scream” made by Bernard Nathanson, a former abortion provider who became an anti-abortion activist. It shows live ultrasound footage of a 12 week old foetus being aborted. Critics argued that elements of the film that seemed to show the foetus feeling pain were deceptive, as a foetus at that stage of development is not capable of pain. This argument will be unavailable in the case of similar videos showing abortion in the third trimester.
3. As a result of public outrage, in ten or fifteen years’ time the UK’s abortion laws will be stricter than they have been since 1967. My guess is that the limit will be around 15 weeks, as it is in most of Europe.
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I discussed how the issue of abortion relates to debates within libertarianism in this post from 2013: “Thinking aloud on a mountainside”.
Quote:
“Having to carry a stranger because otherwise the stranger will die is approximately the position of a pregnant woman expecting an unwanted child.”
“This is the dirty work that Israel does for all of us.”
– German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, quoted in the Wall Street Journal. ($)
Today’s Guardian has up an article with the title “Climate misinformation turning crisis into catastrophe, report says” and the strapline “False claims obstructing climate action, say researchers, amid calls for climate lies to be criminalised”.
Quote:
Climate misinformation – the term used by the report for both deliberate and inadvertent falsehoods – is of increasing concern. Last Thursday, the UN special rapporteur on human rights and climate change, Elisa Morgera, called for misinformation and greenwashing by the fossil fuel industry to be criminalised. On Saturday, Brazil, host of the upcoming Cop30 climate summit, will rally nations behind a separate UN initiative to crack down on climate misinformation.
“It is a major problem,” said Dr Klaus Jensen, of the University of Copenhagen, who co-led the Ipie review. “If we don’t have the right information available, how are we going to vote for the right causes and politicians, and how are politicians going to translate the clear evidence into the necessary action?
First, that as the Casey report acknowledges, the crimes really are mostly committed by ethnic minority men, mostly Pakistani, against white-majority children. And Labour are, far more than any other party, the standard-bearers for “diversity”. On this front, Helen Lewis spelled out the problem with commendable clarity earlier this year: no one on the Left wants a “national conversation” about the rape gangs — because so many of the possible solutions are, from this perspective, prima facie unacceptable:
“Would it include calls for the mass deportation of migrants, as many on Europe’s emergent Right want? […] Should Britain enact a “Muslim ban” or reject asylum seekers from Muslim-majority countries? When liberals are still queasy about engaging with this topic, it’s because they sense that these shadow arguments lie just out of sight.”
And second, it’s not just about race relations. It’s also about the public sector, of which Labour has long presented itself as a champion. And the extent of institutional complicity, already clear, is reiterated in Casey’s report: they all knew.
The police, especially, knew. Victims were blamed, or even arrested: in one notorious incident, a father arrived outside the house in which his own daughter was being raped, called the police, and was then himself arrested. In other incidents, girls would press charges only to be immediately contacted by their rapists with threats: events strongly suggestive of police corruption. One officer in Rotherham told a desperate father that the town “would erupt” if the crimes were exposed; another, according to the 2014 Jay report, admitted these atrocities have been ongoing for 30 years but “with it being Asians, we can’t afford for this to be coming out”.
Care homes also knew. One Bradford girl reported all the way back in 2014 that the home where she ought to have found safety and respite didn’t just look the other way — when the men who raped and sold her arrived outside the home, the staff would tell her to “go out and see them”. Councils knew, too: Birmingham was suppressing reports into looked-after children being raped and trafficked 30 years ago. In Oldham, the notorious leader of one rape gang was appointed “Welfare Officer” after a girl had already come forward with allegations against him. How many teachers knew? If Dominic Cummings is to be believed, the Department of Education knew.
– Mary Harrington
Read the whole thing. Nothing less than a counter-revolution will fix this.
Nice one Eyal! This is great work and genuinely hilarious 😀
Labour spent decades denying the grooming gangs, now it dares to pose as on the side of victims.
– Tom Slater
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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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