Taiwan is not a Chinese province, you bat-eating, dog-beating, grave-robbing, ethnic cleansing, police state cockwomble of a stolen Nazi uniform.
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I read (iirc in one of Viktor Suvorov’s books) that in the Ukraine of the 1930s, a peasant who was not starving and thin automatically came under suspicion of food hoarding. Whereas, in besieged WW2 Leningrad, the populace were starving, and I read somewhere that there was a sub-stratum of the population who had unusually rosy cheeks and an almost healthy glow compared to their starving fellow citizens, they were not under suspicion by the Party. These were not privileged Party members, but cannibals, who had resorted to devouring the abundant supplies of human flesh. Grim as that was, and we are nowhere near anything like that yet, I can’t help but noticing that the impact of the CCP-Covid-19-Terror is beginning to show in people. This is a country where, whilst not illegal per se, getting a haircut other than from a member of your household (and how many live alone or with those unable to help) necessarily involves leaving your home (or someone else leaving there’s) without ‘reasonable excuse’ under the (not quite limited) excuses, so if your hair is now neat and short, or dyed or coloured in your usual fashion for those so inclined, you might come under suspicion of having failed to have followed ‘social distancing rules’ or having patronised a business operating illegally. Will we see a ‘haircut hotline’ open up for us to denounce a neighbour whose thatch is well-trimmed? Will we have Ministers of the Crown denouncing professional haircutting at the daily 5pm press conference, a ‘Two Minute Hate’ against the ‘Socially Undistanced’ (or should be the ‘Unsocially distanced’)? What else might be a give-away in this new culture of conformity? Looking unconcerned as the economy collapses, or not clapping the sky when the time comes to applaud the NHS? There is more to be done. Perhaps to deter breaching of ‘social distancing’ in those elements of the populace who pay for ‘personal services’, the Queen could grant a Royal Charter to a new organisation “RASEL – The Royal Anti-Sex League“, that might give the Duke of York, who currently seems to be at a loose end, a useful role as its Patron should he seek a new role and a spot of image polishing, there’s not much use for his Airmiles at the moment, and even if there were, he might wish to avoid countries with US extradition treaties, just in case he is unjustly accused. April 20th, 2020 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
 One trend that has been a big push in recent weeks is – for obvious reasons – homeschooling. And those who run the education system in North America (and I presume, in other places) are worried that if youngsters learn at home, they’ll be less prone to teachers’ ministrations. Kids will start to think for themselves. This must be resisted because it undermines civic spirit, apparently, according to this Harvard Review article:
Here’s another gem:
The problem with this article is that the author of the piece appears oblivious to parents’ worries about the poor quality of much public schooling in the US. There is also the default assumption that the State is entitled to impose a certain view and set of aptitudes and attitudes on children and that the burden of proof is on those who want the family, not the State, to be the primary decision-taker on education. An article in Reason magazine last year also directly challenged the idea that homeschooled kids are less likely to be well-adjusted adults. (Like with all these issues, there are clear exceptions, such as with children who are maltreated by parents, etc). I will be interested to see if any of you fine Samizdata commenters have been schooled at home for any part of your time, and what your experience has been. In times of crisis, certain viewpoints are challenged. Now is such a time. April 19th, 2020 | 60 comments - (Comments are closed)
I expect ability to procure was some way down the list of attributes they were expected to demonstrate at the interview, coming behind devotion to the cult of the NHS, commitment to diversity, and being utterly subservient to upper management and bureaucracy. – Tim Newman responding to reports of NHS procurement ineptitude. April 19th, 2020 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
Via Ed Driscoll of Instapundit, I found this admirably thorough story by Mollie Hemingway in The Federalist. Here, she said, are some of CNN’s reports about Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations against Brett Kavanaugh: Read the letter Christine Blasey Ford sent accusing Brett Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct, These senators could make or break Kavanaugh’s nomination, Trump calls Kavanaugh ‘an extraordinary man’, In Hemingway’s report, every one of these is a link. Click ’em and see. There were more, I just got bored of copying them. And here is all the reporting CNN had done of the very similar allegation against Joe Biden by Tara Reade until yesterday: April 18th, 2020 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
“China knows it is in a strategic battle with the West; it is time we realised this basic fact, too. Using their comparative advantage of getting through the virus first, Beijing is pursuing its geostrategic interests via ‘mask diplomacy’, soft power, trying to change the basic narrative by offering hard-hit countries medical supplies, both as a showy humanitarian gesture and as a sign of their system’s supposed superiority. Leaving aside that these supplies must be paid for and some are defective, the whole exercise feels like an arsonist expecting gratitude for providing their victim with a watering can.” April 17th, 2020 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
Governments anxious to be seen to “do something” (the curse of democratic politicians everywhere) made grand dramatic gestures – building hospitals in days that would normally have taken years. To hell with whether they were needed or not (the much bruited London Nightingale reportedly has just 19 patients) Look! We are doing stuff. Stuff you could never do yourselves!! The State and its hordes are heroes. April 16th, 2020 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
Samizdata no longer needs me. Soon it will no longer need you. I took the text from the sidebar:
and copied it into Talk To Transformer.
Comments are, as ever, welcome. Even from humans. April 16th, 2020 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
“The coronavirus outbreak gives us a neat experiment in what happens when humans suddenly dramatically reduce both production and consumption. And, to put it mildly, most of us are not enjoying it one bit. That suggests that instead of the hair shirtery favoured by the Gretas of this world, our best solution is creating the technologies that allow us to keep consuming while also keeping the planet cool with our doing so.” April 15th, 2020 | 39 comments - (Comments are closed)
Yes, I learn from a tweet by Anton Howes, a young academic whom I greatly admire, that his first book, entitled Arts & Minds: How The Royal Society of Arts Changed a Nation will be out on May 12th. It is already available on Kindle.
I will start reading this book with the prejudice in my head that the Industrial Revolution was not only “industrial”; it also resembled what we more usually mean by a “revolution”, in the sense that it was also an ideological event. People didn’t just do this, for their own private and selfish reasons. They believed in doing it. They told each other, and anyone else who would listen, that what they were doing would do good, on a huge scale. But unlike with almost all other “revolutions”, the ideologists of the Industrial Revolution were completely and triumphantly right. This triumphant rightness has been such an elephantine presence in the room of history, and is so very counter-intuitive (“Ideologists are all nutters!”), that the ideological nature of this revolution has now become nearly invisible. The concluding paragraph of the Amazon blurb …:
… together with the title of the book, arts and minds, suggest to me that the above prejudices will be confirmed and strengthened. April 15th, 2020 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
If there is a disaster, would you like people for hundreds of miles around to drop everything and make herculean efforts to get those worst affected exactly the sort of help they need most – even when the helpers have no personal connection with the victims? Would you like factories worldwide to rush to switch production to making whatever they are short of in the disaster zone? You would? Then let people make money by doing it. You can either rely on the small subset of people who will seriously disrupt their lives to help strangers out of pure charity, or you can also get help from the much larger pool of people who who are pushed from vague thoughts of benevolence into action by the prospect of profit. Let them sell goods of which there is a shortage at a higher price and soon there won’t be a shortage any more. – something sorta like this was said by someone, whom I would gladly credit if I could remember who they were. My post was prompted by this story by Edward Thicknesse in City A.M.: Coronavirus: Calls for price controls dismissed as ‘economically illiterate’. April 15th, 2020 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
Coronavirus is dominating all our lives just now, but I have little to say about it other than that I, like almost everyone else, wish it all to stop, both the virus itself and the measures now believed necessary to combat it. Whether these measures have been and are insufficient or wise or excessive, I look forward to reading about in the months and years ahead, but do not now have much of an opinion about. Instead, I would like to ask some questions about the political beliefs that most of us here share. What are the best arguments you know of in favour of libertarianism? I define “libertarianism” loosely, as a general inclination towards liberty, towards property as the way to solve the problems of contending liberties, general lifestyle freedom, and (very) little in the way of governmental power, either financial or regulatory. Insofar as I can remember how I first thought about such things (during the 1960s and early 1970s), what made me a libertarian was that the world’s most free countries seemed also to be the nicest countries, while the least free countries were definitely the nastiest ones. This contrast was especially clear when you looked at single countries which had been divided into two countries, unfree and much freer, such as Korea and Germany. What pushed me away from the majority “centrist” notion of how things should be (quite a lot of liberty but also a lot of government), was the thought that if extreme liberty worked amazingly well (Hong Kong seemed to me to illustrate that) and extreme lack of liberty definitely worked extremely badly, why would you want to have a “balanced” mixture of these two contending processes, one very good but the other extremely bad? There was a widespread view, then as now, that “business” needed to be quite free, but that things like healthcare, education, and (a particular interest of mine) architecture, could not or should not be treated only as businesses, as the mere outcomes of free and individual decisions, like the washing machine business or the hi-fi business. I thought: Why not? Surely this notion should be given a serious go, in at least some countries. I further thought that if it was given a serious go it would work out very well, and that it consequently would, or at least should, spread very widely and preferably to nearly everywhere. I further believed that “lifestyle” freedom and commercial freedom went well together, each reinforcing the other, despite the loudly expressed opinion from many of my contemporaries, who also favoured lifestyle freedom but who believed that only government power applied to the advantage of hitherto disadvantaged minorities could set them free. So, those were my answers to my above questions, and such thinking continues to make me call myself a libertarian. But are mine the sort of arguments that will best persuade others to arrive at similar conclusions? What I’m hoping for from commenters is not so much minute dissection of only a very few arguments, but rather quantity of arguments, each quickly and perhaps rather roughly described, together with expressed preferences for this sort argument over that, in terms of persuasiveness. Thanks in advance for as many answers to these questions as commenters are kind enough to supply. Concerning quantity of arguments in particular, different people respond to different arguments, depending on how they already think, and therefore maybe quantity is the key to successful libertarian persuasion. We need lots of arguments, including many that we have either not yet thought of, or made much use of, or which we ourselves do not now consider very persuasive. Perhaps the title of this posting should be: What are all the arguments for libertarianism? By the way, you don’t have to be a libertarian to contribute to this discussion. Quite the contrary. Every argument against libertarianism calls for a response, which it may get, or may not get but should. Links have been lacking in this so far, so here is one to end with, although not a proper one because it is to a video recording of a talk that I myself gave in 2012, to the now alas dormant Libertarian Home. This talk was entitled Libertarianism Is Simple To Describe But Not Simple To Argue For. Partly because of what it said, this talk started well but became less coherent as it went on. But I’m still quite proud of it, because despite its meandering nature, it does refer to many different sorts of arguments for and against libertarianism, of the sort I seek to learn more about now. April 13th, 2020 | 69 comments - (Comments are closed)
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